I wanted to share this great slideshow courtesy of my SL friend and fellow Australian virtual worlds researcher, Joanna Robinson. Joanna works and studies at the GNWC Centre for Digital Media in Vancouver and is a leading presence for digital media studies in Second Life. Her work is very cool and theoretically rigorous – enjoy!
Tag Archives: video games
Participatory Theatre / ARG about Video Game Influences in Society
Zen Zen Zo is a physical theatre company based in Queensland and there’s already a huge buzz about how they incorporate participation from the audience into their theatre. Next year’s performance is Sub-Con Warrior 2.0. The screenshot above explains it all. I love the concept and am definitely hoping I can find space to go to a performance.
Proposed Video-Game School Gets $1.1 Million Boost
I just came across this press release …
All Things Considered, June 21, 2007 · The MacArthur Foundation board announced Thursday it will fund a $1.1 million grant for a brand new middle- and high school in New York. The curriculum revolves around teaching kids to make video games.
The MacArthur Foundation says video games and the dynamic systems they use will be key to information management in the future.
Wow!
Pleasure, Play, Participation and Promise: the audio to my conference talk
Thanks to the wonderful Alan Levine, I now have the audio recording to go with my NMC talk, here:
Alan’s write-up of my talk is on the NMC blog here – thanks so much!
Youth Online – almost there!
Yay! Here is my final book cover!!!
And here is one of the endorsements:
How lovely of Len Unsworth to write such kind words.
New Literacies Sampler Online
Peter Lang Publishers are incredibly forward thinking – they have provided the full manuscript of this book online here! This book has chapters from all of my favourite new literacies authors – see the table of contents below:
Contents
Chapter 1: Sampling “the New” in New Literacies
Colin Lankshear & Michele Knobel
Chapter 2: “You Won’t Be Needing Your Laptops Today”: Wired Bodies in the Wireless Classroom
Kevin M. Leander
Chapter 3: Popular Websites in Adolescents’ Out-of-School Lives: Critical Lessons on Literacy
Jennifer C. Stone
Chapter 4: Agency and Authority in Role-Playing “Texts”
Jessica Hammer
Chapter 5: Pleasure, Learning, Video Games, and Life: The Projective Stance
James Paul Gee
Chapter 6: Digital Design: English Language Learners and Reader Reviews in Online Fiction
Rebecca W. Black
Chapter 7: Blurring and Breaking through the Boundaries of Narrative, Literacy, and
Identity in Adolescent Fan Fiction
Angela Thomas
Chapter 8: Looking from the Inside Out: Academic Blogging as New Literacy
Julia Davies and Guy Merchant
Chapter 9: Online Memes, Affinities, and Cultural Production
Michele Knobel & Colin Lankshear
Chapter 10: New Literacies
Cynthia Lewis
Skip the Textbook, Play the Video Game
I recently read this article in the Chicago Tribune. It recognises the MacArthur Foundation’s investment in gaming research:
If that sounds like yet another New Age fad, destined for the scrapheap of once-trendy educational ideas alongside “new math,” “open classrooms” and “whole language,” consider this: The prominent Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation–the people who give out those $500,000 genius grants every year–is distributing $50 million to researchers to understand how digital technologies are changing the ways young people learn, play, socialize and exercise judgment.
“We realized that over 80 percent of American kids have game consoles at home, 90 percent of kids are online and 50 percent of them are producing things online, so we really need to understand what is going on here,” said Constance Yowell, director of the MacArthur Foundation’s digital research initiative. “This is what kids are doing, so we need to know both the positive benefits and the unintended consequences.”
It’s nothing new for most of us I imagine, but its interesting to see the media give a positive spin for a change, rather than the moral panic too often associated with children and video games.
(Thanks Craig for the link)
