I haven’t posted much this past week, in part because I have worked too much, but also because I am now in the application phase of the research project I have been working on for the past few months. Once again, though, I have found myself lacking in motivation and structure for my work in this open-ended phase of the project, so I am once again turning to this blog as a possible solution – it worked wonders during the research phase.
So, I have been working on a 3 hour course titled “Introduction to Video Games in Education”, which I will actually teach at the OCDE tech center on December 13th. (Sign up if you live in Orange County!) Tonight I offer up my draft of the slides I will use during the class. I have almost certainly over planned at this point, but all of the theory in the opening section I have previously presented in an entertaining 15 minutes at the Walden residency this summer, so this may be do-able, even if it may make participants’ heads spin a bit.
In any case, if you are interested, take a look at the powerpoint file and let me know what you think. (I hope you have the fonts I used, but if not, that will be valuable feedback, too.) Thanks.
Click here for a zipped version of the powerpoint file. (2.7 MB – sorry, I have cable and don’t usually bother resizing my images.)
In the coming days I hope to start posting reflections on articles again, too. I’ve been making my way through last months’ Issue of Innovate.
Also, I had the good fortune of interviewing / chatting with Clark Aldrich on the phone last week. If all goes well, I will also be talking with James Paul Gee this Thursday afternoon. Parts of these talks will appear in the “Video Games in Education” webcast scheduled to be available October 13th through the OCDE at http://vc.ocde.us. At this point we also plan to produce a companion podcast in order to share more of the audio only conversations, so keep an eye on our RSS feed at http://edtech.ocde.us. Henry Jenkins will be interviewed via iSight for the webcast this week also (again, if all goes well), and other educators are submitting video of their implementations of games in education. I’m more than a little excited about this project, as you might imagine.
Thanks for reading.
-Mark
PS. I finally received “Got Game: How the Gamer Generation is Reshaping Business Forever” in the mail this afternoon. :)