After a fairly intense year at work and study, it was great to have a chance to wind down a little in sunny Brisbane for the Australasian Conference on Interactive Entertainment.

I’m not altogether sure what I was expecting – the program covered a broad spread of content from A.I, the use of space, mobile games, online media performance, robotics, storytelling and games-based education.

Keynote speakers included Caryl Shaw, who manages the Spore online community; Jeff Brand, a researcher at Bond University who recently published an extensive statistical overview of gaming in Australia (Interactive Australia 2009) and John Passfield from Krome Studios in Brisbane, a long time game designer.

While the majority of presentations were a little too academic for my taste (heavily technical and narrowly focussed), there was more than enough interesting and useful content to make the trip worthwhile.

At this juncture I have to issue an impassioned plea to academics making presentations about funky projects – show us the project/demo/game first and then bang on and on about the rationale, existing literature, underpinning conceptual frameworks and what not. This is most important when the project is something that is hard to understand without experiencing it. I promise I won’t leave once I’ve seen the goodies.

The attendees were a great bunch of people – a mixture of academics (primarily people undertaking doctorates in some gaming related field of I.T or another), game-design lecturers and QUT game-design students. After the initial “forming” period, it was surprisingly easy to have a chat to pretty well anyone.  After the tenth time of being asked whether/what I was presenting, I realised that the point of these things really is to share information (not that I have a lot of first hand knowledge to share just yet) and I was taking on something of a passenger role. Maybe next time around.

There were a few things that I will follow up on – I’ll go into more detail about them in upcoming posts but I will mention one right now.

Auditorium – beautiful flash game about pushing beams of light around the screen to create music

Thanks to the conference organisers (Ruth Christie in particular) for putting on a great event and also to the presenters and fellow attendees. With luck, I’ll be back.

While we’re looking at Croquet here for our work in virtual worlds in learning, there is a lot happening in education in Second Life that is worth investigating. Earlier this year an extensive conference was held there called Best Practices in Education and thanks to the kind folk at the Second Life Cable Network, you can see the better part of 12 hours worth of conference talks given by educators on the virtual world education cutting edge.

Some of the topics covered include:

• An observational survey of educational institutions in the virtual world of Second Life
• Student engagement in  Second Life
• Two Years of Introducing Educators to Second Life in 60 Minutes, or: Tips for Dinosaur Wrangling
• Fostering meaningful and productive relationships in a virtual reality environment
• Creating a community of practice and searchable database of learning objects in Second Life – The SaLamander Project
• Drawing on Second Life Experiences to Enrich the First Life

The Tips for Dinosaur Wrangling talk looks particularly interesting here as a starting point as getting institutional support to get these things set up (and past the firewall/security issues) is currently our first and biggest hurdle.

Subjects where learners keep a work-journal of some description (while working on a major project for example) can find blogs particularly valuable – not least because the date-stamping of posts discourages learners from whipping up 12 weeks worth of project reflection on the morning that it falls due.

What happens though when your learners aren’t that tech savvy? How do you get the underlying principles of what blogging is and why you do it when it takes half the session to get everyone online in the first place?

Easy – do it all on paper.

This activity (which has a number of game-like elements even if it isn’t strictly a game) was devised by the Flexible Learning Solutions (FLS) team at the Canberra Institute of Technology and it offers an enjoyable, low-tech introduction to blogging.

Leonard Low from the FLS team explains it in detail on his highly regarded Mobile Learning blog here.

A great part is that instead of a whole computer lab, all you need is:

Materials:

• A5 sheets of Paper – one per participant, and preferably in many colours
• Writing implements – lots of colours of ballpoint pens and/or colourful textas
• Post-It Notes – I use 47.6 x 73mm ones. If you can find some colourful ones around this size, so much the better.

(image from frozenchipmunk on Flickr)