Recent posts for Alecia Magnifico

Epistemic Games at Games Learning and Society Conference

A 1.5 hour session at the 2006 Games Learning and Society conference was devoted to research on epistemic games:

In his recent bestseller “The World is Flat,” Thomas Friedman (2005) argues that industrialized countries can no longer compete in the global economy on the basis of making and selling commodities. Their competitive edge increasingly comes from how well they produce products, services, and technologies that are new, special, and non-standard, and thus are not easily produced across the globe by competitors.

But how and when should children learn the kind of innovative thinking they will need for success in the new, interconnected, high-tech, work-anywhere, just-on-time, on-demand, world of global competition?
Continue reading »

Results: Epistemology

Journalism.net players learn about the epistemology of journalists during gameplay, and they begin to use this information to make decisions about their actions and the information that they have. For example: In the pre- and post-interviews for Science.net, we asked players to evaluate whether scientific information would make a good news story if it were written up in the news, and to describe what they would do if they were given this information.

A typical pre-interview response: “I’d get more information on it, because there isn’t very much here, and I’d probably, like, ask some people what they thought… just people… [and] I might try and find out like what the way is to change the genes.”

A typical post-interview response: “I would go and interview whatever scientist that discovered this. And then I would interview a few environmentalists about whats happening. It would give me all the information of the story and would give me opposing sides of view… Because it could be biased if you just include the scientist or the environmentalist point of view… You want both sides of view to be included in the story.”

Results: Copyediting Case Study

Copyediting helps the Journalism.net reporters to develop journalistic skills, knowledge, and values in their writing. The table below the cut shows the difference between a first draft of a story about Madison’s lakes and the final, published draft. Continue reading »

Results: Skills, knowledge, and values

Skills, Knowledge, and Values in stories -

Journalism.net players’ stories all show a similar pattern: completing story revisions that are guided by peer and editor copyedits help gameplayers to develop journalistic skills, knowledge, and values. Players’ first story drafts, revised drafts (revisions that players completed alone), and final published drafts (revisions that players completed with the aid of written editor copyedits) were scored on a rubric that was developed from the training practices of journalism. These results were statistically significant (p < 0.05).
Continue reading »

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…