Online Shopping Propensity by State

I came across this interesting infographic dispensed by eBay based on their database analysis of people utilizing online shopping via eBay.  According to the Daily Post, these big data were gathered from 2013 to 2014, as represented in the infographic that depicts an interesting picture of the consumers’ different preferences for purchasing a variety of products online.

Mmmm…Oregon shoppers like to buy surveillance equipment?  Online consumers in  Delaware seemed quite into vacuum machines.  Pennsylvania shoppers buy more products in the gaming department.  Some cases made more sense as Texas shoppers buy more hunting goods and New Jersey shoppers squander on men’s cologne.  Take a look and see if your shopping habit on eBay maps onto their analysis.

MIT to Launch “Intro to Game Design” via EdTechX Open Courseware

Picture Credit: Gamasutra.com

By way of introducing an exciting opportunity for practitioners and other educational stakeholders to understand and learn more about game design, below is an excerpt of the description of the free-to-all open course, Introduction to Game Design.

“A practical introduction to game design and game design concepts, emphasizing the basic tools of game design: paper and digital prototyping, design iteration, and user testing.”

This course is part of the EdTechX series from the MIT Education Arcade. If you are interested in exploring other educational technology courses, please click here to see more details.  By the way, I had personally taken a series of serious game design courses at Michigan State University where I learned to work with a group of talented game artists and researchers to build board game prototypes, playtesting, and improve game play mechanics through iterative design.  That said, I am sure to be enrolling in this course, set to begin on October 22nd, to further cement my knowledge in educational game design.

Launching “2014 Japan Study Abroad Program Media Hub”

Welcome banner made by staff and children at Asakumi Kindergarten in Matsue Japan

It never does harm to maintain more than one blogs at one time if you want to base off the different blogs of a variety of nature and to serve varying functions.  In my case, I recently started a separate WordPress site as a repository for my wonderful study abroad experience back in May in Matsue Japan.

That said, having two blogs now actually aids publicity for both of my sites.  I proudly bring to you the 2014 Michigan State University College of Education 2014 Japan Study Abroad Media Hub where you can find documentations of our memorable stay in western mainland Japan in the form of photograph and video-embedded blog entries.

Screenshot of the media hub

During our stay in Matsue, we were closely followed by local TV news station crew and as a result our visit appeared multiple times on newspapers and evening TV news broadcasts.  Worry not, the TV news reports were captioned in English so you will have no problem understanding them.  Talk about being a star for a day or two!  For more information related to our 2015 study abroad program, stayed tuned ~