Learn about the successful use of virtual, augmented, and alternate reality environments for instruction and enhancing student engagement. I will be presenting my experience and published research on designing instructional space for sustained engagement, extending instructional contact and learning, increasing student motivation and academic production, and the enhancing teaching satisfaction with the seamless integration of technology and new approaches to instruction.
In this talk I will talk about my own experience in k-20 settings using virtual worlds, game environments, models, simulations, and the augmentation and creation of alternate reality learning scenarios. The presentation will offer a cultural -cognitive model of learning with focus on developing comprehension, production and knowledge acts, as well as the critical habits of mind for problem solving and student innovation through play.
On Saturday, join me for Getting Started in Second Life — Academic spelunking through possible worlds.
Look at ways that SL and other instructional environments have been used effectively — some of my own work– and how it can be replicated across content and context.
In this session, we will go through several stages of virtual world acclimation and visit spaces, pedagogies, and tools that may serve as a springboard into new practice.
The Wyoming Humanities Council’s Humanities Matter! conference will bring together representatives of community organizations, museum and library personnel, interested community members, and humanities faculty from across Wyoming to explore how to work together to create humanities courses and public programming that will address issues relevant to their lives, communities, and world.
Summary: As losses continue to mount, price cuts remain slow to materialize and more and more blockbuster releases are delayed until 2010, the PC and video game industry finds itself at a crossroads. The big question: Will it power up in time to save itself from going the way of the arcade? With the stakes higher than ever, we ask the field’s best and brightest what’s causing the biz to short circuit, whether the virtual landscape has permanently changed, and how to save interactive entertainment. Join us for the conclusion of our critically-acclaimed season opener as we discover whether or not it’s too late to hit restart.
Posted by admin on Monday, August 17, 2009 at 10:11 am Filed under Uncategorized · Tagged with
Freefalling sales. Skyrocketing unemployment. Studios tanking left and right. Tune in for the first of a special two-part series as we ask: Is it ‘game over’ for thousands of developers and publishers – and millions of fans – worldwide?
This video segment came form Digital Trends and I thought it interesting and perhaps worthy of dialog.
What do you think?
Need to read more?
Ask any family who’s ever dealt with addiction: When a friend is ailing, collapsing under the weight of their own dependencies, only two courses of action exist. Either you sit down, shut up and let nature take its terrifying course, or pause, take a deep breath and do what duty demands… step in and stage an intervention. And speaking as a player, parent, professional, fan and longtime ardent admirer of this medium so many cherish and adore, let’s not kid ourselves. To put it bluntly – the time has come to take the game industry aside and show it some tough love.
For two days in August we will be examining the state of the art in educational uses of new and emerging technologies in education. Come to the campus of Inver Hills Community College in Inver Grove Heights, Minnesota (southeast suburb of St. Paul) for a focused conference that will provide practical teaching tips and great ideas to prepare you for the start of school in the fall.
Enjoy engaging, informative, and entertaining talks that will not harsh your mellow.
vgAlt will be there for a keynote and a hands-on seminar on integrating games into traditional classroom instruction, as well as next generation hybrid courses that build upon notions of online and extend them with new interactive media into augmented reality.
Title:Â
Professionalism
and the Jekyll and Hyde Effect
Subtitle:
Games facilitate learning acceleration, no one will dis your MOJO now professor.
Brock Dubbels 12:45 – 1:45
New models of comprehension and memory validate the value of active playful learning for generative transfer:Â five years of data collection on standardized reading assessments are shared from a curriculum of games, play, and virtual spaces in k-20 classrooms will be presented on the value of virtual worlds and interactive games used with developmental students and instructors.
In this presentation, on overview of research, methodology, outcomes, and descriptions of implementation will be presented on how video games and virtual worlds were used to raise standardized reading scores and improve reading performance with developmental reading exit examinations. This evidence provides some corollary to educators’ hesitation in using games as methodology for data collection and curriculum.
This hesitation was documented through genre chain analysis in the form of surveys, interviews, and discourse analysis of teacher artifacts, and the institutional experiences of educators balancing the tension of using games and play, and the fear of being stigmatized as unprofessional at their teaching sites.
The outcome of the genre chain analysis begins to create picture of educators creating two different sets of books, and two different teaching identities — Jekyll and Hyde. Where we may have a feeling games can be powerful learning tools, but dare we get caught using them?
Jekyll — standards, benchmarks, traditional curriculum to not be singled out — proper, professional, dignified
Hyde — Dude, I know what works for my students — the role of interpretation and translation of policy, climate, standards, content and expectation as genre chains– INTASC, Standards of Effective Instruction, Personal Development Plans, learning walks, oversight accountability, parent letters, and report cards–and offering coursework that is engaging and developmentally appropriate, and fits the teachers MOJO.
In this presentation evidence from classroom success and data collected from standardized assessments and cognitive neuroscience is presented. You can come out and relieve your fears of being caught using games in the classroom. Games are effective in learning acceleration. You no longer need to Hyde it.
You can have your fun and EAT IT too.
Come to the Break out session 2:00 – 3:00
Track 2: Brock Dubbels –
Video Games as Learning Tools
In this session, participants will be exposed to experiential learning and access to next generation game systems and an example of curriculum as games relate to content and can be used for developmental reading, technical writing, and technology.
Other content areas will be discussed, along with an approach called 9 ways to use video games for learning acceleration.
Posted by admin on Saturday, July 25, 2009 at 8:13 pm Filed under Uncategorized · Tagged with
This event is well worth the trip just for the networking.
This is my third year participating in this conference, and every year the bar is raised with excellent speakers, useful and illuminating workshops, and excellent hosts.
Play next gen gaming consoles like the X Box 360, Playstation 3, and the Wii
Play traditional systems like the X Box, Playstation 2, Sega, V Tech
Play computer-based games
Experience a variety of titles for k-20 students
Receive curriculum proven over years of classroom implementation and featured in the Star Tribune, NEA Today, Ed Week, WCCO and newspapers around the USA.
Receive CEUs for professional Development
Course attendees are free, and there are 20 spaces available for non-enrolled attendees at $29.95
— also good towards the cost of the full course!
To reserve your space for this workshop, contact
Brock@vgAlt.com
Posted by admin on Tuesday, July 21, 2009 at 7:36 pm Filed under Uncategorized · Tagged with
This day was centered around the idea that play is an important part of learning, and that we can leverage our natural learning state — play — as a portal to work, and work like actvities.
Engagement and motivation are crucial if we are to ever begin with standards and benchmarks, and putting mandates up as an overhead or classroom poster is not going to motivate kids to jump in.
The presentation and breakout offered nine ways that games can be used in the classroom, and these are built on the premise that play can motivate and engage, and the games that we build for learning are what help them sustain their engagement.
What I Want to See in the National Gallery of Writing
By now, you’ve probably heard about the National Gallery of Writing that NCTE is building online by inviting people to select and post one thing they have written that is important to them. Anyone can share any composition. It can be any format—from word processing to photography, audio recording to text messages—and any type of writing—from letters to lists, memoirs to memos.
I found a great example of the kind of writing that belongs in the Gallery. Read “Video Games: Play and Learn” from this week’s Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune. The article describes a project, created by at the Seward Montessori, that tackles reading comprehension, STEM, analytical skills, and community building:
Over a three-week period, the kids split up into groups and play video games. They also take notes. The goal is to explain how the game is played, how a player might win and how the game is designed. By the end of the session, the students will have created a multimedia presentation, including lots of writing, about their games that is then uploaded to the Web.
Students at Seward Montessori and their teacher Brock Dubbels describe the fun and engagement that are part of this video game unit, but there’s more than just fun going on. Jess Sanchez, one of the students, explains that he likes “learning how the games can help you in the future and how they’re made, instead of just playing them. . . . . It makes me think of them in a different way.” Could a teacher ask for a better recognition of the critical thinking behind a classroom activity?
Dubbels has designed a great assignment, and what makes it work is that underneath it adheres to the basic principles outlined in the NCTE Beliefs about the Teaching of Writing. The students in the middle school class are positioned as authorities in an authentic research project. Their project is personally relevant, and they have a real audience of peers who want to hear what they have to say. The presentations students publish at the end of the unit are precisely the kind of work that belongs in the National Gallery of Writing.
So why do I want to see those presentations in the Gallery? The Gallery invitation asks writers to share one piece of writing, anything that they “deem important or significant.” Those multimedia presentations are perfect because, in them, the writers are exploring something that they know and care about. The presentations are “important or significant” because they matter to the people who wrote them. That’s the kind of writing I hope people will share—and the kind of writing I hope all teachers will encourage others to submit.
Dance Dance Education Games Learning Society 2008 DubbelsThis presentation was shared at the Games Learning and Society Conference in 2008. The slides themselves offer the interview data, as well as the themes for coding. This study was conducted to explore what happens when people are given opportunities to choose how and what they learn and especially, what happens when they create the why to learn themselves and as a result are self-governed in that learning. By gaining some insight inot these questions, we may begin to understand what motivates young people and get them to choose to engage in learning in directed activities, and better yet, learn about what sustains their interest to continue and then create this opportunity in directive instructional contexts; perhaps through an awareness of this, teachers and schools can become a positive and powerful part of the identities of tall of their learners through insight into how to support them as they participate and play in the world. As adults, we may begin understand and remember the rigor and effort young people put into activities that are chosen– young people work hard at their play.
In his work, The Ambiguity of Play, Brian Sutton-Smith creates a dichotomy between work and play as an ethos that culturally situates activity within the purview of values that constrain and define activity and the purpose in participating. This study was intended to explore the elements that inform the lived experience of a chosen play activity and the possible social learning theories that might inform it. The three theories include Communities of Practice (Lave and Wenger, 1996), Affinity Groups (Gee, 2001), and Self-Determination theory (Ryan and Deci, 1999). All of these theories seek to explain the motivation behind learning and why people participate in activities; one of the central features of these theories, once operationalized through analysis of construct description, is identity; but identity may best be thought of as an organizing principal that is informed by these theories.
