Education Blog Roundup

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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 in an iPad world. Textbook publishers take note – he specifically cites one as part of his examples. This isn’t just for Penguin.

Pearson gets it – mostly. But they can’t escape the book metaphor. Essentially this is the sidescroller stage of evolution. Beyond Pong, but no further than Mario Brothers. Do something interactive, flip a “page.” 3D, embedded social connections (“who else in the world is looking at this page that i could talk too…”) etc. is still in the future and will require some radically different ways of constructing and navigating content. Hopefully they are working on that in the back of the back room. Hat tip to personanondata.

Katie Piatt: The Process of Play – shares a solid framework for designing playful experiences in educational settings. The emphasis is on playful not on games. It could be used in a wide variety of products.

ISU study shows that violent video game play makes more aggressive kids. This broad study confirms common sense. What the headline writers miss are two key points. First only a small portion of games are violent, this is not a blanket indictment of games. Second, the effect sizes while real are not particularly large. So lets build some more cool non-violent games like:
Portal 2. I. Can’t. Wait. If you missed the original Portal go get it. This is also one of the coolest product sneaks I’ve ever heard of – marketers take note.

OR – play Susan McGonigal’s new game Urgent Evoke designed to politically empower people in Africa. She did great work with World Without Oil – this one looks even more interesting.

And for your amusement go visit PhotoshopDisasters. Warning: you will waste at least 5 perfectly good minutes chortling over this site. You must read the captions – hot piping snark.

Have a great weekend.