WiiMote and World of Warcraft

Well I guess if you need to make a run to town for supplies or to auction off your loot you’ll get in shape. 🙂

But seriously – what’s fascinating, aside from Wii fit, and Wii Warcraft…hmm Wow Wii? Wowee?…is that the Wii, along with the iPhone, are suggesting new gestural ways of interacting with systems. Everybody go rent Minority Report again – pretty much you’ve got it. In teaching and in interacting with information we’ll increasingly have different options for showing, accessing and interacting with information and each other.

They talk about decoupling the Internet from the desktop – but it’s now becoming clear that in doing so the devices to which it will decouple (does that even make sense? Long day)…will go far beyond Wiis and cell phones.

Microsoft’s Surface is starting out for use in hotels – but imagine when it’s a conference table, student’s desk, blackboard and we can now manipulate and move content.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/30/technology/30soft.html

You could use Surface and other devices like it to have a collaborative classroom discussion about, say, the Renaissance, accessing maps, paintings, and documents. You could ask your students to “pile” things with similar themes to them, or draw connections between different parts of your ‘content pile’ to help demonstrate themes or connections.

Games seem like they’re often the first peephole into the future – whether Surface in a casino, or the WoW Wii, but eventually they get picked up, mashed up and modded and they’re part of our tool set.

I’m sorry, Jack Smith. I know nothing about this website. I would just go to a retailer and buy the game where I know there I am buying a guaranteed product. 🙂

On your comment, Dusan.

I agree with you. Seeing the latest news about my home country, Brazil, and the growth economically and technologically makes me so happy and also wonder when these devices, like you said, will be available to most everyone.
My own mom got herself a computer for the first time with broadband Internet connection at a relatively very low cost. And know how technology used to be much more inaccessible to the middle class in Brazil, I know things are changing, slowly…

The desktop is not disappearing, what is happening is the surfacing (no pun intended) of new technologies that stretch the “desk top” metaphor to its limits. The way we interact with that “desktop” is changing, being it Microsfot Surface, Bumptop or even WebTop applications… it is just an evolution of the Desktop, in my opinion…