Second Life

The state of North Carolina has gotten involved with a virtual learning grant that has allowed for the following:
http://ncvirtual.ning.com/
Basically, and island within Second Life (http://www.secondlife.com) has been created and is available for the use of schools in either classroom learning, professional development, meeting, or any other use. The maintainers have even created a building where educators can customize their own office space, I have placed my office in a corner spot on the sixth floor, would have preferred a lower floor but those were mostly filled already.
Second Life provides for a very powerful environment in which we can facilitate virtual learning, basically take distance learning to a whole new level. This is something that I had started looking into at work last fall, but no one seemed interested and I just kind of quit. It turns out that people were interested just did not know what I was doing and so a few days ago this information was dropped on my desk with a "let's discuss" which I though was just wonderful and really exciting. It is my understanding that the original goal was to roll out a class for this Spring semester but that just is not doable, however we are going to hit a leadership development thing going on during the spring (around February) as a proof of concept and then hopefully roll out a full course through the environment come next fall.
Anyway, been very busy with all of this Second Life stuff this week. So here is my office and if you happen to be a Second Lifer, look me up in-world: Jere Silverweb

Video Game Industry and Stuff

Well, my dad just pointed out that this has not been updated in almost a year. This means that someone is actually reading this, well not just someone but my dad so that means it is time for an update and this may be a better forum than Facebook notes anyhow.
So many things have happened in the year since I've been on here so lets just get started.

Job:
I am very happy at Wilkes Community College. We have moved from Boone to North Wilkesboro and we are all very happy with our current situation, at least for the most part. The school is a wonderful place to work and given the current economic climate teaching at the community college level is a very exciting place to be as so many displaced workers are returning for re-training. I teach in the Computer Information Technology curriculum and my classes cover the gamut from introduction to programming all the way to systems analysis and design. I now have 10 advisees of my own which is pretty nice but also pretty intimidating as I tend to worry about putting them in the wrong class or screwing up in some other way with their program of study. The school is going through a re-accreditation process in which we are implementing student learning outcomes and so all of the classes and curriculums are being rethought from the ground up. This means that while initially I took over someone else's courses and material, now I am redesigning all of my classes so that they mesh with the SLO and other guidelines that we are looking at.

Video Game Industry:
Have been making a bunch of very interesting discoveries over the past 6-8 months. Shortly after starting at WCC I began to ask about the possibility of offering some classes in video game design. These questions led to my being told that there is already a simulation and game design curriculum defined by the North Carolina Community College System, it even happens to be a part of Business and Public Service Technologies the division that I work in (you can read about it here and here). So, Late last spring I began looking at this and trying to talk to some people and just trying to find out what can and can not be done, etc. Essentially, nobody really cared. Don't get me wrong, nobody was trying to stop it, but it must be understood that the school had looked into implementing this program a few years ago however due to lack of local jobs and cost of the program it was not implemented (even though there was overwhelming student interest). I started by looking at the other schools that currently implement this program and noticed a definite trend (which had already been noticed) to get this up and running it is going to be several hundred thousand dollars for all of the software licenses (Unreal Engine, 3DS Max, Maya, etc).
Why, you may ask, is this so expensive? In order to properly train students to jump into entry level positions at game companies the student need to know the tools used and the tools used by the industry are very expensive. Well, that is fine enough, but why would schools in North Carolina be implementing such a program anyway? As it turns out, the RTP area is now considered to be the video game capital of the East coast, there are nearly 50 video game companies in that region (I am not going to go into why, although it is very interesting why it happened). So, the community colleges here are training people to be able to jump into those compaines. Ah, but wait.
The video game industry is currently undergoing a fascinating metamorphosis. The current trend is towards independent game development. What does this mean? This means that many of those Iphone apps, Facebook apps, Xbox Live Arcade games, online Flash games, Wizards 101, and the list can go on, are actually being created by one or two guys in their garage. You see, with modern digital delivery mechanisms, one of the biggest hurdles of game development is overcome and now average Joe can publish a game without having to bank roll publishing and marketing the way it was done in the past. But, how can average Joe afford all of the tools to make these games? Well, he can't. But he can afford the free tools that are available and are arguably as powerful as the expensive ones.
So, I have taken the curriculum and adjusted it towards the independent game developer or entreprenurial approach and have presented it. My boss was excited about it, her boss was excited about it, other people are getting excited about it so that we are now doing employment surveys, but we are not looking for jobs for game developers, but jobs for people with the skilles of a game developer (3D modeling for architecture or medical visualization, simulation development for business and economic models, virtual world creation for communication and training, and the list goes on).

Hmmmm, this got a lot longer than I thought it would guess that is why one should post more frequently. Well I have more to say, but will stop for now. Perhaps add a new post next weekend if not sooner.