Fortnightly Mailing

More about "user-generated" games

In the 25/5/2006 Fortnightly Mailing I pointed to an interview on the BBC web site with Will Wright, the creator of "The Sims".

Thanks to Dick Moore for sending me the these two videos. The first is of an hour-long talk by Will Wright at the Games Developer Conference in San Fransisco in March 2006, to an (adulatory) audience of games developers. His basic argument is that when games are played by masses of people, even if only a small proportion players make content, and even if only a small proportion of this "user-generated" content is any good, more high quality content will be generated by users than could ever conceivably be made by the games-development companies themselves.

The second is a 30 minute description by Wright of Spore - basically a video, with Wright's voice-over, of the Spore "world", the kinds of creatures that populate it, the tools available to players to create content, and an overview of the technology underpinning it. (For me it brought back memories of a rather unpleasant shrimp (Triops australiensis) one of my children once grew from eggs bought in kit form from the Natural History Museum. There were several shrimps to start off with, but they were vicious cannibals.)

You can find out a bit more (but not much more) about user-generated content from Caryl Shaw's Building Community Around Pollinated Conted in Spore by [9 MB PPT], from the same conference.

Three free reports available from Learning Light - a "centre of excellence in the use of learning technologies in the workplace"

I commented last April about the formation of Learning Light, when the job of Chief Executive was originally advertised.  At that time PA Consulting had the contract for getting Learning Light established, procuring a web site for it, and commissioning some "research reports" for Learning Light to subsequently provide to users of its services. (I wrote two of these with David Kay, David Jennings, Camilla Umar, and Liz Wallis.) 

Earlier this year Learning Light appointed Jane Knight - founder of the e-learning centre - as  Head of Research, and Vaughan Waller - of the e-learning network - as Head of Membership Services. Astute decisions, since each of them brings with them a network of contacts and a lot of exerience and credibility. In addition, Donald Clark, original founder of Epic plc, who sometimes comments on posts in Fortnightly Mailing, and who did a Guest Contribution in March, has joined the Learning Light board of directors.

Learning Light's web site is now properly live, rather better designed and with less hyperbole than before. If you register on the site you will be sent by email links to 3 of the "research reports" referred to above. These are:

• Enterprise Learning 2006 Trends, Focus Areas, and Predictions for 2006 - written for Learning Light by Bersin Associates;
• At Cross Purposes - Why e-learning and knowledge management don’t get along - by Patrick Dunn and Mark Iliff;
• Generating Demand for E-learning: the 21st Century Citizen - by David Jennings, David Kay and Seb Schmoller.

Here is a direct link to Generating Demand for E-learning [400 kB PDF]. Thanks to Learning Light for permission to point directly to the report. Feedback on it would be most welcome.

How to geotag a page or an image

If you store photos on a service like Flickr you may want to "geotag" a picture so that a user can see on a map where the picture was taken. See for example this link on the full Flickr version of the picture.

No doubt there are much more elegant ways of doing this - post a comment if you know of one - but the cumbersome method I worked out involves the following:

1. Convert the the UK Ordnance Survey Grid Reference of the spot to longitude and latitude with this 1998 web-based tool from David Harper and Lynne Marie Stockman. Thus NY690250 is Longitude 54.618332, Latitude -2.480000.
2. Insert the longitude and latitude into this tool from Beeloop.
3. Copy the resultant tags and text back into Flickr.

For more on geotagging in general see this page on the Mapbureau web site, and [20061020] this interesting 19/10/2006 piece by Stuart Yeates about some emerging problems with geotagging.

You may also want to use geotags with Google Earth. You can link a series of longitude and latitude coordinates together to create a "fly-over". For example, if you have Google Earth loaded on your PC or Mac, and click on this link to a 1 kB  .kmz file (a small XML file that can be generated using Google Earth, and that Google Earth can interpret) you should be taken, within Google Earth, to an aerial view of the English/Scottish border. Click on the start button under "Places" and you should experience a rather soothing "fly-over" South to Middleton in Teesdale.

[Link to Suart Yeates post added 20/10/2006.]

 

Ferl - The Ofsted Handbook for Inspecting Colleges

This helpful article on the FERL web site by Becta's Nigel Ecclesfield reviews the revised Ofsted Handbook for Inspecting Colleges, and highlights the paragraphs relating to e-learning and supporting learning through the use of ICT. Essential reading if you work in English Further Education.

Ask Edward Tufte - a moderated forum - mainly about design

Years ago I was given Edward Tufte's Visual Display of Quantitative Information, and have used it occasionally ever since. Tufte is renowned for his dislike of PowerPoint, as normally used. His $7 Cognitive Style of PowerPoint is worth every penny (well, cent), and it has recently been updated. There is also a  slightly quaint  Ask Edward Tufte Forum, complete with RSS feed, which has some long discussion threads, some of which have been running slowly and steadily for the last 5 years. Worth browsing if you are interested in "information design".

MathWorld - the "world's most extensive mathematics resource"

During May I did a rather poor 2 day commercial course about using Excel for statistical analysis.  The PCs that trainees were using had web access and, grumbling to myself about better course design, I was able to supplement the teachers' input and the information in the handouts from parts of the statistical tests section in the MathWorld web site. This was the first time I'd come across the site and it is where I would now go if I want an explanation of a mathematical term or concept.

The nature and value of formative assessment for learning

Link rot fixed using WebCite, with minor edits, 11/5/2011

This 2004 paper [72 kB PDF] by Paul Black and Christine Harrison, with the King’s College London Assessment for Learning Group, is in the same vein as Inside the Black Box - Raising Standards through Classroom Assessment [PDF]. The latter influenced me a lot, in particular when working with David Jennings  in 2003 on BS8426 - A code of practice for e-support in e-learning systems. (BS8426 is absurdly overpriced, but this 8 page CC overview covers quite a lot of it.)   Here is the abstract in full:

The this paper has two foci. The first is to present an account of how we developed formative assessment practices with a group of 36 teachers. This is then complemented by a reflection on the productive and positive experience of these teachers, in the light of learning principles, of changes in the roles of teachers and pupils in the task of learning, and of effects on the self-esteem and motivation of pupils. Attention then shifts to the second focus, which is on the ways in which these teachers struggled with the interface between formative assessment and summative testing. The conclusion is that the potential of enhanced classroom assessment to raise standards may never be fully realised unless the regimes of assessment for the purposes of accountability and certification of pupils are reformed.

 

Linux - within a whisker of being able to hold its own as a serious nonproprietary desktop solution?

Yes, according to this 2005/2006 Investigation into the viability of Linux as a Business Desktop Operating System by Stephen Fellowes for the UK Society of Information Technology Management. This ~50 page report [650 kB PDF]  compares 5 different linux-based desktop operating systems, against a range of criteria (installation, first boot, devices and peripherals, applications and file types, systems administration, networking), and includes a focus on their use on laptops computers. It finishes with some pragmatic recommendations for corporate users, concluding that:

• versions with a clear link to a major development partner like SUSE or Novell have a "greater potential to provide a fully functional installation", and
• the support of hardware vendors is crucial to the successful deployment of linux-based operating systems on laptop computers.

Citizen Connect - inclusion through technology

Thanks to reader Martine Tommis for this link to the English language version of the Final Report of the Citizen Connect Project [4 MB PDF]. This ~60 page report, available in multiple languages, has been produced at the conclusion of an EU funded project involving cities in the UK (Manchester and Glasgow), Spain (Gijon, Aviles, Valencia), Italy (Bari), Germany (Gera), Netherlands (The Hague), France (Lille, Tourcoing), Finland (Helsinki), Estonia (Tallinn), Poland (Gdansk, Warsaw). The report's 5 recommendations, though they have that "written by committee in such a way as to keep all partners happy" feel, are pretty coherent, and are reproduced in the continuation post below.

Educause RSS feed aggregator

[4 January 2010] Sadly the Educause link below no longer functions.

Educause has this well implemented aggregation of RSS feeds, for a wide range of education-related topics. Useful if you want to show what RSS is to someone who is unfamiliar with RSS as a medium, and how feed aggregation works.