Growing Body Parts

Body parts are appearing all over the place now... We have had a fake severed hand for an ArtVid project, Bugs hand (on the left) created in Blender (hopefully not going into one) and various legs, heads and torsos across several game development groups.

Skoolaborators are also busy with bodies but mostly just dressing them. Several people have now uploaded their own T-shirt designs for their Second Life avatars.

This week's presentation on mentoring was more of a workshop. Everyone present had a chance to mentor and be mentored... Some people found they learned a great deal about other projects, others learned to be a little more structured when reflecting on their own progress and a few were not sure of the usefulness of the exercise.

Uploaded on authorSTREAM by regor2012

The mentoring process is based on GROWTH Coaching and Cognitive Coaching. The latter in particular is designed to assist students with student-directed learning. I did my training in GROWTH coaching a couple of years ago and found the structured approach to reflection very useful - although my workshop was a few hours - not 30 minutes. Nevertheless listening in to conversations around the room I was very happy with the level of reflection I heard.
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Top Tools for Learning

We're in the top 10!

OK it doesn't mean that much but it's interesting to see that many of the learning tools we are using in this course have been rated highly in a survey of 155 educators by the Centre for Learning Performance Technologies.

We use seven of the top 20 tools: del.icio.us, Firefox, Google Reader, Gmail, Blogger, Moodle and twitter.

Wikis also feature in the top 20 and this tool was chosen by seven members of the Glassbiscuit Development Unit.

Also of note is that in the top 100 tools Facebook now comes in at 28 and Second Life has risen dramatically since last year to be number 41.

Google Earth comes in at 48 and this is certainly reflected at HC where many classes used it in 2008.

Mimio Handles Complex Game Plan

The Glassbiscuit team moved their planning to the whiteboard today - recording their ideas to a laptop using Dirk's favourite device - the Mimio :-) This team of six certainly needed the space - not just because they are a large production team but because their project is large and complex.


For documentation, collaboration and file sharing they have chosen to customise the free hosted Wikidot. It's well organised and has RSS feeds for easy feeds - once they adjust the security setting so we can access it :-)

A critical issue with such a large project team is the ability of each team member to be able to document both their individual and collaborative work. This is required for assessment at the highest level of the Student-Directed Inquiry course.

The level of organisation and documentation that the team has put in place should address this very well.

Another aspect of the group's planning involves P.H.A.S.E.

According to their FAQ:

"P.H.A.S.E. (Project HAndling System Environment), is a scheduling system designed (soon) to set deadlines for the completion of all aspects of the project. Once a "phase" is complete a new playable version of the game will also be completed, meaning that we will not be left with a bunch of incoherent stuff at the end of the year, but a finished project and a graphic representation of the path we took to create it."

Sounds like a great idea!