Gaming is flavour of the day in several areas of the OU at the moment.
Digilab opened in the Library to act as a space to playfully engage with technology (a Wii is on the way, apparently ;-)
A couple of us are exploring a possible first level short course (with Abertay) on interactive multimedia and game design.
A small team in the Computing are exploring the possibility of a course in which students create a course on computer gaming in Java which could then, in principle, provide the basis for a course that could be delivered to another cohort:
The Computing Department of the OU is in the process of starting up a project which will get students to develop an OU course on a particular topic that the department does not currently teach; the course will use the OU’s VLE Moodle. The course will teach material on e-learning, teaching, clear writing and distributed working. It is envisaged that students would work as an OU course team in groups of five and at a certain point would work singly to develop a unit.
Our hope is that we can take the best of the material that has been produced and convert it into a presentable OU e-learning course.
This highly experimental course is a response to projects such as Wikipedia, WikiUniversity and activities such as blogging. It is highly experimental since it challenges many of the expectations that we have about course development at the OU...
(Rumours also tell of another approach to a student-generated course that is being explored in Social Sciences, this time using a model in which students must identify their own learning resources for use in a course in a rapidly changing area (such as climate change).)
And finally on the topic of games, there's a fulltime PhD postion going in IET for a project on Seventh Generation Games for Education:
The latest games consoles and handhelds hold exciting possibilities for rapid development of working games. But do such games offer anything new in educational terms? This studentship offers an opportunity to explore this question in relation to any curriculum area of your choosing, and any educational level of your choosing, from pre-school to university. Your proposal must outline an idea for an original game of innovative educational potential that you could prototype in no more than 8 weeks and with £2000 for equipment. During the MRes year, you would develop this prototype but you must also be prepared to spend six months learning about quantitative and qualitative research methods so that you can develop a robust plan for a formal educational evaluation of the prototype. You would conduct the evaluation over four weeks, identifying exactly what users learn. You would also need to write a well-referenced masters dissertation of at least 12,000 words that relates your research to the history of the educational evaluation of games and to common pedagogical frameworks. Progression from the MRes to the PhD is dependent on the quality of the dissertation and on the realistic educational potential of the idea.