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Thoughts on Communication Arts Interactive Annual 16 Winners
The future of this blog
Idea’s for educational trials of the National Broadband Network (NBN)
This blog has been quiet recently, because we have been busy finishing off large projects. Hopefully over the next few months there will be at least one post a week
Serious Games - xMedia Sydney 2009
"Want do you think the mixture of people here is?"
This was a question I heard a couple of times during the day, because I think that few people felt like they were with "their group." The audience wasn't the standard xMedia screen people. There were many people I had met recently at LearnX and at the AFTRS Serious Games and Documentaries day, and 1 Hobart face. During the day I met a number of people with a learning or e-learning background, and also a few people who work with interactive media. This meant that there were a wonderful mashing and mixing of people, and a crossover that the events seek to explore. I think this is the about third xMedia Keynote/Presentation day event that I've been to, and what I still experienced throughout the day was "it's about story" and "it's about moving away from telling." I think this might be because of the event's linkage to the Sydney Film Festival.
Project Canary- Transforming safety training with serious games
Project Canary was one of the most exciting things that I saw at LearnX 09. I had the chance to do a short video interview (with shaky camera work) with Deanna Hutchison from the Mining Industry Skills Centre.
LearnX - websites addresses
- Teaching with Games - http://www.futurelab.org.uk/projects/teaching-with-games/
- Games for Learning Report - http://www.futurelab.org.uk/resources/publications-reports-articles/handbooks/Handbook133
- ABC Serious Game Initiative - http://www.abc.net.au/tv/seriousgames/
- http://delicious.com/petterdr/seriousgames
- Serious Games Summit http://www.gdconf.com/conference/sgs.html There is audio recording of the sessions.
- Apply Serious Games & Virtual Worlds http://www.applyseriousgames.com/
- Games for Health - http://www.gamesforhealth.org
eLearning Review Processes and Quality Assurance
One of the stages of the eLearning development process that I seem to continue to in conflict with and confused by is the review and quality assurance stage. What I mean is the type of review process in which a group of learning experts reviews a learning experience during the development or at the end of the production process. The conflict and frustration have led to the thoughts and suggestions discussed below.
Learning Activities for Visual Learners
Recently, I’ve see some learning designers who are 100% word people have trouble grasping what means to be a visual learner. Often when we think about visual learners, we think: “Oh, they will need pictures and diagrams.” This is a good start . . . if your learning design is an information dump. What about when it comes to assessment tasks or learning tasks? What sort of things could work for visual learners?
“We couldn’t find things” - Organizing learning experiences
I’ve recently been doing with a lot of interviews with project teams that developed eLearning solutions during 2008. One of the themes of the learner interviews was “we couldn’t find things.”
eLearning Resources or Learning Assets
As the year starts to wrap up, I’ve been reflecting on some of the projects I’ve been working on during 2008. One small project was prototyping a different way for doing resource development for a large centralize resource development project. These are resources that are designed to be used by teachers and trainer in different contexts. The project prides itself on the quality of its learning.
One of the frustrating things with the project was seeing how the “Learning Design” got in the way of reusability of the resources. One of the basic fundamentals of learning design is “focus on what the learner is doing,” not what is being communicated. At the same time, what the learners are doing needs to be relevant to the context in which they working or the context they will be working in the future.
At the same time, I’ve seen people in other projects spending huge amounts of time and money taking apart these resources and customizing them to a specific context.
This has led me to wonder what educators really need in terms of reusable eLearning: learning assets with great communication and information design. Then there might be suggestions about learning activities, but they are set up in a way that is really easy for the educator to customize or remove.
By learning assets, I mean things like
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