nicola

nicola

Rethinking the conference

For years (and particularly when I’m about to give a conference presentation), I’ve wondered how it is that despite knowing that talking at people isn’t an effective way to give or receive information, we still create academic conferences that are predominantly…

Gaming the Conference

On Thursday 10 December 12-12.30pm, Rosie Jones will be leading a session in the ALT Online Winter Conference: Gaming the Conference: can Playful Interactions Engage Delegates? She’ll be talking about the #altcgame that ran alongside the conference last year, discussing the…

Ten steps to game design

A few years ago, Alex Moseley and I wrote a workshop for the European Conference on Games-Based Learning, which presented a ten-step model of game design and exemplified the process by gaming the workshop. Since then, we’ve ran versions of…

The resilient researcher

Is it just me, but in the last few years everything seems to have got really hard. It’s become particularly hard to get research funding, as the economic climate worsens and funds get squeezed, pots of money become more elusive…

Ian Bogost on Fun

I recently saw this video of Ian Bogost (of Persuasive Games fame) talk at UX Week 2013 about fun. He argues that ‘fun’ isn’t something that can be added to a task (a.k.a. the chocolate-covered broccoli model) but that it…

Goodbye gambaloa

This week marks the end of the Game Based Learning for Older Adults (gambaloa) partnership project, which has run over the last two years. Personally, it’s been one of the most satisfying projects I’ve ever been involved in, providing space…