Gaming Literacy

Ah crap.. my laptop is almost out of juice. I might have to go offline for a bit and transcribe hand-written notes… gasp.

[Edit:] Ok, I did indeed have to write stuff down by hand. What follows is my attempt at a transcription; sorry for the delay.

Immersion vs. Learning – Michael Wagner

Michael is from the dept. for interactive media and ed tech at the Donau-Universität Krems from overseas! 🙂 Awesome seeing someone from outside the U.S. involved in the dialog about literacy and games. Michael introduced the Game Based Learning Paradox: games are great for learning but that also means violence and aggression might be being learned, too. This is what I had to grapple with in my general exams, too.

Continue reading GLS day 2, late afternoon →

Narrative, Contingency, and Humor

Narrative Engagement: Games as Mnemonic Devices for Process Learning – Jay Laird and Ann McDonald

Jay and Ann are more practitioners rather than learning scientist theorists. They say that a mnemonic system can be used over and over to remember something and that players could use to remember and navigate a system. Things have to be accessible and relevant for them to be meaningful for players. I’m wondering how much of their concepts overlap with memes (Lankshear and Knobel) and unit operations (Bogost).

Continue reading GLS day 2, early afternoon →

Henry Jenkins and Alice Robison presented a talk about identity play and participatory culture this morning. Check out their current project at projectnml.org

The assumption that kids are digital natives is a false notion since lots of kids don’t have the cultural access and sponsorship needed for new media literacy, even some who have physical access to technology. So the idea of digital natives is problematic in that it hides inequalities among kids and it presupposed a generation gap between kids and adults. Here are three challenges:

Continue reading GLS day 2, early morning →

Blurring Game Boundaries

Justin Hall on Passively Multiplayer Online Games where rewards and levels are gained for surfing websites that were valued. The passive part is rewards for just surfing, but there’s active stuff, too, where you can spend points that you passively accumulate on tools and mines, etc. “Internet is a battle between order and chaos. There’s people who want to help you find information and people who only want to distract you.” Also covered other cool web/game techs like Askville, Attent, and itty Bitty RPG. These are totally cool. I wonder if I can use them in the tech class I teach for the Teacher Education Program as a way to encourage participation in Web 2.0 stuff…

Continue reading GLS day 1, late afternoon →

This is a long ass post… 😛

Lunch went well. I met Shawna Kelly earlier and we met up for lunch and then met up with Tori Horton and Laurie, Tom, and Jen, and also some other people at a table we crashed. Photos!

Continue reading GLS day 1, lunch and early afternoon →

I’m now in the Fireside chat with Dan Hunter, Thomas Malaby, and Doug Thomas about what they advocate as a new direction in games research. They want to talk about people and the socio-cultural emergent things around games rather than the game mechanics themselves. This is like what I tried to do when I started looking at game mechanics to affect player behavior vs. the actual practice of players.

Continue reading GLS day 1, late morning →

Uh… I forgot. Rich Vogel isn’t presenting because, sadly, his dad passed away recently. 🙁

Sasha Barab is now presenting in his place about Reflexive Play Spaces: Narratizing Disciplines and Disciplining Narratives. Games are different than simply contextualizing problems a la PBL in that players role-play characters that actually change the world. The context is dynamic rather than static. “Reflexive Play Space is a form of ‘transactive art.'” See the Quest Atlantis stuff for more info.

Anyway, all of the sessions are being recorded. Not sure where they will be online but they will. I’ll pop in a link to them as soon as I find it.

[Edit: July 13] Found the webcasts!

I’m in a session about using virtual worlds in education right now. I just got here so not sure, but right now John Lester (from Linden Labs) is talking about Second Life and the cool stuff people create in it and then talk about the artifacts. “As you increase the perceptual immersion; you increase emotional immersion.” -talking about the Sistine Chapel in SL. Soon, Rich Vogel will be talking about Ultima Online. Cool.

Continue reading GLS day 1, morning →