Via Stephen Downes: Professor Warcraft. Games are better educators than you think, argues the author, and the evidence for this is the deep knowledge gamers have of fictional worlds. "The fact that they generally teach us about fictional worlds or nonacademic issues is secondary to the fact that history, literature, geography, art, and pretty much anything else can be taught effectively in a game environment." The author contrasts current trends in e-learning - "affordable, disposable learning modules so easy and cheap to create that it's better to produce new courses than update old ones" - and suggests that games could adapt to this world. In the gaming community, the equivalent of a learning object is a 'mod' - a player-authored replacement for an original part of the game. Mods can include not only replacement game pieces (such as a 'warrior' tile) but also actual chuncks of game logic - the Civilization games are good examples of this. Where things get interesting - and where I am headed with learning objects (even if nobody else is) - is when the mods for a learning gaming environment are supplied and applied automatically via dynamic syndicated feeds of learning objects and other resources. It would be like the mobility of a chess piece increasing and decreasing based on shifting prices on the stock market. By Matt Sakey, IGDA, October, 2003 [Refer][Research][Reflect] [OLDaily]
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Military Training Is Just a Game. U.S. armed forces increasingly turn to video-game developers to train and recruit troops using role-playing simulations. Not just shoot'em-ups, the games aim to teach soldiers to be leaders or to think like terrorists...Upcoming Xbox-based training simulator for the military, called Full Spectrum Warrior...a $45 million endeavor formed by the Army five years ago to connect academics with local entertainment and video-game industries [Wired News]

More on Full Spectrum Warrior

Official Website
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The October 2003 issue of First Monday (volume 8, number 10) is now available at http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_10/
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