My Games Design

As a kind of introductory H809 post (though most of this will probably apply to anyone who is thinking about setting up there own blog), I wanted to talk about some of the blogging tools that are out there for people to use and what sort of questions you need to ask yourself when deciding what to use. I figured the easiest way to go about this was to try and compare some of the tools available so I'm going to talk about the OU blogging tool (available as part of the VLE ), Blogger and Wordpress . Note: there is also wordpress .org , where you can download a bit of blogging software and need your own domain name to host your blog, but I'm going to be discussing W ordpress .com where they host your blog for you. Obviously, I am most familiar with blogger, but I did have a play with the OU tool and a chat with another student at in IET , Anesa Hosein , about her experience with W ordpress .com. With respect to the OU blogging tool (you can find this via the StudentHome websi

There were a couple of things I went to last week that I thought were worth mentioning. One of them was BETT , which I went to with my supervisor James Aczel who has already blogged about it here . The picture on the right is me playing with Microsoft's surface, which was definitely pretty cool. So we saw a lot of cool bits of technology, but I think what I'd like to add to James' commentary was that we saw very little in terms of innovative gaming approaches. There were a fair few simulations on offer, and a lot of interactive software but in very little in terms of actual games. There was a stall for Serious Games Interactive , who were promoting their Global conflict series where students take on the role of reporter in either Palestine or Latin America. I'd already heard about the company at ECGBL , when Simon Egenfeldt -Nielsen did his keynote so it was nice to see they had a presence at the exhibition, albeit in a little stall in an upstairs corner. ConnectED

In good news, I have managed to get myself some part-time work! I'm quite excited about it not just because it's a chance to gain some useful experience and earn some extra cash but I think the post is going to be a bit of an experiment in and of itself. I'm going to be helping out on a 20 week OU course called "Practice based research in educational technology" (H809) , which ran for the first time last year. The course aims to help students locate, understand and evaluate empirical research within the area of technology enhanced learning in order to answer questions such as "How strong is the evidence for claims made about the use of ICT in edcuation?", and "How can we use theory to improve things?". It can be taken as part of a masters program or seen as a stepping stone to further study (e.g. PhD) and is aimed at teachers, lecturers, and education professional who have an interest how ICT is being used and evaluated within education. You ca

It's time to talk about Spore . Designed by Will Wright (who gave us Sim City and The Sims ) and produced by Maxis there has been a lot of hype surrounding this game, partly because it took so long to develop. In Spore, the player gets to follow and make choices about the evolution of their species through a series of phases: Cell, Creature, Tribal, Civilization and Space. Now I got the game back when it was released in September and got through the first four stages relatively quickly, but then I hit Space. I'm not even sure you can compare the Space phase to the previous ones because it is ridiculously huge. In the earlier phases, it is fun to watch your creation evolve, but it also feels like there is a lot of repetition going on e.g. in terms of how you interact with other creatures, plus I don't get why things like the camera controls seem to differ at each stage. But anyway, once you get through all that and unify your civilization, you discover space travel and th