I’m in a session about using virtual worlds in education right now. I just got here so not sure, but right now John Lester (from Linden Labs) is talking about Second Life and the cool stuff people create in it and then talk about the artifacts. “As you increase the perceptual immersion; you increase emotional immersion.” -talking about the Sistine Chapel in SL. Soon, Rich Vogel will be talking about Ultima Online. Cool.

Anyway, I tried to go to a different session on learning through design with Eric Zimmerman, Betty Hayes, Alex Games, Eric Klopfer, and Eric Rosenbaum–AKA the Eric session. I wasn’t able to get in the room, though, so I tried to go to the room that is set-up with a live broadcast of the session.. except that some of the headsets were broken, so after fiddling around with some of the conference organizers for 10 min, I decided to leave. Ah well… this one is pretty good and I think there’s a bit of overlap, anyway. 🙂

Earlier, Jim Gee gave the keynote speech over breakfast. He talked about the gamer mindset (transgressive, model building, welcoming failure, always looking for ways to use the system to their advantage, modding, etc.) and how we will be saved by it despite how crappy our schools are. One thing he said was that capitalists like the ones who make the Yu-Gi-Oh! card game trust that all kids can learn and will learn in order to play their games, whereas schools don’t trust all kids equally. This is why an achievement gap exists in schools but not in games. Interesting.

Before breakfast, I met up with Jen Stone while she walked around saying hi to Consance, Jim, etc. After breakfast, Lisa came over to introduce me to Shawna Kelly, one of the people whose organizing the book that Lisa and I wrote a chapter for.

More later..