Using gaming paratexts in the literacy classroom

This paper illustrates how digital game paratexts may effectively be used in the high school English to meet a variety of traditional and multimodal literacy outcomes. Paratexts are texts that refer to digital gaming and game cultures, and using them in the classroom enables practitioners to focus on and valorise the considerable literacies and skills that young people develop and deploy in their engagement with digital gaming and game cultures. The effectiveness of valorizing paratexts in this manner is demonstrated through two examples of assessment by students in classes where teachers had designed curriculum and assessment activities using paratexts

Gaming capital: Rethinking literacy

This paper is part of the symposium: Gameplay, gameplayers and gaming capital: Exploring intersections between games, education and adolescent subjectivities in virtual worlds PEER REFEREEING REQUIRED In rethinking literacy education in light of unprecedented technological change, this paper reports on adolescent gamers and their accumulation of gaming capital. This is in opposition to more pervasive assumptions about gaming as mindless entertainment, learning simulations, ideological tools and interactive mediums for the masses. We see the need to research the medium of games in their entirety, exploring their uniqueness as a medium--while at the same time--making connections to a wider media ecology (Fuller, 2005) that includes more than the games themselves. This media ecology of videogames is demonstrated in part by the 'paratextual' (Consalvo, 2007) industries that support game play, production and design. The 'paratext' is central to gaming capital in creating individual and group systems of distinction within gaming culture. Because we understand videogames as actions across social fields enacted through the actions of players or 'operators' on software, we also deem it necessary to understand both the operator and machines' diegetic and non-diegetic actions (Galloway, 2006). This distinction allows us to think about games as more than texts, literacy practices and narratives, which highlights games' significance in technoclture as systems (Salen, 2008), procedures (Bogost, 2007), algorithms (Galloway, 2006; Wark, 2007), configurations and code (Lessig, 1999; Manovich, 2001). In conclusion we provide a series of interview questions developed to uncover adolescents' gaming capital. We also propose a heuristic to map a players' total volume of gaming capital to better understand how gaming capital establishes trajectories of exchange between cultural and economic capitals and its implications for literacy education

Playing public health: building the HIVe

In thinking through the impact of digital media on how frontline workers, activists, practitioners and researchers understand and fight HIV and AIDS, it is important to acknowledge that digital media does not only provide new channels and strategies for communicating information around HIV prevention and education. It also establishes innovative domains for conceiving of, and building, ‘resilient communities’ like The HIVe. Such digital interventions are cultural assets that confront biomedical and behavioural approaches to HIV prevention and education. Immersive and social technologies, network ubiquity and low cost mobile phones provide new tools for aggregating, representing, collecting and disseminating community-based and led data that ‘plays’ public health differently. This play involves fore-fronting the success of social science HIV prevention and education against the essentialist logic of dominant biomedical approaches. ‘Playing public health’ provides an entirely new and comprehensive picture of the agency of the HIV virus that goes beyond the pathology of the individual. This paper proposes the goal of putting HIV prevention back into the ‘game’ of public health and playing it to win by building The HIVe

Horofunction Compactifications of Symmetric Spaces

We consider horofunction compactifications of symmetric spaces with respect to invariant Finsler metrics. We show that any (generalized) Satake compactification can be realized as a horofunction compactification with respect to a polyhedral Finsler metric.Comment: In the new version, the Convexity Lemma is proven for general norms and not only polyhedral ones. Additionally, smaller changes and corrections were don

A Performer's Guide to the Saxophone Music of Bernhard Heiden

Doctoral documentBernhard Heiden (1910-2000) composed ten works involving the saxophone in a variety of genres. Most significantly, his Sonata for E-flat Saxophone and Piano(1937) was the first sonata to become part of the standard repertoire for saxophone. This document provides a biographical sketch of Heiden and historical background on each of the ten pieces by Heiden that include saxophone. Heiden's four pieces for alto saxophone soloist-Sonata (1937), Diversion for Alto Saxophone and Band (1943), Solo for Alto Saxophone and Piano (1969), and Fantasia Concertante for Alto Saxophone and Winds (1987)-are treated more thoroughly, with analyses and notes on performance. The analysis of each piece consists of a form diagram and discussion of Heiden's use of form, themes, rhythm, meter, harmony, and counterpoint. Sections titled "Performance Considerations" document the published errors in each work and provide suggestions for performance culled from interviews with Bernhard Heiden and Eugene Rousseau, and from personal observations. The other works by Heiden that include saxohone are Duo for English Horn and Alto Saxophone (1938), Intrada for Woodwind Quintet and Alto Saxophone (1970), Partita for Orchestra (1970), Four Movementsfor Saxophone Quartet and Timpani (1976), Voyage for Symphonic Wind Ensemble (1991), and Four Fancies for Alto Saxophone, Marimba, and Tuba (1991). The document concludes with a summary of the compositional style characteristics found in Heiden's works for saxophone. A discography is included

Insights on Quality: A National Review of Policy, Practice and Research Relating to Quality in Early Childhood Care and Education in Ireland 1990 – 2004

The Centre for Early Childhood Development and Education (CECDE) was launched by the Minister for Education and Science in October 2002. It is jointly managed by the Dublin Institute of Technology and St. Patrick’s College of Education, Dublin. The aim of the CECDE is to develop and coordinate ECCE in Ireland in pursuance of the objectives of the White Paper, Ready to Learn (Department of Education and Science [DES], 1999). The remit of the Centre is comprehensive, focusing on all aspects of ECCE for children aged birth to six years in Ireland, in both informal and formal settings