Call For Papers: Games+Learning+Society 4.0
On July 10th and 11th, 2008, Madison will host the 4th annual Games+Learning+Society conference, bringing together game designers, educators, and academics interested in the intersections between learning, gaming, and larger social concerns. We’re happy to repost the Call For Papers here, and encourage anyone doing interesting work in this area to submit a proposal.
More information (including the full call) after the jump.
No commentsUnschooling and Instruction
There was an interesting post on WoWInsider this week, on the topic of “unschooling” and WoW. Unschooling (or entirely child-led, child-directed learning) is an interesting movement, and one which I hadn’t considered in relation to online games before — it shares some goals with our work, but differs in many significant ways. In this post, I’ll talk a little about how, in our afterschool group, we’re trying to balance the freedom of play and discovery in the game with achieving specific educational goals.
4 commentsPlacing Information Sites at the Center of MMO Play
What are the boundaries of a game like World of Warcraft? Which practices lie inside of the game, and which outside? Gee has already made the argument that there are social spaces around a game that can be included as part of the game’s larger experience (2007). These social spaces provide alternate ways of participating in play around the game, but they also serve as a resource for learning. Today I want to talk about some of the web resources that help form the larger game of World of Warcraft.
Continue reading…
On Zelda And Timelines
Just a quick post from me on some ongoing research I’ve been doing which has ties to the science literacy/informal scientific reasoning work which our group has been doing in the World of Warcraft forums. In the past year or so, I (with Jim Gee) have been investigating the ways that reasoning and argumentation occur in online forums dealing with The Legend of Zelda games. Wrestling with the construction of so-called “timeline theories” for the Zelda games, I hope to show the ways that literacy practices are embedded in much of this informal fan activity.
No commentsMacArthur Blog Spotlight
Just finished a recent blog post to the MacArthur Foundation Blog Spotlight on digital media and learning. Its part of a jazzy seven-part series on identity & learning. The best part? I get away with citing the fairly mediocre sequel to Silence of the Lambs.
/rawr
No commentsIntroducing the After School MMO Group
Last week, Constance was the invited keynote speaker at Future Play 2007 in Toronto, Canada. Gamasutra posted quite a positive article highlighting the main points of her presentation including a brief mention of the after school program we recently started. (See MMO Researcher Argues MMOs are Educational dated November 15, 2007).
Since the cat is out of the bag, we thought this week’s post would be a perfect time to talk a little about our Boys’ MMO group. In short, the program involves working with a group of middle school and high school boys who don’t feel strongly affiliated with school. Our intention is to help them learn ways to see their gaming practices not as a determent to academic success, but instead as a bridge to enhancing key literacies found in the 21st Century Learning Skills, such as scientific literacy, computational literacy and digital literacy to name a few.
1 commentPersonal Narrative In WoW
I came across a fascinating piece by David Bowers on WoWInsider today, on the differences in play styles between role playing and the game mechanics of World of Warcraft. The issues he raises ties into a few interests of our research group, so if you’ll pardon the digression, I’d like to speculate a little about narrative in virtual worlds, motivation and identity in developing a WoW character, and some of the implications for learning.
3 commentsMMO research tools: Screens, video and text
In researching World of Warcraft, even the moderately technical among us have access to some useful tools to simplify the experience. In this post, I want to cover just a few examples of relatively simple tools we would have difficulty living without.
1 commenttacit epistemologies in WoW forums
More interesting results on science literacy in WoW…YES, THERE’S MORE!
Okay, remember that we took a random sample of roughly 2000 posts from the World of Warcraft forums (specifically, the priest forum) & analyzed the data in order to assess what (if any) scientific discursive practices people used, what kind of systems- and model-based reasoning we might see going on, and what kind of stances toward their claims they took? This last one is what I want to say a few words on now: tacit epistemologies we found in the WoW forums.
We chose to use a pretty blunt instrument to look at the dispositions toward knowledge that discussion participants exhibited this time, because we weren’t sure what we’d find. Our fear (and the reason that we took a look at this) was that, while we might see folks engaging in informal science reasoning and argumentation as part of WoW forum discussions, we’d find them taking a stance toward their claims that was rather anti-scientific (such as an “absolutist” stance, claiming there was one Big-T Truth out there and they had direct access to it somehow). We’ve all run into the kind of obstinate forum poster people I’m talking about here, who insist they’re right and think any debate of their position is fruitless.
No commentssystem- & model-based reasoning in WoW
More interesting results on science literacy in WoW…
To review, we took a random sample of about 2000 posts from the World of Warcraft forums (specifically, the priest forum) & analyzed them according to a basic coding framework that looked at (a) scientific discursive practices, (b) systems- and model-based reasoning, and (c) tacit epistemology. More on the other topics before and after. Here, I want to talk some about the second one, (b) systems- and model-based reasoning.
1 comment