Gaming Industry Leverages Social Aspects of Gaming

The New York Times ran an interesting article about how the gaming industry is trying to leverage the social aspects of gaming in their designs and marketing strategies.

Collaboration and the New Economy

This video features Howard Rheingold talking about how new forms of collaboration through things as the open-source movement may lead to new economic models.

ePals To Provide Education Software for Classmate PCs

Ed tech developer ePals this week announced that it's developing education tool's for the Classmate PC, Intel's low-cost, ruggedized laptops designed for elementary and middle school students. It's also part of Intel's World Ahead Program for bringing technology to students around the world, particularly students in "emerging" cultures.

Read article by Dave Negral in The Journal

What do we mean by participatory cultures

This video of Will Richardson speaking at ETech 2007, in Columbus, Ohio is a good explanation of what is meant in the Jenkins Paper on Participatory Cultures and how we need to ensure that all students have experiences doing this.

Casio EXILIM

I recently bought a Casio Exilim. It is a nice inexpensive camera with a lot of nice features. I originally bought it because it has a YouTube caputre mode in which video is taken in the right size and format for YouTube. Another nice feature is "best shot" it give a variety of typical shots such as portrait or scenery or twighlight and it will change the camera settings for you. It even has a setting for eBay. Another cool feature is the "anti-shake" mode that helps stabilize the camera.

The camera also displays a colored histogram to help you take better pictures. I wasn't sure what this was until I attended the Beach City CUE meeting last week and Stu Woodward taught us about how to use histograms in photography. What you want is a range represented on the histogram. A good web site about histogram is http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/understanding-series/understanding-histograms.shtml

Many Eyes

During our last face-to-face session at Pepperdine one of my classmates shared a cool site with us called Many Eyes. It allows you to upload your own data-sets and display your data in a variety of ways.

Virtual Biking

Lately I have been interested in the convergence of simulation technology in society. This week I was at Pepperdine for a week of classes. A group of us elected to get a one-week membership at the Spectrum Athletic Club across the street from our classes.

Being Ed Tech students we all had to try the stationary bikes that had a virtual reality interface added to make you feel like you were on a real bike ride. It had a variety of rides that you could do, for example I rode the Coastal Route which was nice. I enjoyed viewing the ocean from high bluffs.

As you ride there is a small map that shows where you are on your route. The scenery and landscape changes as you ride. You see your handle-bars and you have to steer while you’re riding. The resistance of your bike changes with the landscape. Other riders are in the simulation as well which is designed to help motivate you. You can also see an elevation chart at the bottom and other stats such as your heart-rate and revolution per minute. We all enjoyed it and felt that working out at the gym before classes made us more calm throughout the day.

This fits with a study conducted at Santa Clara University on Virtual Reality and its Psychological Benefits. The results suggest, “that virtual reality may enhance the energy and tiredness levels of females hours after the completion of the exercise and virtual reality experience but not for males” (Sorry Dan).

A Slow Time in Arcadia

Here is the video we created at the San Jose Museum of Art on a Slow Time in Arcadia painted by Roy de Forest.




To download the mp4 version (file type needed to play on an iPod) at http://www.thestephensgroup.com/final.m4v .