Hello

My name is Kersti and currently I am studying at the University of Tallinn in Estonia. I am a student of IMKE.

I like travelling, photographing. Every country is different and there is always something to discover and perpetuate. So I have lot of pictures. If I should somehow categorize them, then the biggest catalogue would carry a name "Croatia" :)

Beautiful country (excellent food, good wine if you know what and where to eat and drink) and from my point of view Varazdin is not a typical Croatian city …

But we in Estonia have white nights in summer-time :)


I have used before: blog, wiki, msn, skype, orkut (community portal).

My interest in this course: what is e-learning, how can e-learning be successful, learning strategies, …

I am little sceptical about e-learning and this is my first e-learning course. I do hope it changes my preconception.

Other expectations:

I want to have some structured knowledge about e-learning.

I am curious whether e-course can create synergy between learners and teachers.

Hello

My name is Kersti and currently I am studying at the University of Tallinn in Estonia. I am a student of IMKE.

I like travelling, photographing. Every country is different and there is always something to discover and perpetuate. So I have lot of pictures. If I should somehow categorize them, then the biggest catalogue would carry a name "Croatia" :)

Beautiful country (excellent food, good wine if you know what and where to eat and drink) and from my point of view Varazdin is not a typical Croatian city …

But we in Estonia have white nights in summer-time :)

I have used before: blog, wiki, msn, skype, orkut (community portal).

My interest in this course: what is e-learning, how can e-learning be successful, learning strategies, …

I am little sceptical about e-learning and this is my first e-learning course. I do hope it changes my preconception.

Other expectations:

I want to have some structured knowledge about e-learning.

I am curious whether e-course can create synergy between learners and teachers.

E-learning course: week 1

As this is my first experience with e-learning then there was a lot of confusion with this environment, requirements and materials: lot of links where to orientate and too much information. So first few days I was only looking around and tried to make sense of it. Some links were very good and some did not openJ.

What are the trends in e-learning and how do they influence online course design?

This is a good question and frankly I don't know yet the answer. Trends in learning we might say is movement from behaviouristic explanation to constructivism. I really liked Ertmer and Newby's idea of taxonomy for learning (behaviourism = what, cognitivism = how and constructivism =why) - this is brilliant.

Although these learning trends reflect in e-learning as well, it is still hard for me to see behaviourism as ground of e-learning. If we want to train students then e-learning is perhaps not the best method.

But as understanding of learning process is changing the way how to plan (how to motivate, assess,…), create materials and learning environment (does it enable interaction; is it ease to understand and orientate), communicate with each is changing.

In behaviourism students do get the learning materials, in constructivism learners should be allowed to construct their knowledge. So the roles of student and teacher are changing: student activity changes from passive learner to active (therefore student motivation is changing as well) participant of learning process. (From personal learning to collaborative and cooperative, interactive learning). With taking active role in learning process student takes more control of his/her learning. Instead of cram facts deeper understanding of content is important.

For teachers understanding what is most significant rather than what most easily assessed is very important and at the same time this makes course design difficult

What was the most important thing you learned this week?

There were several interesting approaches in articles: content-content interaction; Ermter-Newby's taxonomy and many more. Idea that web's in-built capacity for hyperlinking has been compared to the way in which human knowledge is stored in mental shema.

What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?

Boring - there was no discussion this week, but this is normal.

Interesting - everything is new and therefore interesting.

Was there something you didn't quite understand and want to know more
about it?

Two things:

1. content-content interaction - I have always thought that interaction takes place between to subjects (student-student; teacher-teacher; student-teacher). It is hard to me to accept that interaction could take place between subject-object or even object-object. How can to contents interact with each other?
2. "agent"-idea in Online Learning and the Semantic Web I did not get. It would be great to know a little more about Semantic Web.

What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week's activities raised for you?

It is too early to say. Second chapter of the book was very interesting for me.

Which tools did you use this week, explain what was the purpose of using these tools (eg. social talk, to regulate my team activities, to work on documents)?

Scuttle, Moodle - to get started J

MSN - to communicate with my friends, but it had nothing to do with this course.

With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?

There was no communication with co-students during this week. I read introductions/blogs of co-students and facilitators.

E-learning course: week 1

As this is my first experience with e-learning then there was a lot of confusion with this environment, requirements and materials: lot of links where to orientate and too much information. So first few days I was only looking around and tried to make sense of it. Some links were very good and some did not openJ.

What are the trends in e-learning and how do they influence online course design?

This is a good question and frankly I don't know yet the answer. Trends in e-learning we might say are the same as regular learning: it is movement from behaviouristic explanation of learning to constructivism. I really liked Ertmer and Newby's idea of taxonomy for learning (behaviourism = what, cognitivism = how and constructivism = why) - this is brilliant.

Although these learning trends reflect in e-learning as well, it is still hard for me to see behaviourism as ground of e-learning. If we want to train students then e-learning is perhaps not the best method.

But as understanding of learning process is changing the way how to plan (how to motivate, assess,…), create materials and learning environment (does it enable interaction; is it ease to understand and orientate), communicate with each is changing.

In behaviourism students do get the learning materials, in constructivism learners should be allowed to construct their knowledge. So the roles of student and teacher are changing: student activity changes from passive learner to active (therefore student motivation is changing as well) participant of learning process. (From personal learning to collaborative and cooperative, interactive learning). With taking active role in learning process student takes more control of his/her learning. Instead of cram facts deeper understanding of content is important.

For teachers understanding what is most significant rather than what most easily assessed is very important and at the same time this makes course design difficult.

About trends (what is going to happen next) - it is very hard to predict. Probably a lot of discussion/communication and therefore learning will move to web. This might cause the overload of information and people don't have time to deepen anymore.

It might happen that brilliant guys will get more brilliant and other will have problems with information overload and orientation and therefore they might give up and satisfy with secondary/ light information. So this is the worst what might happen…

We can not say now that e-learning makes learning more accessible when there are many people who don't have a computer and internet.

But for those who have access e-learning … It is still hard to predict. Two main things can cause learning: the will and the need. Will depends on motivation (inside motivation). But how many people you do know who have constant will to learn in formal or even informal way? So a part of learning comes from need (outside motivation). It might even depend on economy …Although form economy-side the future is bright: knowledge-based and flexible economy requires (constant) learning and if e-learning is more accessible then it might become more successful.

What was the most important thing you learned this week?

There were several interesting approaches in articles: content-content interaction; Ermter-Newby's taxonomy and many more. Idea that web's in-built capacity for hyperlinking has been compared to the way in which human knowledge is stored in mental shema.

What was particularly interesting/boring in this week?

Boring - there was no discussion this week, but this is normal.

Interesting - everything is new and therefore interesting.

Was there something you didn't quite understand and want to know more
about it?

Two things:

1. content-content interaction - I have always thought that interaction takes place between to subjects (student-student; teacher-teacher; student-teacher). It is hard to me to accept that interaction could take place between subject-object or even object-object. How can to contents interact with each other?
2. "agent"-idea in Online Learning and the Semantic Web I did not get. It would be great to know a little more about Semantic Web.

What kind of questions/ideas/experiences this week's activities raised for you?

It is too early to say. Second chapter of the book was very interesting for me.

Which tools did you use this week, explain what was the purpose of using these tools (eg. social talk, to regulate my team activities, to work on documents)?

Scuttle, Moodle - to get started :)

MSN - to communicate with my friends, but it had nothing to do with this course.

With whom did you communicate during this week, how many times, with which tools, and for what purposes?

There was no communication with co-students during this week. I read introductions/blogs of co-students and facilitators.

New Education

Author

Kersti Peenema

Keywords

Education, competencies, creativity, e-learning, knowledge

Abstract

In this article Kersti Peenema from Tallinn University focus on the new goals of education. The main goal of article is to find an answer based on literature analysis to the question whether e-learning can meet the competencies of tomorrow. Peenema expresses her belief that using Web 2.0 tools in education will help develop creativity and competencies of tomorrow.

Intorduction

Development of technology is rapid and this has impact to the society and education. With the development of electronic forms of communication and World Wide Web new learning spaces are being created (Jarvis, Holford & Griffin 2003). As society is changing more knowledgebased the question arises: what kind of education we do need to meet the requirements of tomorrow.

Research Question

How can e-learning meet the competencies of tomorrow?

Method

Method used in this blog is literature analysis.

Future competencies

Ken Robinson (an expert on creativity) argues in one of his presentations, that we do have the same kind of educational system for a long time now: mathematics is still at the top of the curriculum and arts down of the list. He poses a question: whether the structure and goals of today's education meet new requirements of society 50 years in the future? His answer is no as for the future we have to support more creativity.

Quite the same is said in the Report of National Centre of Education and the Economy in 2006 where skills of future are listed as: collaboration, communication, creativity, innovation, information literacy, critical thinking, problem solving and global awareness (Rosenfeld 2007). Erica de Vries argues also, that people need in the future to have competence in defining problems, finding information and collaboration (de Vries 2003). The nature of work is changing: there are more people who are working in the knowledge-based professions. Knowledge-based professions have a continuous need for updating their competence (Severinson Eklundh, Groth, Hedman, Lantz, Rodriguez, Sallnäs 2003). These people are dealing with different mental problems every day. Based on this, we can say: problem solving will be the key issue in future, but successful problem solving can be based only on creativity. So how can we support creativity instead of killing it?

As society is becoming more knowledgebased more people who are part of educational system are representers of knowledge-based professions, it means that lifelong education and the availability of different educational possibilities are growingly important questions. Here e-learning can definitely help by offering different tools to learn in formal as well in informal education. But the question is: will e-learning meet the requirements of tomorrow?

Use of technological solutions and real life

When web changed to web 2.0 it brought along the change of goals and the essence of web. Instead of being just arbitrator of information (offering/receiving) web 2.0 is about creation of new information and knowledge. In web the user was passive and just gained information, in web 2.0 the user is active (!) and takes part of knowledge creation. This is qualitative change and it has changed the goals and structure of web. Similar to web 2.0 there is already discussion about education 2.0 but it remains quite technological. So there must be a qualitative change in education before it is legitimate to use the term education 2.0. Todays discussions about education 2.0 are supporting the same essence of education as it is today. Will there be education 2.0 or are we just using new tools of technology to fulfil old goals of education?

So we don’t have yet deep discussion about education 2.0, but still: can e-learning somehow support creativity as basis tomorrow's competencies? Roschelle and Pea in 1999 have pointed out, that today's web-based communication is pretty much text-based. This leaves knowledge creation to background and supports just passive reading (Järvelä, Häkkinen 2003). So today many opportunities stay unused. More active creation and use of videos, live-conferences, live-interaction, online communities and (why not) different simulations would help us solve that problem and fortunately we can see it already happening. But as the design of virtual environments is political (Gillespie 2003), it must be possible to create a learning environment to support creativity. Let us take for example virtual environment Second Life (SL) what has being used as a learning tool . Terry Beaubois created a virtual classroom on architecture . Since almost everything is possible in SL, it gives to the student's possibility to try out different architectural design. Students can try things what they would never try in a normal classroom: it is possible by either denying the laws of nature (gravitation) or it's just not too expensive. This all enables students to "think out of the box" and foster their creativity.

Of course there rises a question: how can we create a bridge between this kind of learning and real life with real situations. It is very important to know how to transfer our knowledge to the real world. In this transfer reflection has important role: does this kind of learning make students reflect more their knowledge? Visualisation of their knowledge helps to bring out tacit knowledge. Students are more conscious about it and it might become a ground to the creation of new knowledge. It might be even great that you have to visualises everything (even by writing) because if helps to reflect. So this is real win-win situation: tacit knowledge will become visible and conscious and knowledge will be available to others and used a ground for creation something new. The key question is how to do it so that people will want to make it visible.

Second Life is a multiplayer role play game (Doherty, Murphy 2007). As future games will be more complex and realistic and players will have more control over them (story, structure) (Goldstein 2003), this means that using different games in learning will add more fun and creativity to the process. And having fun in learning usually guarantees a good learning outcome. But using different games is hole different approach to the education then usual classroom study.

Different generations

There is one more problem in the field of new education. Differences between the generations are growing larger and larger and not only from an attitude side. Young people of tomorrow will still have another attitude toward life, but they will have a different skill profile and different thinking structure. As technology is more widely available, more people are using it. Because of use of technology there skill and thinking profile is different and this is causing a conflict between the generations. As more learning is becoming knowledgebased there will be a fundamental shift in the relations of teachers and learners (Jarvis et al. 2003). They will be from different generations and the old ways of teaching do not work. So it gets harder to understand and predict the needs of future and the essence of new education. If we can, then it's clear that new education requires radical change in the ways in which learning is organised and executed. E-learning may develop the skills and creativity; it is the great enabler (Thompson, Randall 2001). It all depends whether we can realised that.

Conclusion

In this paper I analysed impact of development of technology to education. Society is changing and therefore the goals of education need to change. With wider use of technology we have different technological tools to support new goals of education.

References:

Doherty, P., Murphy, P. (2007) "Science visit the metaverse and change your mind", Fantasy & Science Fiction 113 (3), 127-134.

Ecklundh, K. S., Groth, K., Hedman, A., Lantz, A., Rodriguez, H., Sallnäs, E-L. (2003), " The World Wide Web as a Social Infrastructure for Knowledge-Oriented Work", in van Oostendorp, H. (ed), Cognition in a Digital World, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., pp. 97 - 126.

Gillespie, T. (2003), "The stories digital tools tell", in Everett, A. & Caldwell, J. T. (eds), New media: theories and practices of digitextuality, New York: Routledge, pp. 107-126.

Goldstein, G. (2003), "People @ Play: Electronic Games", in van Oostendorp, H. (ed), Cognition in a Digital World, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., pp. 25 - 46.

Jarvis, P., Holford, J., Griffin, C. (2003), The theory and practice of learning, London and Sterling: Kogan Page Limited.

Järvela, S., Häkkinen, P. (2003), "The Levels of Web-Based Discussions: Using Perspective-Taking Theory as an Analytical Tool", in van Oostendorp, H. (ed), Cognition in a Digital World, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., pp. 77 - 96.

Rosenfeld, E. (2007), "Beginning the conversation about education 2.0", Teacher Librarian 34 (4), 6-6, http://search.epnet.com/, [accessed 2 Oct 2007].

Thompson, P., Randall, B. (2001), "Can e-learning spur Creativity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship?", Educational Media International 38(4), 289-292.

de Vries, E. (2003), "Educational Technology and Multimedia From a Cognitive Perspective: Knowledge From Inside the Computer, Onto the Screen, and Into Our Heads?", in van Oostendorp, H. (ed), Cognition in a Digital World, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., pp. 155 - 174.

Interactive Television: Future of Television

Television is something that people tend to take today self-evidently. But actually it is a pretty recent invention: according to Wikipedia it originated from the late 1930-s. Apparently, the first live TV broadcast in the world was provided from BBC studios at Alexandra Palace only in 1936 (Wikipedia, 2007).

Since I am not a technology expert then television to me is tied strongly with TV-set I own at home. I don’t know almost anything what actually lies behind the blue screen. So I will not step over my limits of competence and instead attempt to write an essay from a viewpoint of a so-called consumer of television.

Former director of Estonian National Television, Mr Ainar Ruussaar told in one of his public speeches about the opportunities that currently expanding digitalization of the TV provides (presentation at conference JuhtimisAju, 30.03.2007). According to him, the technology of the digital TV enables the viewers easily control the time-factor of our currently well-known Television. As coupled with a simple recording device (such as VHR or a DVD or hard disc recorder) the digital television enables to pause or review, skip or split any of the audio or video signals. Time Warner Cable has similarly established its Start Over service that allows customers to watch a TV show from the beginning if they come late to the screen. It however lacks the possibility for fast-forwarding (Atkinson & Klaassen, 2007).

Hence the viewers can easily manipulate from around the commercials that are the main source of income for TV stations. For this reason TV stations are forced to completely rethink their business models. We have seen one part of practice already: there are several pay-tv stations, especially in film-only or adult-TV channels where the screen is either fully or partially scrambled or the audio distorted unless you have paid for a renewable chip card. But there are other - much more elegant possibilities for getting around this. Apparently during watching a football match the TV station can program the Digital TV to affect the TV receiver in a manner to make the ball disappear. What would be the fun of watching that kind of match? Therefore - if the viewers are really up to enjoy the match they would need to send a pay SMS to disentangle the screen and make the ball reappear.

But then on the other hand my imagination should be running much wilder than simple reiteration of the obvious truths of incremental improvements of current technology. Probably TV-sets as we know them today will soon go out of date and it’s quite positive that different systems are going to be combined or joined. In the future there is no need to hold different systems like PC, radio, TV-set. They probably will all be united into one. There is a currently ongoing debate on whether the TV sets of the future will be small iPod like portable creatures or huge domestic entertainment centres that allow for a wide range of experiences. One possibility that has been left out of previous discussions is the opportunity of affecting other human senses. Currently the TV allows us to see and hear. The highest quality enables to view a crisp-clear picture of HDTV together with 7-channel surround sound that increases the chill of a horror movie. However, the live experience would be way more real if also the TV picture would be 3-dimentional, the TV set would emit smells to our living room and vibrations to our chair which would most probably make watching Indiana Jones movie a true adventure. Interesting - of course! Doable??? I’m sceptical, but it doesn’t mean, that it would not happen one day.

It might also happen that every person will have his own list of favourite channels and he can access them wherever he is or whatever system (new TV-set, PC, self phone) he uses at any given moment.

In the nearer future it might happen that every household has its own web camera. Whenever you feel desire for sharing your life with others, you can do it. Whenever you want to see somebody’s life, it is your possibility. There will be few families who would be extremely famous and huge celebrities. Something like this is actually already happening: in the ITU Telecom World 2006 forum director of Alacatel-Lucent presented My Own TV: users of this would create a Personal Channel with their own TV content. Users have possibility to upload their photos, videos and share this to their friends or other people (Hall, 2006). But this isn’t still the qualitative leap we would be hoping for.

Another example of wide possibilities of TV we can find in Liverpool where the residents of the city found a way develop democracy. Tenantspin is an internet TV station organised and run by and for the residents of Liverpool’s tower blocks. One purpose of Tenantspin was to increase community participation and it enabled to residents to produce, record and broadcast their own programmes. Finally it ended up by creating a new community (Stanistreeet, 2006).

It is rather entertaining to visit their website www.tenantspin.org and read about the experiences of a group of elderly grannies and grandpas from the same neighbourhood who have already more than 7 years of experience in trying to master the usage of video cameras and editing equipment to come out with the video shows of their own that they target to their nearby community. In warm-heartedly written feature story Stanistreeet describes the experiences of the participants in the TV programme:

“We’ve done around 350 shows now,” Mavis says, “some have been good, some have been awful, everything from quizzes, talent shows, look-a-likes, to interviews with people […]”

“It's been like a big adventure. And it's not over yet. When I first came here I knew nothing about computers. We used Mondays to train. We learned to use sound systems, cameras, we had to set up computers, and on a Wednesday we'd go out on the internet. That went on for about 18 months”

“We initially envisaged a virtual community”, says Alan. “For one reason or another, that hasn't really happened. But it has produced a real community of people from all the different blocks”.

“Community”, Vera says, “was only a word before […]. Now we have different things going every day for tenants in these high-rises. Years ago, you only met neighbours in the lift. Now there is something going on every day on every block. I'm not just talking about where I live, not only our block. Every block has something going for the tenants. When it was the council running the flats, nobody really cared about each other. You just lived there and that was the end of the story. And now everyone knows everyone and we send cards when people are sick. It is community living now. Tenantspin has made people friendlier. It's brought a lot of people out who wouldn't have come out. It's brought people together.” (Stanistreeet, 2006)

This is certainly one development of the future. There will be more community televisions and as television is often being accused to have too much of attention of people that they don’t find time anymore to their friends then Tenantspin surely proves opposite. So TV can be seen as an improver of democracy or just a tool what brings people together in their real every-day life. But as interesting as it is, even this still is not the qualitative leap I was searching for.

Where should we go next? As internet is very common nowadays, there are more and more people who have web cameras. You can sit in front of the computer screen and communicate online with others. By using web cameras television might have the same qualitative change or leap as web already has had by changing to web 2.0. Instead of being just giver, transmitter of information (TV-shows, films, videos, text-TV) television 2.0 might enable direct communication with other persons. This might lead us to new process – to the knowledge creation process. If we added here the community aspect then the result would be very interesting. It offers wide possibilities for example to professionals who can discuss, argue, show or do something like this in television and at the same time something new is born. This can be very successfully used in universities. As the essence of work is more and more knowledge-based the need to improve your skills and develop your competence is constantly growing, it means that lifelong learning and accessibility to the education will be crucially important.

Interactive television has already been used as a tool to deliver distance education at the Faculty of Health Sciences, Stellenbosch University. There are around 20 studios which have connection via satellite. Learning sessions are in real time and students must (still) physically be in one of the studios. In all the studios students can see and hear the tutor on a TV monitor. It is possible to interact with the tutor and co-students. Students and tutor in different studios can not see each other. Although this is interactive television in its beginning (it has a limited interaction, if there would be possible to have a online picture of every studio, it would be a qualitative change), the possibility to interact with each other was highly valued among the students and lectures. As educators did use virtual learning environments (VLE) these were a little bit more popular as students found that interaction in VLE was more supporting (Mash, Marais, van der Walt, van Deventer, Steyn, Labadarios, 2006).

The sky above the interactive TV is definitely not cloudless. There are several critics about, too.

A columnist of PC Magazine John Dvorak (2006) has written that already the conventional TV provides him with enough interaction possibilities that he needs: to turn it on, or off, to change channels, to switch to the TV text. He is afraid that the interaction that the TV moguls have in mind should instead be labelled invasive TV – the kind of television system where the TV stations would have the chance to mark the items shown in TV series with price tags and offering the viewers a chance to “immediately buy the same kind of sweater that Jennifer Aniston is wearing in a Friends episode.” However, this kind of intrusion would quickly become disturbing and replace the pleasure of enjoying the shows with annoyances.

He furthermore argues that even greater dangers would be brought about by the introduction of TV “spyware” which would start monitoring the actual behaviour of viewers.

It does not however matter too much what kind of name-tags we put on the changing landscape of the media. The fact is that the TV is changing and will not remain the same as it has used to be. And in the end it does not matter what is the key channel that we use it through – whether through a huge home theatre or tiny iPod screen. It still probably remains largely influential in the lives of people.

What concerns the content of TV shows, it is self-evident that this is going to expand. With the introduction of new Community TVs or MyOwnTVs, the future is also for BBC News-alikes that have been considered reliable and trustworthy sources of information. As the supply of information is increasing then it might call for further specialisation and integration for some of the channels. It also requires higher degree of media literacy of the providers and customers.

So there is nothing more to say – the television is dead, long live the television!

References:

Atkinson, C., Klaassen, A. (2007), “BEWKES: FUTURE OF DIGITAL IS CABLE TV”, Advertising Age 78 (16), http://search.epnet.com, [accessed 30 Oct 2007].

Dvorak, J., C. (2004), “The Return of Interactive TV”, PC Magazine, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_zdpcm/is_200411/ai_n7182224, [accessed 30 Oct 2007].

Hall, K. (2006), “Put Your Own Stuff on TV”, Business Week Online, http://search.epnet.com, [accessed 26 Oct 2007].

Mash, B., Marais, D., van der Walt, S., van Deventer, I., Steyn, M., Labadarios, D. (2006), „Assessment of the quality of interaction in distance learning programmes utilizing the Internet or interactive television: perceptions of students and lectures”, Medical Teacher 28 (1), http://search.epnet.com, [accessed 26 Oct 2007].

Stanistreeet, P. (2006), “Ways of seeing further”, Adults Learning 17 (10), 22-25, http://search.epnet.com, [accessed 26 Oct 2007].

Tenantspin (2007), www.tenantspin.org [accessed 30 Oct 2007].

Wikipedia (2007), “History of television”, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_television [accessed 30 Oct 2007].

Open Source Management: The Quest of the Dwarves - Wesnoth developed by Blue Team

First: I have never played as much computer games as now.

I played twice The Quest of the Dwarves - Wesnoth developed by Blue Team. Second time I was more successful but even then I used several times the possibility to go back a few turns. After playing it for second time I found surprisingly the first mission the hardest one although the third one was also very difficult.

The drawings in the beginning of the game and between missions are very nice. The landscapes are very different - it seems that Blue Team has used all possibilities in map drawing. This is definitely strong element of the game.

I have to admit that all missions were quite hard. I used in every mission back turns to win.

In the first mission the ground of landscape was mainly sand and mountains and it was very difficult to move. This was a problem for me because I had no flying creatures unlike the Vampire Bats owned by the "Bad" team.

Second mission I liked the best. It might even be that this was the easiest one for me (or the reason might have been that I liked green landscape much more...)

Third mission had very difficult landscape and it was very difficult level because lots of villages were located closer to enemy. So the "Bads" had a chance to collect many buildings and raise lots of money and that was used to recruit more fighters.

The main goal was to resist until the end of turns. At the final mission it would have been more logical if the end would be "killing" the bad guy?

I would have preferred a more interesting story line, but then again - the story of our team was not more elaborate either. For example, it would have made me happier if I would have got to know what "The Thing" was or for what it was good for... At the beginning of the third mission there was a "gem", was this The Thing?

These were all just tiny remarks. Anyway I am impressed that we could do something like this. And I would like to congratulate the Blue Team for their good work done.