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.

The Multimedia Production Division received 35 proposal submissions for the Dallas conference.

We’re in need of two more reviewers who can help us maximize our allocations.

We have only five hours allocated for concurrent sessions, and five roundtable/poster allocations.

The 35 proposal submissions represent 6.3% of conference proposals.

If you can help review proposals on behalf of the Division, please email Rick Xaver as soon as possible. I’ll be posting some great material on navigating the proposal review process to this weblog as well.

It isn’t technology that’s keeping us from making best use of the resources before us - it’s human factors, and the lack of a communications model for telling each other what we’re doing.

Each Division, Committee or working group should have a Communications Officer who can communicate the news of that group, update its progress, provide officer rosters and contact information, make sure the web pages or blog pages kept by that Division, Committee or working group are up-to-date…. and the same responsibilities extend to one who can manage the whole shootin’ match.

What would AECT’s Communications Officer do, anyway? What does any Communications Officer do?

According to the bylaws,
(f) A Division shall have a President, a director on the Association Board, a Webmaster, and a Secretary and such other officers as it may desire.

The Communications Officer isn’t the Webmaster; the CO would fall under that “other such officers” designation. The duties would include:

On behalf of the Division, making best use of the communications technologies the Division has available.

The Division has its own directory (its own website) on the aect-members.org server, and all Divisions have a weblog installed as part of that site (some Divisions and committees have no web site per se, but use the MovableType publishing platform (often called simply “the weblog”) for all their online publishing, rather than the more-technically-daunting and less-democratic Webmaster-in-charge model).

The Communications Officer is the Admin for the Division weblog, and may create entries, edit all previous entries, assign contributors for the weblog who may create their own entries, change how the whole thing looks, and so on.

The Communications Officer also manages the Division ListServ and works with Electronic Services at HQ to configure the ListServ as necessary. If the ListServ is moderated, the Communications Officer is the moderator.

We have unlimited ListServs available to us on the aect-members.org web server, but not on the aect.org server - the current Division and other ListServs that end “@aect.org” are going to have to change, one way or the other, because they are served separately from the AECT web server (specifically, from a Windows NT server in AIT’s basement, with a Rube Goldberg - type script for making the thing work the way it does.

Illustration 1: How Division ListServ rosters are updated

But back to the unlimited ListServs:
This means, for example, that Design and Development can have an official News ListServ, and an optional Discussion ListServ. Division members would automatically receive the official news posts, and could choose whether to receive the more-frequent and possibly - unmoderated Discussion ListServ messages.

The ListServ on the aect-members.org server is the popular open-source Mailman server. It is an available but totally unexploited resource.

The Communications Officer is not a webmaster
The Division Communications Officer then is much more of an editor rather than a webmaster, seeing that the Division’s news is disseminated effectively through whatever channels are appropriate. Sometimes the Division Communications Officer will have a story (news item) of much wider significance than just to the Division, so the Division CO brings this to the attention of the Communications Officer for AECT.
Compare the position with that of a newspaper editor, with a few reporters and feature columnists contributing as well. Let’s run with the metaphor until the wheels fall off..

The Communications Officer for AECT (CO) is our Editor in Chief, working closely with the Publisher (Headquarters and the publishing infrastructure [ the AECT website ]) and the Division Communications Officers and other contributors.

Division Communications Officers are the bureau chiefs, whose responsibilities are much like the CO: the Division Communications Officers manage the Contributors, whose posts appear in the Division blogs.

The Contributors might include

1. the Division officers, who may post announcements and news to the Division weblogs
2. Division members who have questions, comments, or other business.

OK, so the CO has the work of Division Communications Officers and Contributors coming in to the Copy Desk. Anyone else?

Each Division, Committee or working group should have a Communications Officer who can communicate the news, provide officer rosters and contact information, make sure the web pages or blog pages kept by that Division, Committee or working group are up-to-date.

Currently, every aspect of AECT’s main web site - content, design, and technical upkeep - is managed by headquarters staff. This proposal will reassign some of those responsibilities directly to AECT’s members. Evidence of the necessity of this realignment, a solid rationale for doing so, and a roadmap to accomplishing these goals are also presented.

Proposed: That the Board appoint a Communications Officer for AECT. The Communications Officer will be responsible for the content of AECT’s web site (including editorial content, graphic design, and general “look-and-feel”); the Director of Electronic Services will continue to be responsible for the technical upkeep of the site.
Communications is part of our name and our mission. The creation of a position, an office, or an appointment that includes the word “communications” implies a high standard of commitment, responsibility, and involvement. AECT’s Communications Officer is responsible for the message we as an Association present every single day.

This position is distinct from the Director of Electronic Services, who is responsible for the technical upkeep of AECT’s website. The relationship between the Communications Officer and the Director of Electronic Services roughly parallels the relationship between an editor and a publisher – the Director of Electronic Services enables the Communications Officer to do his or her job. (The Communications Officer is also distinct from the part-time sales position that had been described as “director of marketing and communications.” For the sake of clarity, we recommend that the part-time sales position not include the word communications in its title).

Background
AECT’s Electronic Services Committee disbanded some years ago, disconnecting AECT’s Electronic Services staff from the vision for these services as represented by the Membership. The disconnect is creating problems we can only guess at now: fundamental choices, such as which database platform we use, will have lasting impact. We have no formal documentation system for how our e-services operate, or how we envision it should. No structure exists for headquarters’ electronic services staff to work directly, strategically, and with accountability towards Association goals. We present ourselves daily to the world via the web, but that presentation is far from adequate, and has seen very little improvement in years.

In the meantime, staff is overburdened with a long list of old- and new-business:

1. Our mail server (handling AECT email and listservs) is hosted separately from our web server - an inefficient, limiting, and problematic situation.
2. Our main membership database is still in MS-Access and needs to migrate to a more web-friendly platform so that it can communicate with our mySQL databases, but such a migration also involves scores of .ASP scripts, all of which would need to be modified.
3. The MovableType publishing platform has offered member-managed content to our Divisions but support at HQ is limited; this common platform does not yet include HQ and the AECT website.
4. There exists virtually no documentation for database and web operations (of critical importance for reasons of security and succession).
5. Electronic memberships are still envisioned, but not yet implemented.
6. A yearly cycle of conference proposal submission, review, and event planning must operate without flaw.

But most pressing now, as it has been historically, is our web site: what it is, what it does for us, what it says about AECT and our Association’s future.

Our main AECT web site is a chronic source of complaints from general members and leadership. The general design model has not changed since 2001 (and in fact, the home page copyright notice is still dated 2001). We offer a link for “The latest news, developments, issues, and comments from across the organization” but find that link is for a PDF-based newsletter dated April 2005 – eight months ago.

AECT members have the expertise, the commitment, the necessity to manage our own web site. An inadequate website hurts AECT and lowers our professional image.

If AECT members take responsibility for design and content of AECT’s main web site, the director of electronic services will be freed to concentrate on other issues that can only he can address. With professionals engaged in relevant fields (perhaps led by the Division of Design and Development as part of the Strategic Task Force’s recommendation concerning Leadership Development Projects), it is certainly appropriate that members take this more-active role in our Web presence; members’ ownership of the home page should result in more-frequent updates and more-careful scrutiny of how we represent ourselves to the membership and the general public.

It is proposed that AECT members take responsibility for web content, design, and development, and that the Director of Electronic Services and Communications Officer form the genesis of a renewed Electronic Services Committee.

See E-Mail Is So Five Minutes Ago BusinessWeek Online

A message from Multimedia Production President-elect Rick Xaver

As you may know I’ve been employed by AECT since May of 2001. In September 2005, budget realignments eliminated my position with the Association.

I take this with mixed feelings, as you may expect. Obviously, losing one’s job is hard to take. On the other hand, it may be time to move on, and I may be in a better position to lead this Division without the conflicts that come with a staff position.

For a moment, consider what we mean when we say this is a member-driven Association. From the point of view of a member of the Multimedia Production Division, what does that say about which electronic services are developed, about how they are deployed, about how they are managed?

I beleive that as members, we’re not clients who are buying services, and an AECT membership is not a product developed out of Headquarters - AECT Headquarters is responsible to the membership. We can’t wait for AECT’s understaffed staff to develop and deploy services. AECT members must take an active role in these efforts, managing them on behalf of our colleagues, and continually striving to improve them.

As members of the Multimedia Production Division, we are in a position to lend our expertise to the rest of the Associaiton: for example, the use of weblogs to initiate and sustain conversations that add value to membership. Here’s what I mean:

Consider the last time you made a presentation at an AECT conference. You spent time developing the presentation, preparing a PowerPoint and handouts, and practicing your delivery.

But the most interesting part of your presentation probably wasn’t what was practiced. I’ll bet the the most dynamic and mutually-useful part was that little slice of time when you opened your presentation up to questions. Perhaps it spilled into the corridor later, and maybe even continued at the cafe later.

In other words, it is the discussion of the presentation that gives it significance that is not bound by the time or location of your presentation. It is the ongoing discussion, debate, Q&A connected with the presentation that keeps it interesting. By nodding towards “time and location,” we get to the point:

What if we could develop a sort of conference that is not time-bound? That includes a discussion that begins when your proposal is accepted and really never ends?

Can the Multimedia Production Division develop the next generation of conference, one that allows participation from presenters who couldn’t travel to the site? That allows attendees to attend even if they never left home? That can carry the post-presentation conversation for days, weeks, months if necessary - and adds the value of that conversation to the accumulated knowledge already presented?

As a “former” staff member I can tell you that some of this has already been broached in conversations with next year’s conference committee. Can Multimedia Production operationalize this for the rest of the membership? Can we make it happen?

Elections for the Multimedia Production Division have concluded. Please extend your congratulations and best wishes to the new officers.

President-Elect: Rick Xaver
Vice President: Doris Bolliger

AECT Board Representative: Bill Sugar
Multimedia Board Member: Doris Bolliger
Secretary/Communications Officer: Edd Schneider