Video Game Helps Physicians Identify Prescription Drug Abuse | GamePolitics

For many physicians, prescribing painkillers can be a dicey prospect. The desire to help people in pain can sometimes conflict with the possibility that the patient may be abusing his or her prescription drugs. So what can help health care professionals distinguish between patients who have a legitimate need for pain medication and those out to abuse it?

I’ll give you a hint – this blog is titled GamePolitics.

Based on Dr. Michael Fleming’s research at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, a new web-based video game seeks to teach primary care and family physicians how to interact with patients seeking prescription pain medication.

via Video Game Helps Physicians Identify Prescription Drug Abuse | GamePolitics.

GamePolitics.

Virtual Worlds Research Network: Resources

Resources

We encourage contributions to this developing list. Please contact us (VWResearchNetwork [AT] gmail [dot] com) to suggest additions. Where possible, descriptions are taken from the websites of the referenced organisations.

via Virtual Worlds Research Network: Resources.

 

SLACTIONS 2012 | SLACTIONS – Life, imagination, and work using metaverse platforms

The metaverse is emerging, through the increasing use of virtual world technologies that act as platforms for end-users to create, develop, and interact, expanding the realm of human cooperation, interaction, and creativity. The conference focus is scientific research on applications and developments of these metaverse platforms: Habbo Hotel, IMVU, Second Life, OpenSimulator, Open Croquet, Activeworlds, Project Wonderland, and others, including MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft, and virtual worlds based on social networks, such as *-ville and others, providing a forum for the research community to present and discuss innovative approaches, techniques, processes, and research results.

via SLACTIONS 2012 | SLACTIONS – Life, imagination, and work using metaverse platforms.

 

AJET: Australasian Journal of Educational Technology Home Page

AJET submissions from 30 December 2011

Commencing 30 December 2011, authors can [submit articles] to AJET using AJETs new journal submission and management system. The new system has been put in place to enable ascilite to more effectively manage journal submissions. Authors will need to register before submitting an article. The registration system provides authors with the option of registering as an author and / or reviewer. We encourage you to register as both an author and a reviewer.

Volume 28, Special issue, Number 3, 2012

AJET 28(Special issue, 3) was published on 25 April 2012. Readers are invited to select file format, window width, font and font size to suit their personal preferences for screen reading comfort. For environmental sustainability purposes, we endeavour to make screen only reading as attractive as we can.

Mark J. W. Lee, Barney Dalgarno and Helen Farley Editorial 28(3): Preface to the Special issue

Virtual worlds in tertiary education: An Australasian perspective [HTML]

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Des Butler Second Life machinima enhancing the learning of law: Lessons from successful endeavours [HTML]

[PDF]

Michael Henderson, Hui Huang, Scott Grant and Lyn Henderson The impact of Chinese language lessons in a virtual world on university students’ self-efficacy beliefs [HTML]

[PDF]

Sue Gregory and Yvonne Masters Real thinking with virtual hats: A role-playing activity for pre-service teachers in Second Life [HTML]

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Swee-Kin Loke, Phil Blyth and Judith Swan In search of a method to assess dispositional behaviours: The case of Otago Virtual Hospital [HTML]

[PDF]

Denise Wood and Julie Willems Responding to the widening participation agenda through improved access to and within 3D virtual learning environments [HTML]

[PDF]

Sarah Stewart and Deborah Davis On the MUVE or in decline: Reflecting on the sustainability of the Virtual Birth Centre developed in Second Life [HTML]

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Margaret Wegener, Timothy J. McIntyre, Dominic McGrath, Craig M. Savage and Michael Williamson Developing a virtual physics world [HTML]

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Katherine Wimpenny, Maggi Savin-Baden, Matt Mawer, Nicole Steils and Gemma Tombs Unpacking frames of reference to inform the design of virtual world learning in higher education [HTML]

[PDF]

via AJET: Australasian Journal of Educational Technology Home Page.

 

Imaginary Places – Reblogged from Writersrest.com

Robert M. Geraci wrote a book called Apocalyptic AI: Visions of Heaven in Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and Virtual Reality. On Sunday afternoon I finished it while I was also half-watching Billy Wilder’s movie from the 1950s, Some Like It Hot.
(Yes, I AM good at multitasking. Why do you ask?)
Geraci is an academic, but a superb writer nonetheless. He is honest, thorough, and careful in his examination of the thousand-mile-high ideas in Apocalyptic AI.

VREP – Virtual Reality Education Pathfinder

he Virtual Reality Education Pathfinder (VREP) is an educational initiative that offers K-12 students an opportunity to develop and expand their learning across the curriculum by capturing student interest through the use of Virtual Reality and 3D. Students become self-motivated learners and mentors for their peers, choosing to create VR projects related to their own interests and for educational use within the VREP consortia. Student projects serve to both demonstrate the designer’s competency on key national and state learning standards and to provide avenues for other students to better understand and demonstrate their learning against key standards.

via VREP – Virtual Reality Education Pathfinder.

 

The Federal Consortium for Virtual Worlds

The Information Resources Management College (iCollege) of the National Defense University established the Federal Consortium for Virtual Worlds (FCVW) in July 2007. The consortium was created to explore multi-agency and intra- agency collaboration using the robust capabilities of virtual worlds, examining best practices across multiple sectors. The objective of the consortium is to help government agencies to share resources, training, and experience; leverage outreach capabilities and practices; connect to new partners and business opportunities; and demonstrate the benefits for virtual worlds’ collaborative capabilities.

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The Federal Consortium for Virtual Worlds (FCVW) consists of over 1,600 registered members from government (federal, state & local, & international), academia, and corporate sectors. The Consortium supports individuals and organizations to improve government collaboration through the use of virtual worlds to enrich collaborative online experiences, explore technologies that may enhance telework, and foster cross-agency collaboration. It provides a venue to share best practices and lessons learned for the collaborative use of virtual worlds, address common challenges, and create structures to share resources. An organization that uses a variety of collaborative technologies, the FCVW communication channels include an email announcements list, wiki knowledge base, and events. One of the most notable events is the Federal Consortium for Virtual Worlds annual conference, which is now in its fourth year. The 2010 conference was attended by over 350 in-person participants and over 3,200 virtual participants.

via The Federal Consortium for Virtual Worlds.

 

Positive Work Being Done in Second Life & Other Virtual Worlds | Saving the (virtual) world

One of the efforts the Mentors group has been focused on these last few weeks has been on this project of collecting news and other interesting items that would reflect the kinds of positive work being done in Second Life and other virtual worlds settings. The idea has been to then share this perspective with the world at large in order to help balance out the general image presented by popular media, which tends more often to focus on Second Life and virtual worlds as places for purely recreational gaming or which tends to take a perspective that perhaps highlights more potentially sensationalistic pursuits, like virtual sex.

So as part of this effort by the Mentors group over the last several weeks, I’ve been gathering items I thought were especially interesting from this standpoint to share. As I collected and began to study the items that caught my attention, I realized they were falling into three general categories for me…

via Positive Work Being Done in Second Life & Other Virtual Worlds | Saving the (virtual) world.

 

P2PU | A Virtual Worlds, Games and Education Tour | Reflections on the VWBPE Conference

Reflections on the VWBPE Conference

Many of the people taking this course will participated, volunteered at or attended the Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education 2012 conference. KK Millet has written a blog post on how you can use this course as a way to reflect on what you experienced or learned at the conference.

via P2PU | A Virtual Worlds, Games and Education Tour | Reflections on the VWBPE Conference.

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Game-Based Learning: An Opportunity For Teachers to Shift Paradigms & Innovate | WiredAcademic

What Gamers Know

Gamers understand something that was a bit of a revelation for me last week. My brother gets together with friends and games with cards and dice when he’s social, and he’s on his Xbox 360 and PC when he’s gaming solo or sometimes synchronously with friends. For him,�to technology or not to technology�is not the question. My oldest friend, Adrian Dunston, a computer programmer at SAS, feels the same way. He has as much fun playing a board game (I’ve never heard of) as he has gaming on a computer.

It didn’t occur to me until now to apply what these gamers know naturally to Game-Based Learning in the classroom, which is a hot item among a list of innovative 21st Century Teaching and Learning best practices. It’s not about the technology; it’s about the game. In the case of education, it’s about the game and the learning, but the point is lost if the game isn’t fun.

via Game-Based Learning: An Opportunity For Teachers to Shift Paradigms & Innovate | WiredAcademic.