Games in Education

Mark Wagner of the EdTechLife blog linked this interesting video [Quicktime movie] about how educators can incorporate games to facilitate learning. Webcast about video games in education, with Interviews of Henry Jenkins, James Paul Gee, Clark Aldrich…

It may not be completely relevant for us, but my impression is that gaming in K12’s products has become more of a focus.

[Runtime: 22:12 | Please make sure you have the latest version of Macromedia Flash installed on your computer to watch this video. To download it, please visit: http://www.macromedia.com ]

Online Mind Mapping?

The rage now is converting every MS Office application to the web (web 2.0) so you can access tools and files from anywhere, enabling better collaboration among team members. One suite of tools that comes to mind is Zoho, which includes most of the MS Office tools, but with less functionality.

This morning I read an article about Gliffy, a web tool that looks to provide Visio-like functionality. I wonder if it can provide the mind-mapping functionality like we were discussing? The cool thing is that we could easily embed the results into this site.

Update

I think it might fit the bill – I signed up for free, played around with it for a minute or two, and am impressed with what I see. It can be exported in formats including specific image files, which could then easily get dumped into a Word document or put up on our web space.

Usability Templates

I stumbled across a usability site that includes some templates that our team might find useful:

Usability Toolkit – The Usability Toolkit is a collection of forms, checklists and other useful documents for conducting usability tests and user interviews.

Developing User-Friendly Flash Content

I stumbled across an interesting whitepaper on usability tips for Flash content. It’s focused primarily on designers but I believe there would be good applicability for us as well.

Usability ROI: A Collection of Resources

Some great usability ROI resources:

• Usability News: The Return on Investment (ROI) for Personas
• Usability First: Usability ROI: Case Studies
• Rashmi Sinha: ROI of Usability: A Collection of Links
• Dey Alexander Consulting: Return on investment
• WebWord: A Business Case for Usability

I forgot I also discussed this issue a while back here.

UMCP HCIL Recap

Here’s a recap of information from the HCI Symposium:

• Preview
• Day 1: Symposium
• Day 2: Workshop: Humans and the Semantic Web

Also, you can view most of the posters that were presented here.

Note: To see the poster details, choose “different sizes” on the right-hand side of the screen (under “additional information”) and then click on the original image size.