Spoon River

I've had the distinct pleasure to be involved in a class this semester that talked about instructional games. It was quite enjoyable, especially the class project we did. It can be found here.

The basic premise is that we took a text that is often taught in High School, and turned it into an interactive text adventure. It was fun to work on, but even more fun was to attend our 'release party' (no representatives from EA Games showed up (their loss)), and see the reaction of the people playing it. They were having fun! To me it was an enjoyable project, but to see somebody really have fun while playing something you created was surprising pleasant. In fact, I just re-checked out Spoon River Analogy. I want to go back and build a few more clusters, because I know I could come up with some better ones. And now I've got the 'computer hacking skills' to do it.

And a follow up to the wiki news

As a follow up to my last post, a couple of folks decided to dig a little deeper on the recent research that showed wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britannica have about the same error rate. As it turns out, most of the articles that were examined were much longer on wikipedia. So if you look at errors per bytes of text, the wikipedia is actually more accurate. From the article:

"Result: WP errors per 2KB: 1.3. Britannica: 3.6. WP average article size: 6.8KB. Britannica: 2.6KB"

More Wiki in the news...

With all the news about wikipedia lately, you would think that the onlin, free, collaborative encyclopedia was nothing more than a cess pool of inaccurate, messy, worthless information (that creed is actually what uncyclopedia is shooting for, and doing a very good job of it, if I may say so myself).

But this article suggests that the difference between Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia Britanica is not that far. Errors are found in both encyclopedias, although wiki did have a slightly higher rate.

Interesting read.

Amazon...

So, my book is finally on Amazon. For whatever reason, my publisher doesn't list their books on Amazon.com. So it is up to other book stores to sell 'through' Amazon. I was checking all through the summer but it just wasn't getting on there. But now it is. Of course the asking price on Amazon $35. I'd like to say that is because my book is so popular, and it's a first printing, and I'm selling thousands of copies, but it's not. I'm actually not sure why it's so high. If I had the gumption, I'd sell copies myself, but currently I'm trying to get the copyright back so that I can release the book under a Creative Commons license.

We'll see what happens.

Too Many Lawuers

Sometimes all you can say is "Oh Brother".

The FUDDERS are probably giggling with glee.

31 Years

Maybe I don't need a retirement fund? I'll be 64 in 31 years.

I get deep into school, and just can't get around to posting to my blog.

I've had a class on problem-based learning this semester, and while there is a bit (only a bit) of research on problem based learning and writing, there are some methods with very close parallels; process-based writing seems to be the closest.

But now I'm looking at model centered instruction as maybe a theory that gives a little bit more room. It has similar characteristics to PBL, but it has a bit more flexibility.

I'm also excited, as I've been doing research into the teaching of writing, that a wiki could really be a powerful tool in teaching, and producing, good writing. Many of the theories and methods of teaching writing rely on constructivist approaches and communication between the reader and the writer. I think the wiki could facilitate this process.

Anyway, more to come after final papers and projects are in.