Archive by Author

Exploring Interactive Narrative – Traditional storytelling

In an increasingly multiplatform, multiformat world, the way we combine activity with storytelling fascinates me.  Although usually associated with video games, I think the principle of ‘interactive narrative’ applies to all the domains where we punctuate presentation with participation. [To clarify, I’m using the following definitions: ‘story’ describes characters, events and plot; ‘narrative’ describes how […]

Learning with Auntie

This week the BBC launched its new strategy for learning. Despite the unalloyed successes of the revision service Bitesize, the foolishly shelved creative offering for teenagers Blast and the sterling work of Adult Learning, the BBC has been frustratingly timid about its Charter-proclaimed educational remit for the last few years.  The reason for the half-heartedness was, no doubt, […]

Violent Play – Rubbing salt into the wound

I came across an interesting research paper today in the Social Psychological and Personality Science journal.   Brad Bushman (Ohio State University) and Bryan Gibson (Central Michigan University) suggest that the aggression associated with violent video games can persist long after the game play has finished. Many people, notably Craig Anderson of the Department of Psychology at […]

Where success counts

Last week I listened to two fascinating talks from TEDxSheffield.  The first was by Richard St John based on his book, The 8 traits successful people have in common (Amazon link).  St John  describes the results of an extensive survey he’s conducted of the world’s most successful people – leaders from all fields and walks […]

Gaga

“Gaga’s fans are marooned in a global technocracy of fancy gadgets but emotional poverty. Everything is refracted for them through the media. They have been raised in a relativistic cultural vacuum where chronology and sequence as well as distinctions of value have been lost or jettisoned by politically-correct educators” says Camille Paglia, professor of humanities […]

Free iPhone

While I was in Leeds this week, I came across a fascinating research project that is having a major impact on undergraduate studies. Following an earlier collaboration between health schools across the north of England called ALPS (Assessment and Learning in Practice Settings) which explored the value of mobile computing for medical students, Leeds Medical […]

Failure, Friends and Finding your Feet

I love being a dad.  I find it the most astonishing, life-affirming, challenging wonder-filled experience I have ever known and my children keep surprising me and teaching me new lessons. My little boy, Jacob, is 17 months old.  He’s been tentatively and briefly on his feet for the last few weeks but mostly he’s been […]

Ping – too little, too late?

We’ve become accustomed to rather cynical annual software updates from the likes of Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Studio that deliver dubious new ‘features’ and diminishing backwards compatibility. Likewise we’re increasingly familiar with the perpetual beta nature of apps – software released early and continually refined. But I wonder if we’re entirely sold on the […]

Adapting to new technologies

A report in the current issue of the Journal of Service Research describes the changing nature of customer relationships and how new technologies have altered the way consumers interact with businesses.  The authors from Europe and the US describe a ‘pinball’ framework that characterises the to-ing and fro-ing of these more equal relationships, which they […]

Friendship Business

A couple of weeks ago I talked about a piece of informal research I’d conducted with teenagers about their use of Facebook and wondered aloud how their average of 400 ‘friends’ correlated with Dunbar’s number of meaningful relationships? Could those many hundreds of connections translate into a genuine social circle? Likewise, Twitter’s ability to broadcast […]