Robust Designs for Scalability

By Stephen Downes - Stephen's Web. Jody Clark and Chris Dede[Edit][Delete]: Robust Designs for Scalability, The River City Project [Edit][Delete] November 29, 2006
Chris Dede has been working on MUVEs (Multi User Virtual Environments) recently and though he has been, with various partners, writing a lot, he's hard to track because he unfortunately has not yet discovered RSS. Still, you'll want to have a look at this paper, in part because it addresses what is in my mind a critical issue for MUVEs, scalability (I contend that as long as they depend critically on human instructors, they don't scale; Dede focuses mostly on the technology and how to get (mostly unwilling) instructors into the environment in the first place), but also in part because of the mathematical renderinsg of the "effect size" and the "'ccalability Index' that estimates the relative sensitivity of innovations to attenuation in various dimensions that represent their conditions for success." I like MUVEs. More...