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.
Mostly I try to be modest, and to be honest what I’m about to describe didn’t take a rocket scientiest to recognize, but I did recognize it wereas most did not so….today’s New York Times has a short piece on the use of weblogs in education and how they’re approaching the tipping point. Why am I pleased with myself? Because I was doing this 2.5 years ago at Bowdoin, well ahead of the curve in terms of technology use. This is why if you manage an academic technology program at a small liberal arts college, you should consider hiring me 😉
Kidding aside, I do love the (very) occasional opportunity to feel just a bit smug. You know when something hits the pages of the NY Times that it’s entering the public’s awareness, and being and staying ahead of that curve is a big piece of what I’m all about.
Now this is useful. A clever hacker has put together RSS feeds for tv listings. Big deal you say? Imagine using the ‘watches’ feature of FeedDemon to build your own customized news feed that automatically makes you aware of, oh, say, every mention of the NY Giants football team, or Lucille Ball or every episode of Law and Order (wait, strike that, too many episodes ;-)…anyway, then using a little more imagination, stitch this into your handy RSS Calendar and you’ve got….something cool? Too much TV to the detriment of your reading habits? I’ll vote for something cool and never miss an episode of Cowboy Beebop again.
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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Pivotal games announced that they’re releasing the source code to the RTS Warzone 2100. This is excellent – the game, released years ago, was one of the best RTS of its generation, right up there with Total Annihilation in my opinion. Fans have been trying to score the source code for at least 3-4 years now, it’s really fantastic that they’ve managed to do so. Let’s hope this leads to good stuff, like what we’ve seen with the doom and quake source releases.
Today’s unavoidable spontaneous purchase was a copy of UberGoober on DVD, not because in many ways the title reflects who I am, but because kidding aside it covers Board, War and Roleplaying gaming, all of which I spent a good part of my youth playing. It’s Trekkies for Dungeons and Dragons nerds, basically, and while I’m no longer a member of this crowd the sad little secret is that sometimes I wish I still was 😉
Anyway the DVD is apparently pretty good. There’s a review on RPG.net if you’re interested.
Ok this is pretty silly but it cracked me up when I stumbled across it today, it was a .sig file in a posting to a threaded discussion board, reproduced verbatim:
“In a perfect world… spammers would get caught, go to jail, and share
a cell with many men who have enlarged their penisses, taken Viagra and
are looking for a new relationship. ”
— Anonymous
