Donald+Brinkman


 * CS5. Donald Brinkman ** – //The Arithmetic of Change: Gameful Research and Ludic Technologies for Education, Heritage and Humanities//

May 27 Friday 9:45-10:30 PM HM 150

Can a billion scrapbooks be the source for some seriously big social science? When is 500,000,000,000% magnification not enough? How do you display a 260 foot long painting on a coffee table? How many universities does it take to fix education? How many mice must you connect to a single PC in order to provide low-cost adaptive learning for developing countries? How many individual data points does it take to turn learning into an engaging alternate reality game? This talk will deliver a glimpse into the collaborations and initiatives forged and supported by Microsoft Research Connections and their implications for formal and informal education. Donald Brinkman will discuss ongoing initiatives such as the Games for Learning Institute, Rich Interactive Narratives, Garibaldi, One Mouse Per Child, Big Time, Just Press Play, and Montage. He will also provide his perspective on the current state of educational reform and predictions about where it is going and where we should invest our research resources.

Affiliation/Bio: Microsoft Research Connections, donaldbr@microsoft.com. Donald Brinkman manages external programs in digital humanities, digital heritage and games for learning at Microsoft Research. Before joining MSR, Donald served for two years as a technical program manager for the Microsoft education group. In that role he was responsible for defining vision of innovative business intelligence and analytics for education as well as driving a variety of enterprise-scale server capabilities. Prior to joining Microsoft he spent eight years in developmental and technical roles acquiring and executing government research contracts in areas such as quantum computation; signals intelligence; electromagnetic and kinetic simulations; behavioral economics; game theory; and cross-cultural communications. Donald is a writer, painter, game designer, and a passionate advocate of the benefits of building bridges between technical and humanist disciplines. He is particularly interested in disruptive technologies that leverage crowdsourcing, social computing, culture jamming, transmedia, and other non-traditional approaches. Donald supports the Games for Learning Institute, a consortium of 8 universities, 14 principal investigators, and a small army of graduate students whose mission is to explore what makes games fun, what makes them educational, and how to best blend the two goals. He is developing the second versions of ChronoZoom, a tool to visualize massive time scales for the purpose of teaching Big History and enabling massively multidisciplinary research. Other projects include Project Garibaldi and Game Show NYC.