I am very pleased to announce that for the first time my name will be appearing as a co-author of an academic paper! Consuming Linked Data within a Large Educational Organization was written by Fouad Zablith, Mathieu d'Aquin, Stuart Brown and myself and is a full research paper which has been accepted for the Second International Workshop on Consuming Linked Data (COLD 2011) which will be held in Bonn, Germany on October 23rd. The paper discusses the findings of the Lucero project which investigated the uses of Linked Data in educational institutions. My contribution was mainly the use case seen in an earlier post on this site: An HTML5 Leanback TV webapp that brings SPARQL to your living room but the paper is a much wider in scope than my blog post discussing not only use cases but the role of Linked Data principles to avoid the problems of data "silos" often found in large organisations. The paper can be obtained free-of-charge.
conference
I was really lucky this week to be able to attend the Game Based Learning Conference 2009 in London, one and half days of presentations that never failed to be thought provoking and very interesting with the latest ideas and practice surrounding the use of computer games to assist learning. It is a topic which can immediate provoke scepticism, many people associate games with having fun and few people associate having fun with education, so how can games help in education? The answers could be found in this conference, with teachers and researchers finding out how to use games to make a real difference and use them to build up all sorts of skills such as numeracy, literacy, business acumen, military skills and many others. I mention military skills as it is a good reminder that using games in learning is not actually a very new concept, e.g. in the Middle Ages, Chess was used to teach war strategy.