Ludic Epistemology: What Game-Based Learning Can Teach Curriculum Studies

"Ludic epistemology" references the need for educational game studies to remediate traditional (linguistically mediated) epistemologies. Its guiding questions are about what it means to encode knowledge in the form of a game, and how we might conceive coming to know as a process of playing. In digital game studies, a theory of ludic epistemology is concerned with the distinctive demands of-and the particular constraints upon knowledge representation in the development of computer-supported game-based learning environments. Its primary theoretical questions are about the re-mediation of educational knowledge and its representation.What educational game studies does for curriculum is to radically stir things up. Its core theoretical project of formulating a "ludic epistemology" can advance epistemic inquiries into media and learning, and respond to what have become serious questions for educators about how game-based technologies for learning, and emergent digital epistemologies, reform and re-forge relations between learning and play.

Queer Pedagogy: Praxis Makes Im/Perfect

This article examines tensions between post-structuralist theories of subjectivity and essentialist constructions of identity in the context of a lesbian studies course co-taught by the authors. We describe the goals, organizing principles, content, and outcomes of this engagement in the production of “queer pedagogy” — a radical form of educative praxis implemented deliberately to interfere with, to intervene in, the production of “normalcy” in schooled subjects. We argue for an explicit “ethics of consumption” in relation to curricular inclusions of marginalized subjects and subjugated knowledges. We conclude with a critical analysis of the way that, despite our explicit interventions, all of our discourses, all of our actions in this course were permeated with the continuous and inescapable backdrop of white heterosexual dominance, such that: (a) any subordinated identity always remained marginal and (b) “lesbian identity” in this institutions context was always fixed and stable, even in a course that explicitly critiqued, challenged, and deconstructed a monolithic “lesbian identity.” Cet article porte sur la tension qui existe entre les théories de la subjectivité et les constructions essentialistes de l’identité dans le contexte d’un cours sur le lesbianisme donné par les auteures. Ces dernières décrivent les buts, les principes organisateurs, le contenu et les résultats de leur démarche en vue de créer ce qu’elles désignent sous le nom de “queer pedagogy”-une forme radicale de la praxis éducative implantée délibéré- ment pour contrecarrer le concept de “normalité” dans les matières enseignées. Les auteu- res prônent une “éthique de la consommation” explicite pour ce qui a trait à l’inclusion des matières marginalisées et des connaissances subordonnées. Elles concluent avec une analyse critique de la façon dont tous leurs discours et toutes leurs actions au sein du cours, en dépit de leurs interventions explicites, avaient pour toile de fond inévitable la prééminence de l’hétérosexualité des Blancs si bien que : a) toute identité subordonnée est toujours demeurée marginale, et b) l’“identité lesbienne” dans ce contexte était tou- jours fixe et stable, et ce, même dans un cours qui critiquait et mettait explicitement en question une “identité lesbienne” monolithique.

Research on Women and Video Games Needs to Improve

Research on gender and video games often conflates gender with sex, which leads to stereotyping of girls and women. In general, research on gameplay treats women like a second sex and gender like an insignificant variable.York's Knowledge Mobilization Unit provides services and funding for faculty, graduate students, and community organizations seeking to maximize the impact of academic research and expertise on public policy, social programming, and professional practice. It is supported by SSHRC and CIHR grants, and by the Office of the Vice-President Research & Innovation. [email protected] www.researchimpact.c

Theorizing gender and digital gameplay: Oversights, accidents and surprises

This paper attempts to tell a story of a different kind about gender and digital gameplay. Resisting the repetition of stereotypes about who plays, how and why, we show how, as researchers, our own assumptions and presumptions about gender keep surprise at bay, enforcing instead "findings" that solidify an inner "truth" about gender. Re-citing hegemonic gender ideologies that tell us nothing we don't already know, we argue here, is no accident. Rather than recurring encounters with the all-too-familiar, we are entitled to expect to be surprised by the research we do, and more serious interpretive work, in conjunction with alternative methodologies, promise very different findings than those hitherto attributed to women and girls playing games

Investigating sound intensity gradients as feedback for embodied learning

This paper explores an intensity-based approach to sound feedback in systems for embodied learning. We describe a theoretical framework, design guidelines, and the implementation of and results from an informant workshop. The specific context of embodied activity is considered in light of the challenges of designing meaningful sound feedback, and a design approach is shown to be a generative way of uncovering significant sound design patterns. The exploratory workshop offers preliminary directions and design guidelines for using intensity-based ambient sound display in interactive learning environments. The value of this research is in its contribution towards the development of a cohesive and ecologically valid model for using audio feedback in systems, which can guide embodied interaction. The approach presented here suggests ways that multi-modal auditory feedback can support interactive collaborative learning and problem solving

Building as Interface: Sustainable Educational Ecologies

This paper begins with the most obvious, and yet most elusive, of educational media ecologies, the buildings which are ‹home› to pedagogic communication and interaction, and considers how we might understand «building as interface», construed first as a noun, («a structure with roof and walls» – OED) referring to places as physical structures, and then as a verb, («the action or trade of constructing something» – OED), referring to the activities of construction through which we can engage technologies central to theory, research and practice. Our concern is with exploring the larger question of educational sustainability: with what ‹sustainability› means when applied to a specifically educational context, and with the sustainability of the kinds of emerging educational environments in which new information and communications technologies play a significant role. This question of sustainable educational environments is driven by a need to be responsible and accountable for the impact of the technologies and practices we eagerly embrace in the name of «21st century learning», even as prospects for a 22nd century are so rapidly receding from view. As one prominent media ecologist put the point: «we have to find the environments in which it will be possible to live with our new inventions» (McLuhan 1967, 124)

In and out of control: Learning games differently

In this paper we make use of the theoretical resources of actor network theory as a ‘frame’ within which to organize video data we have been collecting on playing, and more specifically, on girls learning to play, digital games. Through a microanalysis of interaction, we closely examine intersecting trajectories of control -- self, other, and technology -- within the context of game play. Using MAP, a software program that supports multimodal analysis, we offer an illustrated account of the microgenesis of competence in collaborative, technologically-supported gameplay, drawing attention to developmentally significant behavioural regularities which, because they are embodied and not necessarily cognitive-linguistic in character, have not typically been evidenced in research on collaborative learning. A particular contribution of this paper is its study of group play, a relatively under-studied topic in gameplay research, and a perspective that has allowed us to look specifically at the phenomenon of the distributed development of competence central to learning in and through collaborative play