Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

This is a indeed delayed posting for the 2007 NMC Summer Conference at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis. NMC summer conference has a great reputation as “the most entertaining learning technology conference” to attend each year. This year's event well defended it's reputation. It was a week of great community building, great knowledge exchange and most importantly, great fun!

Gaming and Education was the theme of this year's conference. While Second Life certainly made to the top of the list among all discussions, presentations and group sessions, the NMC community still managed to cover a wide range of technologies around the new media and education industry: motion graphic productions, web based rich media learning tools, open source 3D immersive platforms and a variety of commercial/educational games. What I find most valuable of this conference are the people, you will meet many instructional developers, technology innovators, hard-core gamers (not gonna mention u-all names), creative artists and brilliant media designers throughout the conference!

Ok, enough praise to the conference, here are the report from us UBC folks who attended the conference. Friday the 15th was a PACKED day for all of us. Uli and I did a presentation on Arts Metaverse and Open Croquet at 8:30 in the morning. Then a productive and exciting Pachyderm meeting at the lunch time. (It was great seeing the Pachy folks in person again!) Then in the afternoon we received the “NMC Center of Excellence Award” (YES, we are one of the three recipients this year! Thank you NMC!) and Joel did a 5 minutes of fame on the Language Pronunciation Tool. The morning session and the 5 minutes of fame session went extremely smooth (phew... not to mention we missed quite a few good “party opportunities” before Friday for the last minutes preparation...). I think we have raised a lots of interests in Open Croquet and Arts Metaverse throughout the conference. Following-up emails are flying in...

The Jam session was absolutely fabulous! No need to describe it in words, check out Alan Levine's flickr photos.

Oh, yes, one more thing, NMC made an announcement during the conference - "NMC Joins Immersive Education Initiative to Advance Virtual Learning", and Croquet is on the list!

Anyway, thank you NMC again for the award and see you all next summer at Princeton!