Research and Writing

Funny Indexed post

A Stuff White People Like that (as usual) can be applied to the entirety of mainstream America

Clay Shirky's talk on Web 2.0

New Wiiware download, Lost Winds. Really digging the new downloads of games and demos for the DS bought a 2 GB SD card to accommodate my coming addiction.

Learning environments research on virtual environments

What Lisa bought me for my birthday

What I gave her

What I bought myself this weekend

This will catch you up on how I have been spending (most) of my net time today. Now don't you feel enlightened?

Don't you hate when you write a long post and it gets lost in the ether. Here's my attempt to recreate it before I go to bed.

So I've been playing a lot of Professor Layton and the Curious Village on my DS before I go to bed at night and I find it amusing that "Critical thinking is the key to success!" is one of the professor's key phrases. As a teacher, it would be great if all of my students thought that way, right?

Professor Layton is a lot like Brain Age with a narrative. You solve a series of puzzles to get clues from the villagers. The game offers an interesting cast of characters including the sloppy detective, the beautiful lady in distress, the flamboyant servant with purple lip(stick) to match his purple suit who interjects "Woo Hoo" in a Tourettes-esque manner during his speeches, matronly little old ladies, and an assortment of village idiots.

Oddly enough all of the villagers have puzzles that they want you to solve (and they can't solve them for themselves). You need the clues that they give you to solve a series of mysteries. There are disappearing artifacts, a murder, kidnappings, and more to come I am sure. I have finished 4 or 5 chapters of the game and the puzzles are starting to get a little challenging (either that or it's the cold medicine that I've been taking at bedtime). What is (so far) obviously absent from the game is word puzzles. Professor Layton 2 has already been released in Japan and a third is the works so hopefully the the developers at Level-5 will pull in some wordsmithy types to develop some word puzzles!

Additional game features?

In addition to the clues that you get from the villagers for solving the puzzles you can also earn money (picarats) that can be used to buy bonuses at the end of the game.

You can download new puzzles every week via the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection.

While I spent far too much time touring the Expo at GDC I played a lot of games as well. Want to know what I played? Here's a quick list and my 5 word maximum first reactions!

Hellgate London- Really Liked It

Crysis- Liked It

Spore Creatures (DS-Pre-release)- It could grow on me

Wii Fit- Strangely addictive (and the Nintendo guy got me to hula hoop in public!)

Dishwasher: Dead Samurai (XNA community game for XBLA)- Definite Download

Little Gamers (XNA community game for XBLA)- Definite Download

Penumbra:Overture- Not for me

Warriors Orochi (Pre-release for the PSP)- A hack & slash feast. Gots to get me some of that!

Bionic Commando (watched a demo)- A Black, male, Lara Croft with dreads...not really my type of game this one.

Fez- A GDC Indie favorite...a cross between Echochrome and old school platformer

On Tuesday I went to sessions from both IGDA and the Serious Games Summits. You'll find those notes below the fold. :-)

So day one is over and here are my notes. You can find them below the fold. Now to find some food.

well the morning of day one is official in the bag! i made it through almost the whole morning before my body decided that food would be necessary to keep my blood sugar up and I had to sneak out before the last morning session, but 3 out of 4 ain't bad, right? I'm posting my notes from the a.m. below the break for those who are interested in what when on in the Serious Games Summit today.

ContraCostaTimes.com - Laptops log middle school students on to learning

The 17 sixth-graders in the Westhampton Beach Middle School classroom sat at tables, staring up at their teacher. In front of each was an IBM laptop, screen slanted down. "You're going to have to figure out how you think King Tut died," Cindy Hart said to her social studies students. Screens went up, fingers tapped keyboards and ear buds emerged from backpacks. Students skimmed a news story, clicked through photos, watched a video clip and visited an interactive Web site about the Egyptian boy king. "It's better than just looking in a textbook to find answers," said Ricky Wagner, 11, who received the assignment from his own teacher in a classroom down the hall.

More interesting to me than the fact that these students are using the internet to learn ancient history is how they get to the information that they need to complete the assignment. I am more and more interested in the paths that students "instinctually" take to do research. This can be fruitful stuff. I want to see where they go first, what tangents they take,how they multitask...in essence the work-play that they do.

Late night musings :-)

We are back from vacation and back in the swing of things. I am spending the week playing catch up with the our job search, considering applying for a study in a 2nd discipline program (or taking some some design and programming classes if that doesn't work out), and doing a Kairos review.

There is so much to do and so little time to do it. In the meantime I have been playing My Sims and Paper Mario for fun and contemplating the online the online space that accompanies Webkinz. I knew I should have bought the hairy frog at the airport when I saw them on sale!

It's still Friday somewhere, right? Yesterday I had a great workshop with some of the student's from Dene Grigar's DTC program. We worked on storyboarding and machinima. The students worked really hard and did some good projects! I miss production. I really want to find some time to do more production in my own life!