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While doing research with Dr. Edward Brantmeier, I ran across this interesting information from Cole and Crawford (2007) in an article called “Building peace through information and communication technologies.” The table below details some of the authors’ main points.

Education Futures is the repository of Global Leapfrog Education (formerly ISSN 1933-0200).

Contents available online are

Volume 1, Number 1 (December 2006):

• Editors Welcome: Arthur Harkins and John Moravec
• Learning 2.0: Juan Cristobal Cobo Romani (reviewed by Suzanne Miric)
• Facilitating 21st Century Education: Leapfrogging Culture and Time through Simulational Learning: Arthur Harkins, John Moravec, and George Kubik (reviewed by Drew Davidson and Juan Cristobal Cobo Romani)

Twenty years ago, playing games over a distance might have meant that you played turn-taking games like chess over email, and you were cutting edge. I remember people playing chess through snail mail! You would make your move and wait for a reply.

What is happening now is taking place in real-time in virtual environments that are interactive and look better than many films. Decisions, actions, and communications happen like they would in a face-to-face conversation, but they are done through a proxy, that is first and second-person perspectives with an avatar: a graphical representation of yourself in the game space.

Here is my avatar in Second Life.

He is a mix of Yoda, Pei Mei, Zatoichi, Master Po, and Real Ultimate Power. I would have liked to have made him old, but this is only possible if you learn to use some tools outside of the game to create more specialized characters. There are many who do this custom avatar creation, and the cool thing is that you could make your avatar something other than a person. Maybe a virus or a mailbox.

In fact, many people are already creating a comfortable living creating products for in game use. If you have not seen it yet, there are already success stories of people capitalizing on the new economies that virtual worlds have created.

In this Business Week article, one school teacher in Germany has made substantial gains flipping virtual property!

Imagine that you have the tools and access to build in these environments. In Second Life you do. You can visit models of the Sistine Chapel, Yankee Stadium, or even visit government agencies like the Center for Disease Control. You can build what you like on your virtual land.

What make this kind of play appealing is the ability to play and communicate when you want, and the possibility of meeting people from all over the planet. The prospect of building models and interacting in this environments should be very appealing to educators. This is an extension of the diorama. (Tomorrow I will talk about a project using these ideas in the classroom).

(Read more …)

For those of us in Minneapolis/St. Paul, this looks good:

Normandale Community College

Learn what your students already know Games and simulations are powerful tools – changing the way we learn Hands-on Instruction Enables You to Play the Games Yourself Seated at your own computer, with an instructor as your guide, you’ll be taken into virtual worlds and 3-D environments where you become The newly elected President of Chimerica, responsible for stabilizing the country’s troubled economic and social situation, changing public policy and forming a new administration. (Hidden Agenda)   A 21st century student traveling back in time to a town besieged with health problems. Working with others, you track clues, form and test hypotheses, and make recommendations. (River City) A rookie newspaper reporter for the Harperville Gazette whose job is to write an article on the health and environmental implications of a toxic spill. (Behind the Message)   Leader of a pharmaceutical company’s research team. You must determine the product’s features, estimate demand, and set price and production levels. (SimSeries Business) A $100,000 investor in the stock market, using real Internet research and news updates to determine how to build and grow your portfolio. (Stock Market Game)   and more Integrating Games/Simulations into Education Now that you’ve played the games, the afternoon sessions address key issues that will help you take the next steps, topics include: How Games Improve the Learning Process Preparing the New Learner for the New Economy with Games Breathing Virtual Life into the Classroom Integrating a Game/Simulation with eLearning Like a Rock Star: virtual character development

I just received this note from Janet Cohen:

John -
You are going to love this one - from the Feb 2007 Wired.
A Second Life for MTV by Mark Wallace
article is not online yet, but this article explains the part you’ll like, MTV is calling their Virtual MTV a Leapfrog Initiative!
http://www.mediavillage.com/jmr/2006/12/04/jmr-12-04-06/
I’ll try to blog about this soon, if you don’t beat me to it.
cheers, janet

Although MTV’s Virtual Laguna Beach has been out for a while, this is a great example of digital media converging with culture — and new culture creation. No wonder they call it leapfrogging!
Thanks Janet!

Update - Jan 24 @ 20:08

You should really read Janet’s thought’s on “leapfrogging” at MTV:

http://janetdcohen.blogs.com/babyboomerblog/2007/01/virtual_worlds_.html

The Los Angeles Times recently ran a story on the adoption of technology in California’s higher education institutions. Gaming and simulation technologies are being explored to provide “more individualized instruction” that cater to both emotional and learning needs of students. Carol Twigg at the National Center for Academic Transformation is looking at online education. Writes the times:

Twigg’s outlook is based partly on her center’s four-year effort with 30 colleges to redesign high-enrollment courses. The 30 projects involved such things as deemphasizing lectures and relying more on online tutorials and discussion forums, along with using computerized grading to give students speedier assessments of what they were learning well and what they were getting wrong.

The result: Student learning rose in 25 of the 30 projects. And in the other five cases, performance remained roughly even with the level in traditionally taught classes. At the same time, the cost of providing instruction was reduced an average 37%.

I’m not quite sure how student learning is measured, but if this research is accurate, the trend of rising college costs may be reversible…

Arthur Harkins and I deivered a presentation on “Facilitating 21st Century Education: Leapfrogging Culture and Time through Simulational Learning” at the 30th Annual Pacific Circle Consortium meeting at Mexico City on July 13. Read on for the abstract or download the PowerPoint slides.

(Read more …)

This is a great article!

Online education often provides too much explicit knowledge and too little tacit knowledge and social interaction. In this article, John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas identify an avenue for tacit knowledge production in virtual settings. As virtual reality is becoming more-and-more preferred over the real world, perhaps the “Leapfrog U” would find its greatest success embedded in the World of Warcraft, the Sims, Ever Quest, Final Fantasy XII, Second Life, etc., etc., etc…

From the IST program:

If computers could create a society, what kind of world would they make? Thanks to the work of an ambitious project that adds a whole new meaning to the phrase, ‘computer society’, in which millions of software agents will potentially evolve their own culture, we could be about to find out.

With funding from the European Commission’s Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) initiative of the IST programme, five European research institutes are collaborating on the NEW TIES project to create a thoroughly 21st-century brave new world – one populated by randomly generated software beings, capable of developing their own language and culture.

Read the full article.