Before you head to U of R, begin at RIT for talk on gameplay & iterations

When:    Friday, February 5, 2016
Where:   Golisano College 70-1455
Time:     11:00 am
Experimental Gameplay and the Iterative Process
Presentation by
Ian Schreiber

PhD Research Colloquium in Computing and Information Sciences
Rochester Institute of Technology

Lecture @ U of R: “Video Games & Learning”

Friday, February 5, 2016

Introduction: Andrea Hickerson, Journalism

I teach a variety of traditional journalism courses including Law & Ethics of the Press and the History of Journalism, but I also teach project-based courses like the "Digital Journalism Incubator" and Interviewing.

At this point in my career I'm looking for more creative and engaging in-class activities. I'm particularly concerned that students don't push themselves enough in interpersonal interactions with peers and sources for journalism stories.  I have an idea to partner with an improv group for an activity about "difficult interviewees" for my interviewing class, but I'm not sure how to structure it. Furthermore, I'm keen to try game-based learning in my History and Law courses. The former is particularly challenging for students, and I'm sure there is a way to make case law fun...I just haven't figured it out yet. 

I'm also interested in critical game theory.  Integrating games and journalism - or the idea of doing so - is a hot topic. However, I'm hard pressed to think of an organization that has done it well. I'm interested in exploring how good and thoughtful uses of games can be integrated into the journalism process without seeming forced or tacked on to a more traditional form of storytelling.

Introduction: Michael Brown, History and Museum Studies

One strand of my research looks at debates about the role of intellectuals in American political culture after World War II.  I am interested in the anxieties and hopes aroused by the presence of intellectuals in public life, as well as the way in which the role of the intellectual was constructed and reconstructed in relation to those anxieties and hopes.  A second strand of my scholarship addresses the public history of the Rochester region.  In particular, I am interested in the prospects of a “usable past” at the local level—a public engagement with history that may nourish civic, cultural, and economic renewal.   An overriding concern with modes of intervention by academics in American democratic culture weaves together the two strands of my research agenda.  I think often about the overlap between the “public historian” and the “public intellectual.”

I am intrigued by GBL/PBL as both a teacher and a scholar.  As a teacher, I am on the lookout for new ways of enhancing students’ learning.  I regularly use projects as culminating assignments in my classes, and my sense is that I could extend project-based learning from a solo endeavor at the end of the semester to a class-wide mode of learning throughout the semester.  In particular, I would like to identify student projects that not only result in students’ learning but also in a tangible piece of public engagement.  Could student projects, for example, make significant contributions to local public history?  This question intersects with my interest in civically engaged scholarship.  To what extent can projects that we do within the academy become sites for dialogue and partnership with the community?

I often make analogies to popular computer games in my lectures, and these moments seem to pique student interest.  As someone concerned with how students learn about history, I recognize that these games are frequently young people’s first and most intensive engagement with historical content.  A critical approach to historical games—understanding how game dynamics can both represent and distort historical conditions—might be a helpful prelude to projects in which students not only play such games but design them as pedagogical tools for helping others learn about history.  I am also interested in how games can map onto historical landscapes, like the re-creation of 1920s Rochester by Trent’s class.  To what extent can games recover historical spaces and, through games that require students to move through those spaces (virtually or “IRL”), foster historical preservation and ultimately a “sense of place”?

Intro:Trent Hergenrader, English/Creative Writing

My research is at the intersection of creative writing studies (a small but growing research field), digital pedagogy, and games and game-based learning. My approach is to use digital tools to reconfigure the creative writing classroom from that of the sole author of a print-based work to collaborative, multimedia projects with distributed, non-linear narratives. I look forward to sharing some of the best practices in using games and game-based approaches to increase student engagement and leverage deeper learning.

An interactive map of the alt-history world of Steampunk Rochester

Introduction: Juilee Decker, Museum Studies

In terms of research and pedagogy, I look to collections (i.e., libraries, archives, and museums) as spaces that have potentiality as sites of digital scholarship and collaboration. I have worked in this way for more than a decade—this practice has been informed, very much, by my work in the field of public art (since 1998—I can tell you more!). At RIT, I have created four courses in museum studies and public history that are intended as spaces for collaborative engagement, self-assessment, public dissemination and....  

Note: all of the photographs below relate to projects undertaken by students in my course this past fall (2015).

Students installing an exhibition
in TWC, October 2015

Overview of GBL PBL Group

The website is intended to function as a workspace for a mentoring project in the spring 2016 aimed at developing the pedagogies of invited participants and the co-organizers. The mentoring project has been generously funded by the Office of the Provost at Rochester Institute of Technology.

The project involves faculty seeking to develop their own work in the areas of project-based learning (PBL) and game-based learning (GBL). In addition to co-organizers, Juilee Decker & Trent Hergenrader, the participants including the following faculty fellows: Michael Brown, Andrea Hickerson, Ammina Kothari, and David Meiggs—all from the College of Liberal Arts.

The mentoring project will introduce instructors to proven project-based and game-based methodologies that improve student learning, as endorsed by organizations such as the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning Initiative (DML), the New Media Consortium (NMC)’s annual Horizon Reports, and the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory (HASTAC). Both project-based and game-based learning have been shown to leverage deeper learning when designed well.

The goal of this mentoring project is to highlight both best practices and common pitfalls in these methodologies, and to center the group’s work on actual classroom activities from the participants’ own courses. Through demonstrations and discussions, participants will be able to choose from a wide range of different approaches for achieving specific learning objectives in their classes, and for contributing to the development of the Digital Humanities and Social Sciences (DHSS) program at RIT. DHSS is a new major that will be offered at RIT beginning in the Fall 2016.

Overview/Timeline
• In December 2015, the cohort will meet and introduce themselves and establish meeting times for the spring.
• Our January/early February meeting will serve as a springboard for the semester and will introduce goals, expectations, and deadlines.
• In the following two sessions (Feb & March), Juilee & Trent will focus on introducing models and theories of game based learning and project-based learning, before opening up the sessions to a workshop-approach of hands on application of what we’ve introduced.
• Our focus will turn to dissemination in April and May, including presentation at THATCamp to be organized by RIT's DHSS program.

After participating in the spring session, it is our hope that the cohort can continue to meet and/or be involved in DHSS in some way in the following year.

--Juilee Decker (Assoc. Prof. Museum Studies) & Trent Hergenrader (Asst. Prof. English)
College of Liberal Arts, RIT