2 great kudos for EdTech

Big news from the dungeons. That’s where EdTech faculty work on educational games and quest-based curricula.

A team of EdTech and Computer Science professors has won the Stage 2 competition in the MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning grant awards.

EdTech team members Lisa Dawley, Chris Haskell, and Andy Hung, along with Computer Science Department Associate Professor Alark Joshi are using Boise State’s 3-D Game Lab to facilitate and validate learning in a high school science curriculum to be created in conjunction with NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In fact, Dawley now travels to the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco to work with Peg Steffen from NOAA to submit the final presentation to judges in the Stage 3 competition. Overall competition winners will be announced on March 1.

Boise State’s 3-D Game Lab, built by Dawley and doctoral student Chris Haskell, is a quest-based learning environment. It’s already an innovative learning platform, but Dawley caught MacArthur judges’ attention when she suggested using the software-as-service platform as a means of measuring and rewarding learning with digital badges.

MacArthur’s “Badges for Lifelong Learning,” in collaboration with the Mozilla Foundation, focuses on badges as a means to inspire learning, confirm accomplishment, or validate the acquisition of knowledge or skills.

The MacArthur grants are part of the HASTAC system---(Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, pronounced haystack)---a network of networks, “dedicated to transforming and reforming traditional education with peer-to-peer collaborative techniques inspired by the open web”—which, all in all, is a pretty big deal.

Go to http://www.dmlcompetition.net/Competition/4/badges-stage-2.php to learn more about the MacArthur Digital Badges awards.

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE!

That’s not all the news wafting out of the dungeons this week.

Boise State’s 3-D GameLab is mentioned in this year’s Horizon Report for Higher Education as an example of an open-ended, challenge-based learning environment.

The Horizon Report’s 2012 Higher Education Edition is a collaborative effort between the New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, an EDUCAUSE program. To access the report, go to http://www.nmc.org/publications and create an account.

Okay, let’s put the yardstick on this. Being mentioned in the Horizon Report is the educational technology equivalent to being a first-round draft pick. Does that sound like a big deal? Ohhhh, yeah.