The TRAILS project released its annual report from last year. Highlights include the running of three updated courses, the launching of this Web site, and securing a publisher for a book on Educating Learning Technology Designers.

On Monday, October 2, 12-1:30 pm Pacific Time, John Bransford will give his first presentation in the popular virtual world of Second Life. He will present thoughts on how virtual environments can help people learn, and possibly contribute to reforming our educational system. Dr. Bransford is the director of the Learning in Informal and Formal Environments (LIFE) Center. More info on Dr. Bransford's talk here.

Shelley Goldman of Stanford reports that both Erlbaum and Springer have offered contracts for the L2TD book. There's talk that the book's working title ("New Designers, New Technology, New Learning: Guiding and Inspiring Creators of Innovative Educational Tools") needs to be shortened, but the offers are the important thing at the moment. Now the editors have the luxury of choosing the best publisher for the book, instead of just having a publisher.

Mark Chung, the lead developer of Gorp, announces that a new Gorp upgrade is ready for the Fall 2006 semester. Gorp is a web-based tool designed to support courses on learning technology design. Instructors can now "copy" previous courses for the new semester, and customize categories and fields used for describing student projects. They can also create a "new student" login for shared use. For more information about Gorp, including the user guide, go to the Gorp page.

Jim Vanides, the program manager for higher education philanthropy at Hewlett Packard has a new blog out on teaching & learning with technology. It's titled "Teaching, Learning, & Technology in Higher Education". The first entry is about using Tablet PCs to gather real-time classroom feedback where the responses are open-ended, such as drawings, rather than the multiple-choice questions that have traditionally been the only choice with existing "clicker" systems. Check it out at http://www.hp.com/go/hied-blog.

A new paper by Alex Repenning has been accepted for presentation at OOPSLA 2006. The paper offers an easily teachable method of programming game AI – that is, creating smart game agents that engage the player more intelligently. The paper outlines an algorithmic method called "collaborative diffusion", where "antiobjects" are used to build games where agents collaborate and compete with each other and the player.  Alex notes that while it is a relatively simple technique, teachable even to middle-school students, it yields sophisticated emergent behavior.  This is especially important to the field given that many people complain that game AI is still fairly weak compared to the immense progress that has been made in graphical representations.  The paper, titled Collaborative Diffusion: Programming Antiobjects, will be presented at OOPSLA 2006 in October.  Read the paper here.  

Congratulations to Shelly Goldman, whose [course|Collaborative Design and Research of Technology-integrated Curricula. It begins, "It's presentation day for Professor Shelley Goldman's course...Participating undergraduate and graduate students, local teachers, visiting scholars and faculty are gathered in Room 127, one of Wallenberg Hall's advanced resource classrooms, to show off their projects to a standing-room-only crowd."  Read more.

Students of Alex Repenning and Clayton Lewis at UC Boulder have put up 16 variations on the Frogger game using AgentSheets as the development platform. One of them is described this way: "Colorful Tonka trucks, horrific death screams when run over, and very bad artwork." Due to the screams, this one is not to be played during conference calls. Click here to go to the web site - click on "gorp", then on "frogger".

Can interactivity hurt learning? The British journal "Education 3 to 13" found that emphasizing graphics and interactivity can decrease childrens' retention of story details. Twenty six-year-olds used a program that read them a story. Half used a version that simply read the story aloud as text appeared on the screen. The other half used an interactive version where children clicked on illustrations that triggered some 300 animations, only two-thirds of which were relevant to the story. A day later, 90 percent of the reading-only group could recall the story. Only 30 percent of the interactive-version could. The researchers suggested that the graphics and interactivity interfered with childrens' ability to remember the essence of the story. Read it here.

Chris and Gucci will be attending the upcoming SIGCSE 2006 Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education and will be getting early feedback and registration on the LTD community site.