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Blogging Lull and a Video Games in Education Announcement

This post is partly inspired by the call for personal status pages over at 43 folders. At any rate, with work at the Orange County Department of Education, my phd efforts at Walden University, life with my wife, and finally actually playing World of Warcraft (as part of my research... of course), I have been having trouble finding time to blog. In truth, the WoW time has probably replaced my occasional end of the day blogging. I really aught to be blogging about it though. (Actually, I feel I should be blogging about all of these things! The time required would be prohibitive, but I think I would get a lot out of blogging about other parts of my life.)

In any case, one of the ways I have recovered from a blogging lull in the past has been by repurposing writing that I am doing, because for work and Walden I am always writing, and much of it is relevant. What I have been writing tonight is email, so I plan to repurpose some of it as posts here.

Which brings me to another way I have combatted a lull in the past... I have announced some topics I have in the queue. Most of these are games and education related of course:

• I have annotated the rest of the articles in the August/September issue of Innovate.
• I also read and annotated Got Game: How the Gamer Generation is Reshaping Business Forever by Beck and Wade.
• I've interviewed Clark Aldrich and James Gee through work at the OCDE.
• My colleague Mike Guerena interviewed Henry Jenkins for the same project. (See the announcement below.)
• I visited USC to meet John Beck and Adam Carstens of Northstar Leadership Group, and to hear Gerard LaFond of Persuasive Games and Douglas Lowenstein, President of the ESA speak to John's graduate students.
• And, of course, I am becoming personally familiar with the systems that facilitate (and describe) learning and collaboration in World of Warcraft.
  

And now for the announcement alluded to in the title of this post... the project that Mike Guerena and I have been working on is as finished as it will get. The first OCDE Video Games in Education webcast will be available in the archive at http://vc.ocde.us by around 4 pm today. There may also be two companion audio podcasts available at http://edtech.ocde.us soon after. (UPDATE: It's Sunday night, and the webcast is not up yet. I'm glad announcing here is not the same as announcing on the OCDE site. We were adding things down to the wire and apparently there was trouble rendering, trouble compressing, and trouble posting to the webcasting server! I'm sure it will be up on Monday as we've now cleared two of the three hurdles.)

Thank you for your comments and emails of encouragement over the past few weeks. I hope you'll continue to find value in what I post.

Thanks for reading.

-Mark