Alan's Talk

• Why bother with games and on-line simulations in geoscience education?
  • Google Map, Wikipedia, Wikitravel? have new opportunities for teaching.
  • New opportunities from Web 2.0 for learning 2.0
  • New media (e.g. Convergence Culture) changing how we and students interact with media
  • The ways we use technology inside and outside education are starting to come together.
• What is Alan's group exploring?
  • Horizon Project - remote collaboration to create a report on the technology in education horizon (at various timescales) e.g.
    • Grassroots Video
    • Collaboration Webs - (e.g. google home page;
    • Mobile Broadband
    • Data Mashups (map based)
    • Collective Intelligence (e.g. aggregating small bits; building on each others work, NetFlix contest - put out data, set criteria for success, tested against data, and had a prize for motivation (wired has an article))
    • Social Operating Systems (merging facebook type networking in other technologies - moves away from login into every distinct site)
  • Games
    • Engaging - but take a lot of work -- is this viable in a small community like geo education, gaming engines may make more affordable
    • what skills underpin expertise or ease with games--how does this impact use in education
    • role of goals vs exploration in games
    • what makes game promote thinking -- multiple choice games may not promote this; role of open-ended exploration in next level types of games
      • alternate reality games (ARGNet) - World without oil
      • is the NetFlix contest an example of this?
  • Second Life
    • Exploring collaboration in a virtual world - sorting out what can be done
    • big learning curve especially for building
    • big win is collaborative construction of content in real time(arts, NOAA)
    • big potential for visualizing in 3-d, realtime collaboration in 3-d.
    • power is in social interaction not in data manipulation
    • compare to google sketch up work in architecture -- need realism and real data manipulation (sketch up reduces learning curve and financial barriers - limited capabilities but does basic things you want to do for drawing buildings-- now getting a collection of buildings on campuses and then build on that. Similar model for geoscience things?)
  • Google Earth as a Mirror world -- misses the interactions of 2nd life - but starting to incorporate the street/texture rich buildings from sketch up
  • Open Croquet
  • Wonderland - organizations can run their own virtual world in their own space -- collaboratively using desktop applications
• Comments - importance of Google Earth in generating interest in geoscience careers.