Author Archives: admin

Facebook privacy settings for educators

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In my EDN 303 class we discuss privacy issues and social media. One of the issues that comes up quite often is facebook privacy. Here are my recommendations that I give to my students:

– Make your profile private – do this so that only your friends can see your wall, photos, page, status updates, etc.

– Make yourself unsearchable. While it’s ok to be searchable it might just better to make yourself hidden so that your students cannot find you

– Do NOT become friends with your students. Do NOT chat with them on instant messenger, etc. While I will be friends with my students, they are 18 years old. I would never be friends with a student that is a minor. Just do not do it.

– Make a separate profile for work friends. I do this using LinkedIn. That way my colleagues can be my friend but do not have to see all of my personal photos if I choose to post them.

– If you want a page but are a little scared, create one using a fake name and just friend your close family and friends. That way you can see their pages

– The final thing – check the privacy settings at least once a month. Facebook tends to change their settings all the time, so please double check yours to make sure they are correct.

Here is a video that goes through setting your privacy settings:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FA7GL507mrk]

Future of game and training development for the designer

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Games are becoming significantly easier to create. I say this because the most popular games on the market right now like Mass Effect 3 and SWTOR use off the shelf, free, game engines. Normally, games are developed using their own engines, which take a lot of time and money to develop. However, off the shelf engines are becoming just as good. The best part is that many of these off the shelf engines are free and opensource.

Now before I get into ease of development, these engines still require a significant amount of programming and are not really made for the novice. However, there is a trend to make these engines more designer friendly, meaning less programming and more ‘building’. Examples of this can be seen in Google App Inventor (now at MIT), Scratch, Squeak, Gamemaker etc. The reason that game engine designers want engines to entail less programming is that programmers are not game designers, they are programmers but at this point only the programmers can use the engines. They want and need designers to use their engines to build games, which will in turn make their engines more popular.

This trend is happening in training development as well. We are seeing a push to develop with software like Articulate, a program that does not take a lot if any programming experience to develop sound instruction. This makes the instructional designer also now a developer, and more marketable as programmers are not required to develop the instruction. This however, does take time away from the instructional designer thus someone still needs to develop whether it’s the programmer or designer.

Essentially the point of this post is that I see game and training development starting to fall into the hands of the designer more than it is. In fact, I would not be surprised if our field starts focusing on ‘building’ – that is understanding programming logic and constructing games and training, instead of actually having to program at all.

CES 2012

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For those interested in the latest and greatest gadgets and computer technology coming out this year, check out the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2012 – jan 10-13. Many cool devices will be shown….one of which I am looking forward to seeing is a quad core phone. I would also like to see phones with 10+mp which would not be surprising as 12+ ones have been released overseas.

Here is the link to CES 2012: http://www.cesweb.org/

Prepping for another semester

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People tend to always ask me what this means…well here is what prep means to me:

– Making preparations for my semester which usually takes at least 1-2 weeks and this does NOT include research time

– Preparing my syllabi – making new ones or modifying old ones

– Preparing the course schedule. What are we going to be doing each week?

– Preparing readings. I usually do NOT use a textbook. I usually find that latest and greatest research articles and have students read them. I also usually include significant pieces from the field.

– Going through my course materials and developing course materials. I need to plan the course and assignments. I generally change my courses at least by 80% each semester so I need to rethink everything.

– Developing materials for the first few classes. I usually only develop my PPT slides (if used) and class activities for the first 2 weeks of class. I find that when I develop them for the whole semester they end up needing to be modified a lot because not every class is the same. Things need to be tailored to my students, in the specific class, which usually takes me a week or two to pick up on.

– Planning assignments. This is the hardest part. What do I want my students to accomplish in my class? This is the product that they will leave with. I want this product to be something that they can add to their portfolio to show employers. I also want this product to be something that will help them when they are working professionals. This usually involves a lot of work thinking through the assignments, how it is due, if its going to be done in groups, etc. I am a big fan of having students create a scenario or working with clients, then developing a project around that. I generally have various parts of the product due throughout the semester so I can give feedback before the final product is completed. I am also a big fan of students peer reviewing each others’ work.

– Prep also involves contacting students, making sure they know how/where to get to class the first day. This is essential in my program since some students may be using webex (virtual classroom software) to attend class.

– Setting up my course website. Whether using blackboard or my own website, I need to make sure all the course materials are posted.

Im sure I am missing a few steps but as you can see it’s a lot of work, planning, and thinking – and my semester has not even begun!

10 things your IT wants you to know….

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Thought this was pretty funny:

1. Don’t argue with me.
2. If you say you’re an idiot for doing something, I’ll likely agree.
3. Don’t lie about what you did, we’ll find out anyway.
4. IT might be awesome and powerful, but even we have limitations.
5. Don’t cry wolf.
6. It’s pretty likely you don’t have the most important job.
7. Like an elevator button, we won’t come to you faster if you keep pushing ours.
8. Email me, we’ve got 5 devices that tell us when we get a new email.  However, many of us still only have one that tells us when you left a voicemail.
9. Don’t cry.
10. We can do most, if not more than the things you think we can do, but we don’t because we don’t really care.

Here is a link to the article with descriptions of each point on the list

Self healing electronics

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This is absolutely amazing and makes quite a bit of sense.Essentially, wires and devices are cased in a liquid metal, thus, when they break/fail the liquid metal fills in the ‘break’ and allows the process to continue functioning. Technically it’s not self healing but it allows you to continue without interruption until you can fix it. This seems like it would be great for things like airplanes.

Here is the link

MIT expanding open courseware

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MIT is going to be expanding open courseware by actually offering certificates from it. However there is a catch, or two:) The certificates will not be from MIT, rather a non-profit organization, and it will cost money.

My thoughts on this concept: Great in theory but this is going to go nowhere. People do NOT have the motivation or time to do things like this. Online courses in general have high drop out rates due to lack of motivation. So my question to MIT, what are you going to do differently here? Why should I take one of these courses and complete it? I just do NOT see the motivation but that does not mean it’s not there, I just might not have read it or maybe it’s still in development.

Link to article