A Light in the Darkness

These are dark times. It's kind of an inescapable truth.

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In other news...

I am collecting bears.

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Finding a Place for Gamification - DT&L 2015

In early August 2015 I gave a speed talk at the UW Distance Teaching & Learning conference on gamification and learning. The speed talk format is a bit different from the pecha kucha and other related formats in that there is no slide limit, and and time limit is ten minutes. That's just enough time to get yourself in trouble! Link for the slides after the jump.

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Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, & the Skills Gap

I'd like to spill just a few words on the topic of critical thinking and problem solving which I've started exploring in relation to the so called "skills gap." To make a long story short, there's a whole lot of noise out there at current around how underprepared colllege students are from the perspective of employers. There are a lot of dimensions to this conversation, but I'd like to focus on just one of them. A significant amount of research has been conducted asking employers about the skills they believe prospective employees should have (here's an example), and there are consistent themes that come up. One of them, regardless of how the question is asked, seems to be that employers want new hires who are strong critical thinkers and have excellent problem solving skills. I believe that these responses are indicative of a serious problem, and it's probably not what you think it is.

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A few thoughts on games without characters

I have a little over an hour to kill in the Minneapolis airport, I just linked a keyboard to my iPad for the first time, and I'm charging my phone so I figured I might as well take the opportunity to write a blog post. After all, I'm on my way to a conference, and the last several posts on my blog are older and were almost exclusively focused on the gamergate, which basically means I was being trolled very effectively and haven't taken the time to write anything since.

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