Virtual Worlds: Yay or Nay?

Virtual worlds are often related to idealistic applications in education. Or rather any application that contains “virtual” in it’s name, are categorized so.

In my previous employment, I got the opportunity to work on multiple virtual world projects. Majority of those were for the education sector. It was very refreshing to see that at least a handful of educational institutes here in Singapore, understand it’s demand and are investing time, money and manpower in building “fantasy worlds” to engage their learners in challenging topics.

Last week I was involved in a serious discussion to roll-out some form of virtual world project in my current workplace. There were lots of areas we spoke about but the following were the key points:-

• How does the 3rd dimension help in learning?
• What does the 3rd dimension do that 2-dimensions are not able to do?
• In what situations do we deploy virtual worlds?
• Virtual worlds should not be mirror worlds. They should be “fantasy worlds” that allow you to perform tasks that you are not able to do so in the real world.
• How do we leap from our current level?
• How do learners construct and demonstrate knowledge in a 3D virtual environment?

Lots of thinking went into this whole conversation. And the conclusion was, we will give it a go but the first impression will either make or break the situation. I totally agree!

Currently, very hard at work. Preparing the best I can. But I am going to share with you some stuff so that if such a need arises for you (or else you can always create the need right?), you know where/how to start…

Virtual worlds were created using OpenWonderland

Edu Games – Yay or Nay?

Well officially the 1st ever entry here. Not exactly a newbie in the blogsphere, but relatively new to a techlog 🙂

Have been working in the IT industry since graduating from poly in the early 2000s. what started off as a job to earn money for further studies and some other crisis, turned out to pave the path for my future – Technology in Education.

I will not delve into details. else, I will need a lengthy post dedicated to my career path (:

In the midst of preparing for the upcoming “new term” at work and for an on-going project, I was in search for game builders/ creators/ generators/ whatever-you-call-it. These are to aid in producing games for lower order thinking skills (LOTS) activities. For such activities, educators should be able to create their own games in a fuss-free manner so that both the educators and students will enjoy games for teaching and learning.

I am now going to share with you game generators that I have introduced to the English Language dept (ELL)  in the Institution I work at:-

• Choose from 12 or more templates to produce online interactive quiz-style flash-based games – http://www.what2learn.com
• 3 -4 installers available for download at http://www.contentgenerator.net for FREE. Each installer allows one to produce a different style of offline flash-based game.
• Not a digital native? Fret not! Go by the good ol’method of using PPT – http://jc-schools.net/tutorials/ppt-games

I wish I was able to share with you what some of the ELL students from our institution produced so that you can get an idea of what you can do with the links above. Unfortunately, IP rights do not belong to me so no-go. I made some samples, though. Will try to update this post with those links, if my memory doesn’t fail on me :S

Some other interesting finds will be shared in the upcoming entries.

Remember, this is just the start 🙂 You will certainly keep seeing more of “me”, I promise!