On-line games and virtual worlds were the theme at this year’s Austin Game Developers Conference (AGDC). This is the third of a few roundup articles about the conference with a focus on topics of interest to education and education publishers. The parallels between how the web is changing the game…
The panel on Managing Influencers at the Austin Game Developers Conference yesterday got me thinking about a frequently ignored aspect of the K12 publishing world – building and nurturing communities of key influencers around education products. In education influencers are the people who speak at regional trade shows, who write…
Mike Morhaime, President & Co-Founder of Blizzard Entertainment kicked off the Austin Game Developers Conference (AGDC) this morning. Blizzard produces the wildly successful World of Warcraft on-line multiplayer behemouth (9 million+ players worldwide). AGDC is focusing on on-line games this year and a packed auditorium was eager to pick up…
Textbook publishers have a checkered history with developing technology products – which I’ve already commented on here and here. Yesterday Richard Carey sent me a link to Rockets, Cars, and Gardens, which does a very elegant job of explaining different software development paradigms. One of the concepts that jumped out…
I’m assuming this is just a rhetorical device but Wesley Fryer over at Infinite Thinking Machine is calling for a textbook moratorium so we can get laptops and digital curriculum in everywhere. I don’t disagree with his urge to shake things up and increase the rate of change in the…
Virtual Worlds and Video Games for Education are getting a lot of press these days. With all the hoopla it helps to bring a little perspective to where we are in the development of this new market. It is feeling a lot like the web in 1997 and perhaps we…
Collective writing is a critical 21st Century Skill. Wikis are the primary tool for teaching this skill today. What resources exist to help teachers use wikis in the classroom? Recently this issue has been bubbling up on several places. The Wall Street Journal had an article on the discussions behind…
An idea for reforming the textbook market in higher education was floated on the editorial page of the New York Times this past Sunday. Fellow Austinite Michael Granof proposed converting the textbook market to a site license approach used in the software world. His ideas, while thought provoking, fail the…
Unpacking the Zeitgeist is an amusing post about World of Warcraft (WoW). In it Sci Fi Author Charlie Stross attempts to explain to someone from 1977 how Gnomes dropped from the sky in the shape of a URL advertisement in WoW. He unpacks 30 years of assumed knowledge (what is…
Statewide Web 2.0 applications for education are a growing force in the market. This has huge implications for how schools will organize and manage information. Education Enterprise Software has always played a critical role in the adoption of new technologies. For example, when web applications first debuted in schools many…