Preparing the books to read every day is enjoyable for many people. However, there are still many people who also don't like reading. This is a problem. But, when you can support others to start reading, it will be better. One of the books that can be recommended for new readers is experience and education. This book is not kind of difficult book to read. It can be read and understand by the new readers.

Experience and Education.

aimed to attract a more diverse audience of gamers and non-gamers – and to bring video games off the screen and into the living room. While not all games are well suited for multiplayer play – ‘It’s hard to avoid getting in each other’s way and impeding rather than advancing game progress’ (p. 133) – most games are intended to be played while in the room with other people. ‘The Wii is just the latest attempt by Nintendo to bring a version of this kind of social gaming into the living room, closer to arcade parties and karaoke than to, say, bouts of online multiplayer military simulations’ (p. 142). Jones and Thiruvathukal’s book is as much a user’s manual for the potential of the Nintendo Wii as it is an academic and technical deconstruction of the console as a computing platform. Their joint approach to considering the topic works well, but it isn’t until the very end of the book that Jones’ cultural contextual approach really shines. In the final six pages of the sixth chapter (pp. 143–148), the authors consider the paratext of the Wii, as well as the diegetic and nondiegetic elements of video games – and the various layers of the platform and the games, interactions and activities it supports. ‘This social layer of a video game platform is an essential part of what the system means, because it’s the environment in which the platform gets used’ (p. 148). Much of the existing literature on Nintendo – such as Osamu Inoue’s (2010) Nintendo Magic: Winning the Videogame Wars and Jeff Ryan’s (2011) Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America – concentrates on the company’s success as a business. The more technical literature to date focuses on the use of the Wii Balance Board, another controller for the platform, in healthcare and therapeutic settings. This text sits comfortably in the middle, Wiimote and Nunchuk controllers in hand, making a valuable contribution to the study of the Nintendo Wii and how technology and culture work together.

It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens

Will Tracz, our esteemed editor and Used-Program salesman, has written an entertaining, non-technical book dealing with the practice (and lack of) of software reuse. Its a collection of essays, mostly rehashed (reused?) and updated from various columns and papers published over the years.. Its a short (a bit over 200 pages) easy reading and enjoyable book (I read most of it in one sitting). Some of the essays discuss what was printed in the past and a discussion of the current status of the points.

Safeware: System Safety and Computers

It has been claimed that working memory training programs produce diverse beneficial effects. This article presents a meta-analysis of working memory training studies (with a pretest-posttest design and a control group) that have examined transfer to other measures (nonverbal ability, verbal ability, word decoding, reading comprehension, or arithmetic; 87 publications with 145 experimental comparisons). Immediately following training there were reliable improvements on measures of intermediate transfer (verbal and visuospatial working memory). For measures of far transfer (nonverbal ability, verbal ability, word decoding, reading comprehension, arithmetic) there was no convincing evidence of any reliable improvements when working memory training was compared with a treated control condition. Furthermore, mediation analyses indicated that across studies, the degree of improvement on working memory measures was not related to the magnitude of far-transfer effects found. Finally, analysis of publication bias shows that there is no evidential value from the studies of working memory training using treated controls. The authors conclude that working memory training programs appear to produce short-term, specific training effects that do not generalize to measures of “real-world” cognitive skills. These results seriously question the practical and theoretical importance of current computerized working memory programs as methods of training working memory skills.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1745691616635612

Working Memory Training Does Not Improve Performance on Measures of Intelligence or Other Measures of "Far Transfer": Evidence From a Meta-Analytic Review.

Working memory (WM), the ability to store and manipulate information for short periods of time, is an important predictor of scholastic aptitude and a critical bottleneck underlying higher-order cognitive processes, including controlled attention and reasoning Recent interventions targeting WM have suggested plasticity of the WM system by demonstrating improvements in both trained and untrained WM tasks However, evidence on transfer of improved WM into more general cognitive domains such as fluid intelligence (Gf) has been more equivocal Therefore, we conducted a meta-analysis focusing on one specific training program, n-back We searched PubMed and Google Scholar for all n-back training studies with Gf outcome measures, a control group, and healthy participants between 18 and 50 years of age In total, we included 20 studies in our analyses that met our criteria and found a small but significant positive effect of n-back training on improving Gf Several factors that moderate this transfer are identified and discussed We conclude that short-term cognitive training on the order of weeks can result in beneficial effects in important cognitive functions as measured by laboratory tests

/pdf/improving-fluid-intelligence-with-training-on-working-memory-34a3xht9zp.pdf

Improving fluid intelligence with training on working memory: a meta-analysis

Rapid prototyping a virtual fire drill environment using computer game technology

Building realistic virtual environments is a complex, expensive and time consuming process Although virtual environment development toolkits are available, many only provide a subset of the tools needed to build complete virtual worlds One alternative is the reuse of computer game technology The current generation of computer games present realistic virtual worlds featuring user friendly interaction and the simulation of real world phenomena Using computer games as the basis for virtual environment development has a number of advantages Computer games are robust and extensively tested, both for usability and performance, work on off-the-shelf systems and can be easily disseminated, for example via online communities Additionally, a number of computer game developers provide tools, documentation and source code, either with the game itself or separately available, so that end-users can create new content This short report overviews several currently available game engines that are suitable for prototyping virtual environments

/pdf/computer-game-engines-for-developing-first-person-virtual-k44dq12q6k.pdf

Computer game engines for developing first-person virtual environments

Embedding immersive virtual reality in classrooms: Ethical, organisational and educational lessons in bridging research and practice

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) potentially challenge the traditional dominance of brick and mortar institutions as providers of quality higher education. The benefits for students include reduced education costs and global access to exclusive institution courses and instructors. However, the benefits for institutions are less clear as there is a financial overhead required to develop and deliver content that is suitable for mass student consumption. In this article we examine the opportunities that MOOCs provide and identify several different business model challenges for offering MOOCs.

/pdf/exploring-business-models-for-moocs-in-higher-education-4hgupwki2e.pdf

Exploring Business Models for MOOCs in Higher Education

New and emerging media technologies have the potential to induce a variety of experiences in users. In this paper, it is argued that the inducement of experience presupposes that users are absorbed in the illusion created by these media. Looking to another successful visual medium, film, this paper borrows from the techniques used in "shaping experience" to hold spectators' attention in the illusion of film, and identifies what breaks the illusion/experience for spectators. This paper focuses on one medium, virtual reality (VR), and advocates a transparent or "invisible style" of interaction. We argue that transparency keeps users in the "flow" of their activities and consequently enhances experience in users. Breakdown in activities breaks the experience and subsequently provides opportunities to identify and analyze potential causes of usability problems. Adopting activity theory, we devise a model of interaction with VR - through consciousness and activity - and introduce the concept of breakdown in il...

/pdf/evaluation-for-the-design-of-experience-in-virtual-196ke2dlau.pdf

Shamus P. Smith

Papers

Rapid prototyping a virtual fire drill environment using computer game technology

Computer game engines for developing first-person virtual environments

Embedding immersive virtual reality in classrooms: Ethical, organisational and educational lessons in bridging research and practice

Exploring Business Models for MOOCs in Higher Education

Evaluation for the design of experience in virtual environments: modeling breakdown of interaction and illusion.