Games for Change - what games have changed

One of the meetings that I hope to go to next year is the Games for Change summit. Apparently a high-profile event with potential for good energy. At the center is an organization with the same name that seeks to be a "...global advocate for supporting and making games for social impact." See http://www.gamesforchange.org for more info. Through their newsletter I saw this really nice summary of some great things that games have done for society. It includes high impact testimonials from classrooms, the developing world, and research. They also provide video of the best talks from this year's event by world renowned game designer Jesse Schell, Valve Software’s Gabe Newell, Sheryl WuDunn’s conversation with Laura Pincus Hartman from Zynga.org and Pierre Guillaume Wielezynski from the UN World Food Programme, and US Department of Education’s James Shelton.

Early visionaries

Source: The Oil Drum

Several times I have referred back to some of the early visionaries in the area of virtual globes and GeoGame-like simulations. Al Gore is frequently mentioned because of his "Digital Earth" speech and David Gelernter's "Mirror Worlds" vision from 1991 seemed to me as the most insightful and detailed account of what we currently see emerging. But as I was going through notes form a research meeting a few years back I found a note on "...a vision of a large globe hanging above campus to display earth info..." attributed to Fuller 1962. As I started looking around I found that Buckminster Fuller was indeed a man of big visionary ideas. Not only did he envision what now has been realized by Mitsubishi as the World's largest OLED globe, but he also had grand thoughts on how a "World Game" could enable a design revolution and provide a place where people would "Make the world work, for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone". His book "Critical Path" sounds like a must-read and I am sure will provide great insights and ideas for our own work to develop GeoGames.

Cyberlearning Research Summit CfP

As part of the Cyberlearning initiatives at NSF this event, The Cyberlearning Research Summit, January 18, 2012, promises to be a high-profile gathering in Washington DC, featuring top quality research-based speakers, who will share visions for the future of learning with emerging technologies, in style of the TED conferences. Deadline for presenter nominations and attendee applications is October 1. I am hopeful that our OSU team can attend and maybe present our ideas and plans.

Cyberlearning with GeoGames

After many months of crossing fingers, holding thumbs (that's what we do in Sweden), and not counting the eggs until... We got NSF Cyberlearning support to develop and study learning with GeoGames! YAY! We will have two years to do exploratory, design-based research that develop our new Esri-technology platform into a learning tool and look at how learning happens within a GeoGames such as the 'Green revolution' scenario.

The broad goal will be to better understand the opportunities and obstacles presented by our GeoGames framework for role-play games/simulations. Under this portal we will look at some more specific questions about how people learn with integrated online GIS and gaming technology, such as:

• what is a GeoGame? - key components and functionality that can help and guide others to develop similar technology
• what does a GeoGame provide in terms of authentic experiences, student engagement, and higher-order thinking?
• how does specific GeoGame affordances (access to rich geographic information, particular game mechanics, collaboration opportunities, etc) help/hinder learning?

Our fabulous team (me, Rajiv, Kathryn, and Andrew) will approach these questions using the pattern of design-based research (Barab & Squire, 2004) where we gathering data from users before, during, and after playing a game. By doing this repeatedly with each new version it will help both technical and content design improvements as well as to better understand how people learn using this technology.

Presenting at GLS 2011

http://www.glsconference.org/2011/

Presenting our work with Geographic Live Online games at the Games + Learning + Society confrence in Madison, WI. Great location and very vibrant crowd here and many stimulating presentations to digest. Unfortunately I could not attend the first day due to another meeting but coming here the second day was still great to hear Eric Klopfer's breakfast keynote look at games through the lens of ecology. My own presentation can be found here. Katie Salen's lunch keynote began by the idea of game-like learning (as opposed to game-based), not necessarily using games as such for the learning experience, but pull ideas from good game design. E.g. drop students into a challenging situation where they will have to learn incrementally, collaborate through succcess and failure towards a goal. While her work with Quest to Learn has successfully done this, in a way moving many components from the K-6 to the 7-8 level and possibly 9-12, I think moving the same idea to the College level will meet a tough challenge in overcoming the individualistic structure of faculty-course ties and virtual absence of a team taught curriculum. Looking forward to see and learn from the many other sessions ahead. Jeremiah McCall, as always engaging to listen to, concluded with the thesis that the written or spoken word is not the only source for facts and learning. We know that discussions, documentary movies, and personal experiences are important sources of learning, and why not games? His teaching where students are allowed to critically examine historical videogames provides a prime example of how to instill critical thinking. Check out his website.

GeoGame 2.0

Great times!
Our small team look forward to do some serious development of the next generation geographic live online map game. What's in store then? Through a new partnership with Esri we will work with GIS technology to put all game functionality into a browser environment so there is no need for the sometimes cumbersome installs and Java downloads that we had to deal with in our first prototype. This also allow us to easier tap into the rich support for geospatial processing that no existing gaming platform can provide.

Maybe the folks at Epistemic Games are closest to what we are looking for. Their Land Science/Urban Science games take a new spin on planning games like Sim City by incorporating the real world in the game dynamics. The benefits are obvious. Not only do we get a joyful experience, but there may actually be some important knowledge generated for use by non-participants.

I look forward to hear Art Graesser and David Hatfield this Friday present here at OSU on Embedded Assessment in Video Games.

When: Friday, June 3, 11-1 p.m.

Where: Rm 1089, Center on Education and Training for Employment

Registration:  https://registration.it.ohio-state.edu/node/336

Presenting today at Innovate

Exciting conference today at OSU http://blog.it.ohio-state.edu/elearning

Me and Shaun will be presenting "Development of a Platform for Spatial Thinking Through Online Games" and here are some links to go with that presentation:

Maps and games – Simple map trivia - http://bensguide.gpo.gov/flash/states_game2.html
Combining online maps and games - www.fleck.com, www.planetinaction.com
MMOG WoW – Leeroy Jenkins clip - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkCNJRfSZBU
Debunking some myths -http://www.pbs.org/kcts/videogamerevolution/impact/myths.html
Microsoft Surface Touch table – Calculation game - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnVTNbpXR-A
The GeoGame website - http://www.geogame.osu.edu/
Fate of the World - http://fateoftheworld.net/ - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Pk3QDC84Go
Cityone IBM - http://www-01.ibm.com/software/solutions/soa/innov8/cityone/index.html

References:
Roper Public Affairs. 2006. National geographic-roper public affairs 2006 geographic literacy study. New York: GfK NOP, 89p.
Steinkuehler, C., & Chmiel, M. (2006). Fostering scientific habits of mind in the context of online play. In Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Learning sciences (p. 729). International Society of the Learning Sciences.