Class as a Fully Realized Online RPG
Faculty of Boise State University have converted a class to a fully game-based approach that leverages role-play characteristics, MMORPG leveling and skill building, and an immersive game-based design. This session will outline the theory, pedagogy, and application of this course built in the virtual world. It will be presented in the form of a graphic novel using machima to tell the story. It shows the unlikely but natural intersection of learning, games, and digital culture.
Recording (must enter name & email to view)

Gamifying Political Science: Experiences from Teaching Socials Science in Higher Ed
In this session, Mikael shares experiences from his transformation of political science courses to 3D GameLab, including:

• The effects of quest-based learning for learning outcomes and relations with the students
• The changed role for both instructor and teaching assistants
• How gamification allowed for more effective teaching tools, with educational live-action role-plays as the most potent example.
• The implications for social science teaching on the post-secondary level, with particular attention to norm based grading vs. a mastery based assessment.

Recording (must enter name & email to view)

The Persuasion Games
Lee will introduce designing classes as games that persuade students to want to learn—not by using commercial products or educational games—but by applying game design principles and narrative techniques to standard curriculums and learning outcomes. He will then help you with the hard part: honing your sales pitch to parents, school boards and state standards committees.
Recording (must enter name & email to view)

Other recordings can be view at: http://www.questboise.com/#!speakers/cfvg

questboise 2013 videos can be viewed at: http://www.questboise.com/#!2013-videos/c1gz6

New AERA Open Access Journal Now Accepting Article Submissions

WASHINGTON, D.C., October 9, 2014 – AERA Open, a new scholarly journal from the American Educational Research Association (AERA), is now accepting article submissions. …

AERA Open is edited by an inaugural team of leading scholars—Mark Warschauer, Greg Duncan, and Jacquelynne Eccles. The editors are joined by an accomplished associate editor team and editorial board. The editorial team is committed to upholding the highest standards of rigorous and rapid review.

• WATCH: Video of AERA Open Editor in Chief Mark Warschauer discussing the purpose of the new journal
• READ: Inaugural AERA Open editorial by Mark Warschauer, Greg Duncan, and Jacquelynne Eccles

In the journal’s inaugural editorial, Warschauer, Duncan, and Eccles describe what a truly “open” journal means. In addition to being open and accessible to a broad audience, AERA Open is open to diverse authors, disciplines, and contexts, and to inspection and replication studies.

Through AERA Open, the editors note that they “seek to promote strong education research; strengthen the ties between researchers, policy makers, and practitioners; and foster greater international communication and collaboration in education scholarship.”

“With the launch of AERA Open, AERA continues its leadership role in scholarly open access publishing,” said AERA Executive Director Felice J. Levine. “We are eager to open the submission system for AERA’s newest journal, which we anticipate will become a venue for innovation, data sharing, and connections across interdisciplinary arenas of inquiry.”

As with AERA’s other six journals, SAGE is publishing AERA Open on behalf of AERA—and is similarly committed to this effort as AERA’s publishing partner.

“AERA Open will cross disciplinary and geographical boundaries to make significant advances in global education research,” said Bob Howard, Vice President of Journals, SAGE. “We are confident in the exceptional editorial team put together by AERA and are delighted to be serving as the journal’s publisher.”

The submission site for AERA Open is on the ScholarOne platform. AERA Open’s manuscript guidelines, list of author payment fees, and other important information can be viewed here.

About AERA

The American Educational Research Association (AERA) is the largest national professional organization devoted to the scientific study of education. Founded in 1916, AERA advances knowledge about education, encourages scholarly inquiry related to education, and promotes the use of research to improve education and serve the public good. Find AERA on Facebook andTwitter.

This release is available online.

Call For Articles:
Special Issue of the Bulletin of the Technical Committee on Learning Technology “eLearning and Linked Open Data”

Guest Editors:

Salvador Sanchez-Alonso and Enayat Rajabi
Information Engineering research unit
University of Alcalá, Spain
{salvador.sanchez, enayat.rajabi}@uah.es

With the proliferation of e-learning resources on the Web, exposing, and
sharing educational resources in digital form has become an important issue.
Many of these resources are implicitly related to each other or to the
interest, cultural and technical environment of learners. Connecting
different kinds of learning objects promotes a new scenario where currently
isolated data repositories would progress towards an open discovery space
including resources independent of their geographic and system boundaries.
Finding links  is also very useful for enriching educational materials and
provides the added benefit of giving access to richer contents to both
educators and learners.
The Linked Data approach, as a de facto standard for interlinking data on
the Web, includes a set of successful principles which facilitate sharing
and reusing data on the Web and lead to vast amounts of publicly available
datasets. Using Linked Data, the repository owners can publish structured
data and establish typed links among them from various sources. This
approach enables enriching existing resources, enhances casual discovery,
and improves resource discovery. However, applying the Linked Data in
eLearning contexts needs more research attention and many aspects remain
largely unexplored.

This special issue discusses how the Linked Data approach can be applied for
sharing, reusing and enriching the eLearning resources on the Web and what
advantages it can bring to the eLearning stakeholders.

The Bulletin of the Technical Committee on Learning Technology publishes
articles, project reports, and case studies which may be of interest to
academics, researchers, and professionals involved in the field of existing
and emerging learning technologies.

This special issue will be published in Volume 16, No 4 (October, 2014).

Submission procedure
•       Articles, case studies and project reports can be submitted to this
special issue. Manuscripts are limited to 4 pages. Use the IEEE template for
preparing your manuscript and follow the IEEE guidelines. The IEEE template
is available online at: http://www.ieeetclt.org/content/authors-guidelines
manuscripts should be either in Word or in RTF format, with any figures
embedded in the text at appropriate places. In addition, figures used in the
contributions should be provided in separate graphics files (gif, bmp, or
jpeg files).
•       Please send the manuscripts and all relevant material by email as an
attachment to salvador.sanchez@uah.es and enayat.rajabi@uah.es (Please user
subject line: IEEE-TCLT Bulletin Submission).
•       In the email, please state clearly that the manuscript is original
material that has not been published, and is not being considered for
publication elsewhere.

Important Dates
Deadline for submission of articles: October 31, 2014.
Notification of review results: November 15, 2014.