Two gentlemen from the WV Dept. of Ed. came to visit our school on Friday, the 20th. They came to my class with our Director of Career and Technology. They happened into my Intro to GraphComm class, where the students were working on one of three ongoing assignments; a scanning assignment, a vector based artwork using Illustrator and a pixel based project using photoshop. 

In the course of discussion, the Globaloria Game Design course came up and we had an interesting discussion, about the whole web 2.0 and I immediately put that into the context of some corollary reading for the game design course I've been doing, most recently The Big Shift, Why it Matters by John Hagel III John Seely Brown and Lang Davison. I've read it twice now and will read it again, directly. 

The Big Shift is an eye opening look at emerging factors impacting business, strategies to deal with these emerging trends, (including new media) and how all of these trends and factors relate to business sustainability, innovation, ROI and global competition. It certainly provides come context for our endeavors to use game play and design as a gateway to understanding the new media. 

It was a very interesting conversation with the gentlemen from Charleston and quite an exciting way to end the week.