New England Learning Association FREE event on gaming
“You got my gaming in your education!”
“You got your education in my gaming!”
“Let’s host a thing and talk about it for serious.”
What: Serious Games : Human Science in Design
When: Monday, May 21, 2007, 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Where: British Consulate General, One Memorial Drive, Suite 1500, Cambridge, MA 02142
“Join Keynote Speaker,Professor Robert Stone, Director, Human Interface Technologies, Chair Interactive Multimedia Systems University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. It is predicted that by 2008 40% of U.S. companies will adopt serious games in their training efforts. Learn more about games-based learning, its market and what it means to the US and UK markets.”
Serious gaming, in a nutshell, uses games to address issues and increase learning in work, school, and personal situations.There’s a whole organization behind the use of serious games in the education, training, health, and public policy fields. In his Technoschism keynote at MLA this week, Stephen Abram mentioned how we’ve lost a sense of play in librarianship. He’s right: while the world is playing their way to solutions, we’re still a little too serious for our own good (and a little too focused on DDR as the way to absolution). Serious gaming is something that libraries should really look into — a little serious, a lot fun — to ease into the idea that, well, sometimes toys really are *useful*.
The goal of the New England Learning Association (yet another NELA that actually used to be BELA - Boston E-Learning Association) is to integrate technology into education in a way that makes sense and is successful. The organization is diverse in it’s members, including corporate, higher-ed, and K-12 people in executive, manager, trainer, instructional designer, technologist, consultant, and solutions provider positions (as per their about us page).
As a general thing, diversification of backgrounds in an organization can do amazing things for the creative capital of the group, and to the benefit of everyone, and gaming is probably the most diverse group I know it (we’re not *all* supergeeks, you know). I actually heard about this from the Second Life Boston Meet Up group, whose members I met at the Museum of Science Second Life presentation last week (all about networking, kids, especially *outside* of librarianship). It’s unfortunate that librarians aren’t featured on the highlight list of typical members, and I’m not sure if there are any librarian members of the group, but I may venture to become one of them. Even if it means being The Token.
So yeah, consider hitting this, if you can. I’m registered, and I’ll blog it (hopefully) soon after.
Tags: conference
