For the first time in my professional career I’ve spent a few days playing games while on the clock. On the one hand I totally love this. On the other hand it’s a great tragedy as the game is the sims online, and while I appreciate its design goals and think it’s fairly well implemented, I can’t stand it, it’s like playing dollhouse or something.

We’re investigating using online gaming as a tool to aid teaching foreign languages, the theory (in part) being that full immersion in a locality where everyone speaks only the foreign language will force the students to learn quickly in order to be able to succeed in the game world. If all goes well we’ll be using one of the Spanish language courses next fall as a test case for this approach.