Game-Based Learning (GBL)
Embodied learning experiment
Creative Emotional Reasoning Computational Tools Fostering Co-Creativity in Learning Processes
The C2Learn project aims to introduce an innovative digital gaming and social networking environment incorporating diverse tools, the use of which can foster co-creativity in learning processes in the context of both formal and informal educational settings.
In developing this project, we are innovating methodologically by introducing two new non-linear thinking processes, as fundamental heuristic devices in assisting the user to generate new types of candidate solutions. These innovations are based on most recent results of cognitive science research, which have marked a breakthrough in our understanding of the roots of reasoning and its relation to emotion and representation: Diagrammatic Reasoning and Emotional Reasoning.
We shall also implement these non-linear thinking methodologies in game environments, especially for school age users, in order to enhance the motivational component and to enrich the manner and opportunities of engagement with these activities. In so doing, we shall be guided by an acclaimed educational theory on how to use digital gaming and social networking technology to promote creative thinking in children and the young.
The C2Learn environment will be an open-world "sandbox'' (non-linear) virtual space enabling learners to freely explore ideas, concepts, and the 'shared' knowledge available on the semantic web and the virtual communities in which they participate. In this open-world sandbox, creativity is contextually defined as open-ended, and has no pre-sets or barriers. So too will be the virtual game environment housing nonrestrictive opportunities for learners to engage in creative problem-finding and creative problem solving. These new computational tools - rather than setting a series of preset problems and challenges based on players' previous actions in the virtual game environment - will afford and generate potential playful experiences surrounding creative problem solving and non-linear thinking tasks.
Creativity in learning through Social Computing and Game Mechanics in the Enterprise
Much social creativity involves human collaboration through and about artifacts that embody collective knowledge resulting from the collaboration. It can be a catalyst to enable European SMEs and large organizations to adopt and sustain new approaches to learning by fostering non-linear and non-standard thinking and allowing promising ideas to be transformed into new processes, products, services or business models
To this end COLLAGE will exploit new synergies between the social Web phenomenon, emerging Web analytics, collaboration and gaming technologies to energize and enable social creativity in learning. It will design, develop and validate an innovative cloud-enabled Social Creativity Service-Set that will support the interlinking of learning processes and systems with (i) social computational services for inspiring learners,
(ii) social affinity spaces for leveraging expression and exploration, and (iii) social game mechanics for supporting social evaluation and appreciation of creative behaviour.
The COLLAGE service set will be applied to enhance creativity in the learning processes of: FIAT SEPIN, which provides training to the Fiat Group and its automobile ecosystem; CEDEP, the executive education consortium; and WAAG, the creative technology society. COLLAGE will aim to generate:
- Economic impact by enabling SMEs and large organizations to capitalize on the creative capabilities of their employees through new value creation.
- Technological impact by advancing leading edge technologies (context-aware computing, web analytics and social computational systems) towards creativity support.
- Impact on TEL by providing an open-source service-set for social creativity able to mash-up with existing learning processes and solutions.
- Scientific impact by advancing research in prominent research areas such as creativity models for learning, game-based learning and social recommender systems.
PELeCON 2013 - The 8th Plymouth Enhanced Learning Conference
Digital Learnscapes: Meeting Future Challenges. We live in a period of change and uncertainty. Many are bewildered by these changes and find it difficult to keep up, particularly in the education and training sectors. The ability to anticipate and prepare for change is the mark of innovative educators, as is the skill of harnessing new and emerging tools to promote good learning.
At Pelecon 13 we want to provide learning professionals with opportunities to explore, discover and discuss new approaches, new technologies and new ideas to enhance, enrich and extend their own professional practice. There will be particular emphasis this year on simulations and games, personal learning tools, new pedagogies and practices, learner and teacher voice, and digital literacies.
eLmL 2013 - Fifth International Conference on Mobile, Hybrid, and On-line Learning
eLmL 2013 conference continutes bringing together federated views on mobileLearning, hybridLearning, and on-lineLearning. eLmL 2013 is dedicated to educators, eLearning experts, and students to exchange their ideas, experiences and lessons learnt in different facets of modern learning.
eLearning refers to on-line learning delivered over the World Wide Web via the public Internet or the private, corporate intranet. The conference is intended to provide an overview of technologies, approaches, and trends that are happening right now. The constraints of e-learning are diminishing and options are increasing as the Web becomes increasingly easy to use and the technology becomes better and less expensive.
As the ease of execution increases, more and more institutions are discovering the benefits of delivering training via the Web. Interest in e-learning is at an all-time high, and the workshop wants to serve as a stimulus to accelerate collaboration and dialog among the e-learning providers, trainers, IT researchers and the lifelong, self-directed learners. Such business trends as an increased global economy, the pressures for rapid development, and the necessity of teamwork are shaping the present state and the future of eLearning.
Employees are increasingly aware that they must continue to update and advance their skills if they want to understand the state-of-the-art technologies and remain valuable to their organizations. This means that learners will be more and more self-directed, and they will want access to what they need when they need it. The Internet based educational materials and the e-learning providers have to meet this demand.
The conference focuses on the latest trends in e-learning and also on the latest IT technology alternatives that are poised to become mainstream strategies in the near future and will influence the e-learning environment. Ubiquitous systems proliferate quickly due to the latest achievements in the industry of telecommunications, electronics, wireless, and economical globalization.
Wireless and mobility allow any user to timely use resources using various access technologies under (assumed) secured and guaranteed privacy. The family of the mobile devices expand dramatically, allowing a user to have a portable office everywhere, every time. Mobile learning became a fact, due to the technical accessibility and Internet communications. Many online classes, learning systems, university curricula, remote education, and virtual training classes are now part of the corporate education and use.
Progress is made in user modeling and adaptive learning models. The generalization of successful practices on mobile learning is favored by many national and international projects and policy synchronization boards. Adaptation implies also the use of the classical methods, still in use and useful in some contexts and for some categories of users. Hybrid learning is an increasing trend in education today. The traditional classroom learning has been historically proven beneficial. Hybrid learning is rather a series of different learning strategies going from teacher-centric to student-centric. This improves the critical thinking, creativity, self-management, self-study, and advance problem solving thinking of the student.
We solicit both academic, research, and industrial contributions. We welcome technical papers presenting research and practical results, position papers addressing the pros and cons of specific proposals, such as those being discussed in the standard fora or in industry consortia, survey papers addressing the key problems and solutions on any of the above topics short papers on work in progress, and panel proposals.
Industrial presentations are not subject to the format and content constraints of regular submissions. We expect short and long presentations that express industrial position and status.
Tutorials on specific related topics and panels on challenging areas are encouraged.
The topics suggested by the conference can be discussed in term of concepts, state of the art, research, standards, implementations, running experiments, applications, and industrial case studies. Authors are invited to submit complete unpublished papers, which are not under review in any other conference or journal in the following, but not limited to, topic areas.
All topics and submission formats are open to both research and industry contributions. You can check them all here.
Atlas Didáctico
Este Atlas Didáctico nos ofrece contenidos de geografía. Pueden ser utilizados en el último ciclo de primaria y en secundaria en función de los temas que escojamos de la web. Son destacables sus juegos, diseñados para comprobar al aprendizaje en los distintos contenidos tratados, algunos de ellos en formato quiz. En su portal de Cartografía didáctica podremos encontrar muchos otros recursos como puzzles, mapas mudos (en formato pdf, muy adecuados para imprimir y trabajar con nuestros alumnos) y unidades didácticas.
Introducing Serious Game Programming to Teacher Education at Hamburg University
This article describes a course for pre-service teachers designed to get them into touch with creating games for educational purposes while offering them various possibilities of having experiences with the benefits and the possible pitfalls of new media usage in education in general.
At the University of Hamburg, integrating new media into educational settings is a central aspect of teacher education. The introduction of Serious Game programming to teacher education supports pre-service teachers in familiarizing themselves with creative ways of utilizing the educational potential of new media for themselves as well as their students.
Hamburg University, one of the largest universities in Germany, accepts several hundred pre-service teachers per year. During their course of studies, they can choose to focus on courses in educational science aimed at deepening their knowledge about integrating new media into educational settings.
CUC 2012 - CARNet Users Conference
In this year of the Olympics, let us gather at the CARNet Users Conference in the Olympic spirit! Let us be inspired by it, not in order for us to compete with each other, but to re-examine our own abilities.
Can we improve the network we are developing, and it’s security? Do we know how to operate that network in educational institutions? What kind of content do we want to publish on it? To what extent do we want to control the Internet users? How will we teach young people that on the Internet, too, their freedom is limited by the freedom of others? How to use technology which they find interesting in a way to enhance their innovativeness? These and other topics will be addressed at CUC 2012. We invite you to make your own contribution to the discussion by submitting your papers or to propose workshops and encourage further learning!
Additional information about the Conference can be obtained by e-mail at CUC@CARNet.hr.
CARNet Users Conference - CUC 2012 will be held under the auspices of the President of the Republic of Croatia and the Ministry of Science, Education and Sport.
Gamification World Congress
Gamification World Congress will bring together key leaders and international gamification experts well as all those interested in optimising the production process of their companies, or improving the loyalty and engagement of its user base.
It is the perfect place to share knowledge and concerns about gamification, the new marketing strategy based on the customer's enjoyment of unique experiences offered by our products and services.
Gamification is being applied across the board in almost every field, which is why experts will talk about the following topics, among others:
- Gamification for marketing campaigns and loyalty programs.
- Gamification for increasing the effectiveness and outcomes of business processes.
- Gamification for the engagement of services and online products.
- Gamification in education, health or as a social transformation tool.
- Gamification's main challenges within organisations.
- Practical applications of gamification in new environments.
Making Serious Games Available to All
Ángel del Blanco Aguado works on making Serious Games universally accessible at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid's eLearning Research group. The group recently presented a paper on this topic in the Game-Based Learning workshop at ICWL 2012, in Sinaia, Romania.
Serious Games? Isn’t that an oxymoron?
If we use games in education, we can't forget the fun factor. But we also have to include, and this means working together with education experts, the pedagogical element as well. The word serious is used because the audience we’re talking about includes both children and adults—teaching business skills like teamwork management, for example.
Your current research focuses on automatic and semi-automatic tools, what exactly do you mean by that?
It’s what we’re putting into practice at our eAdventure platform: making games accessible for everyone, without a need for technical skills. The word automatic simply means that by selecting a few choice settings, creative games can be transformed for use by disabled people, for example.
Are we talking about a choose-your-own-adventure kind of website?
Well, it’s more about tackling certain program features in favor of universal access. For example, using a text speech engine means you can transform instructions into audio, so that the game becomes available to blind people. In the end, our aim is to bring universal educational content to a wider audience.
Is this being put into practice in actual classrooms?
We’ve been working on eAdventures for 6 years, and at first it’s true that teachers didn’t use games much. Our research led us to believe that, although they were keen, the games were not easily adaptable to their needs because they were diconnected from their real learning cenarios. Nowadays, however, there’s a growing interest, not only in schools, but at the university level as well, due to the increasing number of games. Also, in cases like eAdventure games, the possibility of adapting their content or creating them from scratch makes them more attractive and accessible. We've already started to hear from teachers who employ them in our community.
What does the future hold for Serious Games?
In a global sense, it’s hard to tell. Our near future involves connecting games with learning analytics so as to predict and understand the problems users encounter. Because right now there’s a lot of information and materials out there that could be used to examine students’ interaction with educational content, but it’s not being fully analyzed and interpreted.