Anne Fox :: Blog :: Pervasive gaming

Yesterday I went all the way to Copenhagen for a one day conference on pervasive gaming. We flew and nearly had to turn back because of fog but finally, after two hours in the air instead of the usual 25 minutes, we came down.

We were perhaps one conference too early since the next one in spring 2006 will be about pervasive e-learning while this one was more theoretical and abstract and probably won't lead directly to the inspiration we were looking for for future projects, though indirectly it might. The highlight for us was the contribution from Learning Lab Denmark which seems to be a font of good ideas. They described a school project and a management project both of which were of great interest.

Another good thing about the conference was that my virtual colleague Susanne Nyrop was also able to attend and so we had one of our few face to face meetings. Not much time to talk though as we rushed off to catch a plane which was cancelled.

One totally incidental benefit was to discover that I could understand spoken Norwegian but not Swedish. I also discovered that the much derided Powerpoints do help a lot when trying to follow a talk in a language you are not fluent enough with. This was an insight for me as I am involved in the planning of a virtual conference aimed at a Nordic audience and the issue of language has been plaguing me from the beginning. Embarrassingly enough for me as project leader, I cannot understand my Norwegian project partners and this must be because they speak the other kind of Norwegian to the speaker at this conference. (Yes, there are two Norwegian languages).

And finally we met up with Lars Clausen who is also at elgg, no doubt as a result of the recent Odense conference.