Session Information
| Title | The Intellectual Life of Online Play |
| Presenter(s) |  Constance Steinkuehler is an Assistant Professor in the Educational Communications and Technology (ECT) program in the Curriculum & Instruction department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is a founding fellow of the Games, Learning, & Society (GLS) Initiative at UW-Madison and chairs their annual conference held each summer in Madison WI. Her research on cognition, learning, and literacy in massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) has been funded by the MacArthur Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and the Academic ADL Co-Lab - to date, including research on such commercial titles as Lineage I, Lineage II, Star Wars Galaxies, World of Warcraft, and, most recently, RuneScape. She earned her Ph.D. in Literacy Studies in the Curriculum & Instruction in 2005, her MS degree in Educational Psychology in 2000 and three simultaneous BAs in Mathematics, English, and Religious Studies in 1993. She teaches graduate courses in Research in Online Virtual Worlds, Analyzing Online Social Interaction, Critical Instructional Practices on the Internet, and Gender and Technology, and an undergraduate course in Digital Media, Pop Culture, and Learning. She sits on the editorial board of several journals including the Journal of the Learning Sciences, the International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations, and Second Nature: The International Journal of Creative Media. She is the Chair of the AERA SIG "Media, Culture & Curriculum," sits on the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Committee on Gaming, Simulations & Education, and recently received the NAS/Spencer Post-Doctoral Fellowship. |
| Time | Saturday, October 23, 9:00a-10:00a |
| Location | Ballroom |
| Format | Keynote |
| Description | The past three decades of cognitive research has well documented that play is an important context for learning for younger children, but we have a harder time accepting that it is equally important for teenagers and adults. Digital worlds for play such as those found in massively multiplayer online games (so called "virtual worlds") offer compelling, naturally occurring models of the online learning environments educators have been diligently attempting to craft in the basements of their ivory towers (with somewhat limited success). This disparity gives rise to a deep irony: American schools, designed for intentionally learning, remain locked within a Ford type factory model of industry and efficiency; games, on the other hand, with no intention to teach or education, lean forward rather than backward, recruiting intellectual practices, dispositions, and forms of social organization that are well aligned with many of today's "new capitalist" workplaces.
In this talk, I review the findings of a five-year investigation, funded in part by the MacArthur foundation, into the forms of cognition and learning that arise in virtual worlds. In it, I detail the constellation of intellectual practices that constitute gameplay in such spaces ranging from collective problem solving and digital media literacy to computational literacy and informal science reasoning. I highlight the ways in which this constellation of intellectual practices coalesce into a form of civic engagement I call pop cosmopolitanism and how such a disposition is shaping the everyday lives of today's adolescents and adults. |