The Value of Wiki Collaboration

Bob Coffield, a West Virginia blogger and lawyer, has a great post today about the value of wiki collaboration. I see this value proposition on a daily basis.  

Look at the required process for sharing documents via email. 

Wikinomics Image

The only real benefit that using word processing is ease of formatting.  You can run into some formatting issues when using wiki's as your primary editing tool. One thing I've learned is that quick table editing in WikiMedia can cause troubles down the road if you want to transfer the information to Excel to allow for calculations.   However, I still feel it is worth using a wiki for sharing any information. 

What about you? Do you send a draft of a document around via email? Do you have 4 or more versions of it on your computer wondering if you need to keep them all?  Have you ever got a large document that someone else has edited and you have no idea what they have changed? These are all reasons to use wikis.   I know that online collaborative documents are getting popular and for good reason, Google Docs and Zoho are really getting popular and I use them both in addition to using wikis.  They offer a little more control over the document that you are creating then a wiki, such as who can edit it.

Bob is a lawyer in Charleston and deals with the healthcare industry. I wonder how many hospitals have a wiki?

Of course in Globaloria, everything is on the wiki, so everything is already in a great collaborative format.   I would love to see more of us put more of our information in wiki pages, making it easy to share and easy to collaborate.

Score, Timer, and Collision: Flash Code Examples

This was Bill's question...

Does anyone have actionscript coding for a game timer (countdown), score keeper (hittest), and drawing walls that stop character movement that work in FLASH MX2004? My kids had started their game on that platform and those are the last 3 major issues to make a fully functional game.

[[Bill]] 15:59, 1 April 2008 (EDT)

I was wondering if anyone out there could point us to some good code examples? These are very common game elements so am thinking it would be great collect several examples around each concept. I posted here first, now I will go and search around the web. I'll let you know if I find anything.

Teaching Game Design

I am so excited... Denise Stalnaker has shared another post with me and I am sharing it with you....

There are some days that I feel like I don’t know anything and other days when I feel that I might just be getting ahead. This feeling was one of the main obstacles that I had to face when I started teaching business technology classes. When I had taught other classes I knew the content or at least 80-90percent of it. However, I am lucky if I know 20-30% of the features of the software that I teach. At first I felt stressed about it but now I have learned to let the students do the leading. If they know more than me I put them to work helping other students, teaching me or doing special projects. There are days when it still bothers me that I don’t know certain information but generally that feeling goes away once I see the work of the students.

I also try to talk to students about technology advances. At least 5 years ago a few of my students told me I needed to get Flash. My principal allowed me to purchase a copy and I tried to use it. I was lost so about two weeks later two of my students in web page design were ahead so I gave it to them to learn. Approximately 20 minutes later they were showing me how to do the basics.

As I teach game design there are days when I cannot help the students but I have learned that figuring things out together or assigning another student to help work just as well. I really hope this is 21st Century learning because I know I am learning “tons” and hopefully preventing Alzheimer’s in the process.

Using Google Reader

This is a guest post by one of our educators: Denise Stalnaker

At one of the training sessions Lee taught us how to set up and use Google Reader and since then it has been very helpful to me. My students are working with MCTC so I wanted to monitor what they were doing on those pages as well as the RTC pages. Then my students also joined Kasson Middle School pages. The Reader was one way I can easily see when changes are made and by whom. I can then click and see the changes quickly. I have other sites that I also want to monitor. Try it.



Google Reader Screen

Game Movement Trouble

UpDate: We have already identified the issue here. It is great to see the community support address the issues quickly. It was a cut and paste issue.

I received this email today and I looking for some of you who have already worked through this process to help out....

Some of the students are having problems with the coding in Animation I, Elementary Programming. For example, (Cradox) cannot get the code from the game, Game Movement [the basics] - Part 1 to work properly. The game will execute on the website, but the code does not seem to work for them. [One student] will be putting a copy of his game with errors on his wiki page under the heading Animation 1. Could someone take a look at it and see what may be the problem?

Some of the other students have tried various segments in the Elementary Programming, but have the same problems. They were wondering if it could possibly be because they are using a different version of Flash.

I am posting the issue here on my blog so that anyone who might have already run into this issue can offer some support. Maybe you have already worked through the tutorial or you use a different version of Flash. Or maybe you can just offer a word of encouragement.

So if you are within a hyperlink of this problem.... lend a hand?

Free Images to Use in Your Games

I found this great resource in my RSS Reader yesterday. It was a suggestion from Shannon about where to find great, free pictures that you can use in your game.

I heard that you were looking for some good free clip art sources and I have a few suggestions. Good luck with your game! --[[User:Shannon|Shannon]] 19:23, 18 March 2008 (EDT)
* Wikimedia Commons (over 1 million images, animations, audio, video): http://commons.wikimedia.org
* Flickr (over 7 million CC-BY and 5 million CC-SA photos) : t
* openclipart : (over 10,000 tagged clipart images) http://www.openclipart.org

Check it out!

Things in Process Here at Globaloria

There are a lot of great things going on in Globaloria right now. I thought I would take a moment and share some of them. The students are really working hard on their games. Check the wikis and you will find a lot of new digital artifacts and game components. It is really getting cool to watch the complex games pieces come together.

In Crittenton all the students are creating their own design and they are going to pull together pieces of that for their own game. At Clay County High School, now one of our most active groups on the wiki, each student is creating their own game. And at MCTC, the students are really finalizing their group project and will be providing a live demo in April.

Our Internship Program has been underway for about four weeks now and we are seeing a lot of great things. They have created tutorials based on requests from the educators and they are each blogging. Check it out here, here, and here. The Interns are also starting to provide guidance to some of our students through their wiki. Students helping students.

And our educators have been very busy as well. They have been guiding students. Kasson Middle School lead educator Chad has been conducting daily presentations to his group, all the educators are preparing and submitting their reports, and they will be participating in an online mini-workshop very soon.

Finally, our recruiting efforts are in mid-stream. We have reached out to schools through our presentation and asked them to complete this application. It is really neat that we are getting referrals from our existing schools (Thanks guys!).

New Calendar for Educators

We have created a public calendar on the WV Educators wiki to share important dates and events within the community. Please go and check it out. If you have any feedback or additional important dates, leave a note on the Discussion Tab.

It is exciting to see so much happening in the Globaloria Community and in our West Virginia schools.

Thanks!

Clay High School Interfaces

There is a new group of students this Spring at Clay High School. They have been working through the Globaloria tutorials and have started to post some great work on their wiki.






This is an example of an interface created by one of the students. For those of you who may not be aware, the Play Station Portable (PSP) is a mobile, handheld device that has an awesome screen resolution and internet connectivity. This shows some great talent in recreating the PSP in Flash. Great Job!

How to Publish a Flash File

If any of you are just starting to use Flash and are wondering how to publish your Flash file, here is a video (screencast) that will walk you through the process. It is really not that hard of a skill, but if you have never done it before, you may wonder why there are two files, (fla and swf) and why Publish is different then Save.

Well, watch this video, then go to the Text tutorial and work through it. It gives a quick explanation. Good Luck!

P.S. I need to learn how to embed a Flash file into my blog. That way you can watch it here. Anyone out there know how to do this?