Posted in haste from my phone…
So far, SXSW has been eye opening. From the sessions I’ve been to and the people I’ve met, I’m discovering that there is a ton of work and thinking being done in the area of games for formal and informal learning across the US. At the same time, I’m finding that there is little awareness of what’s being done in this area in the UK.
Also, there has been a lot of discussion about how to make this innovative work more mainstream. It seems like pooling information, resources and learnings could be a good start, and that everyone working in this space could learn from each other. I know I could. So, this post is a plea for suggestions about how to do this, or for directions to places where this discussion might already be happening.
A google group? A wiki? both? Something else altogether? Suggestions in the comments or @ me on twitter and I’ll add them here. Thanks!
Updated after twitter discussions:
Museum games wiki as possible model: Museum games wiki
Q: are there not some serious games lists already out there?
Yes, lots of people working in this area in us but because it’s multidisciplinary it’s fragmented.
So q: is how to bring that all together.
any other thoughts from people?
My group members (http://www.meetup.com/The-London-Educational-Games-Meetup-Group/) have suggested a Wiki for our shared knowledge. If you think this would be a useful starting point that might persuade me to actually get on and do it. (I’ve been hesitating because in my own experience of wikis lots of work goes into creating them and very few people read them).
I am amazed at how often I get asked for advice by new educational games developers in the US who don’t seem aware of the great resources and groups that are already working over there. Am now getting requests from countries like Italy and the Netherlands as well…
That’s interesting, it definitely feels like people working in this area are a bit un joined up. I wonder whether a mailing list/group might be more useful, perhaps with a wiki attached, but I don’t know how that would scale. Maybe we could have a short discussion at the next legup and see what the group thinks?
Whoa, things just got a whole lot eaersi.
I think there’s a fair bit of informal idea sharing going on – and I think you’d have a hard time corralling everyone into a single wiki!
Maybe our own daily news site would be good (if anyone had the willingness to build or curate it?) We’ve seen the mashable/gizmodo/tech crunch etc. model work for the big boys, but it can work for far more niche interests too – I’m a regular reader of fleen.com, for example, which is exclusively devoted to webcomics news.
At last! Someone with the insight to solve the prolbem!