Postings on the CITE will resume today. The knee surgery turned out to be a slightly more complex problem than anticipated, but everything went well and I am back to work. I will be working today to post a couple items, and line up several postings over the next few days.
As a brief reward for your patience, if you have not seen it, check out the "teachable moments" cartoon series by Matthew Henry Hall at Inside Higher Ed. I thought this week's cartoon (shown below with a link back to the original), was an interesting one -- particularly as we think about all the assessment tools, digital learning objects, and other interactive learning tools that will become part of the future of the digital textbook. Hope it gives you a laugh along with something to think about.
On a related note, one of this year's speakers at SIMposium is talking about the concept of "games with a purpose." Here is the blurb for the event:
Did you know that nine billion hours of online solitaire were played in 2003? If 5,000 people played an online picture labeling game instead of solitaire, they could label all of the images on Google in two months.Think that sounds improbable? Luis von Ahn begs to differ - he gets people to work for free every day. His "games with a purpose" entice them to play online games that complete simple tasks and help make computers smarter.Von Ahn, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University, shares his pioneering ideas at SIMposium 08, taking place November 9-12 in Orlando. As the inventor of captchas, those mash-ups of fuzzy letters computers make you recognize to access a Web site, he is revolutionizing the way computers learn to think.
Sounds interesting. If I did not have a conflicting engagement, this is one I would be interested in seeing. In what ways are "games with a purpose" infiltrating the educational space?
