Enemy of the Great Satan enters Videogame arena

www.rasgames.com

I rather like this story that's been posted on the BBC website. It would seem that Iran has taken to producing video games, basing them on the rich legends of Persia.

Games producers from Iran have been exhibiting at a big trade fair in Cologne, in an effort to drum up financing and to raise the profile of their fledgling market.

All of which goes to show that technology can bridge boundaries in so many unexpected ways.

I for one hope some of the games being designed make it into Western stores. Having studied Herodotus and the rise of the Persian Empire against the Greeks at university, I would love the chance to re-create some of the epic myths and historical events in a digital gaming domain.

Satire is alive and well

I'm always happy to be distracted by some of the quality satire available online.

Here are two offerings that have made me smile this week.

The first is from the Onion, mocking Google and privacy:

New Google Service Lets Privacy Critics Opt-Out, Relocate To Remote Village

The second is from the ongoing series that features Hitler being enraged by a topical issue. In this installment he's just found out that Facebook has bought the aggregation service FriendFeed:

Making money out of paper

Source: www.newspaperclub.co.uk

I rather like this idea - give individuals, groups, companies, anyone with a shared interest, in fact, the chance to make their own newspapers. Not some crummy 'I read a Dummies' guide to DTP' output, but something rather elegant and delightful to read and hold.

The brains behind Newspaper Club are British and they're aiming to start up and be operational within 60 days. Their trials and tribulations can be read on their blog. It's a cracking read, especially for Business Studies students.

You can sign up for the Beta at their main website which is here.

At a time when media mogul Rupert Murdoch is claiming all his newspaper titles will be charging for online content within a year it's refreshing to see a consumer led model appearing too. You see, despite the fact that much of what I read is done so on an LCD screen, I still like the simplicity and tactile experience of reading a paper. I also like the way Newspaper Club is proposing taking online ease of design and transforming it into something that can be held, stored and shared in person.

It's an ambitious plan and it will be interesting to see what the pricing is. Newspaper Club offers a new dimension in terms of social networking and user control over content production. I hope they succeed and wish them well.

Sharing the musical love

Source: news.bbc.co.uk

One of the areas that interests me is the point where informal and formal learning overlap in the digital domain. It's something I've been studying as part of my MA in Online Education at the Open University, and it's an area where there's plenty of scope for research and innovation.

With that in mind I was interested to read the findings of a report from the University of Hertfordshire, showing that there's been a slight shift in the attitudes of teenagers towards illegal music downloading using peer-to-peer services. You can read the full facts here.

What is relevant from my point of view is that teens are beginning to accept that there can be a value placed on content and intellectual property. If that change is beginning to occur then we might also see a shift in teens' approaches to greater learning and interaction taking place online.

When Berkhamsted had to shut for a week due to heavy snow in February, we used a Facebook group to keep parents and students in touch with what assignments needed to be done. I was interested to see the degree of antipathy this created - students felt that their space was being invaded by adults. This is one of the problems in bridging the divide between formal and informal learning. There are no explicit ground rules or guidelines for what language to use, which metaphors to apply to the process of online interactions and so on. Perhaps it is the vehicle or technology that's used that's created the tension we experienced?

This is something I'm reading up about at the moment for my MA - and in particular the ideas of social theorist Etienne Wenger. He proposed the idea of communities of practice and maybe what's needed is education for teachers and students alike into how online learning communities should function. Certainly, it's an area I intend to explore from a practical purpose when the new academic year begins in September.

There is a chasm at present between the walled gardens of Virtual Learning Environments, and the free-to-all Web 2.0 open source options that exist in the ever expanding online Cloud that the WWW has become. How educators span that space between what is taught in school and what is learnt elsewhere remains, I believe, one of the great challenges for the near future.