By Tony Bates, on February 8th, 2010
Thanks to Natasha Boskic for this:
Amazon.com has published a list of Bestsellers in Video Games for 2009.
Jamie Madigan published an interesting article on her blog, “Phat Loot and Neurotransmitters in World of Warcraft”, about psychological effects of games, using World of Warcraft as an example. Her whole blog is an attempt to understand why we play games and what they do to us. In this particular posting, she compares playing WoW to slot machines. This triggered an even more interesting discussion on game addiction, human behaviour and the ways different countries respond to the consequences of increased game-time of everyday citizens.
The Independent Games Festival has announced the Main Competition finalists for the best games of the year. This is a record-breaking year in terms of the number of main competition entries (306 entries in total) since the establishment of IGF in 1998. The awards are in the categories: Seumas McNally Grand Prize, Excellence In Visual Art, Excellence In Design, Excellence In Audio, Technical Excellence, and Nuovo Award. The winners will be announced on stage at the IGF on March 2010 during the 2010 Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.
In addition to nearly $50,000 in prizes in various categories, a constructive, written feedback (over 1500 written comments) from anonymous judges will be given to entrants, regardless of whether they are finalists or not, which is a great incentive for game developers to take part in this competition.
Harry Wallop’s report (in “Video games bigger than film”) on the growth of video game industry in United Kingdom shows that movies haves lost their dominant position in entertainment arena. In 2009 500 million pounds more was spent on video games than on films in UK. Video games have become part of mainstream, affordable and enjoyable by the whole family.
Satisfied with the success of Super Mario Bros Wii, Satoru Iwata, the president of Nintendo, announced that the new Legend of Zelda Wii would be released by the end of the year. Read Chris Kohler’s article “Nintendo’s Iwata Says Wii Zelda in 2010” in Wired magazine.
Launching of Google Nexus One smartphone has attracted a lot of attention. One of the first questions about its functionality and possibilities is whether it could be used for playing games. Google is certainly thinking about how to make its mobile operating system the best in the world, competing with other already established phone companies on the market. Read the comment in Edge, “Gaming on the Google Phone”.
Can video games be used as a medicine? According to the story in Wired magazine, “Injured MMA Fighter Recovers With Modern Warfare”, video games helped an injured cagefighter to get back in shape.
Sony is unifying its products by enabling Sony PlayStation owners to use their PSN accounts to download content from other Sony devices. This was announced at Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2010) in Las Vegas on January 6, with a next month deadline. (Sony Details PSN Expansion To Other Products)
However, if you have non-Sony pieces of hardware, there will be no way for them to communicate. When every brand has its own network with no communication with other brands, we are faced with the same issue of compatibility as between Mac OS and Windows, with painful conversions and tons of helping applications (version for this and version for that…). If different companies don’t’ start thinking about how to “play” together, maybe every household should think about getting a huge deck instead of a dinner table.
See also: News on educational games, posted on January 21, 2010.
Also, Natasha’s list of conferences on simulations and games has now been updated to cover the whole of 2010.
By Tony Bates, on February 8th, 2010
Garrett, R. (2009) Online Higher Education Market Update Boston MA: Eduventures Inc.
This post is an expansion of an earlier post ‘For-profits increase market share of online learning‘, now I’ve had a chance to read the original report in full. I am grateful to Eduventures for sharing a copy with me, as the report is not publicly available over the Internet. There is however an excellent short video by the author available from http://www.eduventures.com/resources/video?vid=oh1.flv
The focus of this report is on the impact of the recession on the online market, but the report also provides some interesting data about competition between for-profit and public institutions for the higher education online market. For instance the for-profit sector has a much higher proportion of the total online market (around 32%) compared with its share of the overall higher education market (about 7%), and seven of the top ten institutions in terms of the number of online enrolments are for-profits. The report goes into the reasons why (mainly better marketing and more ability to respond to demand in the for-profit sector), and the video gives some useful pointers to the public institutions with regard to how they can compete better with the for-profits.
Enrolments in fully online courses are around the 11% mark of all enrolments, and this is expected to increase to 20% by 2014 (about 4 million enrolments). Still more than half (55%) of all US degree-granting institutions offer no fully online courses (down from 69% in 2005). However, Eduventures estimates that of the adult market (25+), 24% are currently in online programs and this is expected to increase to 35-40% by 2014.
Master’s programs are the big growth area in online teaching. The report stated that:
master’s programs offer the best combination of student maturity, short length, career focus and institutional comfort with experimentation-hence often very high online penetration.
The two most popular online master’s subjects in terms of enrolments were business and education, although there was a ‘long tail’ of subjects at this level.
The main message appears to be that for-profit institutions offering 100% online programs such as University pf Phoenix Online and Kaplan are much better placed to expand over the future than public and private universities, who, partly because of faculty resistance and partly because of a wish to exploit the benefits of a physical campus, have neither the desire nor the capacity to expand rapidly into fully online learning. However the demand for online learning is there and is likely to grow, while at the same time campus-based enrolments from high schools are likely to decline over the next few years, due to demographics. Lastly, online enrolments have benefited from the recession in the USA and therefore could act as a stabilizing factor for student enrolment in both for-profit and public universities.
By Tony Bates, on February 6th, 2010
CEET, the Community of Expertise in Educational Technology, is a professional learning forum for BC educators. It is an opportunity to network, explore technology and create partnerships. Each facilitated group contains information, resources, discussions, events, videos, tutorials and ideas on using Web 2.0 tools in K-12 education.
It is offering three free online Moodle Meets over the next couple of months:
Date: February 12th to 19th
Topic: Math 2.0: Tools & Resources for 21st Century Learners.
Register at http://tinyurl.com/ylmvd7n
March 19th to 26th
Topic: Literacy 2.0: Literacy lesson plans and classroom activities.
Register at http://tinyurl.com/yjnqd69
April 16th to 23rd
Topic: Cell Phones in the Classroom: Distraction or “Swiss Army Knife” for Research and Organization
Register at http://tinyurl.com/y8pjpo3
By Tony Bates, on February 5th, 2010
Whitton, N. (2010) Learning with Digital Games New York/London: Routledge
From the publisher’s blurb:
Written for Higher Education teaching and learning professionals, Learning with Digital Games provides an accessible, straightforward introduction to the field of computer game-based learning. Up to date with current trends and the changing learning needs of today’s students, this text offers friendly guidance, and is unique in its focus on post-school education and its pragmatic view of the use of computer games with adults.
The chapters are as follows:
- Introduction
- Recognizing the character of digital games
- Understanding the pedagogy of digital games
- Identifying types of digital games for learning
- Integrating digital games into the curriculum
- Designing a digital game for learning
- Assessing the impact of digital games on learning
- Using existing digital games for learning
- Developing new digital games for learning
- Evaluating digital games for learning
- Case studies (6)
- Conclusions
Nicola Whitton is a Research Fellow in the Education and Social Research Institute at the Manchester metroplitan University, UK. She has a web site: Learning with Digital Games
I look forward very much to reading this book and will post a review when I have done so.
By Tony Bates, on February 3rd, 2010
Johansen J. (2009) The Impact of Opencourseware on Paid Enrollment in Distance Learning Courses Salt Lake City UT: Brigham Young University
This is a Ph.D. thesis about the cost of converting online distance learning courses to OCW, the impact of opening these courses on paid enrollments, and the long-term sustainability of OCW through the generation of new paid enrollments.
This study is interesting not just because it provides information about how a university is using MIT’s Opencourseware, but because it also provides a business model for making courses based on open courseware viable. Unfortunately, because it was beyond the scope of the thesis, there is no information about the effectiveness of these courses compared to the more traditional programs offered at a distance by Brigham Young University.
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