In this 9 minute podcast, we feature an interview with Rachel Smith, Vice President of NMC Services for the New Media Consortium. The interview was recorded at the 2007 Seminars On Academic Computing Conference where Rachel Smith presented two session, "Games for Learning" and "The Role of Play and Preparing for a Changing Student Population".

Students are arriving on campus with a set of expectations and behaviors that differ from those of previous generations, including the faculty, who are faced with engaging them in the process of learning. Students' experience with new kinds of games and media has shaped their view of what learning is and how it occurs.

It is not yet possible for us to duplicate the richness amd complexity of the real world in a virtual world. What instructional deisgn elements can we use to simulate real world experiences? What affordances do these virtual spaces offer that the real world does not and what are the barriers to success?

At the 2007 NMC Summer Conference, a panel of educators tackled these and other complex issues in an exploration in the use of virtual worlds in the classroom.

A featured session at the 2007 NMC Summer Conference

Cynthia Calongne, (also known as Lyr Lobo in Second Life) joined the Computer Science Department at Colorado Technical University (CTU) in 1996. She develops and teaches undergraduate and graduate software engineering courses that benefit from activities and projects in Second Life. For over thirteen years, she worked as a software engineer in support of Air Force Space Command and on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. Her doctoral research included designing and building a PC-based immersive virtual reality system and a new user interface for it.

For years, gaming technology has been considered an area of opportunity for universities. Edward will argue that the opportunity phase has passed, that we will now be forced to adapt to the new world that digital fantasy gaming is creating. That new world is more than 3D; more than immersive; more than online; more than entertainment; more than communication. It is all of those things, and one thing more, a new source of Meaning - a critical contribution of the games industry, very little noticed. All together synthetic worlds make a new frontier, and frontiers dramatically disrupt the old world. Edward will talk about how the new world, with its new maps of meaning, will reshape society within a generation.

In our second podcast, we turn to virtual worlds– as many people know, NMC has been heavily involved these past 15 months with our NMC Campus in Second Life, but wanted to point out developments we are tracking in broader realm as part of of the NMC Virtual Worlds efforts.

Listen to this podcast as we discuss the Media Grid, Sun's Wonderland Project, Google's Burning Man Earth, Croquet, and the Torque Game Engine.