Gaming gets respectable -- or is it respect?

Here's some sources of articles on gaming and higher education.

"New Tools for Back-to-School:Blogs, Swarms, Wikis, and Games"

"Redesigning Games: How Academia is Reshaping Games of the Future."

"Gaming the System: What Higher Education Can Learn From Multiplayer Online Worlds."

"What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy" Click on book icon and then on the left bar, Learning by Design: Games as Learning Machines.

"The New Culture of Gaming"

"Second Generation e-Learning: Serious Games." This is a special issue of On The Horizon (vol 12, no. 1, 2004) and is available to subscribers at www.emeraldinsight.com/oth.htm or for FirstSearch subscribers, in the ECO database.

In the "Introduction to the Study of the Future" classes I took at the World Futures Society conference, the Life Cycle of an Issue was presented as one way to gauge the maturity of a trend. Here's some of the elements--think of the axes of the life cycle as time and degree of public awareness. In other words, the newer the trend, the less the amount of public awareness. Based on the list, I'd say gaming is moving to the mass awareness level.

Visionary (artists, scientists, radicals, lunatics)

Uninhibited (fringe media, underground)

Diffusion (specialists' journals, web sites)

Mass awareness (general interest magazines, websites)

History (doctoral dissertations)