Blogging the GLS Conference: Thursday Afternoon Edition

Not to self to get to the next session significantly early so that I can get a plug. After notetaking all morning and using the wireless my battery is just about dead. I may not make it through this session. (I didn't. I had to grad a pen and notebook, yep the paper kind!)

David Squire: Creating Links- RPG characterization, Identity and Learning

Elizabeth Hayes: Gendered Identities at Play

Lisa Galarneau: The Power of Perspective: Games and Simulations for Transformative Learning

Squire: Exploring aspects of gaming techniques (game design) and game theory applied to learning design. Sees learning games as different from edugames because they do not seek to fit into a set curriculum in the library like edugames do.   Looking at RPGs (features that create, RPG puzzles, exploration, and NPCs), relationship between player and avatar, character development and design, and learning game design issues.

As with the last entry, click read more to see the whole post.

Avatars: Masks to conceal identity, taking risks and making mistakes that don't hurt you (no consequences or Gee's Psychosocial moratorium) , uneasy, idealized, digital egos.

Multiple Identities

Evolution of avatars (from pong paddly thingy to Link from Legend of Zelda)

Characterization and Agency

Identity Crisis:

Post industrial identity crisis. Need a safe place. RPGs give us control over self. Evading the bans and commands.

Playing at being a gun toting archeologist, an elf, a time-lord, a town-planner, a scientist, a housewife.

Creating a space to learn

            Relationship with avatar is a complex element

            Predefined or pre-rendered characters don't impact of player's identification

            Role playing is a natural way to learn

            Is fantasy more interesting than fact

            Do we follow conventions/cliché's or acknowledge the domain and then redesign.

Hayes: Horizontal vs. Hierarchal gamers.

Problems with this perspective:

Gender attributes are presented as intrinsic, static and immutable

Differences among women and among men are rendered invisible or devient

Social context is treated as irrelevant

Social construction of gendered identities

            Gender belief systems

                        A range of possible gendered identities

                        Gendered identities in practice

Enactments of particular kinds of practices associated with being women

The Study

            Case studies of two women who were learning to play Morrowind

            Data collection: Interviews and observations of game play

            Researcher participation in class and gaming

Looking at how the characters chosen were affected by the actual characteristics of the gamers in the study.

Playing like a girl?

Fighting: The assumption: girls dislike violence and direct competition; they are bored by fighting (so not me!)

Both gamers initially said that they didn't want to fight. One said that she was afraid of failure, but really enjoyed fighting once she used the cheat code for immortality. The other wanted to be a healer. Initially she couldn't kill people, but eventually learned to kill well in hand to hand combat. Partially because her male professor told her that she wouldn't be able to kill unless she got really good at weapons use?

Playing like a boy? Enjoying the masculine pleasures.

Skill in combat was not the primary source of identity as much as a means to the end.

Perhaps the stereotypes of women games (not wanting to fight, being more diplomatic, not liking the game) are actually characteristics of newbie gamers. They don't want to fail/lose/etc.

Galarneau: Flexible environments that allow for infinite possibilities and points of view (going meta). Allow learners to form connections by experimenting with knowledge in context.

Learners learn by doing. Learning must be transformative because it is no longer sufficient to know stuff or do stuff but rather it is about being different.

Transformation is a natural by product of experience. Experiences that are not reflected upon can result in unconscious judgment (Malcolm Gladwell, Blink)

Games that ask you to shift perspective (I only wrote down the ones that I didn't know first hand)

MIT's Replicate project that asks you to view things from the POV of the virus

The Oregon Trail (yeah, I do know this one)

MIT's Revolution. What if you could change history?

Civilization III (yeah, I know this one too) Can replaying history shift one's perspective?

BT's Better Business Game. Would you be an environmentally and socially responsible CEO?

Teacher tips:

            Consider using games with unexpected POVs

            Allow learners to play at being

            Remember that sims are well suited to practice the impossible.

            Add fun.

            Remember that transformation is a goal, but that it comes only with experience.

            Don't forget the importance of guidance and reflection.

Extending the Reach of Games

Douglas Thomas: Teaching (not so long ago) in a Galaxy Far, Far Away: Using Star Wars Galaxies (in/as) the Classroom

Joshua Fouts: Public Diplomacy & MMOGs: Rethinking Foreign Policy, Cultural Understanding, and Peace Through Play

Stephen Gillett: Guild Building is Skill Building: How guild building leadership & management skills learned in MMORPGs transcend into the real world of a startup company.

Doug : Teaching a class in-game 11 undergrads and 3 interlopers.

MMOG about 250K people; profession based (about half of them are more social); signicant social basis for play;

Course goals: explore 3 distinctive points of view: designer, player, and critic.

            Grounded in constructivism, games as objects to think with, reflection

Challenging Assumptions

            Fun/learning binary

            Play/teaching dichotomy

            Tacit values

                        Fun is okay if there is learning. Ok to play if you are teaching

            Challenging values

                        Okay to learn if it's fun. Okay to teaching if its also fun

From class to game

            Traditional assumptions about classroom roles and behaviors

            Course material as primary

            Transformation: experience became the primary text

From students to players

            Read Bartle's work on 4 different player types

            Play as expertise

            Blurring the binary distinction

                        Fun and learning as indistinguishable

Student anxiety: “We didn't want people to think that we were just playing games.”

From Teacher to ???

            Rethinking the role of teacher

            Responsibility and anxiety

            But they aren't learning anything!!

            Theory testing and theory breaking

            Reading Hamlet on the Holodeck

Conclusions

            Play creates expertise

Taking play seriously violates everything we know (or at least feel) about student and teacher roles.

            Principle barriers are faculty and not students.

Fouts and Thomas:

What is Public Diplomacy? What a government does build foreign policy.

            Tools: International Broadcasting and Cultural Outreach

In 1999 the gov't disbanded the US public diplomacy organization.

USC's definition

            Facilitation of intercultural dialogue

            Current Issues in Public Diplomacy

                        Out of fashion

                        Out of date

                        Not a scholarly culture

                        Failure to embrace new technologies

Why MMOs?

            One to Many Networks

                        Developer to community

            Many to Many Networks

                        Networked communication systems

            One to Many Networks

                        Player to community

Gillett: from Yahoo! (Senior Executive)

This guy was called upon by conference organizers (?) to tell us how guild building skills were useful in the real world? Interesting concept, but not necessarily what I was looking for because it kind of takes on the slant of this is how I got to where I am in Yahoo and then saying this is how this happens in MMOGs, not a whole lot on theoretical stuff or even stuff that could be useful to me as teacher unless I think about how students may seek to justify this in their own minds. I am glad that this stuff is being recorded because I may have to go back to this talk later. It is probably more that I am burned out for the day at this point than that they guy just isn't interesting.