Authentic Technical Professional Development

For Dr. Dawson's class I was torn for my positioning myself in the field assignment between either doing something for my RPG, or something to do with technology coordinating for the district or a school. After much debate I've decided to stick to the game idea. The game is going to take up so much time and I just think I'll be spreading myself too thin if I try to add another major project in this semester. So for the Positioning I'm going to do the research on what kind of research goes into educational games, and for the professional development I'm going to learn how to program in RUBY which is an up and coming programming language that is going to be extremely useful not just because it's what RPG Maker XP uses, but it's being predicted that it will be a major programming language for Internet and Web2.0 apps in the coming year. A quick look at Amazon shows 7 different books that are on preorder for this language as well as 3 that have been published this year. I ordered RUBY for the Pragmatic Programmer yesterday and it should arrive by Tuesday.