Note: Some of these thoughts are based on a paper by John Rice, a school technology director in Texas. John has spent several years researching instructional gaming and his doctoral dissertation focuses on predictors for student success in educational video games. Assume a Role. role-play that involves speaking to a nurse. To foster higher level skills, the player should assume a role during the game and not just play. Assuming a role means the learner must actively think about their actions, decisions and choices from a perspective other than themself. The classroom context is artificial. MORE >>

At the recent DevLearn, several of us gathered together in a Junto  to talk about issues we felt were becoming important for our field. After a mobile learning panel I realized that, just as mlearning makes it too easy to think about ‘courses on a phone’, I worry that ‘learning experience design’ (a term I’ve championed ) may keep us focused on courses rather than exploring the full range of options including performance support and eCommunity. Let me try to make that concrete. We want to minimize the latter. If it’s rote, we’re liable to be bad at it. MORE >>

If you are looking for ways to connect to South African researchers engaged and passionate about mobile learning. Look at the people mentioned in this post and connect with them. They are wonderful mLearning experts and … open to collaboration. As mobile learning gets more broadly accepted, meeting inspiration people around the world gives rise to new ideas. Here are some ideas I encountered in South Africa. The University of Pretoria invited me to exchange some notes on mobile learning and innovative educational technologies and the meet up was simply amazing. Quite a challenge as we all know. MORE >>

by Kevin Siegel    A student attending a recent  Advanced Captivate 6 online class  was lamenting the poor color quality in her Captivate lessons. She had recorded a lesson using a combination of the Simulation and Video modes. When she previewed her lesson to the class, we could clearly see a shift in color quality between the slides in the simulation part of the lesson and the video portion. The slides themselves looked great. the color in the video was not very good at all.) The lower setting will result in smaller videos. It's a simple process. MORE >>

One question I am frequently asked is “How did you get interested in games for learning?” ” When did you notice that games could play a role in corporate learning? There are a number of incidents that eventually lead to my study of the subject. Some involve watching a poker tournament and learning that online poker was used as a way of practicing for real poker play. But here is a progression over time of my thinking. noticed that games could play a role in corporate learning on my first internship out of college. He needed some people to test the game and I volunteered. MORE >>