Day 3, SXSWedu

9a session: Mind the Gap: Games, Impact, Potential, Reality

One of the conference's Distinguished Speakers, Alan Gershenfeld is a former chairman of Games for Change, an organization focused on digital games for social, humanitarian and educational impact. He's also the president of a for-profit, which was relevant to his topic: what's involved in moving beyond simply having a great edugame idea - the pragmatic steps involved in making it happen.

Gershenfeld spent a fair amount of time at a high level of generality - something I appreciated, having little to no background in the business world. I found interesting his take on the "double-bottom-line" business model: while expressing strong commitment to the notion of a sustainable, mission-aligned business model, Gershenfeld nevertheless sounded a cautionary (to my ear, slightly pessimistic) note:  at best, maintaining a company's commitment to social responsibility is a continual rebalancing act, adjusting to the tensions with the profit-seeking inclination.

Anyway, he presented several substantive pieces of advice for an aspiring edugame creator. Stakeholder alignment. Team building. Articulation of outcomes. Identifying a target audience well, with both demographic and psychographic analysis. Identifying the context of the game experience, including platform alignment. I know, I know: summarized like this, these look like the very picture of content-free entrepreneurial buzzwords. I promise, the talk was actually significantly interesting.

10:30a session: How Immersion in Virtual Worlds and Mobile Devices Engage College Students in the Real World

The River City interface.

Finally, a session about an actual game! Chris Dede of the Harvard Graduate School of Education walked a packed room through the EcoMUVE and EcoMOBILE projects. Phase 1: build an immersive virtual environment ("River City") to recreate a RL pond ecosystem, and build a middle-school ecology curriculum within that virtual space. Think Second Life, except that the environment is designed to be educational, rather than repurposed as such.

Phase 2, however, takes the curriculum out of virtual reality (which is really hard to build and maintain), and instead ventures into augmented reality (AR) as the curriculum platform. The virtual world of Phase 1 is a kind of springboard toward this phase, which (a) avoids the technical demands of a fully-virtual space and (b) gets kids out into the physical world (which is, after all, a lot better than accumulating hours of screen time manipulating a virtual pond and virtual trees, yes?). Dede is doing serious, well-informed work. He gets the real function of gamespace in relation to education - he's not a breathless cheerleader for gaming for its own sake. And, since I've already planned to incorporate some AR in this semester's version of my Dungeons & Discourse philosophy class, I'm really psyched at his announcement that his project is going to be releasing templates for AR curricula.

1:45p session: Gameplay as Assessment, Assessment as Empowerment

This was a 15-minute mini-session: but seriously, it was utterly jam-packed with awesomeness. My colleague and co-presenter Emily Lewis of the Pericles Group was sitting in the same row, and we just kept exchanging expressions of astonishment throughout the presentation. Dylan Arena graduated from Stanford and is co-founder of a media/tech company developing an iPad-centric curriculum. He didn't do any plugging, though: the talk was straight-up statistics and psychology. So you claim that your game has educational value? Then you'd damn well better have a rigorous and well-designed way of measuring that purported value. And it had best be valid and reliable - that is, measuring the appropriate construct (and not some other one, like the IQ test or SAT) and doing so consistently over time and over a given population. In Arena's words, "calling it a math game doesn't make it so..."

+1 for turning me on to DragonBox.

3p session: Investing in Education Innovation

I'm really not sure what to say about this session, other than that it was the epitome of "edu-preneurism" - that buzzword-filled and, at least to me, incomprehensible shadow realm which is the ever-present flipside of where I live in the education world. There are plenty of people out there who will tell you how awful and venal and antithetical to true learning these investor-types are - I don't feel the need to ride that particular pony. I went to the session hoping to see for myself whether there was anything noble and principled in the investment side. Honestly, I'm not yet sure how to judge what I heard: my initial takeaway is that educational investors are simply investors. For better, for worse: it's just a whole different way of looking at the world, and one that's supremely alien to me. Educators with great ideas do somehow reach out into this world and make things happen - still, it all kinda reminds me of China Miéville's Embassytown...

Whew! Day 3 was jam-packed. I'll post something about Thursday, Day 4, for the sake of completion. The only things left to talk about are my own session and the final keynote by Bill Gates...