ISPI
While searching for information on the Center for Programmed Instruction, I came across this rather interesting history of ISPI [from http://www.icodap.org/ispi/ispihist.htm]. The origins of International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI) are intricately related to the formation of a series of fledgling groups coping with the impact of exploding technology and evolving methodologies in the early [...]
Neverwinter Nights for military
It was at I/ITSEC 2007 that I first heard about Shawn A. Weil from the folks from Aptima, Inc. (Woburn, MA). It appeared that Aptima (or should I say Weil?) also worked on Neverwinter Nights for a little bit, and had presented their papers at past I/ITSEC (2004/2005). It looks like they have been busy: [...]
Delta3D: OS Game Engine
Well, it was at best a random encounter. It started with a listserv posting on members’ opinion of the Top 3 serious games, and Jim Brazell (UTAustin) said, amongst a list of games/software: Delta 3D – because to me the most serious game simulation is building games. This is the path to human development for [...]
Playing to Learn
The Murphy Winter Report (2005/2006) ran an article about Kathleen Hansen and Nora Paul of University of Minnesota using NWN for Journalism. (I have known about someone using NWN for journalism for quite sometime now, but it keep slipping my mind as to who the researchers are… Now I won’t forget.) Original article: http://sjmc.umn.edu/mreporter/winter2005/neverwinter.html (Excerpt… [...]
Neverwinter Nights 2 “Research”
I have finally come across the first report about folks “using Neverwinter Nights 2 for learning and/or research.” I am pretty sure the folks at Heriot-Watt University are somehow “inspired” by the success at West Nottinghamshire — since both Judith Good and Judy Robertson also hailed from the United Kingdom. But whatever the things they [...]
Peter Gorniak (MIT)
Peter Gorniak, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is probably the first person who used NWN as a research platform. He originally conceived it as Situated Speech Understanding (you can read his thesis proposal here) but eventually turned it into Affordance-Based Concept [ABC] (you can read his thesis here). Some of his other writing [...]