Clinical Playground, LLC Managing Member, Eric B. Bauman was recently at the 2011 INACSL Annual Conference in Orlando, FL. This year’s conference was held at the Hilton Convention Center located on the Walt Disney property. The conference was well attended and seems to be attracting more attendees from outside of the U.S.
This conference seems to be growing every year. Sessions were well attended including the session presented by Bauman and co-produced by David Thompson a Nurse and Health Sciences Educator from Northern Ontario School of Medicine. Bauman and Thompson met in Sudbury, Ontario during an Inter-Professional Education Workshop that Bauman facilitated focusing on Game-Based Learning and Simulation on the Northern Ontario School of Medicine campus. The INACSL Presentation titled Preparing Learners for Future Experiences using Game-Based Learning was interactive and well received. The game-based learning movement is gaining momentum in the health sciences and educators once reluctant to engage this pedagogy are now beginning to test the waters and explore how it might be integrated into their curricula.
The enthusiasm for virtual and game-based environments was also evident at the CliniSpaceTM booth in the exhibition hall. Bauman was on hand with CliniSpaceTM innovator Parvati Dev of Innovation in Learning, Inc. to demonstrate the new SBAR CliniSpaceTM Nursing platform. As the clinical sciences, including nursing begin to embrace distributive education models, including online learning models, the need to embrace educational technology that is both interactive and socially dynamic becomes not only desirable, but imperative.