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0 commentsWhile watching the ALT-C 2010 Twitter stream, I saw a posting from the iVERG group inviting people interested in gaming and virtual worlds to check them out. I visited their home page to discover it’s a consortium of academics investigating virtual worlds for use in learning and teaching:
iVERG is a group of collaborating academics and professionals from universities worldwide. Research on virtual environments for use in learning and teaching is diverse and complex and draws upon specialisms in education, computing, sociology, psychology and anthropology.
It has an important contribution to make to the effective uses of these environments which are being increasingly taken up by a wide range of educational institutions worldwide. Although they have an intrinsic appeal founded upon their origins within gaming and social networking, immersive virtual environments need research informed practice to ensure their effective educational use.
From: http://www.iverg.com/iVERG/Index.html
They’re looking for people to join them, including students conducting research in associated areas. The two-page application form asks for a 200-word biography. I was struggling for something to write when it occurred to me to check my very old, but still maintained, “About Me” page, which had a blurb. I took that as the starting point and came up with:
Michelle finished her Bachelor of Science degree in honours computing science at the University of Regina (Canada) in October 1995. She then joined the University of Zürich’s (Switzerland) Software Engineering Group, led by Dr. Helmut Schauer, and the Artificial Intelligence Lab, led by Dr. Rolf Pfeifer. While in Switzerland, she worked with Peter Schauble’s team at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology on the EuroSpider project. She’s a co-author with Kenrick Mock of several IRC-based games, including Risky Business and Acrophobia. She’s a long-time member of the IDEAs Lab in the School of Informatics at the University of Sussex, where she’s currently working on a Ph.D. under the direction of the Lab’s head Dr. Judith Good. Michelle’s part-time Ph.D., started in 2008, combines her lifelong love of teaching, community building, and gaming to examine learning and motivation in World of Warcraft (WoW). She also teaches, writes, and chairs courses at The Open University on accessibility, online learning, Open Source, PHP, and e-business technologies. In 2010, she completed the two-year Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice and got a second character to Level 80 in WoW. She’s active on Twitter as @Eingang.
I suppose I’d like to see what other people have said. I hate writing about myself, but it’s probably “good enough.” Now, off to post the application.
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