My bet is there’s been more than one time in your life that you wished you knew that this website existed so you could send the url to someone who’s just asked you a ridiculously dumb question. Well, now you know, and so the question becomes: do you have the chutzpah to actually send it? More than one of you is likely to see this one at some point or another coming from my IM client to yours 😉

I was mulling over the recent move and job change last night and it occurred to me that since 1992, I’ve never applied for a job and been rejected – every position I’ve interviewed for, I’ve been offered, and I’ve only turned down a position once. This covers 7 different sets of interviews. Wierd, huh? Is it because I’m selective about what I apply for? Because I’m damned lucky? Because my employers would have taken any warm body? Suddenly I feel very fortunate, I’ve watched some of my friends struggle with their employment situations over the years and my brother just went through 6 months of uncertainty as he tried to land his first job out of college. Of course, my experience in 1991 was similar to his I guess. Anyway, dunno why this dawned on me last night but I did find it interesting.

Well, sort of. I’ve been harping about wikis off and on for the last year and a half or so. In part I’ve become so enamored with them because of a project I helped design at Bowdoin, The Romantic Audiences Project, which was very successful on a number of levels. More levels than I knew, in fact, since the most recent issue of the Educause Review uses the Bowdoin project as one of the examples of the effective use of a wiki in higher ed. I was psyched to discover this today.

The instructor I worked on this with, Mark Phillipson, also asked me to help him write a piece about RAP and wikis for a literary journal that should be published soon, I’ll post more about that as soon as it’s published.

We had a super muggy hot weekend this weekend with some torrential rains. Reminded me of one of the things I miss most in Maine, which coincidentally one of my favorite Bowdoin colleague’s posted a great shot of – the awesome rocky coastline.

Check out more of Mike’s site if you’re so inclined, he posts a picture every day, many of which are really awesome.

File this under the ‘we don’t need no steenking flash’ category, err, which I don’t actually have 😉 Anyway, check out this excellent isometric map of Washington DC. Someone posted a link to it in today’s University Web Administrator’s digest. This an awesome alternative to the too often used flash-based university maps that have popped up in the past couple if years. Javascript and html, and an art style that evokes simcity. Me likes! Note that it’s basically broken in Safari on OSX, use firefox or your favorite flavor of mozilla on a mac, ie also works fine on the PC.

I’ve talked endlessly about wikis here. More evidence of their mounting popularity – Socialtext closed a round of financing this week. When the venture capitalists start circling you can infer that at least some (smart) folks think there’s a broad market to be served.

One of these days I’ll get around to opening one of the wikis I’m running on this box to the public. Meantime I’ll post later today about how you can easily get one running on your own box.

Can you tell I’m researching games in education this morning? I’ve actually known about this project for quite some time but I keep forgetting to blog about it. The Education Arcade is using the Neverwinter Nights game engine, originally constructed to play Dungeons and Dragons online with friends or at home solo, to build a mockup of a North American community during the dawn of the Revolutionary War. Students will be able to role play their way through a simulation of society at that period in time. This is just absolutely brilliant. I could have almost directly applied this work to coursework at Bowdoin – we had an instructor who taught a course in revolutionary france and he would have his students role play being members of french society at that time (aristocracy, the petit bourgeoisie and so on) using a threaded discussion board. Imagine the horizons this would have opened up.

There’s a big grant just screaming to be written here building off of this work. What if I built a larger scale version of this, 100’s of players at once. In simple terms this kind of project can be the textbook of the modern age. Read about the french revolution? Yeah that’s important, but I can BE the french revolution. Which do you think will stick in the kid’s heads, today’s kids, raised on interactivity?

I need to get my doctorate. Not that this is insight on my part, as the link clearly indicates there are many others working on this stuff, but there’s vast opportunity here for me to do the kinds of things I love doing, right as these kinds of projects are starting to take off.

I’ve spent the last several years adovcating for the use of games in education. I was fortunate to have a boss who was receptive to the notion (and in fact had led the development of one application prior to my arrival at Bowdoin, but though we dabbled with the Sims Online, no projects emerged during my time there (though I did ultimately contribute to the Flight to Freedom project). Today I happened across this proposal for a PhD. She’s going to study ‘learning’ in Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs), a genre of games I’ve tinkered quite a bit with myself. Seeing proposals like this make me consider actually moving on to my doctorate – if the work can be fun for me and as engaging as I am sure this proposal will end up being, why not go for it?

Give yourself a quick chuckle – check out this poor fellow and his trouble with a fly. Note that you need the flash plugin.

Bowdoin College is hiring for the position I vacated when I left to come to Skidmore College. You can check out the job listing on their site or click the link below for a locally archived copy of the job description since the link above will eventually go away, wereas my weblog won’t. I had an exit interview with both my boss and his boss before I left and I’m mildly gratified to see that they seem to in large part be agreeing with what I said about my position and how it could best be evolved to better serve the needs of the college.

I don’t know what they’ll pay my replacement but I can say that I was being paid in the high 50’s and my expectation is they’ll raise that somewhat for the new person since there are a few new reauirements, notably the masters degree which I don’t currently have. Oh, and I still think the title is terrible 😉
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