technology | Liam O'Donnell

Getting Started in Minecraft: From Zero to Punching Wood

by liam | Feb 1, 2013 | education, gamebasedlearning, gaming, media, Teacher's Guide, video games, virtual worlds

A few months ago, the GamingEdus team was interviewed about using Minecraft in Education by Seann Dikkers, for an upcoming book on the subject to be published by the University of Ohio. As the interview progressed, it became clear that one of the goals of our...

Minecraft Madness and Play at ECOO 2012

by liam | Oct 27, 2012 | appearances, education, gamebasedlearning, gaming, literacy, media, virtual worlds

Yesterday, I had the great pleasure of talking Minecraft with my two GamingEdu pals, Diana Maliszewski and Denise Colby and many, many fantastic educators at the ECOO 2012 conference. We were there presenting our talk: Playing with TNT and Other Lessons from...

Patterns holds promise for gaming educators

by liam | Oct 14, 2012 | education, gamebasedlearning, gaming, Teacher's Guide, video games

Earlier this month, Linden Lab released a very early beta-version of their new sandbox game, Patterns. Clearly inspired by Mojang, Patterns takes the block-building structure Minecraft and adds two very interesting elements: triangles and physics. I downloaded the...

Multi-School Minecraft Server Mid-Point Update

by liam | May 10, 2012 | education, gamebasedlearning, gaming, literacy, media, video games, virtual worlds

We’ve been running our Minecraft Multi-School Server Project for nearly 5 months now. We’re actually way beyond the mid-point, so I thought I was overdue for giving an update on how things are going. In a word: fantastic. There have been a few frustrating...

Doctorow tells librarians to reject DRM

by liam | Jul 28, 2008 | education, life, literacy, media

Last month I read Little Brother by Cory Doctorow and really liked it. Liked it so much that I wrote a review of it for the upcoming issue of Canadian Bookseller Magazine. Little Brother is a YA novel dealing with issues close to Doctorow’s heart (and mine):...