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Digital Worlds Week 2, Round-Up

Here's a round up of posts to the Digital Worlds uncourse blog experiment over the last week:

• Whose Rules?
• Points Make Prizes - or Penalties!
• Getting Philosophical About Games
• Who's Best? Keeping Track of High Scores
• Upping the Stakes - Bonus Points
• A (Very!?) Brief History of Games
• Friday Fun #2 Get Your Own Avatar
• Moving on With Game Maker - A Maze Game
• Bringing the Digital World Alive
• A Two Room Maze Game

I also created a timeline at http://xtimeline.com/timeline/History-of-Games to act as the focus for a user discovered content activity ("Playing" at Soliciting Learner Generated Content). Providing access rights so blog readers can edit the timeline is a bit of a pain (I can't make it public, or provide user password, for example. The admin has to invite a user, or they have to contact the admin, and then edit permissions have to be granted.)

One problem I've noticed with the Wordpress theme I'm using is that the category links on each post point to a corresponding Wordpress tag page, rather than the blog category page. There doesn't seem to be an obvious link to the feed for each category, either (though feeds are available: just add /feed to the end of the Wordpress category page URL, for example http://digitalworlds.wordpress.com/category/what-is-a-game/feed).

I've started exploring a glanceable view over the uncourse using a Pageflakes pagecast page. I haven't posted about this on the Digital Worlds blog yet - I'm still working on a first pass stable version - but as it has elements of PLEness about it, I thought I'd post a link to it here: Digital Worlds Pagecast.

The tabs are fed by separate category feeds, run via a simple Yahoo feed item order reversing pipe, to be the feed items in category panels into presentation order, rather than the typical category feeds' reverse chronological order.

I'm also considering experimenting with a drop.io box for file sharing. Whilst drop.io does offer a widget for file uploads, and RSS feed notifications of uploads to a storage area, the widget doesn't display the most recent 5 entries to the box, say, let alone a full contents listing... which is on my feature request list for them ;-)

Workload-wise, it's taking me on average about an hour and a half per post at the moment, though I have been drawing on previously made notes in some cases, particulary for the Game Maker activities. Included in that time is resource discovery (e.g. on flickr and youtube), as well as 'reflection' on how to do various things - e.g. for the timeline post, I tried out various ways of how to introduce the activity. As it is, I think the timeline activity is underspecified, but I've added a few thoughts about that in the comments to the post.

As I enter new territory (i.e. fewer notes) I'm expecting things to level out at up to 2 hours per post, which will mean up to 4 hours per day, on average for 2 x 800-1000 word illustrated posts, including minor activities/self-reflection questions. The Game Maker activities may also require additional preparation time.

See also: Digital Worlds Week 1, Round-Up

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Tags: digitalworlds

Posted by ajh59 at March 15, 2008 11:16 PM