Conference Report: Madison DE ’10

–OVERVIEW–

This was my first time in Madison. Unfortunately, I fell ill with the flu during the second day of the conference. I missed the afternoon sessions of the second and third days of the conference. Having said that, I enjoyed the parts of the conference I was able to see. The location was wonderful and the audience was overall energetic and engaged.

–PRE-CONFERENCE WORKSHOPS–

• Using VoiceThread (VT) to improve educational outcomes
– discussion: What is VT? It is a web-based, multimedia-enabled, social-media sharing platform. What does it look like? VT features a main panel that displays images or movies; a control panel below for playback, commenting and navigation; and finally, two panels along the sides that graphically display avatars for the presenter and visitors. How does it work? VT’s roughly playback like movies except that anyone, generally speaking can interject comments along the way. Why is it significant? VT provides a platform for deep interaction between individuals-at-a-distance.
– examples: The examples ranged from internally and externally generated VT’s, and VT’s from the K-12 to the higher ed domains. They provided a valuable look at what can be done and the pedagogical implication of various strategies. VT is a powerful tool to motivate students to design and deliver their own content to the public. VT even integrates with ANGEL and other LMS’s. It would have been nice if the presenters asked us to find VT’s and share them with the group.
– hands-on workshop: We practiced using VT by importing already-existing content into VT. From there we narrated our VT’s using audio and video annotations. It would have been nice if we had time to visit other people’s VT’s and commented on them during the workshop. I think a good way to use VT would have been to publish out a screencast/VT of the didactic portion of the presentation before the workshop. This might have freed time up during the workshop to get our hands dirty using the tool. On the other hand, people rarely come prepared to workshops like this.
URL: https://sites.psu.edu/kent/2010/08/04/madison-10-voicethread-vt-pre-conference-workshop/

• Getting started with casual games: Justification, design, and development
– What is a casual game? They are developed for the average person, they spread like a virus, they are smaller in scope, they are developed around a unique business model (the game is developed, then it is marketed to certain portal sites, advertising pays for the portals that in turn fund the developers after the game has been released)
– development calculator: a simplistic graphing tool to help visualize how much work a particular project may incur.
URL: https://sites.psu.edu/kent/2010/08/04/madison-10-casual-games/

–SESSIONS OF INTEREST–

• Blended courses and higher ed: On mission or off course? An institutional-specific look at how blended learning benefits one particular school. The presenters closed with a 10 min open discussion on the definition of blended learning and it was not surprising how varied some of the responses were. It just goes to show how important it is to be as explicit about how we use the term blended learning or hybrid learning when addressing adult learners.

• Integration of virtual environment, Web 2.0, and cloud computing technologies: A great session that walked through the use of SecondLife in a particular online course. The instructor focused on finding educational and entertaining locations to bring her students to. This was a great look at why it’s important to search for locations like these for potential use in our “Games, Sims, vWorlds” research team pilot.

• Using 3D virtual world models in e-economics instruction: Another interesting look at how SecondLife is being used to create immerse learning environments, in this case for an economics course. It seems possible to import graphics and convert them into 3D models for use in SL.

–MAIN TAKE-AWAY’S–

• VT is a powerful multimedia platform that fits nicely with distance education pedagogy: faculty presence, engagement and motivation, and stimulates higher orders of learning.

• games are best used with learning when the learning outcomes are captured by the game mechanics (see: http://www.its.umn.edu/GridlockBuster/)

• many objects in SecondLife can be copied and are good to keep in your inventory for future building projects

• no one is willing to talk about the entire costs (development time, money, research, resources, hardware, training, etc.) associated with games and virtual worlds, is that because people know the ROI fails to justify these kinds of projects?

–CONTACTS–

• John & LeeAnn Orlando (presenters) – made a personal connection with them as they live in Vermont. We knew people in common. We’ve committed to future networking through a Yahoo! Group social networking site dedicated to developing materials in Voicethread.

• Jon Aleckson (presenter) – Penny and I spoke with Jon and his colleagues about our “Games, Sims, vWorlds” research team and hope to share our findings in the future.

–CLOSING COMMENTS–

It was difficult to take notes on my laptop for many of the sessions because a number of the rooms only offered seats. Thankfully the WiFi worked well for all of the sessions. There were plenty of opportunities to network. In preparing for the conference, I found the digital library associated with this conference and found dozens of articles that will be useful for our “Games, Sims, vWorlds” research team.