Outbreak App from CDC

The Centers for Disease and Prevention (CDC) created an app, Outbreak, which is a free download for the iPad.  The app is an epidemiology game with different levels, where the user attempts to find the source of an outbreak.  It has fantastic potential as a teaching tool for use in high school, and higher education.  An pre-professional in healthcare could benefit from its use.

Learn more about the app from the YouTube video below.

2013 Horizon Report Available

The 2013 Horizon Report from New Media Consortium (NMC) and Educause was just released.  You can download it from http://www.nmc.org/publications/2013-horizon-report-higher-ed . The visionary report reviews changes in technology that we can expect over the next 1-5 years.  The topics discussed are:

• 1 year or less time 
• Massively open online courses (MOOCs)  There will be a special issue of JOLT on MOOCs
• Tablet computing
• 2-3 years
• Game and gamification (application of game mechanics, such as Foursquare) based learning
• Learning analytics
• 4-5 years
• 3-D printing
• Wearable technology

The Horizon Report is always an exciting read!

Gaming and Treatment of PTSD

I am still hooked on Prensky's work about the Digital Native as it relate to thinking differently.  To that aspect, I continue to read about and practice various types of digital gaming.  I ran across an article in the online New York Times this morning that discussed the possibility that the computer game Tetris could be used to treat post traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) http://www.nytimes.com/projects/magazine/ideas/2009/#technology-14 Very interesting!

Educational Gaming

I attended a 2 hour webinar entitled Playing Games to Enhance Learning with Dr. Atsusi Hirumi as a presenter this afternoon.  Plan to attend the follow-up face2face presentation next Friday.  The presenter engaged the audience by asking us to visit gaming sites and then used online polling to obtain feedback. The SCORM modules that I am sharing in this blog are low tech gaming solutions (in comparison to scenes and lifelike figures).  I will be posting some examples of more sophisticated gaming software pertinent to the health sciences later.  I did add a couple of educational gaming blogs to my Blogger site to follow. I attempted to search for additional one at the Technorati (Blog search engine) http://technorati.com/ site, but the search engine was not working.

Gaming sites to explore:

• 360ed  http://360ed.com/ (not open to the public but interesting)
• TabulaDigita http://tabuladigita.com/
• Gazillionaire http://www.gazillionaire.com/gaz.html
• Games2Train http://www.games2train.com/
• Disaster in Franklin County http://cpheo.sph.umn.edu/cpheo/umncphp/franklincounty.html (free but requires registration)
  

What other sites or educational gaming blogs do you recommend?
This information supports Chapter 23 on e-Learning (Thede & Sewell).