E.D. Kain over at Balloon-Juice has a fascinating saunter through crime stats since video games became widely popular. According to the FBI, since 1990 violent crime has been on a steady decline. E.D.’s basic hypothesis is that some of this can be attributed to people experimenting with rage and mayhem…
Richard Carey points to an outstanding article by Shane Snow on using game mechanics to power your business over at Mashable. This rings true in my personal use of social media (see here re Foursquare) as well as in a lot of the thinking that has gone into what will…
Kid’s virtual world Club Penguin has fallen short of the high-flying projections made when Disney purchased them 3 years ago. Read this New York Times piece from today for the details. I can’t say I’m surprised by the result. CP always seemed thin on the engagement side – dress your…
Today’s hotlinks include Pearson’s take on publishing for the iPad, designing playful experiences, the coolest marketing program I’ve seen in a while, a new augmented reality game to promote social change in Africa, and Photoshop disasters. John Makinson of Pearson Penguin gave an interesting talk on the future of publishing…
How can technology and innovation reshape education? Union Square Ventures put on Hacking Education – a conference that brought educators and entrepreneurs together to hash this out. Unfortunately they didn’t have any practitioners from the education technology and publishing industries there. After reviewing the well written summary of the discussion…
If you don’t think story-line matters in instructional materials just look at the pie fight over evolution in Texas. At its root this is a battle over which story we use to make sense of how we got here. Advocates on both sides will be unhappy with this characterization –…
A new free white paper that tackles the practical challenges teachers face when they use video games was released this week by the Software Information Industry Association (SIIA). I was the author of the paper and the co-chair of the working group that produced the paper. Barrels of ink and…
Piping hot education related blog topics served here! The debate over formative assessment, the top 10 sites for educational games, crowd-sourcing the next great novel, controversy around Microsoft’s new ads, the relationship between quality and advertising, and a hilarious spoof of Politicians all get the nod this week. Education Week…
Barack Obama is proposing significant new investments in early childhood education. More attention has been focused on his drive to recruit an army of new teachers but I believe the early childhood focus is equally important. Why? As students age the gap between low performers and even average performers gets…
Education technology bloggers have been a busy lot with NECC 08, end of school year, and lots of new products to play with. Here are just a smattering of some of my favorite posts from the past few weeks. Enjoy. John Rice flagged an article showing that putting games in…