Project ImREAL

Project ImREAL on BBC digital planet

Could virtual training really replace face-to-face human interaction in career development? There are all kinds of schemes to perfect simulated training environments for the workplace – get a computer programme to create a virtual mentor to help employees with scenarios like conducting job interviews, and you save money on expensive human trainers – particularly significant for the voluntary sector. A nice idea in theory, especially in these financially precarious times, but are machines really good enough at chiming with human behaviour to be effective as trainers? A team of researchers from across Europe is trying to crack that through an initiative called ImREAL. Dr. Vania Dimitrova from the University of Leeds School of Computing tells us more about the project.

www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/p00cx67g/Digital_Planet_11_01_2011
www.imreal-project.eu

Serious Games and Game-based learning

Serious Games (SG) are entering more and more the educational world. Games in education make it possible to overcome practical constraints of real-world settings and explore the  boundaries of virtual spaces. Modern Game-Based Learning (GBL) approaches are commonly build on applications that have defined learning outcomes and are designed to promote active participation and interaction, balancing the pedagogical objective with the game play, in order to enhance the ability of the learner to retain and apply the knowledge gained to the real world while being completely involved and thus more receptive. SGs often exploit narratives, storylines, visual elements and other features common to entertainment games, such as scoring and social networking in order to motivate and engage players in a learning activity.

Storytelling for storyboarding and Serious Games

Storytelling is a powerful instrument, often applied in educational and training situations to facilitate the construction of fictional examples or the telling of real stories to illustrate a point and effectively transfer knowledge (e.g. Weik 1995). Storytelling is used as “a medium of collective intelligence” (Frenzel et al, 2004, p.9) by promoting multi-perspective views on certain topics and thereby enriching the individual perspective. Storytelling is a process and a means for sharing, interpreting and offering knowledge and experiences to an audience. Told stories provide a context, they embed knowledge into a concrete situation, they not only comprise pure facts, but also connections and emotions. Stories are a prime vehicle for assessing and interpreting events, experiences, and concepts from minor moments of daily life to the point of a broader e.g. historical, political, work, social level. Storytelling is an intrinsic and indispensable form of human interaction.

Innovation in Learning Institute Milestones

http://www.xtimeline.com/timeline/Innovation-in-Learning-Institute/embed/700/390

Digital competence & e-Learning for Seniors

It is consensus that promoting digital competence amongst senior citizens is  a way to  support older people to actively get involved in the knowledge and information society, furthermore it prevents social isolation and dependent living and proactively confronts the problems that ageing European societies face.

But how to do it? The use of advanced learning and communication technology for the sake of the personal development of seniors it is a feseable and very promising way. Older people are among the target groups that qualify most for technology-enhanced learning:

Intercultural communication

Successful communication presupposes that both sender and recipient master the  communication process in equal measure, that they apply and understand it in similar ways. This claim is certainly problematic, even when the communication process takes place within a homogeneous cultural area, territorially speaking.

In an intercultural environment, the problem is clearly intensified by the respective cultural background of the communication partners. This fact often leads to intercultural misunderstandings that could not be simply avoided by having similar language skills on both sides.

Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009

via c4lpt.co.uk

EDEN – News

EDEN-Research Workshp 25-27 October in Budapest
Call for papers is now open, deadline 23th of August

http://www.eden-online.org/eden.php?menuId=517

Web 3.0 interesting ideas

via rolandneeds.morecoffee.org

Event

ECTEL 2010 / 29.09.2010
Work Shop 6 (full day): Storytelling and Educational Games in the Learning Flow. Organizers: Lucia Pannese, Dimitra Pappa, Sonia Hetzner, Aristidis Protopsaltis, Muriel Garreta-Domingo, Enric Mor, Magí Almirall-Hill, Baltasar Fernandez-Manjon, Iván Martínez-Ortiz, Javier Torrente, Dominik Renzel, Yiwei Cao

This workshop brings together different research teams and approaches around the topic of Storytelling and Serious Games. It starts with a deep introduction into open burning issues in this area and continues with a hands-on participatory activity to produce a game prototype starting from a given topic (taken from the e-VITA project). After lunch the approach taken by the e-VITA team to design and develop 4 game prototypes will be presented and discussed with the participants and finally an insight on how to integrate educational (serious) games into the learning flow is given.

Work shop Blog: http://pretoria.uoc.es/wpmu/ectel_ws_games/