I recently watched two TEDTalks. The first was titled ‘Why tech needs the humanities’ (2017) and was presented by Eric Berridge, the cofounder of BlueWolf, an IBM company. The second was ‘Teach arts and sciences together’ (2002) presented by Mae Jemison, the first black female astronaut. While neither are exclusively […]
Education
29 posts
Sometimes being a teacher means you have to have some tough conversations with your students. I think of them as dialogue wheel options, Bioware RPG style, when I’m standing in front of my freshman writing class. Every day my options light up depending on the topic to be taught, the […]
The magic circle is an interesting place. This is particularly true when looking at values, morality, and consequences for our actions. By Huizinga’s definition of the magic circle, things that happen in a game cannot have consequences in our daily lives. This is why, despite many similarities, school isn’t a […]
Prior to heading home for Thanksgiving, I picked up the Oregon Trail card game. As I wrote about before, my mother has recently expressed an interest in playing games, and I thought the game would be fun and nostalgic. I missed the mark a bit on the nostalgia part, however, […]
I’m always trying to figure out ways to improve inclusion in my classroom and help students begin to recognize the implications of various technologies or arguments. I’ve written before about the LEGO Serious Play methodology and how I see it contributing to project in the technical communication classroom and projects […]
Occasionally, I hear the argument that LEGO has lost its way and instead of encouraging kids to be creative, LEGO now encourages kids to simply follow the directions in the box. Normally, this argument comes from people who seem to be looking nostalgically at their own childhoods, which likely included […]
In academia, there are constant fights about disciplinary boundaries: you can’t teach ethics in a course: that belongs to philosophy; you can’t say the word history in a course description; you can’t touch certain authors. Disciplinary boundaries can be a good thing: they let scholars know they have a home; […]
I write and talk and think a lot about gender representation in toys, games, and just in general media and the world around me. My aim and hope is to show the places where gender representation is missing or problematic. When I think about girls having access to and playing […]
This post is a write-up of a talk I gave recently at the Games+Learning+Society conference in Madison, WI. Enjoy! The GamerGate explosion in 2014 had far reaching implications that spidered across many areas: industry workplace practices, how gaming communities function, and how people view video games and gamers. Scholars have […]
I have always been a huge advocate of ethical reflection and thoughtfulness in the classroom. I believe that regardless of what you teach about or what you teach with, you should be cognizant of the possible ramifications for your students. For example, I gave a talk in 2011 about how […]
Joseph Garrett is a Minecraft playing star. His alter ego, a mischievous orange and white feline named Stampy Cat, has over 5.6 million subscribers (at the time of this posting) on his family oriented YouTube channel. The seasoned YouTuber caters to his younger audience by utilizing humorous sound effects and […]
This week, over 3,000 academics gathered in sunny, warm Tampa, Florida to talk about writing and language and consume every bit of coffee the unprepared Mariott hotel had to offer. It was the 66th meeting of the Conference of College Composition and Communication (affectionately known as Cs), a hub for […]
Recently, one of the other women on the NYMGamer team shared a link to a Kickstarter for “Girlcraft,” a proposal for a Minecraft knockoff branded for girls. Same ideas, just pink and purple and full of fairies and rainbows. My heart sank as I read the description, but it didn’t […]
I love weekends, but not because I get to hangout out later or sleep longer in the mornings because there is none of that when you have young children. I love weekends because we can cheat on bedtime a little and do more of the stuff that gets cut short […]
As a young child, I played games with both my mother and father in different ways. I remember playing Ms. Pac-Man with my mother; there was a machine in one of the restaurants where she worked, and we huddled over it many an afternoon, taking turns navigating the mazes and […]
Way back in early 2012, I bought my son a little mouse for his fourth birthday. He had played a few very simple computer games at preschool and at the library, and of course he loved the Xbox 360 and his iPad, but he hadn’t shown any real interest in […]