Nicola Whitton
This blog contains my personal musings on games, learning, computers, engagement, fun, playfulness, technology, and other stuff that takes my fancy.
playful thoughts on games and learning
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the use of badges as a way for learners to gain recognition for their achievements, because they’ve come up on a couple of projects I’m working on. While, in principle, I’m very much in favour of an open, flexible assessment system such as badges, I do have some [...]
The Making Games in Collaboration for Learning (MAGICAL) project, in which we’re a partner, has just released an updated version of its list of game-making environments (pdf). It contains information about nearly forty different game-building tools, classified by cost, game-type, and type of access (i.e. online or download). One thing that struck me is the [...]
A couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to be invited to Tampere to act as an opponent in a doctoral defence. Coming from the UK, where a PhD viva involves being asked difficult questions for a hour (if you’re lucky) followed by a quick pint (if you’re very lucky) the formality of a [...]
The EU LUDUS project aims to create a “European Network for the transfer of knowledge and dissemination of best practices in the innovative field of serious games”. The knowledge node web site for the project looks like it will become a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners in the field, providing links to research reports, [...]
The 2011 Horizon report (pdf), has just been published. This is an annual report by the New Media Consortium that attempts to future-gaze and identify technologies that will have an impact on Higher Education in the short, medium and long terms. I am pleased to see that game-based learning is tipped to be trending in [...]
The first issue of the International Journal of Game Based Learning has just been published, with a mission to “promote knowledge pertinent to the design of Game-Based Learning environments, and to provide relevant theoretical frameworks and the latest empirical research findings in the field of Game-Based Learning”. Better still, the first issue is available free.