Instructional Gaming Forum (IGFORUM)

AECT 2007 will begin soon, and I am really excited to be able to meet with old friends and meet new ones!

Here is a list of presentations and workshops that I have put together for you. You should find these sessions, workshop and symposium interesting because they are about games, simulation & Second Life. The attached MSWord file is formatted in such a way to make it easy for you to print out and take it with you to Anaheim.

You should notice a new trend in this year’s sessions: SecondLife. Many of AECT’s board members and Presidents have been sighted in SL. Perhaps you already know that AECT has a SecondLife presence? (Session 32-RB will tell you more).

You will also find more about modifying game content (commonly known as Game Modding) in this year’s Gaming Symposium.

3rd Instructional Gaming Symposium: Modding for Serious Play

Since 2006, the Multimedia Production Division has become the official sponsoring division for the “Special Interest Forum for Instructional Gaming” (SIF-IG), as well as the Instructional Gaming Symposium.
We have introduced a session called “Gaming Table” during the last AECT (2006) to showcase some of the instructional games created by AECT members. A variety of games were showcased, including card games, pen-and-paper games, board games, and several digital games / videogame mods. This year, we planned to expand the gaming symposium to include even more presentation formats.

(A) Gaming RoundTables

We would like to see the Game Table session becomes a RoundTable session (subject to approval by the Board and availability of slots). Think of this as a SHOWCASE for serious / instructional games.

If you have created an instructional game and would like to share it with the community at AECT, please submit a proposal for RoundTable (using keyword: Games) to your appropriate Division. Kindly indicate in your proposal that you would like to present it at the Gaming RoundTable. This will help us put all the Gaming RoundTable presentations into one session.

We would like to see a great variety of instructional / serious games (and as many as we can hold), and let attendees see your accomplishments in this area. Please plan on setting up the game (perhaps with a written instruction) to either present it to the participants, or better yet, let them play it. The games can be card games, board games, pen-and-paper games, Flash games, computer games, even mobile (PDA and Cellphone) games! Both independently created or commercially produced game mods are also welcome.

(Note: You will need to bring your own laptop if the game require a computer to run.)

(B) 3rd Instructional Gaming Symposium

This year’s theme for the 3rd Instructional Gaming Symposium is “Modding for Serious Play.”

‘Modding’ is a gamer’s term used to denote production activities in ‘modifying’ an existing videogames to play new contents or storylines created by the gamer(s). We would like to provide a few avenues for the “game modders” in our midst to present your works (serious / instructional game mods) to the AECT learning community.

The 3-hour long Symposium will include:

Full paper session: (1 hour: 2 presenters) – Reading of theoretical paper, or reporting of research and research findings that involve modding digital games as research tools.

Short Paper session: (1-1.5 hour: 4-6 presenters) – Independent and commercially funded mods are welcomed. (If you have a game mod in progress, we would like to know, too.) Each presenter will get 15-20 minutes for a short presentation / discussion about your game mods and their purposes. The purpose is to tell the community what you are doing, and what your research is about. You should SHOWCASE your game mod at the Roundtable Session instead – Note: you will need to send in a separate proposal to present your mod at the “Gaming RoundTable.”) See Section A (above) for more information.

Panel discussion: (0.5 - 1 hour) — The last part of the Symposium will be a Q&A session with presenters from both previous sections (Full and Short papers). The actual duration of the Panel Discussion will depend on how long the previous sessions are.

How to Submit

Please submit your proposal(s) to an appropriate division for review. You should indicate on your proposal that you intend for the paper to be read at the Gaming Symposium. (The division you submit to need not be MPD. In fact, you may stand a better chance of being selected if you send it to an appropriate division based on the purpose and intent of your game.) Proposals submitted will be subjected to AECT’s selection and review criteria. (Please indicate in your proposal: “For Gaming RoundTable”).

Once your proposal has been accepted by AECT, the accepted proposal will then be forwarded to the IG Symposium planner. Not all accepted proposal related to gaming may be selected for presentation during the 3-hour block: (1) there is a limit to how many presenters we can accommodate at the Symposium, and (2) it depends on how many accepted submissions there are. Accepted proposal not scheduled to be presented at the Gaming Symposium will be returned to respective division for scheduling as usual.

Please note that the deadline for AECT submission is February 15, 2007.

To submit a proposal now, visit http://www.aect.org/events/call/

For more information on the AECT Annual Conference, visit http://www.aect.org/

At the last AECT (2006), those who attended the IGFORM meeting have ‘voted’ to merge the IGFORUM with the MPD blog as one, and here’s the result of that decision.

We know you have been waiting for this but several things need to happen first, and timing. With AECTNow.org we finally have the content management software and the access we needed to make this happen.

Thanks for being patient. Over the next few weeks, your communication officer will populate this space with some of the older entries from IGFORUM, before “closing” the other site.

Feel free to use this space.

There’s a new gaming research book on the shelf that should interest many of you.

”Games and Simulations in Online Learning: Research and Development Frameworks” is edited by David Gibson, Clark Aldrich, & Marc Prensky and published by Idea Group, Inc.

The books consists of five broad sections:

1. Situating Games & Simulations in Education
2. Social Analyses of Games & Simulations
3. What Teachers Should Know and Be Able to Do
4. Using Real Space in Digital Games & Simulations
5. Embedding Assessment in Games & Simulations

More information about the book can be found here.