I will be speaking at one of the last Idea Labs at the ASAE Technology Conference next Friday, February 12^th at  3:30PM.

The Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin has been supporting youth health education programs through their Children’s Health Education Center (CHEC) for the past twelve years.  In 2004 the Center started the www.bluekids.org program to focus their efforts on reaching youth, educators, and parents via the Internet. Over 12,000 students participated in CHEC’s teacher-facilitated game-based learning curriculum last semester alone.  When tasked with quantifying the impact of interactive web-based programs on youth behavior and attitudes, CHEC and researchers at the Children’s Hospital have come up with very positive preliminary results.

Here is Part II in my series of interviews with Clark Aldrich on his upcoming book The Complete Guide to Simulations and Serious Games. The book will ship sometime in October, and Clark sent me an advance copy. This book has the potential to become an instrumental resource for sponsors and managers of educational simulation and serious game development. It intrigues me because Clark Aldrich addresses those very issues that concern those of us who manage or fund educational games and simulations:

I am helping a game-based learning client work on a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant (thank you for the tip, Anne Derryberry). My thoughts are connected to our Games Can Teach blog’s on-going discussions concerning the definition of game-based learning and the different types of gaming as well as the research needed. To be sure, there have been ample grants to universities for various studies on the aspects of video games and learning which has provided evidence based research to act on. This interest in video games and learning has had an influence on my practice. We recently developed a new version of an ATOD prevention curriculum, which in 2004 used arcade games to reinforce the lecture style slide shows.

I’ve had about a week to settle back in after giving a presentation at Training 2009 on the open source LCMS, Moodle. As I mentioned last week, I had a packed audience but received mixed reviews. We have been utilizing Moodle for over two years for several client projects. The Moodle pedigree stems purely from higher education, so it was not designed for corporate use as a generic LMS. Moodle.org seems to have little interest in adapting to fit the needs of companies that want to train thousands of employees using hundreds of courses (see threaded discussions on the site-wide grouping feature). Nevertheless, there are many specific corporate training initiatives that Moodle is perfect for. Click here for my presentation.

A quick search of Wikipedia finds that we need to do some work documenting and updating the definition of “serious game” and “game-based learning” -- at least in Wikipedia. Consider this post a call for “all hands on deck!”

This is my first blog post since 2005, when I wrote about my experiences playing the video game, XMEN, for a class I was taking at the University of Wisconsin. Last week I became inspired by my holiday reading of David Merman Scott’s The New Rules of Marketing and PR. Well here I go…As an eLearning entrepreneur, I have paid special attention to the overly depressing 2009 economic prognostications. This is my fourth recession. I’ve been self employed as an educational technologist since 1978. I feel that eLearning is going to be one of the winners during this current downturn. More associations (and there are thousands) will begin investing in online learning and will begin to eliminate a few face to face conferences.