Information Trails

End of Semester: Spring 2009

Well, this has been a really crazy semester… I had wanted to do more, but there was quite a bit of duties and obligations that needed to be taken care of, such as:

1. proposal reviewing for AECT,
2. book chapter with Regina Kaplan-Rakowski for Baek’s new book,
3. programmatic matter in the department
4. Research Group meeting
5. meeting in Springfield, IL with Dr. Pat McKenna (head of urology) for a possible collaboration

Then the programmatic matter became more complicated, in the midst of a big good news (I will talk about that in a future post).

After that I got involved with the IPT, and while I was finishing up a journal article for IJGCMS, I also applied for a Human Subject Review approval…

Quite a bit of work, no? I am not even going to t complain about the changes in weather, when Spring suddenly became Summer here in Carbondale… now we have both heat and allergy. Yay!

Tomorrow I will be having another programmatic meeting to discuss more changes…

Oh, in Fall 2009 I will be going up for P&T, too. So, ya, it will be fun.

So they say, “No rest for the wicked.”

IPT

Matthias Spruill (SAIC) sent me an email out of the blue and asked if I would be interested in serving as a member on the IPT team. Well, yeah!

It’s been two/three years now, since I got to know Curtis Conkey, Brent Smith and Kent. Not only are they a very interesting group of individuals, they are the only group who knew immediately how to pronounce CILR properly! (None of my educator/academic colleagues has ever done it… they always tried “siller”, or something unrecognizable…)

Great to be able to run with people who understand what I am doing, again. With the pending changes in my workplace, it may work out well this time.

Research Interest Group on Video Games/Virtual Worlds

Last December, I initiated a Research Interest Group for Video Games and Virtual Worlds in my institution. We were finally able to meet this month. (Note to self: Spring may not be a good time for this kind of meetings, as we are all busy with reviewing conference proposals, reading thesis/dissertations, and attending conferences).

Our RIG currently comprised of the following members:

1. Michale Young, from Brain & Cognitive Science (military training games)
2. Shawn Cheng, from Computer Science (data mining)
3. David Rakowski, from Finance & Business Administration (business and finance games)
4. Regina Kaplan-Rakowski, Curriculum & Instruction (SecondLife), and
5. myself (serious game assessment)

Research Interest Group Meeting

(There were a couple more who came for the first meeting, but have not shown up since; so I don’t know what to make of their status. Perhaps it is time commitment, and then may be it no longer interests them, who knows?)

As Shawn put it, it doesn’t really matter if others are no longer interested; what’s important is for those who are really interested in (the matter) to continue meeting, and make something worthwhile out of it.

In this economic climate, I’d say that’s a good attitude!

EU Report

The European Parliament Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection released a new report on a study about video games. Here’s the coverage by Reuter. (Nothing new here… and again, sitting on the fence.)

“Videogames are in most cases not dangerous and can even contribute to the development of important skills,” said Toine Manders, the Dutch liberal lawmaker who drafted the report.

“(They stimulate) learning of facts and skills such as strategic reflection, creativity, cooperation and a sense of innovation,” a news release on the report said.

The report avoided any call for EU-wide legislation banning certain games, and instead urged the bloc’s 27 member states to work together in strengthening an existing voluntary code in Europe known as “PEGI” which rates games according to content.

Total revenues from the video gaming sector amounted to more than seven billion euros ($9 billion) last year, the report said. In Britain, separate research last year showed videogames outselling music and other video products for the first time.

Am I surprised? No.

Am I surprised it got flamed (read the comments) by a bunch gamers?. Nope!

Sales of Video Games

I first read about the (Oct 2008) sales of video games is the only number that’s “up” during this economy turmoil…

The Nov 2008 sales figure for video games has just been released and it is closed to 3 billion dollars in US alone! Truly amazing! I guess people are trying to escape from the stressful real world by engaging in virtual worlds. Perhaps the video game industry can bail out the rest of the industries…

Simauthor

Came across SimAuthor, a Northern Colorado company that specializes in Flight Simulation. They appeared to garner customers from all over the place: military sectors, flight and aviation industry, and university with an aviation program. (Since SIUC has an aviation school also, why is it not on the list?)

But what’s really interesting (to me) is their flight training analysis software… of course we are talking about After Action Reports (AAR) here. As always, I failed to understand why the instructional technology folks are simply NOT getting this. Isn’t this kind of training and analysis important to our field? While this is the kind of research studies that kicked-start our field… somewhere in the past, a fork in the road appeared, and people have been traveling down the other path ever since.

Oh, well, you can’t win them all.

Predictive Probabilities

Found a Predictive Probabilities Analysis software for download at the Dept of Biostatistics and Applied Mathematics (BAM Software Download Site), maintained by the MD Anderson Cancer Center of the University of Texas.

This is primarily a software to support clinical trials in which the endpoint is binary or time-to-event (TTE).

Survival analysis

After considerable search and thinking session, (and of course, conversation with Mike Young always help), it become increasingly clear to me that survival analysis may be even more appropriate than data mining. In some circle, data mining may be construde as fishing for data, and is always suspect. A more direct data analysis method would of course be desirable, but which one?

I have already come across various time-stamping methods, and the most closely “sounding” one may be time-series analysis. However, after considerable search into the method, it turned out to be closer to financial analysis (as in moving averages) than what I am hoping for. No go…

Then, I came across some literature on time-to-event analysis… (as in this BMJ article). I think I have found the right thing. (Mike seemed to think so, too.)

secondhealth

You have heard and even used SecondLife, but have you heard of SecondHeath – the SecondLife’s healthcare virtual world from United Kingdom?

Second Health is located in the SciLands, a specialised region of Second Life for Science, Technology and Educational applications. Most of these projects are about professional and patient education, collaboration and health strategy.

Second Heath Hospital in SciLands, SecondLife.

This is an experimental, innovative and efficient means of communicating complex healthcare messages as well as illustrating what healthcare of the future could look like.

The design of the virtual hospital in Second Health is based on the principles and recommendations outlined in the recently published Healthcare for London: A Framework for Action.

Twitter Streamgraphs

WebMonkey has a short write-up about Twitter’s StreamGraph. This is a new text-mining product by Twitter (after it acquired Summize. It visually maps the latest 200 tweets containing a particular given word/phrase. One can also mine a user’s Twitter contribution using the “@user” search function call.

StreamGraph for

“The StreamGraph shows the usage over time for the words most highly associated with the search word. One of these series together with a time period are in a selected state and coloured red. The tweets that contain this word in the given time period are shown below the graph. You can click on another word series or time period to see different matches. In the match list you click on any word to create a different graph with tweets containing that word. You can also click on the user or comment icons and any URL to see the appropriate content in another window. If you see a large spike in one time period that hides the detail in all the other periods it will be useful to click in the area to the left of the y-axis in order to change the vertical scale.”