Author Archives: Stephen Petrina

Video Gaming in the Classroom: Insights and Ideas from Teenage Students by Peter Halim

Peter and research participants in focus group

Congratulations to Peter Halim for successfully defending his thesis titled “Video Gaming in the Classroom: Insights and Ideas from Teenage Students”! Peter made the minor edits and closed his MA program, meaning that he will graduate in November. The thesis can be downloaded from the CIRCLE database.

Video Gaming in the Classroom: Insights and Ideas from Teenage Students

Peter Halim

For this research, four high school aged teenagers participated in an intensive one week video gaming camp, at which time they articulated their attitudes and ideas about mainstream video games and their place in education. The purpose was to explore strategies for utilizing mainstream commercial video games for educative purposes in the classroom. The participants’ insights along with observations made on their interaction with video games were analyzed through Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovation and the General Aggression Model. In summary, the participants, more or less experts in gaming, enjoyed video games and described them as one of their favourite activities. Furthermore, it was found that video games played both a positive and negative role in the participants’ lives. For example, all participants seemed to have developed healthy values and relationships directly through playing video games during their pre-adolescent years. Conversely, their responses also indicated that they experienced limits to video games and did not see innovation from market and home to school as a smooth, trivial process. Rather, they provided key insights into aligning specific games with specific content, curriculum, and courses. The participants’ insights suggest that the use of mainstream video games for learning will most likely continue to be a fringe strategy implemented by individual teachers who actively discern the educational uses of video games. Game and gaming literacies are among the most recent entries into new literacies research. This thesis contributes to this research by exploring teenagers’ ideas about gaming in the classroom. In conclusion, this study finds that mainstream video games have potential to be effectively used as learning strategies in the classroom in the future pending on continued progress and interest in this endeavor.

Bruno Latour: War and Peace in an Age of Ecological Conflict

UBC, Vancouver, and Lower Mainland students and faculty: Calendar the return of Bruno Latour to UBC @ 23 September 2013 (Monday eve, 7:30 downtown at the Vogue Theatre). For this fall’s Peter Wall Exchange, Professor Latour will address War and Peace in an Age of Ecological Conflict. See Peter Wall Institute for details.

Graduate Seminar: Bruno Latour and STS

Please consider enrolling (or advising enrollment) this Winter 1 term (Sept-Dec 2013) in a graduate Seminar on Bruno Latour and STS (at the University of British Columbia).  The course is listed as a Masters Seminar but I encourage all PhD students with STS interests to enroll for intellectual reasons, for taking leadership roles within the seminar, and for learning to teach and design courses on Latour and STS.

Note that the course is Pass-Fail format.  This year the seminar focuses on Latour and the postsecular turn in STS:

EDCP 501 : Thursdays (1:00-4:00)

Course Description:

This seminar focuses on recent work of Bruno Latour, arguably the most creative and challenging scholar of Science & Technology Studies (STS).  Latour’s reputation and scholarship traverses an extremely wide range of disciplines in addition to STS (e.g., anthropology, art, education, environmental studies, geography, history, law, philosophy, political science, sociology, theology, etc.).  Following a survey of Latour’s work and the postsecular turn in STS, we will focus on three new texts: An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (2013), Rejoicing: Or the Torments of Religious Speech (2013), and On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods (2010). The seminar is interdisciplinary and inviting, and students from any and all disciplines are encouraged to enroll.  We will work systematically through these texts to closely examine Latour’s strategies for doing STS.

June Kaminski wins 2012 CASN e-Health Award

June Kaminski (Kwantlen Polytechnic University faculty member and UBC PhD student)
2012 Nursing Faculty e-Health Award

Congratulations to EDCP PhD Candidate June Kaminski, recipient of the Canadian Association of Schools of Nursing’s (CASN) prestigious E-Health Award! June is an Instructor in Kwantlen Polytechnic University’s Faculty of Community and Health Studies. She has been an established national leader in e-health and nursing informatics throughout her career and this award recognizes her long-standing and ground-breaking achievements. She is completing research on e-health and informatics, and the challenge of innovation in nurse education. June works under the Supervision of Dr. Stephen Petrina within Technology Studies.

Kwantlen Press Release

Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU) nursing faculty member, June Kaminski, has been chosen as the recipient of the Nursing Faculty e-Health Award. This prestigious award was presented during the Canadian Association of Schools of Nursing’s (CASN) Annual Award’s reception in Ottawa on November 13, 2012.

“I am very honoured and thrilled to receive this inaugural award from CASN and Canada Health Infoway, two organizations that I deeply respect and look to for leadership strategies for curriculum, e-health and informatics,” said Kaminski. “I wish to thank my nominators Dr. Noreen Frisch and Dr. Elizabeth Borycki from the University of Victoria, both creators of Inspire.net and our own Dr. Jean Nicolson-Church. Thanks too to our Dean, Dr. Tru Freeman for her continued support. I sincerely treasure the acknowledgement of my work and my passion for technology in nursing practice and education.”

The recipient of this award is a faculty member from a Canadian school of nursing who demonstrates exceptional leadership and commitment to e-health in nursing education.  Aside from national recognition, Kaminski also received a $2000 award for her dedication to effectively integrating the use of information and communication technologies, information and knowledge management, and related professional and regulatory accountability into pedagogical materials.
The 2012 Nursing Faculty e-Health Award is a component of the CASN-Canada Health Infoway – Nurses in Training project aimed at preparing nursing students to practice in modern, technology-enabled clinical environments when they graduate.

KPU’s community and health studies programs are grounded in the concepts of caring, collaboration, inclusion and development of healthier communities. Programs vary in length from four year bachelor degrees to five month citations. For more information on KPU’s community and health studies programs visit kwantlen.ca/health.

Designing Immersive Language Learning Environments in Virtual Worlds by Yifei Wang

Congratulations Yifei Wang, who successfully defended her PhD dissertation, “Designing Immersive Language Learning Environments in Virtual Worlds.” Yifei’s defence on 11 December was textbook perfect, in both presentation and response to questions from the Examination Committee and External Examiner. Minor revisions were completed and submitted, and Yifei is now Dr. Wang! The dissertation research involves a sophisticated design and analysis of an immersive learning environment.

ABSTRACT

Designing Immersive Language Learning Environments in Virtual Worlds

by
Yifei Wang

During the past decade, there has been increasing attention to second/foreign language teaching and learning in virtual worlds. The purpose of this study was to explore affordances of a 3D virtual world platform designed as an immersive language teaching and learning environment.

Focusing on designing virtual worlds as a catalyst for change, three design phases (development of artifact, low fidelity prototyping, and high fidelity prototyping) were detailed and documented in this study. Nineteen students from a pre-service teacher cohort, two technicians and eight language learners from high schools in Vancouver as well as eighty language learners from universities in China were involved in this study; participants were asked to immerse themselves in the virtual language learning environment designed for the study. Participants’ interactions in the virtual world were videotaped and avatar interactions were recorded.

Group discussions, observations, suvey questionnaires and the video-stimulated post interaction interviews provided complementary data for understanding affordances of virtual worlds in designing immersive second/foreign language learning curriculum. Analysis of the feasibility study, low fidelity design, and high fidelity design suggested a more robust design for immerisve virtual language learning environments. Three design cycles revealed primary design factors of immersive second/foreign language learning in virtual worlds (embodied avatar, co-presence, and simulation) and their relative significance in the process of learners’ meaning-making and knowledge construction.

Findings showed that embodiment through an embodied avatar, community of practice through co-presence, and situated learning through simulation had a greater impact on the immersive virtual learning design. Building on a theoretical framework of embodied mind, situated learning and distributed cognition, this study documented features of learning theories key to language learning curriculum design in virtual worlds.

The findings and techniques resulting from this study will help designers and researchers improve second/foreign language curriculum design in virtual worlds. It also prompts designers and researchers to achieve a better understanding of how virtual worlds can be redesigned by rethinking learning theories. The refinement of design-based research stages into low and high fidelity prototyping provides researchers with empirically tested and nuanced understandings of the design process.

Treasure Trove for BC Women’s History

The West Kootenay Women’s Association Digital History Project, under direction of Marcia Braundy, has just made available a treasure trove for BC woman’s history and feminisms.  The timelined site provides easy navigation and documentation for students, teachers, or researchers interested in localizing history through the everyday records of women and pro-feminist activists in the Kootenays.  Students of history are given a rare glimpse of the types of records that it took to sustain a feminist movement and culture, and scale up activism to change across the province and country.  Records such as the West Kootenay Women’s Association newsletters and images are priceless!  Well done Marcia and thank you!!!

http://www.kootenayfeminism.com/categories.php#newsletters

Marcia Braundy’s Men & Women and Tools

Technology Studies alumna and HWL friend, Marcia Braundy, is presenting and representing Men & Women and Tools.  The book began as Marcia’s PhD research and builds on her longstanding activism and feminism of masculinities.  In her PhD program, Marcia wrote a stage script for a play by the same title, which was ultimately performed by UBC drama students and screened in courses at UBC.

At the end of this month, Marcia will be presenting on the new book at the American Men’s Studies Conference in Minneapolis.  We are extremely proud of Marcia’s work and her research with the West Kootenay Women’s Association Digital History Project, who by the way, just launched a new digital history website.

New Youth Studies Graduate Program at Calgary

Talkin’ Bout Their Generation:
Empowered Youth in an Era of Chaos and Indecision

Keynote speaker:
Dr. Henry Giroux
Global Television Chair, McMaster University
Youth in Revolt: Coming of Age in an Era of Savage Inequality 
Wednesday April 11, 2012

Registration is free, however participants are asked to register by March 15.  See updates and schedule for this two-day event and launch of Calgary’s Youth Studies Program.

Shirley R. Steinberg
Chair and Director
Werklund Foundation Center for Youth Leadership Education
Professor of Youth Studies, University of Calgary

CFP for Media Transatlantic: Media Theory in North America and German-Speaking Europe

Media Transatlantic: Media Theory in North America and
German-Speaking Europe

April 8-10, 2010; University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
Proposals due: Nov. 27, 2010

http://www.mediatrans.ca

Ubiquitous and indispensible, media technologies have taken on an epistemological or even ontological significance: we learn what we know, and we become what we are, through print, TV, digital, mobile and other communications. “No part of the world, no human activity,” as Sonia Livingstone says, “is untouched…. Societies worldwide are being reshaped, for better or for worse, by changes in the global media and information environment.” Seeing media as a lens or even as an a priori condition for understanding historical, social and cultural change has become increasingly prevalent and urgent on both sides of the Atlantic. However, with some notable exceptions, this work has been developing independently, producing a wide-ranging if fruitful heterogeneity. On the one side are the interdisciplinary and theoretically-engaged Medienwissenschaften (media studies), and on the other, work developing out of the Toronto school and a variety of theoretical and disciplinary traditions. The purpose of this conference is to deepen and expand transatlantic dialogue between North America and German-speaking Europe (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) in the area of media theory — and to provide an opportunity for developing connections to other contexts as well. Areas of research and scholarship relevant to this dialogue include communication, philosophy, media literacy, and literary and cultural studies.

Confirmed Keynotes:
– Kim Sawchuk (Concordia)
– Katherine Hayles (Chicago)
– Sybille Krämer (Berlin)
– Dieter Mersch (Potsdam)
– Hartmut Winkler (Paderborn)
– Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (Vancouver)

This conference invites papers, in English, focusing on such issues as:

– Recent developments in media theory in North America and central
Europe, for example:
–   Media and materiality
–   The construction of “mediality” in theory and
practice
–   Media and the (post)human
–   The “mediatic turn” as milestone or misnomer
– The foundational contributions of McLuhan, Innis and the Toronto
School, of Flusser, Luhmann, and others
– Media as means of socialization and education
– Towards a philosophy of media
– (Inter)disciplinary implications of media-theoretical developments

Abstracts should be submitted using the form provided on the conference
Website: http://www.mediatrans.ca/submit.html

Contact,

Norm Friesen
Canada Research Chair in E-Learning Practices
Thompson Rivers University
+1 250 852 6256
http://learningspaces.org/n/
New Book – Re-Thinking E-Learning Research (http://elearn.tru.ca)

CFP : : Technological Learning & Thinking 2010

TL&T 2010 Call for Papers
Technological Learning & Thinking: Culture, Design, Sustainability, Human Ingenuity
June 17-21, 2010
Vancouver, British Columbia

International conference sponsored by The University or British Columbia and The University of Western Ontario, Faculties of Education, in conjunction with the Canadian Commission for UNESCO.

The conference organizing committee invites papers that address various dimensions or problems of technological learning and thinking. Scholarship is welcome from across the disciplines including Complexity Science, Design, Engineering, Environmental Studies, Education, History, HCI, Indigenous Studies, Philosophy, Psychology, and Sociology of Technology, and STS. The conference is designed to inspire conversation between the learning and teaching of technology and the cultural, environmental, and social study of technology.

CFP: TL&T 2010 Call for Papers
For more details: http://learningcommons.net

Lecturer bans students from using Google and Wikipedia

Originally from The Argus

Lecturer bans students from using Google and Wikipedia
By Andy Chiles

A lecturer has criticised students for relying on websites like Google and Wikipedia to do their thinking for them.
Professor Tara Brabazon, from the University of Brighton, said too many young people around the world were taking the easy option when asked to do research and simply repeating the first things they found on internet searches.
She has dubbed the phenomenon “The University of Google”. Continue reading

Critical Mass September 28, 2007

Hi folks, critical mass was a great success this year. It was amazing fun! We went over almost every bridge attached to downtown, which was very satisfying. I felt like I was in a swarm during the ride. It is quite fascinating how the swarm moves. Sometimes individuals from the swarm stop at the intersections and in various necessary places along the way. Other members of the swarm thank those individuals for stopping. This stopping is called: blocking or corking. As the swarm moves, the stopped members are swept back up by the moving mass.

Critical Mass CM

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Search Engine

This CBC Radio program looks at the ways the Internet is affecting the society. Podcasts can be found at:

http://www.cbc.ca/searchengine/

The latest show presented the situation at Jena 6. See YouTude for an overview of the situation. This is Collateral Unfiltered News:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=YuoiZnr4jLYÂ

Doll Web Sites Drive Girls to Stay Home and Play

Interesting article in the New York Times today about girls and social networking sites. The second page has some quotes from Sherry Turkle.

Technology Addict

On YouTube: Managing Editor of Forbes cries after The Today Show takes away his Blackberry for a week.

addiction.jpg

Click to play video