Back in the Saddle

It's been a long while since I have been active with game development and blogging. Time to get back into the swing, I think. My absence for this past year has been on account of responsibilities to the German program at Elon University, and getting a business German program off the ground. Central to this program is a Web-based blended learning environment that utilizes an open source learning management system (Moodle) to layer content-specific language instruction over existing lower-division German language courses (German 121-122).

Screen capture of Business German Program interface

By offloading the business German topics onto a blended learning environment, a tighter integration between the lower-division courses and program subject matter can be achieved while simultaneously ensuring that all instruction is scalable to address the needs of any number of students, transparent to the course instructors, and flexible in terms of delivery time, manner and place. It's been fun, but I'm really looking forward to getting back to research on immersive digital game environments for second language acquisition.

What better way to start of a new research push than a total redesign of the research blog? The old design was getting a bit ... well, old. The new blog look and feel, I think, gives visitors more of a sense of what the blog has been developing over these last few years. It also seems, in my opinion, to be a bit cleaner. For those of you with smaller screen resolutions, here's an image of the full blog:

Full blog screen capture

Anyway, in the coming weeks I will be working on getting an article out detailing the results of an experiment I ran with the game a few weeks ago. Some interesting data revealing how these immersive digital game environments help students project themselves into a simulated cultural space. And then there's the eventual book project I would like to crank up. Should provide me enough material to blog on.