I came across a very interesting site looking at the social dimensions of online games. You can find a lot of statistics about average game time for leveling and leveling curves for keeping players motivated. Other statistics look at the stability and cohesion of groups on game servers.

BTW an interesting article about fun, learning, and motivation can be found in Chapter 5 of Marc Prensky’s book on educational gaming. (link)
Find the PARC blog at at http://blogs.parc.com/playon/

I am in the PC of the Mobile Learning Conference 2007 in Lissabon find the CFP here.

the topics include:

• How to Enhance the Experience without Interfering With It?
• Affective Factors in Learning with Mobile Devices
• How Can We Address the Conflicts between Personal Informal Learning and Traditional Classroom Education?
• Evaluating Mobile Learning: What are Appropriate Methods for Evaluating in Mobile Environments?
• How Should Learning Activities Using Mobile Technologies be Designed to Support Innovative Educational Practice?
• How Can We Integrate Mobile Devices with Broader Educational Scenarios?
• Other relevant themes to explore Big Issues in Mobile Learning

To support the Competence Network for PhD students, the TENCompetence project organized the first TENCompetence Winter School on January 22-26, 2007 in Innsbruck, Austria.

A major aim was to facilitate joint research and collaboration by stimulating the emergence of communities of practice and learning networks related to the TENCompetence research areas.

The programme included various types of training – lectures, hands-on sessions (and snowboarding for the more intrepid!).

The TenCompetence winterschool in Innsbruck was quite a successful event and you can find all material online at http://www.tencompetence.org/node/116.

An excellent review of Profile Aggregators from Frank Gruber can be found online at

http://www.somewhatfrank.com/2007/02/the_web_profile.html

I gave a presentation about “Different Perspectives on Competences” at the TENCompetence Winterschool.

Abstract: Competence Development Perspectives
This session will give an overview of various interpretations of the concept “competence”. Several perspectives for building competence based services will be demonstrated, ranging from competence based human resources services to life-long learning networks for competence development.

from the study:

The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth’s Center for Marketing Research conducted
a nationwide telephone survey of those companies named by Inc. Magazine to the Inc.
500 list for 2006 under the direction of blog researchers Eric Mattson and Nora Ganim
Barnes.

“From familiarity to usage to importance, social media is far more prevalent in the Inc.
500 than previous research would predict. And where these fast-growing, innovative
companies lead certainly the corporate world will follow.
The social media revolution is here. The hype is real.”

an abstract can be downloaded here.

A very interesting blog collecting new projects about visualization and describing his master study is from moritz stefaner (der-mo.net).

It can be found at http://well-formed-data.net/.

in his book about learning an computer games James Paul Gee names some main points about computer games. (find the book online at Palgrave here)

1. Doing and reflecting
2. Appreciating good design
3. Seeing interrelationships
4. Mastering game language
5. Relating the game world to other worlds
6. Taking risks with reduced consequences
7. Putting out effort because they care
8. Combining multiple identities
9. Watching their own behavior
10. Getting more out than what they put in
11. Being rewarded for achievement
12. Being encouraged to practice
13. Having to master new skills at each level
14. Tasks being neither too easy nor too hard.
15. Doing, thinking and strategizing
16. Getting to do things their own way
17. Discovering meaning
18. Reading in context
19. Relating information
20. Meshing information from multiple media
21. Understanding how knowledge is stored
22. Thinking intuitively
23. Practicing in a simplified setting
24. Being led from easy problems to harder ones
25. Mastering upfront things needed later
26. Repeating basic skills in many games
27. Receiving information just when it is needed
28. Trying rather than following instructions
29. Applying learning from problems to later ones
30. Thinking about the game and the real world
31. Thinking about the game and how they learn
32. Thinking about the games and their culture
33. Finding meaning in all parts of the game
34. Sharing with other players
35. Being part of the gaming world
36. Helping others and modifying games in addition to just playing.

Martin Wolpers from KU Leuven and Professional Learning Cluster organized a session on Professional Learning and Beyond at the IST2006 event. I gave a very short presentation about the TENCompetence project.

You can download the presentation from DSpace of the OUNL it is distributed under Creative Commons Licence here.

I gave also two examples of using contextualized learning and gaming for professional learning support.

Today I am visiting the IST 2006 Conference in Helsinki, a huge event with 4200 participants, great networking sessions and conference presentations.

visit the website to get an overview:

IST 2006 Home