Warco

Well, it has been a long time, but this news article about Warco--a game where you play a war reporter--was enough to briefly bring me out of my slumber.  

Puzzle-solving game outcomes used in research... successfully!

This is inspiring news.

MIT

According to the Wikipedia entry for Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), it has an impressive history of spawning progressive educational and open technologies, inclduing the Lisp programming language that gave rise to Logo, the X Window System, the GNU Project and the OLPC initiative.

 

A number of recent projects are presented on their Educational Transformation through Technology at MIT page.

• OpenCourseWare, course material available on the web to anyone in the world free of charge, is perhaps their most famous contribution to open learning.  It is heartening to note that their 1999 faculty committee felt "convinced that open software and open systems were the wave of the future".  Did they really mean "wave" and not "way"?  I don't like the implication that a wave is something that passes by and disappears.  But I guess, nothing lasts forever.
• iMOAT is an online assessment tool to replace the arcane practice of herding students into rows of desks to write essays by hand.  Has it really been 100 years of industrial assessment?
• Technology-Enhanced Active Learning (TEAL) is learning by peer instruction/support in small groups, with a computer.  Not exactly radical but worthy of note.

MIT is committed to "hands-on learning" and so might be interested in my crazy ideas.

Indie game dev fund

Cool.  Seeing as they expect a return on investment, the financial aspect of it is almost certainly not applicable to a non-profit organization.  They may still be willing to donate some sage advice, which is actually what I need more than money.

Nokia, Intel and Qt

Intel and Nokia are teaming up to create a new mobile Linux platform called MeeGo, which is some kind of mutant offspring from Nokia's Maemo and Intel's Moblin.  Anyway, it sounds cool because it will be developed with the Linux community, not behind closed doors like Android.  Since the Qt toolkit is now a Nokia product--available under GPL, LGPL or commercial license--and includes support for mobile platforms, it seems a likely candidate for their new mobile devices.  Qt also runs on Symbian, another mobile OS, which also happens to have been recently bought and open-sourced by Nokia.  Hmmm.  So although I don't like the idea of locking in to one company's product, the Qt toolkit sounds like it's going to be the toolkit for multi-platform (including mobile) development.  Soon, if not already, it will support touch-screens too.  Makes me wonder whether I should be developing in straight OpenGL or instead through Qt.

#!/bin/brain

I'd forgotten how fun it is to come up with catchy names.  Now that I have one for the blog and the first post, we can get started.  As I have written in the description, this is somewhere to blog about technology, pedagogy and freedom.  It's my grand vision to create free educational computer games, and sometimes the details of that vision get blurry or go missing, so a blog would be a nice place to keep it all together.