Animated Characters with PowerPoint Challenge- March 30, 2005 Well, the deadline has passed. I received NO submission to the challenge.Is it too hard Is it not interesting enough Is the deadline too soon Is the prize too small Is the technique you can learn from the challenge not worth putting in any effort Are you too busy Is the timing of the challenge at the wrong timeI have no clue!But this illustrates a typical scenario of "informal" learning - we may have a lot of lurkers, but only a very small percentage of the participants will do...http://acolla.blogspot.com/2005/03/animated-characters-with-powerpoint.html Are blogs good for education- March 27, 2005 Bill Bruck wrote in his blog,Well, they aren't awful. They are fashionable right now, and so may gain learner acceptance. They get learners to write, which is inherently good, and to express their opinions - which may or may not be a good thing. But there's a fundamental problem with blogs: They are essentially optimized for easily publishing ones opinions on the web. This is fundamentally a flawed model for education. It promotes narcissism, not dialog.my emphasisI generally agree with Bill's..http://acolla.blogspot.com/2005/03/are-blogs-good-for-education.html Yahoo! Research Labs and OReilly Media Lauch Tech Buzz Game- March 19, 2005 Matt Pasiewicz pointed out two online trading games (both are free to play): Buzz Game and Blogshares.He questions:Will technologies inspired by the Buzz Game, Blogshares, and fantasy teams make their way into the classroom in a pervasive, systemic way Will they actually support learningThere are a number of reports and papers on the use of games such as the Sims, SimCity etc. in learning. These games are mostly solo player game and the player is playing "god". The success of the game is...http://acolla.blogspot.com/2005/03/yahoo-research-labs-and-oreilly-media.html Existing research on the use of "Pedagogical Agent"- March 15, 2005 Prompted by the current discussion of IFETS-DISCUSSION, I use "pedagogical agent" in Google and find a large number of research results on the use of the Microsoft Agents.Now that I have introduced the world how to use these agents in PowerPoint for story telling, may be you can start incorporating them in your other projects as well. Please leave a comment here if you find a good project which makes good (pedagogically speaking) use of these agent. Let collectively create a repository of...http://acolla.blogspot.com/2005/03/existing-research-on-use-of.html Getting MS agent to work in your PowerPoint- March 13, 2005 Some of you have communicated to me that they cannot get the Microsoft agent to work in order to create the animated PowerPoint. Here are the detailed steps to make sure that it will work - for Windows XP.Windows XP comes with the agent runtime installed - but only have one character file for you to use. Go to the windows directory and open the msAgent sub-directory. Inside there is a chars sub-directory. Inside you will see the characters that your system has. By default, it will only...http://acolla.blogspot.com/2005/03/getting-ms-agent-to-work-in-your.html |