Recent posts for Science.net

Byline Overview

ByLine is the game technology used in the journalism games (science.net, Wisconsin Science Journal and Neighborhood News).

It helped journalism.net players produce each of these online newspapers:

– Science.net (Edition 2, summer 2006)
- Science.net (Edition 1, summer 2005)
- South Madison Times (Edition 1, summer 2004)
- Wisconsin Science Journal (Edition 2, summer 2004)
- Wisconsin Science Journal (Edition 1, spring 2004)

The software is custom-developed, drawing technically from sources in the Learning Sciences (Guzdial’s CoWeb) and from commercial software (WYSIWYG text editors and Knight Ridder’s Cofax publishing system). ByLine also draws from ethnographic studies of professional journalism learning environments, including capstone university courses and actual newspaper offices. As an epistemic game engine, ByLine is designed to make it easier for young people to participate in the professional activities of journalists while also helping those cub reporters learn to think more like professional reporters. As a research tool, ByLine is designed to help researchers better understand the ways young people develop a professional epistemology.

Letter to the editor

Sometimes, it’s easy to see that good games can change how players think. For example, one player of the Science.net game was so interested by her in-game research on stem cells that she continued to read about it after the game was over.

The next month she wrote a letter to the editor which was published in Time magazine.

Press play: designing an epistemic game engine for journalism.

Hatfield, D., & Shaffer, D. W. (2006). Press play: designing an epistemic game engine for journalism. Paper presented at the Paper presented at the International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS), Bloomington, IN. http://epistemicgames.org/cv/papers/hatfield_shaffer_icls_2006.pdf
Continue reading »

Byline overview

Part internet printing press, part computational tool for thought, ByLine is the epistemic game engine used in (Journalism Game), the epistemic role-playing game of professional journalism. Players use ByLine to write and publish stories in an online science newspaper. At the same time, ByLine is designed to help players learn to think like journalists about science and society.

Lead Researchers : David Hatfield

GLS 2005 – The Shifted Librarian

Our GLS talk – Games for Thought: The Future of Education & How We Can Get There – was recently summarized in Jenny Levine’s blog, The Shifted Librarian. She also talks a bit about what she learned at GLS, and what she’s hoping to apply to her library and her kids’ future learning:

The most obvious, glaring thing is that librarians (in general) have absolutely no clue about what is going on in this area [of gaming and education]. Academia is only now starting to do more than just study it, but it’s not even on our radar. I’ve noted before that I talk about Millennials in the context of serving them where they are (rather than making them come to us), but I hadn’t really thought through all of the implications of the gaming side of it. If you have young children or grandchildren, you can see how gaming affects them, and in turn how they interact with information and multi-modal interfaces…

[...]

As a librarian, I was already buying into the whole video games in libraries meme, but what also struck me was how I filtered everything I heard as a parent, too. Having a 9-year old, male gamer at home informed much of what I heard, and there were many times I thought to myself, “That’s Brent,” during the presentations. I fully realize now how much the games are content for him and just how much learning he’s actually doing…