Category: Interactive Media

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Interactive Media Young people & museums

Schaller on educational games in Museums

David Schaller’s workshop at Museums & The Web 2005 was one of the highlights of last year.

Schaller and his cohorts at Educational Web Adventures are not only educators, web developers and interactive game makers, they are also very passionate about analysing what works and what doesn’t work.

The intrinsic appeal of gameplay makes games an attractive format for educational media developers, but the particular characteristics and challenges of a game magnify the usual concerns over design, intentionality, and outcomes that all educational designers deal with. Only through careful design and thorough evaluation can we hope to overcome these challenges and realize the potential that games offer.

Here’s a recent paper of Schaller’s looking at some specific examples of games that have been developed and used online and in museums.

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AV Related Interactive Media

Enough already! More Brokeback mashups

Here’s over 30 more Brokeback mashups. Even Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and He-Man get a run!

Some appropriate commentary on the phenonmenon from If:Book.

Some spoofs work better than others. The more successful trailers establish the parallels between the loner hero archetype of film and the outsider qualities of gay life. For example, as noted by Heffernana, Brokeback Heat, with limited extra editing, transforms Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro from a detective and criminal into lovers, who wax philosophically on the intrinsic nature of their lives and their lack of desire to live another way. Or in Top Gun 2: Brokeback Squadron, Tom Cruise and Val Kilmer exist in their own hyper-masculine reality outside of the understanding of others, in particular their female romantic counterparts. In Back to the Future, the relationship of mentor and hero is reinterpreted as a cross generational romance. Lord of the Rings: Brokeback Mount Doom successfully captures the analogy between the perilous journey of the hero and the experience of the disenfranchised. Here, the quest of Sam and Frodo is inverted into the quest to find the love that dares not speak its name. The p2p/ mashup community had come to the same conclusion (to, at times, great comic effect) that the gay community arrived at long ago, that male bonding (and its Hollywood representation) has a homoerotic subtext.

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Interactive Media

The power of search

Here’s a little search I did on A9 for ‘samurai armour’.

I didn’t know that it could help me with dating as well.

samurai search

Categories
Interactive Media Young people & museums

marc prensky vs digital immigrants in adelaide

Mike and I had the opportunity to see Marc Prensky present to an audience of educators – 90% digital immigrants – in Adelaide last week. He raised a number of points I found provocative and relevant specifically to our shvl programs, if not more broadly to exhibitions and exhibition development. He structured his presentation into 4 main themes:
1. dealing with change
2. producing engagement
3. mutual respect
4. sharing success

Some points which resonated with me include:

  • one important difference between analogue and digital is that with digital you can program it – make it do what you want.
  • netday.org – a website capturing and sharing opinions of students (and teachers) – interviewing over 150000 students in one day!
  • learning can no longer be push, only pull
  • engaement is more important than technology
  • empathy for students is more important than content
  • fun is the act of mastering a problem mentally – Rafe Kotter
  • learn. have fun. do good for others. the new triple bottom line eg The ESP game.

The presentation he gave is not yet up in the EdNA website but here’s a previous ppt with some of the same slides we saw which will give you his main argument. Š

Unoffical audio recording is here (PHM internal use only).

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Interactive Media

Sheep Sequencer

Amuse yourself with sheep playing reggaeton and dancehall . . . . Smookie would be into this for sure.

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Interactive Media

Spore – evolution simulator

Will Wright’s latest mega-game project Spore is nearing completion and it looks incrdible.

Here is a long video of gameplay with Wright talking about how players build characters from single celled organisms and evolve them into other creatures who then can build tribes, cities and eventually leave the planet for space. The most amazing thing about the game other thhan the complex organism engine is the way all other players of the game are represented in the same world similar to a MMORPG.

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AV Related Interactive Media

Gaming

Fantastic presentation on gaming and story writing from Kim Plowright one the BBC’s producers.

Some excellent commentary and links to videos to illustrate points.

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AV Related Copyright/OCL Interactive Media

BurnStation

BurnStation is a cool new art project meets Copyleft . . . . .

BURN STATION is a mobile copying station which – as it travels through suburban spaces – supports the free distribution music and audio. It is software as well as a local network. But above all BURN STATION is a social event which congregates people together to listen, select and copy net label and net radio audio files with a Copyleft Licence. BURN STATION is an open source and a non-commercial project involving the new means of free networked distribution. It is based on the BURN STATION software which was developed by Platoniq and Rama as a 100% Free software. BURN STATION aims to establish links between the media space and the physical space of the city.

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Interactive Media

Amazing new netart projects at Tate Online

The Dumpster – a visualisation of break up blog posts! Hilarious, sad and very voyeuristic.

The other two are launching later this year.

Check it out.

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AV Related General Interactive Media Mobile Social networking

marc prensky in Australia Mar 3, 2006

2006 education.au National Seminars – Transforming Learning through ICT
Seminar 1 – Delivering 21 st Century tools, learning and skills

This is the first in a series of two seminars for educational leaders involved in technology and learning through the use of the Internet.

Keynote speaker: Marc Prensky, the founder of Games2train, designer and builder of over 50 software games, and author of the critically acclaimed Digital Game-Based Learning and the upcoming Don’t Bother Me, Mom – I’m Learning!.

Marc’s professional focus has been on reinventing the learning process, combining the motivation of video games and other highly engaging activities with the content of education and business. He is considered one of the world’s leading experts on the connection between games and learning.