Two topics: Visualizing Unemployment by County over Time; Kurt Squire's Recent Work on ( Video) Game-Based Learning

Below is a screen shot of a web page that shows the increase in the number of unemployed people, by county, in the U.S. from January 2007 until November 2009. According to information from the web site, the data is from the U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics.

From what I can tell from the URL, this visualization was a multimedia final project of Latoya Egwuekwe. Here is the link to the webpage: Unemployment Rates by County, January 2007 through November 2009

Here is the YouTube version:



Thanks to Kurt Squire for the link!

About Kurt Squire:
Kurt is an assistant professor of educational communications and technology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and is associated with the Academic ADL Co-lab.   He previously was the research manager of the Games-to-Teach Project at MIT and co-director of the Education Arcade.  He also was a Montessori and primary school teacher.

I encourage you to take a look at Kurt Squire's recent research and work.  I reviewed some of his earlier work for a paper I wrote back in 2004, when he was  It is exciting to see how far his research in the area of game-based learning environments has come since then.

Here are links to a few of Kurt Squire's publications:
Video game-based learning: An emerging paradigm for Instruction
Open-Ended Video Games: A Model for Developing Learning for the Interactive Age
From Information to Experience: Place-Based Augmented Reality Games as a Model for Learning in a Globally Networked Society
Video Games and Education: Designing learning systems for an interactive age
Video-Game Literacy: A Literacy of Expertise (To appear in J. Coiro, M. Knobel, D. Leu, & C. Lankshear, Handbook of research on new media literacies. New York: MacMillan.)


More about the Academic ADL Co-Lab:
Local Games Lab
"Many kinds of games can be made about local environments. At the moment we are most engaged with augmented reality (AR) games in which players use digital technologies to enhance their immediate experience of walking around in real-life locations. We are also interested, among other possibilities, in classroom simulations, board games, virtual tours, and desktop video games."


CivWorld!

"This is a site for people interested in using Sid Meier's Civilization for learning academic content, including history, geography, or even game design. We have custom-designed game scenarios, curricula, case studies, and experts on using Civ for learning. Our goal is to help players, students, parents, and even teachers use the game at home, in after school centers and maybe even classrooms."