Legsim
After reading about epistemic games, a colleague at the University of Washington wrote me about LegSim:
I don’t know if you are aware of LegSim (www.legsim.org)? It’s a virtual legislature that students organize and operate themselves. It has proven to be very popular at the college level, and we are now bringing it into high schools. I’ve found that high school teachers are eager for opportunities to engage students – if those opportunities reflect the curriculum constraints they face. At least those we have presented to do have some flexibility in terms of how they covered the required materials, and they get really excited when they see new ways to reach their students.
For those who read about The Debating Game in How Computer Games Help Children Learn and are interested in simulations and games in history class, this is worth a further look.
My general take on simulations of this kind are that they are even more effective as learning opportunities if they recreate the way people learn to become legislators rather than recreate what it means to be legislators. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that simulations like these are rich opportunites for teachers to create and use games for learning in their classrooms.
Epistemic games and the law
After meeting at a recent conference, blogger, lawyer, and legal educator Gene Koo and I had a long conversation about developing an epistemic game for lawyers–seems fair, after all, I talk about it as a possibility all the time, and think it is clearly one of the games that should be built sometime soon.
In a recent blog post, Gene describes the issues nicely:
I should note that most law schools and law professors espouse the idea that legal education should teach students to ‘think like lawyers.’ So the frame of epistemic games fits well with the pedagogical ethos of law.
The whole post is worth checking out….
Project data
Writing Beyond the Curriculum draws on written and verbal data from different Journalism.net versions. To date, my analysis has focused primarily on news stories written by and interviews with young reporters who participated in Science.net or Wisconsin Science Journal.
I am interested in how the writing of these young journalists changes as they write and edit their stories, and how they think differently about information when they look through the eyes of a journalist.
Epistemic Games Encourage Innovation
Epistemic games get a brief writeup in the Wisconsin Center for Education Research News:
With the current U.S. focus on testing and accountability, we have made sure that our schools are better equipped than ever to produce commodity workers, but not innovative ones, writes UW-Madison education professor David Williamson Shaffer. But the high end of the value chain in a global economy is the knowledge needed to design innovative products, services, and technologies that let people share information, work together, and do things in new ways. Williamson Shaffer promotes the value of epistemic games in education–games requiring students to make, apply, and share knowledge.
Game Train
Game Train is an epistemic game that prepares players to manage the experiences of the players in other epistemic games. The first version of Game Train will prepare undergraduate journalism students to play the editor roles in the Journalism epistemic game, Neighborhood.net.
