Demand for this tool has been pretty high, and so we are now releasing the code on Sourceforge. Special thanks to Kevin Driscoll for making it happen.

We are aware of several other similar efforts:

• MIT’s backchan.nl
• Emerson College’s Digital Lyceum (NEH grant)
• Albany apparently has a similar system for in-house use (no link)

I suspect that the code will start to fork between a system designed to support classroom discussion (possibly integrated with learning management systems) vs. conference / event support and capture.

Berkman Question Tool (renamed “QuestionAnswer” because the name “Question Tool” was already taken)

Dred Scott’s Second Life

Bernhard Drax did a tremendous job filming, scoring, and editing together this clip. AudioCaseFiles supplied outstanding voice talent.

Charlie’s vision for this project was to do for legal text what graphic novels did for literature: open up new possibilities for drama, engagement, learning, and understanding. I hope this segment will prove a first proof-of-concept for that vision.

Multidisciplinary perspectives: Pedagogical principles / Design of Technology / Game Content (overlapping between the two)

Educational sciences (child-centered pedagogy) + Human-Computer Interaction (user-centered design) + Game design (player-centered design) + Sociology of Childhood (children’s involvement in decision-making)

Talarius – toolkit for designing digital board games. Learned that UI drawings were especially helpful. Children preferred concrete activities (drawing, testing). Value of novelty [does this diminish as activity repeated?]. Problems with “ownership” — children did not recognize input in the outcome well. [why not? what intervened?]. Therefore, in future make design process more transparent, focus more on creating content, use techniques for winning participation from other areas of child-centered education (e.g. less on HCI).

Virtual Mires: web-based learning about peatland ecosystems: Applying lessons from Telarus. Flash-based adventure game: board game, quizzes, videos, virtual postcards. Took ideas from other websites for how to present information. Students chose the presentation forms, e.g. quizzes, photos, games, mocked up the activities, then digitized for website. Lessons learned: children saw concrete creations, even when somewhat “blurred” (as in games); developers + researchers got children more involved + active in the creation, with aid of adults.

Main values: creativity, ownership, collaboration. Emph. on children having ownership at design level.

Questions: How does this overlap with culture of game modding?

Is the learning from designing game or just designing anything? Also, learning beyond just the content but also in design, working together.

Did you learn anything about game design? Children’s ideas about games were very traditional.

***

Pilar Lacasa, (Sara Cortes, Rut Martinez), Classrooms as Living Labs: The Role of Digital Games

“I want to change the school. I don’t want to work with schools as they are now.”

Video of kids interacting with each other, not just playing games but next to each other, moving around, sharing (game = Sims on nintendo DS)

“Living Labs” (Sylvia Scribner) — “active participants in a digital universe…” So the challenge is to identify strategies for collaborating among educators, commercial, designers…

Working with EA Spain to use commercial games for educational ends. But it’s always multimedia, not just Playstation but other technologies.

Not just playing games: “We are interested in literacy.” Writing in blogs what they are experiencing. Interesting to see how it changes w/ Playstation in school vs. outside school.

Games as folk culture… cf. Bakhtin: the mask… “violatoin of natural boundaries.” cf. Henry Jenkins.

How? Going into classes and collaborating with teachers. Creating 50 activities for how to use the games (now posted at EA Spain).

1. How to make materials to make task easier for teachers?
a. Begin from the game, e.g. The Sims.
b. Kids to contrast game family with other families, pictures from the Web
c. Kids take pictures of their own families.
d. Kids post to the blog — learning shown in “color” of the writing

2. [oops missed this slide, I think it's about sharing the experience]

3. How to break intergenerational barriers? What is the role of adults?
Relationship — spontaneous and outside the school. (Will it change the school?)

QUESTIONS

Why avoid creating new games? A good starting-point — need to learn the “language” of the game for them to become creators.

Challenge of getting teachers to understand the media and make proper use of it. But at least games have an inherent agency that movies, books don’t. Consider the activity of watching the Harry Potter movie + playing the game: movie not just as walkthrough for game, but the game is a way for students to externalize learnings/feelings from the film. (Comparable to writing an essay about the movie? Still the need to find another venue outside the game itself for this…)

***

Doris C. Rusch, Case study: Emotional Design of the Videogame Silent Hill – Restless Dreams

What makes this game interesting / immersive will be necessary to making a learning game work…

1) Human Source Concerns: what source concerns is the game addressing on the operational levels of fiction, interface and the game as system? In this game: Love + Togetherness. Also, cognitive understanding — what is the truth?

2) Reality Status: what are the factors that lend the game verisimilitude and help the player to willingly suspend her disbelief? Despite uncanniness.

3) Regulation of Player Interest: how is the player kept playing, and what prevents the story from slipping into the background? Working to solve the mystery, puzzles of quasi-symbolic nature but also meaningful to the game itself. Solving each puzzle moves forward the game itself while also revealing the story (works on multiple layers).

Question: How to convey the desired emotions? Couple the game mechanics to the emotions. Cf. ICO; contrast the Godfather, where the relationship is captured in cutscenes but not through your own actions. [This reminds me a lot of bad storytellers who tell rather than show.]

Does this raise issue of suspending emotional disbelief (compare factual disbelief)

Contrast the banality of the Sims’ relationships, activities to Silent Hill.

***

Dan Roy, Constructing Identities of Mastery in Games: Games emphasize mastery — better than other media: help us see and overcome challenges.

What motivates mastery?
1. Personal relevancy: choice, engagement
2. Personal visibility: measurable
3. Social relevance: mastery obvious to group
4. Social visibility: opportunities for group to see individual mastery

MMORPGs as an example: “Leveling up” as a proxy measure of increased mastery. However, it’s only a measure of time, not mastery — thesis argues that there should be such a measure.

cf. Natural Born Cyborgs about the nature of self. (postmodern “soft” self)

Going to different selves to feel differently, e.g. adopt a self to feel masterful. [Is this why games are addictive?]. cf. Castronova’s concept of migration: “People will go where things are best for them.” Except that migration implies a one-way move. Today, a flexibility to move back and forth that’s less possible in the real.

What a great presentation: Dan was clear, used personal anecdotes/illustration, had a point to make. Dan’s also got a great blog.

***

McKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory (or “G4M3R 7H30RY”)

Existing studies seem focused on formalism, “ludology,” how do we secure this study?

Wark is interested in a critical theory:

1. World seems increasingly an unfair game. Whereas single-player games have a level playing field, “quasi-Utopian.” Rather than less, it’s in fact the world in a more perfect form — can hold this world to account for what it does not deliver.

2. Games as objects, not just a reiteration of cinema. Chose arbitrary games based on ability to see theory, including a “boring game.”

3. SimEarth: What is not quantifiable. What is cannot be modeled. What will be excluded?

4. SimEarth: It is a game you cannot win — the best you can do is get humans to blast off. It’s the “limit case” of the digital: a remainder that will come back to haunt us.

***

QUESTIONS

Gamer vs. Hacker: Work is now play, play is now work (you gotta be creative!). Contrast WoW — you pay to labor.

Presumptive irrelevance of race (de-racinated spaces): Dan purposefully side-stepped this issue in the thesis. Game spaces allow taking on a different race + potentially experience that… though then the assumptions break down about race? Ed. Arcade’s game “labyrinth” avoiding race, or even style (e.g. inserting “cool kids”). McEnzie: studying relationship among races, not just 1-to-1 mapping onto human races.

If games are Utopian, can they give us leverage?

[Look up recent paper of leadership] Ben Stokes: Can you get ‘certification’ of WoW guild master to real-life leadership. Dan: Rehearsal for real-world job market. Ben: Can we help these players translate these skills into jobs? Dan: Maybe a future of a unified identity that can from world to world, WoW to Facebook to blog…

A game designers’ perspective: imperative to make things “fun” — McEnzie: “fun” not thinkable (cf. Raph Koster) but rather opposite of boredom. Boredom is a constant referral to a self that cannot act. Fun is by definition something you think about as you’re doing it.

OK now we’ve wandered into philosophy of fun… and now we’re in game… and now fun… ok that’s a lot of theory that’s just blown by.

9:00-10:300 Session: “Modes of Learning”

***

Storytelling as a Method for Teaching Research Methods

Storytelling to convey complex ideas in non-complex way?

Why? Entertaining.

Benefits?
Break ice
Memorable
Does not replace analytical thinking

***

Remixing + Transforming science-tech-society materials into an e-learning software

STS movement in teaching science

Formosa Hope game : Food + science

> 100 scientific concepts

Player makes decision to engage in the learning — this is the element of play (?)

***

Virtual Leader 2007

Educational simulations when they interpret reality rather than try to reproduce it. Simulations about learning, not the simulation.

Alllows participants to make mistakes + review in real-time

In particular, active listening + communications

“Practiceware for People Skills” : Game uses avatars to model interactions. Player learns own preferred style but also sees different scenarios where other styles are more successful (e.g. fail when using preferred directive styles when cooperative necessary).

Virtual leader proven effective:
increased positive/reduced negative behaviors (would be curious to see how these are evaluated — live, from employees, from self-assessment? emph. on performance vs. on cognition?)

Playfulness allows taking of risk. Virtual Leader teaching more dynamic skills. (Not sure how — did not see the dynamics of the game. Seems to be based on branching story lines — can that really convey these skills? Compare against teams playing against a computer model which relies in real interactions among real people rather than against a simplified computer avatar).

***

Questions

Q: Does Virtual Leader require creators to know what is best practice? “Who’s writing the play?”

A: “Believe me, the design of that is very in-depth. It’s random… It’s very complex.”

Q: “Who is defining leadership?”

…

There isn’t a right answer to what is good civic engagement.

If bloggers see what they’re doing as a public activity, search engines are a private mechanism… should Google’s algorythm be a public good?

***

I would challenge that avatars are capable of teaching body language…What’s the transference from the virtual to the actual? When I writing for the machine vs. writing for people?

Are people writing for Google or using Google as a metaphor for something else… There’s a trend towards kids not understanding or reading social signals, though they are good at a variety of signlas e.g. instant messenger.