A Game is Not a Tool

[Maggie]

For those who are interested, Sean Duncan will be presenting the
following talk:

A Game Is Not a Tool: Interest-Driven Contexts For Learning and
Teaching
December 15, 2:00-3:30 Wright Education Building, 2277.

Sean C. Duncan (http://se4n.org/)
Armstrong Professor of Interactive Media Assistant Professor, School
of Education, Health, and Society + Armstrong Institute for
Interactive Media Studies Miami University

The burgeoning field of digital media and learning research has
already contributed significantly to our understanding of how youth
and adults alike learn in the media-rich participatory cultures of the
21st century. In this talk, I focus on games, gaming culture, and game
design. I emphasize immersion within informal learning contexts
outside of classrooms, presenting case studies of the online affinity
spaces (Gee, 2004; Hayes and Duncan, in press) that typify
contemporary digital culture. Additionally, I present cases of
computational thinking in games (Berland and Duncan, in preparation),
interest-driven learning through engagement with game modding (Duncan,
under review), as well as lessons gleaned from design of undergraduate
games and learning experiences. Ultimately, I argue that valuable
learning ecologies are present in communities of engaged gamers, and
argue that this necessitates further investigation of what and how
players learn with games "in the wild" (Hutchins, 1995).