Kevin Marks keeps posting about interesting meetings that I want to attend, or wish I had attended*.

I am jealous. Every now and then, it’s just a little bit irritating to find onesself nowhere near California!

Hey Kevin, fancy a technorati European tour? We could probably host you in Dublin at Learn3k… once they finish building our office anyway :)

(*your definition of interesting may vary)

No really, these are completely mental images

Tom Smith has been having painful experiences with Word. No surprises there then.

I actually quite like Word (oops, did I really admit that in public?), but these days I find myself more and more tempted to use html + css for writing documents - either as a blog entry, or on an internal project Wiki if it’s not a public document, or even if worst comes to worst as a standalone html page.

Admittedly writing web content can be painful, and most tools are either shit or totally over-engineered for writing simple documents, but generally it isn’t too bad if you’ve got some sort of simple mark up add-on installed (e.g. Markdown).

Sorting out the basics - headings, images, lists, text styles - is easy, and I often find that the constraints imposed on me have a positive effect, leading to a simple layout, or a well structured group of pages.

What I’d love to see is for someone to do a Wiki tool which had a good client-side authoring component that ran as a standalone application.

What it should do is:

• let you author offline, using basic word processor-like wysiwyg editing
• upload your changes to the wiki later, resolving conflicts
• let you package up a group of pages as a standalone document and distribute them as a pdf so that others can read them offline
• be as fun as OmniGraffle to use :)

I attended the (rather grandly titled) ELSPA International Games Summit yesterday, with Stephen Heppell, who was there talking about links between the learning and games communities in the UK.

There were a few interesting sessions, but also some mind bogglingly turgid and boring ones (the speakers shall remain anonymous).

At times I was reminded of the worst of my undergraduate lectures, and felt that we would have been better off if everyone had just gone to the pub for a chat!

The idea of these days is presumably to share information, but often the presentations were too long, going into too much detail, when what was really needed was a brief overview and a discussion.

There’s got to be a better way!

I’d love to see events like these organised differently, so that we got short (15 min) presentations to provide key facts, talking points and perhaps a bit of provocation from an expert.

Each presentation could then be followed by a moderated discussion (the panel events yesterday were the best ones) in which the audience ask questions or make suggestions, depending on the topic under discussion.

What would be really nice would be if these Q&As were actually recorded and minuted, then written up by someone during the day, and presented later as a summary and/or the start of a further discussion.

That way it really would start feeling like the best kind of brainstorming sessions in the pub, but with the added advantage that someone was actually writing down all those great ideas, and you’d also get the minutes and summaries to take away at the end of it, instead of your own scrappy notes!

For a long time now, educationalists have been keen to harness the attraction that computer games hold for many of us. “People spend hours and hours of their own time playing games!”, say teachers, “If only they showed that sort of interest in my lessons!”.

Off the shelf games are already being used, in an ad hoc fashion, in many classrooms, to support existing teaching, and provide background, motivation, and opportunities for debate. Using an existing game as a tool is a great solution, no different from using any other physical object or fun activity as part of learning.

However, there have also been many attempts to create “educational” games. Most of these have been misguided in my opinion, and when I hear people from the educational world getting excited about games, I start worrying that it’s the precursor to another attempt to make a great educational game. My response to this would be: “No! Don’t do it!”.

The idea that one can harness the power of games as some sort of magic bullet to encourage learning is just as valid (and invalid) as the idea of using anything else that people love; music, say, or sport, or chocolate!

One might well be able to base a lesson plan around eating chocolate - it would have a certain novelty value and it would probably be pretty popular with the students, but only if it was nice chocolate! The same is true with games - the key, always, is that you must start with a compelling experience - something that people want to do.

Making a good game is a process with just as many nebulous, uncertain variables as writing a novel or writing a symphony. To make a great game you need a good idea, some great hooks, a slice of luck, and a team of expert programmers, designers, musicians and artists who are focussed on making something cool.

I don’t believe that many developers of successful games think in terms of their “audience”. Most will be in their twenties and thirties, but they are still likely to share the same taste in games as their users (who are probably a lot younger). The developers are just trying to create the game that they want to play.

By adding an extra educational objective to a game, the link between developer and consumer is often lost. Instead of asking themselves, “what would be cool here”, a developer is suddenly forced to ask “how do I make latin verbs fun?”, or some other equally inappropriate question.

The process of development changes from something driven by gut instinct, emotional responses and the subconscious, into something conscious and intellectual. The motivation is almost inevitably weakened as a result, and the game suffers.

I’m not saying that a good educational game is impossible, simply that the barriers to making an engaging game are already high. To make a good game is hard enough already, and adding a set of educational objectives make things worse not better.

Immersive, engaging, fun educational software is certainly being written, and sometimes it provides an experience hard to distinguish from a game. Crucially though, the stuff that works best is generally designed first and foremost to be good educational software, and not a leading edge game.

I absolutely agree that the games and learning industries should be talking to each other, but hiring game developers and asking them to make something educational is probably misguided.

Instead, we should be encouraging developers to just keep making great games, but to make them more adaptable, scriptable, and extensible. They should be encouraged to build their games as frameworks and shells that can be taken by educators and re-used in different contexts.

Good developers do this anyway, as it has a number of advantages, usually improving the robustness of the code, increases the speed with which the developer can generate their own content, and helps to promote a whole community of add-ons and customisation around the game which extend its life.

Not all game developers are great engineers though, and even the good ones have to move fast, and meet deadlines. As a result their tools aren’t always up to scratch, and are almost always not ready for release to the wider world.

If there is any government money available for “games and learning”, then this is where I think it should be focussed. We should pick a few great games which are already designed with extensibility in mind, and spend some resource helping to clean up and document their tools for use by educators. This would allow the educational community to benefit from games technology without having to try to recreate it, and it would offer a clear benefit to the developers too, who would find a way to spend the time on their tools that they know they ought to, and often want to, but generally can’t justify.