Web 2.0 Conference

During April 2nd, we attended the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco at the Moscone Convention Center in which we got a glimpse at what is making a buzz within the Web 2.0 world.

Upon surveying the exhibit / presenter booths I was amazed at how little educational based / online community based groups were there compared to the amount of large corporation / enterprise solution companies there. With the user-empowerment features of Web 2.0 I was under the naive impression that more developers who were more concerned about such things "voices of the minority" or "bringing knowledge to the masses" were going to be there. I guess I was expecting more of a Lollapalooza for web developers for some reason.

I did spot at least two exhibitors that did catch my eye and fit that criteria:

• Open Educational Resource Commons = an open resource site that allows educators and learners all over the world to openly share and collaborate on learning materials (lesson plans, syllabi, assignments, etc.) for whatever they may need it for (K-12, training, universities, whatever). For me, this was the true representative of what kind of empowerment Web 2.0 can provide.

• Meetup.com = group site that allows users to create groups of interest on their site so that others may join and have discussions on their favorite topics within that group. What I thought was really interesting about this site was that groups were categorized along with locations where most of their members were to allow members to easily meet face to face -- it is a mash up of meeting virtually along with meeting up in person in the safety of being with others in the group. Even though they make some of their money from advertisers I still felt that the spirit of community is still predominantly there based upon what I gathered from the site.
  

The overall impression I got from the exhibitor area was that in order for the grass roots / open source movements to grow and evolve in the web developing community, large corporations will have to commericalize and sell the concepts and ideas of web technologies in order for things to progress. It's sort of a symbiotic relationship -- corporations need the ideas from the grass roots folks to make money and the grass roots folks need the corporations to market and imbed their concepts into the public conciousness.

Joseph Khane (Civic Potential of Video Games)

For March 19th's class we attended a talk by Mills College professor / researcher Joseph Khane in which he presented his findings on the benefits of video gaming in teaching civics to teens 12 to 17 years old. According to his research video gaming can promote such points as team play, care or giving aid for another player, learning about problems in society, exploration of social issues, morality / ethics, and decision making in how a community or world should be run.

This is something I never really thought about too much since video games are not usually marketed as "educational" due to the stigma it usually carries being labeled as such -- meaning boring. However when I look back at successful games I have played in the past such as Warcraft or The Sims series, those games did do most of those previously mentioned points pretty well without the "educational" label. These games immerse the players in worlds in which they can pick sides, interact with others, and collaborate in missions, construct buildings, and even build upon relationships. If video gaming is truly to be part of the classroom experience, in my opinion these games are the primary models to refer to.

What needs to be looked at closer is when is it enough? Being a casual gamer, I do sometimes get sidetracked in my day whenever I really get immersed in a game. When I do this I tend to put some important things aside such as sleep and even homework! I am not saying that all teens will do the same as I do but there will be a significant contigency that will.

Another point I ponder is that how entertaining do these exercises / programs have to be in order to interest teens in the materials? In the future, will educators have to stand in the middle of the classroom and ask: "Are you not entertained?!" like Russel Crowe's character Maximus asked of the Roman mob in the move "Gladiator"?