It would have been great if I could mass message those folks, but that was not possible for three reasons. First it was not readily technically possible (I am sure someone with more scripting skills like you could have slapped something together to do this, but it was not directly feasible for me. Two, there is a reason you can’t mass message folks, people don’t want to be spammed. I wanted to conduct the survey in as upright a means possible and for me that meant individually contacting members. Third, I actually had to do additional selection at this point. The 1740 included folks that did not mention their age, or said they were under 18. In accordance with my Human Subjects Approval I could only talk with adults.

So, I needed to manually contact folks, while it would have been possible for me to click through each of the 1740 members profile pages it was time prohibitive and sampling procedures could get the level of specificity that I needed. No need to bother everyone in the community.

So, starting on page 1 of search results I checked out the folks at the top of each page of search results. I then contacted the ones that fit the two remaining criteria. That is how I generated the sample of 160 members from the pool of 1740.

What was your exact method for randomly sampling?

With that background I have three broad questions I intend to explore. Because this is fundamentally qualitative research they are each rather open ended questions.

1. Who participates in the process and what roles do they take on?
2. What attitudes, habits, approaches and kinds of thinking does the community value?
3. What impact does participating in the community have on members?

I think that a game like Itza Bitza goes in another direction. And as stated elsewhere I am also hoping that our game Playing History (www.playinghistory.eu) will go a long way towards challenging the existing edutainment space.

I also, think and hope that as digital distribution goes from game nerds to mainstream we will have a new opening for educational games, but right now its very difficult.

Best,

Simon

Interesting with Spore – I have been researching and developing games for learning for a number of years, and right now we are launching http://www.playinghistory.eu. We take a much more down-to-earth approach at history but so far we are getting really good feedback from the target group.

There’s a free demo, and teacher trial on the site.

Best,

Simon

We’ve seen entire decades worth of news archives run through our company’s AlchemyAPI service; developers are extracting named entities, keywords & tags, then doing all sorts of interesting things with this information: Clustering news articles, generating ontologies and concept maps, etc.

It’s a brave new world out there!