Pablo Moreno-Ger’s blog

Hey! Notice anything different?

I eventually got tired of the old look of the blog and made some changes to the general appearance. Feel free to let me know what you think about the new look

General blogging

Well, many things.

To begin with you have to write a post apologizing. And even if you do that, you still loose credibility and readership. Unfortunately, my credibility as a blogger is probably at an all-time low. On the bright side of things, judging by comments and analytics, I never had a huge reader base, which means that the three or four of you will probably forgive me.

You also tend to need to explain WHY you neglected the blog for a month. Well, my reason is a very complicated month in which a lot of things have happend. To begin with, I registered my PhD. dissertation thesis. I have also pre-defended it internally and registered it for the actual defence. The huge effort required for that meant that I accumulated a lot of work that I am still pushing forward. Additionally, I travelled to the GDTW 2007 conference/workshop, which happened to be highly disruptive workwise but extremely gratifying and interesting. Honestly though, there have been other major events that have completely shattered my concentration and changed my life, although they don’t belong in a research blog.

Another consequence is comment-spam. 1500 spams in the moderation queue. That is an unsustainable amount and I have thus decided to disable pingbacks for good. I had the good eye to spot two legitimate comments among the huge spam, but I might have accidentally deleted something I shouldn’t. In that case, I’m sorry. I also have taken some other anti-spam measures for the future.

Things seem to be getting a bit more relaxed lately, and so I feel confident I will able to bring back the weekly(-ish) posting pace. Wish me luck. I am preparing posts about my thesis, about the GDTW2007 conference and the second part of my reflection on educational videogames and e-learning.

By the way, should I fail to keep this promise next week and in case anyone is interested, I will be defending my thesis and (hopefully) become a doctor on Friday, Novemeber 30th, at the UCM School of Computer Science at noon.

Personal blogging

After having ranted about google’s blogging environment ever since my second post, I have finally decided to move on and try WordPress. The advantages? I’m hosting this myself, the system is much easier to use, the design is cleaner, and I can finally introduce categories. The widget system is pretty cool too. For example, since I blog sporadically but read a lot, I have linked to the “share this” feature of Google Reader so that when I read something interesting in the net, a link will appear here.

After investing far more hours than I really should have (procrastinating? me? never!) I think that everything is ready to roll. The feed seems to be working fine and, after some ModRewrite magic, most of the old links still work and redirect to their WordPress equivalents. Expect some changes in appearance over the next few days (I really need a new banner, I’m accepting suggestions). Also expect some eventual bumps as I will often break things when fiddling with WP’s goodies.

Fnally, please let me hear your feedback, especially if you notice something broken.

General blogging

This blog is part of the efforts of the <e-UCM> research group to bring online our activity, disseminate our results, and get online exposure.

But, unfortunately, the task is not as simple as it sounds. The members of our group work hard in their corresponding fields (both researching and teaching) and online activity usually comes in just as an after-thought. As long as the group is focused in online education, this is something we should be ashamed of. And yes, we are.

This is the reason why from the beginning of 2007 (call it a new year’s resolution if you will) we have been focusing on the improvement of our web presence. One of the first steps was to bring forward a renewed version of the official <e-UCM> website with updated information, including a publication list and offering drafts of relevant publications for direct download. This step is not finished, although we have certainly improved the quality of the information available there.

Another step (which directly affects me) was the already announced publication of a fresh and renewed website for the <e-Adventure> project and to keep updating this blog. Well, the website is there and this is a blog update. What now?

Personal blogging, reflections

The server has been down for a few days. At least it was Christmas time, so it is unlikely that anyone actually tried to access the blog in the meantime.

The reason for the downtime was that the website was being moved to a brand new server. This is plan of a masterplan in which most of the <e-UCM> related websites are going to experience a lot of changes in the following weeks. Yes, including a brand new <e-Game> project website. The current stub will be gone soon. This time for good. Promised. And this time I’m serious. In fact, another person is doing the new website, that’s why I promise without blushing.

Personal blogging

Well, there goes my half-promise of updating every other week after September. If this research blog is “my creature”, it follows that, in all the world, I’m the person who cares more about it and I keep failing to pay it proper attention. So, what will the rest of the world think? Easy guess. Fortunately readers may have such a thing as RSS aggregators that allow them to ignore this blog until something interesting happens in it and their aggregator tells them. Easy excuse.

Moving on, let’s talk game-based learning. My latest chore was a visit to the ICEC 2006 Conference in Cambridge, UK. I spoke about <e-Game> there with an audience that knew what a game was, that accepted that games and education match (weeee!) and where noone raised a hand when I asked who did not know Monkey Island (well, actually one person did, but he didn’t understand the question properly). In retrospection, maybe it was because I asked the question in negative, and that means I counted in all the attendants that were actually asleep as positive votes. To keep my morale up, from now on I will always ask these questions in negative.

The approach was reasonably well received, maybe slightly technical for part of the audience, but I perceived interest. Andrè Melzer (second appearance in this blog!) seemed interested and we discussed about the possibility of turning that personal interest into an institutional interest from the Univeristy of Lübeck.

Speaking of the University of Lübeck, it’s curious how its Institute for Multimedia and Interactive Systems keeps doing stuff that is almost games, without really being games. With the incredibly original ideas they have (on this conference Andrè Melzer spoke about interactive radio plays and Wendy Ann Mansilla spoke about using Acousmêtre in virtual environments), they could enter the game-based learning arena as a storm and really come up with original ideas.

Obviously in a conference about entertainment computing it is difficult to extract only a few papers for a decent-sized blog entry without leaving out a lot of interesting works. Let’s just point out some adjectives:

The curious: Wim van Eck presenting a paper describing their experiences in designing games with real animals within. On the premise that animals are unpredictable and non-deterministic, they conducted a pilot in which they created a pac-man game connected to a camera that looks at some crickets hanging around and translates their real movement to the ghosts in the computer game. Do check it out, it is really interesting.

The true game-based learning: Colleague Pedro Gonzalez Calero presenting the evolution of JV²M, a true game specifically designed to learn the inner workings of the Java Virtual Machine (for a Theory of Compilers subject). Developed by the people sitting next to me in my office, by the way. It will be easy to keep an eye on that project

The game-related: The most game-related talks were actually the keynotes. Emotions in game design, casual games and hardcore gaming rankings and matching. Hard to decide which was more pure gaming. Let’s give Microsoft this one.

The trend: Lot’s works coming from Asia related to hand motion recognition. In all flavours: Using an active glove, using a glove with beacons, recognizing the movement of the bare hand, you name it. Those were different works by different groups in different countries. See a trend? If you are looking for a new line of research, consider that one.

Other notes: Dutch people innovating in Dance Dance Revolution and similars, a lot of interactive storyelling, several GPS-based games (I should really explore that area) and lots of reflections in the relations between games and emotions.

In any case, this is a shallow selection. There were a lot of great talks, so check the conference’s website (they promised to eventually post the presentations there… still waiting) and the proceedings. You won’t regret it.

As for the conference organization: Superb. Nice location, nice facilities, and a nice information flow. Buses to pick us up in the center of the city (and drop us there), two dinners, lunch included. A weird”gala” dinner including live music by a rock band, which is a very interesting twist from traditional conferences. Kudos to them.

The research facilities that Microsoft has in Cambridge look like a wonderful place to produce good science. They even had a XBOX-360 in the common area, which connects with the ranting bit of this post: If this was a Entertainment Computing conference, how comes I didn’t see anyone approach it during the entire conference other than myself and my colleague Pedro González Calero? We can’t talk about entertainment if we never have fun, we can’t talk about games if we don’t like games.

Next post from the Netherlands, I’m visiting the Educational Technology Expertise Center at the Open University of the Netherlands with Daniel Burgos as host researcher, where we will explore the integration of games authored with <e-Game> and Units of Learning following IMS Learning Design.

Personal, Research blogging, conferences, travelling

…or perhaps I should say, “To blog with a third party or not to blog with a third party?”

When I decided to start this small side project I considered the possibility of coding a small blog engine with some server-side technology (be it PHP or full-blown J2EE). I thought that putting together some code to post, some code for comments and such wouldn’t be too difficult.

Then I decided that I would need to add further security checks (we don’t want a kid writing php code in the comment window, do we?). If I wanted to categorize my content that would mean more coding. If I wanted to put some kind of search facility, that is still more coding. And I had no clue on how to code RSS feeds or trackback systems.

And then, I found out about blogger, google’s blog community. That was my solution! It had all the coding done, and it would be hosted in google-ish servers (thus rising my position in search engines). I quickly set up my blog there, made a couple of adjustements and we have a blog!

Alas, blogger doesn’t include categories. And it does provide “searching” functionality, but it is embedded in a banner that I dislike. And I can’t remove that banner unless I host the blog in my machine.

Right now the blog is in my machine, has no categories and has no search funtionality. That makes me reconsider my initial design… I could code something like this, perhaps better, in only a few days, barring the part of learning about RSS and trackback… Now, will I do it?

General blogging

…and this blog came to life. It would be customary to say something brilliant in the first post but, sadly, that will not happen.

With time, I will use this blog mostly to spread my research work in the fields of game-based learning and simulation-based learning. I will also post reflections about the field itself and try to point out interesting advances achieved by others.

Finally, some personal commentaries may appear here and there but, by now, that is not the main objective of this blog.

Enjoy!

General blogging