Games and Gaming, Presented at ELI Meetings

LITRE, the Learning in a Technology-Rich Environment, is a North Carolina State initiative that has researched the impact of various technologies on student learning over the past three years. This session will discuss LITRE's evolution and three current projects: innovative learning environments using multiuser gaming; video, podcasts, and other technologies; and computer-based problem solving.

Experience our quest for a campus-wide program that explores teaching and learning with simulations and games. This interactive presentation uses the game structure of a quest to involve the audience in our journey. Join us for "The Call to Adventure," "The Road of Trials," and "A Return to the Ordinary World."

We are collaborating to create the Garden of Wellness, a web-based, interactive, "serious" game where women with disabilities can actively learn how to improve their physical, psychological, and social health. We hope this new learning environment will overcome attendance problems that prevent women from benefiting from seminars on this material.

The growing use of games in learning may signal a new pedagogical approach to educating the millennial generation. We'll examine the theory behind the effectiveness of games; what the past can teach us about if, how, and when to implement digital game-based learning; and what this will mean for schools.

This presentation will detail the intellectual practices that constitute gameplay in virtual worlds (for example, collaborative problem solving, informal scientific reasoning, computational literacy, and digital media literacy) and the way these coalesce into a form of cosmopolitanism found in the least likely of places, in context of pop culture.

Virtual Learning Environments in 3D We've passed through Web 1.0, entering the architecture of participation. Wikis and other read/write Web 2.0 capabilities provide a collective voice and opportunities for collaboration. They remain, however, fundamentally textual. Emerging now is the Web with shape and form--the 3D virtual world (VW). As education becomes global, will immersive 3D VWs learning spaces provide a persistent new home campus? Discuss.

Framing question for this learning circle: What can we do to jump-start game-based learning on our campuses?

ELI and others have convinced us of the potential of learning through games. What can we do to jump-start this new type of learning on our campuses? The technology is expensive, and some faculty and administrators may think it a folly. How can we design programs that will effectively promote learning through games?

Framing question for this learning circle: How can we learn, select, and apply lessons from computer gaming to teaching and learning with technology?

Computer gaming has emerged recently as one of the world's largest and most dynamic cultural forms. Games often present large amounts of information, and increasingly win wide, even deep, engagement from users. What are the pedagogical lessons here? How can we best follow this enormously complex world, winnow out the academically applicable aspects, and realistically apply such principles and practices to our campuses? Does gaming belong to higher education's curricula, and, if so, where? This session, like the topic, aims to engage a variety of audiences.