arvel supernews july 2011

1. arvel sig SuperNews Applied Research in Virtual Environments for Learning July 2011

In this issue

Invitation to submit immersive learning research for AERA 20124

By Lisa Dawley, ARVEL Chairperson

Welcome to the ARVEL SuperNews! 6

By Jonathon Richter & Sabine Lawless-Reljic

Introducing The ARVEL SuperNews Editorial Board 8

Editor At-Large : Jodi Asbell-Clarke

Augmented Reality Editor : Patrick OShea

Emerging Technology Editor : Jeremy Kemp

Video Games Editor:Moses Wolfenstein

Virtual Worlds Editor : Annie Jeffery

ARVEL Research Wiki Editor :Nicole Miller

ARVEL Research Wiki Editor : John Muratet

The Ecology of a Gaming Environment 10

By Jodi Asbell-Clarke, ARVEL SuperNews Editor At-Large

Introducing the Augmented Reality Column of the ARVEL SuperNews15

By Patrick OShea,ARVEL SuperNews Augmented Reality Editor

Emerging Technology and Finding the Smartest Recombinations17

By Jeremy Kemp,ARVEL SuperNews Emerging Technology Editor

Games in ARVEL 21

By Moses Wolfenstein, ARVEL SuperNews Video Games Editor

Welcome to Exploring Virtual Learning Worlds 26

By Annie Jeffery, ARVEL SuperNews Virtual Worlds Editor

Invitation to submit immersive learning research for AERA 2012

Lisa Dawley, ARVEL Chair 2011 - 2013

Greetings, and welcome to another exciting year with ARVEL SIG!Change is in the air, and we are so proud to welcome our new officers, new editorial board members and super newsletter editors, and many new members to the SIG.

First, let me introduce you to this years officers:

Lisa Dawley, Boise State University:Chair

Jonathon Richter, University of Oregon: Past Chair

Chris Dede, Harvard University:Honorary Chair

Scott Warren, University of North Texas: Program Chair

Amy Cheney, Appalachian State University:Workshop Coordinator

Brian Nelson, Arizona State University:Secretary/Treasurer

Patrick OShea, Appalachian State University: Special Events

Sabine Lawless-Reljic, Independent: Communications

Dennis Beck, University of Arkansas:Membership

Shari Metcalfe, Harvard University:Awards

A huge high five and my greatest thanks is owed to our esteemed past chair and SIG co-founder, Jonathon Richter, for his four amazing years of leadership to launch and establish the SIG.Jon will still remain very actively involved as he works with Sabine, Jodi Asbell-Clarke, and other top-notch contributors to create our first Super Newsletter, with the very latest insights into the world of educational research and immersive learning environments.

Scott Warren will be overseeing this years AERA program and call for proposals.Please consider joining us in Vancouver, as were planning a fun-filled (oh yes, we play games!) and interesting program, complete with sessions, papers, our engaging hands-on workshop, and some quest-based gameplay to support our inquiry into the Shifting Relationships among Scholarship, Learning, and Immersive Technologies.Proposals are due July 22dont miss it.Its sure to be a blast!

Finally, many thanks to Nicole Miller and John Muratet for volunteering to oversee

the development of our wiki project, which you can read more about in the newsletter.We need your contributions!

We look forward to your support this year, in whatever form that might take, and encourage you to participate with us as we head forward on our journey to explore, develop and understand the use of immersive learning in the 21 stcentury.Were on a mission to change education, as our world continues to change around uswe need innovators like you to make it happen!

Warm regards to you all,

Welcome to the ARVEL SuperNews!

co-Editors in Chief Jonathon Richter and Sabine Lawless-Reljic

Immersive learning environments continue to emerge, grow, and morph at astonishing rates. New platforms such as Jibe and Kitely in virtual worlds, new interfaces such as EEG controllers and the Microsoft Xbox Kinect for video games, and countless new corporate and grant-funded research projects across the Spectrum of Virtuality continue to inject fresh new ideas, new concepts, and new approaches to educational research for the immersive digital learning field. The Applied Research in Virtual Environments for Learning (ARVEL) Special Interest Group at AERA continues to embrace and create context for this unique research community by inviting them to dialogue and responding with a cross-section of community services.

In addition to forming and operating a successful SIG within AERA and hosting a substantive program each year at the AERA Annual Conference, ARVEL SIG has conducted weekly public virtual meetings on a broad range of relevant research topics, established a variety of outposts in other immersive learning settings to showcase virtual learning research, offered unique immersive learning hands-on learning opportunities and topical workshops at the Annual Conference, and hosted a social network and evolving member-contributed Immersive Learning Research wiki. This issue 1.1 of the ARVEL SuperNews represents yet another iteration in ARVELs collective attempts to best serve and provide an optimal framework for our emerging Community of Practice.

The ARVEL SuperNews aims to bring research-related news and related events from across the Virtual Spectrum. From fully immersive virtual world and video games to immersive experiences that rely more on the physical world and the digital but slightly augmenting the learning experience through cues and story to emerging forms of immersive learning and issues the ARVEL SuperNews has identified four areas - Virtual Worlds, Video Games, Augmented Reality, and Emerging Technologies and four active scholars with expertise in these areas to assemble our first SuperNews Editorial Board across this Spectrum of Virtuality. Set to publish on a quarterly basis, the ARVEL SuperNews aims to comb these related-but-unique immersive learning sectors, examine them through the lens of educational research, and better compile them for those interested in learning in immersive environments. Because we understand the very arbitrary nature of these artificially devised sectors across the Virtual Spectrum and the breathtaking complexity with which experts are grappling with to fully deal with the technological, pedagogical, and

research-related issues in this space, weve additionally appointed an at large position to assist with seeing the larger picture and weaving the connections among and between Games, Virtual Worlds, Augmented Reality, and Emerging Technologies beats.

While the ARVEL SuperNews Team invites ARVEL SIG members and the greater community to submit newsworthy items whether it be immersive learning events, new technology releases, educational program announcements, related grant or projects opportunities, or germane opinion pieces, we are also keenly interested in publishing unique research-related articles related to immersive learning.

ARVEL SuperNews has set up an Editorial Review process for accepting and peer reviewing substantive evidence-based articles within the ARVEL SuperNews on a periodic basis. Published Quarterly, the ARVEL SuperNews will accept submissions in APA format of reports of immersive educational research up to 3000 words. Though well accept and review such submissions on any topic, submitters are encouraged to submit articles that fit the ARVEL SuperNews topic. The yearly calendar will be set each spring following AERA and may be found in each issue of the ARVEL SuperNews following the Table of Contents in each issue.

The ARVEL Executive Committee is very excited to offer the SuperNews and would invite you to join us in extending a very warm welcome to our SuperNews Editorial Staff for 2011 2012:

Editor At-Large: Jodi Asbell-Clarke

Augmented Reality: Patrick OShea

Emerging Technologies: Jeremy Kemp

Video Games: Moses Wolfenstein

Virtual Worlds: Annie Jeffery

We will see you inworld!

Jonathon Richter, co-founder of ARVEL SIG and Past Chair

Sabine Lawless-Reljic, ARVEL Communications Chair

Introducing the ARVEL Editorial Board

Editor At-Large Jodi Asbell-Clarke

I am the director of the Educational Gaming Environments group (EdGE, http://edge.terc.edu) at TERC in Cambridge, MA. My career has taken me from working as a onboard navigation software analyst on the first 25 missions of the space shuttle program to graduate work in both astrophysics and education and teaching high school in between. For the past two decades I have been developing innovative materials for NSF-funded science education programs for K-12 students, teachers, and informal science audiences. Currently I am working with the EdGE team to foster, support, and measure scientific inquiry in several different types of social digital games, ranging from massively multiplayer online environments (MMOs) to web-based and augmented reality handheld games. EdGE is studying the design scaffolds that foster voluntary and high quality scientific knowledge building in social digital games. EdGE games includeMartian Boneyards a game of scientific mystery that took place in summer 2010 in the MMO,Blue Mars.Our next game,Canaries in a Coalmine,is a web-based alternate reality game starting in summer 2011 (http://inacoalmine.com)

As editor-at-large of the ARVEL SIG supernewsletter, I will be keeping an eye on the overarching models that are emerging in the intersection of games and learning sciences. To kick this off, I offer a model that has emerged from our work at EdGE. We have found an ecological model useful to think about both design and research of educational gaming environments and particularly, about the relationship between design and research, and the relationship between games and learning.

ARVEL SIG Research Wiki Editor Nicole Miller

Nicole C. Miller is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Curriculum, Instruction, and Special Education, with a minor in instructional technology at Mississippi State University. Prior to beginning the Ph.D. program she worked as a social studies and educational technology teacher at a Los Angeles middle school. She earned a Master of Arts degree in Education with an emphasis on Computers in Instruction from California State University, Northridge. She earned her B.A. in Political Science at UCLA. Her current research interests include the use of virtual worlds for learning, technology integration and middle level education.

The Ecology of a Gaming Environment

Jodi Asbell-Clarke, ARVEL SuperNews Editor At-Large

Social digital gaming is an explosive phenomenon where youth and adults are engaged in inquiry for the sake of fun. While U.S. learners are becoming increasingly disengaged with formal and informal learning environments, nearly all youth and most adults are engaging more and more in Internet-based free-choice games (Ito et al., 2008; Lenhart, Purcell, Smith, & Zickhur, 2010).

In social digital games, players activities can be suggestive of powerful learning models such as the community of practice model (Lave & Wenger, 1991). The community of practice model grows from situated learning theory, which suggests that knowledge, activity, and environments are inextricably entangled (Lave, 1988). The game design and players activity directly mediate the players knowledge building and learning, which in turn impact the design and evolution of the game.

In games, players often work together as part of a community to solve (often domain-specific) problems with access to informational resources and tools necessary for each problem (McGonigal, 2011). Peer-review, collaboration, sharing and analysis of data, and evidence-based reasoning are occurring in many popular role-playing games (e.g.,World of Warcraft ) (Steinkeuhler & Duncan, 2008; Asbell-Clarke et al., 2011). These gaming activities are similar to the habits of practicing scientists in professional communities who share data and observations, challenge and confirm each others claims, and work together to build theories through a well-recognized and explicit peer-review system (Dunbar, 2000).

A social gaming environment is a system of design, activity, and progress that continually evolves with the participation of its community. The players are as much a part of the evolving design as the game developersthey are all part of an interconnected ecosystem (see Figure 1).

In this ecosystem model, the game is not delivered to the community, but rather emerges from it. Game designers create an environment with tools and resources, and create an initial storyline that evokes player activity. Much thought and research goes into how to develop: a) an environment that will draw players in, b) tools that make it easy for players to do the activities they are meant to do, and c) a narrative that compels them to continue on. This careful design process is not finished once the game starts, it continues as players start interacting with, and shaping, the game.

This framework of an ecosystem for games is not unique. Gee (2004) describes a game as just this type of complex system that is emergent between the system that a designer puts in place and the way the player interacts within the

system. Cormier and Siemens (2010) describe learning environments as systems that foster and support the creation of communities and that are designed to be consistent with how learners learn. Li, Clarke, and Winchester (2010) use a learning theory they call enactivism to describe how learners can influence their own learning environment, particularly in gaming.

Figure 1: A framework for a participatory gaming environment ecosystem

In a well-crafted social game, players may form a community while interacting with the game tools and resources and with each other. Within this community, roles and identities emerge that mediate players learning within the game. Game designers may play characters to help facilitate the game and learn from the community how to proceed in the ongoing design, allowing for an evolving, dynamic game experience that is responsive to the player community. Players activity results in progress in the game in terms of their advancement within the game (points or status) and also their individual and community knowledge-building. The new roles, knowledge, and social structures they have established become an integral part of the designed game, creating an evolving interdependent ecosystem of design, activity, and progress.

This ecosystem framework opens the door to a variety of innovative pedagogical and research questions for learning in games, for example:

How can we design gaming environments to channel players

emergent inquiry towards question of intellectual and educational interest?

How can we support players activities to foster high quality inquiry in a variety of areas?

How can we measure the players progress in games in ways that relate to learning that is applicable in the real world?

In a participatory model, the community itself is central to the answers for each of these questions. The design of the game (the narrative, the aesthetic experience, and/or the social experience) can pique players interests and encourage deeper interactions, however the drive for the inquiry must come from the players. Designers are able to support and nurture players inquiry by providing access to a rich array of high quality digital tools and resources, embedded in a rich and open-ended compelling storyline. Some of these tools may be game elements designed with strong pedagogical grounding in learning sciences. Resources may include global (and publically-available) databases of scientific, medical, and other research data useful for knowledge building within complex game narratives. Some of the suggestions even may come from players who only have the goal of leveling up in mind, but nonetheless can find very innovative solutions for accomplishing that goal.

Players may be enticed to sustain their activity in the game by their own curiosity as well as their sense of advancement in the game, possibly by points that lead to leveling up in status and also through recognition and roles that emerge in the relationships among players in the community. Gamers own sense of identity as it relates to achievement in the game may play a key role in their desire, confidence, and perhaps eventually their competence in skill areas related to the game.

The social structures that players build and adopt in the game become part of the narrative and game experience for players. The information and resources that they gather, and ultimately the knowledge that they build, can become the driver for further game design. In a completely nimble and responsive system, designers can be developing new tools, storylines, and characters based on the evolving storyline driven by player interest.

This open-ended design for educational gaming environments raises as many challenges as exciting research questions. Learning that takes place in games is motivated differently than formal learningit instills a different mode of collaborative and participatory involvement in the learning design, and it likely needs very different measures than learning weve observed in formal environments. There may need for a more post hoc examination of content learning goals rather than designing towards specific content outcomes. Participatory cultures, where knowledge building is

decentralized from any one authority, may also include very different models for assessment such as wisdom-of-crowds and innovation crowd-sourcing. There is much research to be done to understand how designed assessments can be used to measure learning that takes place in an evolving and open-ended environment.

In the answers to these questions lies the vision and potential for social digital games to become transformative vehicles for learning environments of tomorrow. And with that research may lie solutions to the disconnect between our current educational systems and the exciting media and cultural venues in which digital natives are spending their lives.

References

Asbell-Clarke, J., Edwards, T., Larsen, J., Rowe, E., Sylvan, E., & Hewitt, J. (2011, April).Collaborative Scientific Inquiry in Arcadia: An MMO gaming environment on Blue Mars.Paper presented at the American Education Research Association Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA.

Cormier, D., & Siemens, G. (2010). Through the Open Door, Open courses as research, learning and engagement.Educause Review, 45 (4), 30-39.

Dunbar, K. (2000). How Scientists Think in the World: Implications for Science Education.Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 21 (1), 49-58.

Gee, J. P. (2004).Situated language and learning: A critique of traditional schooling . London: Routledge.

Ito, M., Horst, H., Bittani, M., Boyd, D., Herr-Stephenson, B., Lange, P. G., et al. (2008).Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project . Chicago: John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning.

Lave, J. (1988).Cognition in Practice . New York: Cambridge University Press.

Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991).Situated learning: Legitimate peripheral participation . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Lenhart, A., Purcell, K., Smith, A., & Zickuhr, K. (2010).Social Media & Mobile Internet Use Among Teens and Young Adults . Washington, DC: Pew Internet & American Life Project. Retrieved fromhttp://www.pewinternet.org/~/media//Files/Reports/2010/PIP_Social_Media_and_Young_Adults_Report_Final_with_toplines.pdf.

Li, Q., Clarke, B., & Winchester, I. (2010). Instructional design and technology grounded in enactivism: A paradigm shirt?British Journal of Educational Technology, 41 (3), 403-419.

McGonigal, J. (2011).Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World . New York: Penguin Press.

Steinkuehler, C., & Duncan, S. (2008). Scientific Habits of Mind in Virtual Worlds.Journal of Science Education and Technology, 17 (6), 530-543.

Introducing the Augmented Reality Column of the ARVEL SuperNews

Patrick OShea, ARVEL SuperNews Augmented Reality Editor

Welcome to the inaugural issue of the ARVEL SIG Super Newsletter.Its my responsibility, as the Augmented Reality (AR) editor for the newsletter, to explore the history, current status and future of AR within educational settings.I hope to do this with a fair amount of academic rigor, intellectual curiosity, good humor, and help from my friends.

For those readers who are unfamiliar with the concept of Augmented Reality, at its most basic level it is the practice of placing digital information on top of a physical space in such a way that it can be accessed using a technological tool.This can take many forms and there are numerous tools available with which this data overlay can be accomplished (see, for example Layar or Juneio) and the list is growing every day.Each of these tools acts as a medium through which digital information can be either placed atop the real world or accessed. Part of the purview of this publication will be to explore these tools for their educational usage and provide you, our reader, with a sense of their utility and application to educational settings.Moving forward, each issue will attempt to highlight some of the tools that are available exploring the features and educational affordances of each.It is unlikely that we will ever be able to have an exhaustive list of the different AR tools, but we will do our best to cover as many as we possibly can.

The availability of these types of tools, however, doesnt ensure the appropriate use of AR in educational settings.After all, as most any educational technologist will tell you, the technology itself isnt enough it must be placed into some larger context in order to be effective. Essentially, it should be the solution to an educational problem rather than a solution in search of a problem.Educators should address the needs of their classrooms using whatever tools are most appropriate.Augmented Reality can be a tool that answers various educational needs, but, as a technology, it is only as good as the context in which it is placed.

So, the question becomes, what is the educational problem that AR addresses?Answering that question will be the other part of this publication.More specifically, exploring how the tools can best be used to address that answer will be the focus of the AR section of the ARVEL SIG Super Newsletter.

Squire and Jan (2007) define educational AR as games played in the real world with the support of digital devices (PDAs, cellphones) that create a fictional layer on top of the real world context (p. 7).This, however, raises the issue of what the word games means an area of no small dispute in educational circles.For specifics of this dispute, I would defer to Moses Wolfenstein, who is the Games editor for this publication.I do, however, like the definition of games offered by Bernard Suits, who said playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles (as quoted by McGonigal, 2011, p. 22).I read this as meaning that, in their purest forms, games are freely accepted challenges something that most of us would probably agree is what we wish for students.

What this means in practical terms is that we will have to explore more than just the different AR technologies.We will also have to explore the ways in which these tools are used in educational settings.We will be looking to answer the question of what educational problems exist that AR can effectively address.We will be hoping to grow the field of inquiry into educational AR and the circle of practitioners in a meaningful way.We will be looking to spread the word beyond that circle of practitioners.Youll notice that Ive used the word we a great many times in this introduction.I have done this for a very specific purpose I need your help to do these things.I need you to tell me about AR tools that you have found and explored.I need your help to describe the educational uses of these tools.And, most importantly, Ill need your help to answer the larger question of what educational needs are addressed by AR technologies.

Were at a very interesting and exciting time.The field of AR in educational settings is still at an early stage.There are many exciting and innovative initiatives underway, and there is great opportunity to explore the landscape of these tools and make sense of whats available to us.But theres also an opportunity to inform the direction that the field of AR takes moving forward.We can do more than encapsulate what is happening in the area of AR we can make happen those things that wed like to see happen.After all, as Dennis Gabor said in 1963, the future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented.

Emerging Technology and Finding the Smartest Recombinations,Part 1: Creole Tech Jeremy Kemp, ARVEL SuperNews Emerging Technologies Editor The last annual conference gave me a chance to experience New Orleans for the first time. What a trip! NOLA is the creole birthplace of Cajun, zydeco and Jazz. It struck me that the citys mashup heritage is an interesting metaphor for ARVEL. Its centuries of emergent hybridization parallel our habits as educators using virtual worlds for learning. Like New Orleans, the SIG is a hotbed of hybridization. Our creative experts sample, remix and explore liminal spaces. We beg, borrow and steal technologies and narratives from literacy education (Gee, 2003)(Caperton, 2010), physics (Squire, 2004), neuroscience (Hunter, 2003), social psychology (Yee, 2007), fantasy fiction (Berger, 2006), dystopian battlefields and even the preschool playground. This article is a mashup tale of America's "Most Unique City" and of AERA's most unique SIG to examine how we sample emerging technologies to achieve what advertising and design writer Warren Berger calls "smart recombinations." (Let me throw in some multimedia here and ask you to listen to a music file while you read. Im playing it while writing, and I will come back to it as an illustration later in the article. Please start this in the background: "Koop Island Blues" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEWW2zGGaKc) New Orlean's pastiche origins and ever shifting sociological boundaries suggest novel strategies for framing our new field and for describing our prescient work with emerging technology. Our SIG is still fuzzy around the edges, and this comparison makes it clear that the conceptual borders and topical outlines will remain perpetually fluid. We all know that ARVEL members are technically cutting-edge, but what makes our design and research on immersive settings like a stroll through the French Quarter with a Jazz soundtrack?First a thread on New Orleans, Louisiana.... If the US is a melting pot then NOLA is a piquant gulash. A cultural collage. NOLA wears the finery of centuries of emergent culture in its food, architecture and

languages. It has mad synthetic skills.Here's an example. Did you get a chance to sample the Beignets at the Caf Du Monde in New Orleans? AERA conference attendees lined up for these doughnut confections and sipped caf au lait before meandering into the more colorful bits. It's basically a square donut smothered in powdered sugar. Nothing fancy; just a messy dessert from the creole coffee stand (Danno, 2006). This old time treat was the highlight of my after-hours tourist treks into the French Quarter. I can't get this cuisine here in San Jose and it rings true as authentic culture without a factory marketing wrapper. Indeed, I was drawn joyously to the Caf as a California stripmall refugee. Caf Du Monde serves this fried doughy confection and it was named the official state doughnut of Louisiana. But it is not French. In fact, it doesnt much resemble French beignets de carnaval which are filled with fruit and lightly fried. It does rather share a lot in common with Italian zeppole, a popular treat served in the Italian-American community for St. Joseph's Day on March 19. This makes sense when you understand that by 1905 nearly a half of the Quarters population were Italian-born or second generation Italian-Americans. The donut may be Italian, but it is still technically "Crole." Before visiting New Orleans this first time, I'd always assumed that creole was a spice that big chain restaurants sprinkled on their meats. But the term first meant 'locally born of foreign roots.' These were the children of the French and Spanish colonists who cherished their language and culture even after Napoleon sold the city to Thomas Jefferson in 1803 -- along with 900,000 miles of its suburbs. Later the term morphed to describe the language, race and culture that mixed and mingled in NOLA. What does a donut have to do with ARVEL and emerging technology in virtual environments for learning? Now on to ARVEL. How do we predict or forecast "the new new thing" for virtual environments and learning? To quote Gibson's soon-to-be clich phrase,"The future is already here" Although this column purports to give you a roundup of emerging technologies, most academics reading this are already in the process of distributing that future reality in their work. We are the AERA's experts at repurposing tools to help our students. This is the core theme of the SIG - Creole tech.

In future columns I will be chronicling the ways ARVEL experts are adapting emerging technologies from disparate fields and using these connections to forecast areas for further exploration. I welcome your comments and suggestions. And why did I choose Koop as our soundtrack? This Swedish Jazz duo strings together thousands of samples to create the layered sound behind Ane Bruns haunting vocals and the accordion and clarinet you hear. For more on mashups in popular culture, read Kakutani (2010). Keywords for this concept include: sampling, hybrid vigor, dub remix, creole, smart recombination, liminality, mashup, lateral thinking, emergent gameplay, musique concrete, montage, collage. Sources Berger, W. (2009). Glimmer: How Design Can Transform Your Life and Maybe Even the World. The Penguin Press. ISBN 978-1594202339 Berger, A. (2006), Neverwinter Nights in the classroom, UMNnews. Retrieved fromhttp://www1.umn.edu/news/features/2006/UR_83484_REGION1.html Caperton, I. H. (2010). Toward a Theory of Game-Media Literacy: Playing and Building as Reading and Writing. International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations (IJGCMS), 2(1), 1-16. doi:10.4018/jgcms.2010010101 Danno. Beignet Recipe Nola Cuisine. 15 Jan. 2006. Retrieved fromhttp://www.nolacuisine.com/2006/01/15/beignet-recipe/ Gee, J. (2003). What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. New York: Palgrave/St. Martins. Hunter G. Hoffman, Todd Richards, Barbara Coda, Anne Richards and Sam R. Sharar. CyberPsychology & Behavior. April 2003, 6(2): 127-131. doi:10.1089/109493103321640310. Kakutani, M. (2010 July 1). A Mash-Up Culture: Ten to Watch. New York Times. Retreived fromhttp://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/17/a-mash-up-culture-ten-to-watch

Kurt Squire, Michael Barnett, Thomas Higgenbotham, and Jamillah Grant, Electromagnetism Supercharged! Paper published in The Proceedings of the 2004 International Conference on the Learning Sciences (Los Angeles: UCLA Press, 2004). Yee, N., Bailenson, J.N., Urbanek, M., Chang, F., & Merget, D. (2007). The unbearable likeness of being digital; The persistence of nonverbal social norms in online virtual environments. Cyberpsychology and Behavior , 10, 115-121. Wikipedia articles for New Orleans, Beignet, Creole, Warren Berger, Koop (band)

Games in ARVEL

Moses Wolfenstein, ARVEL SuperNews Video Games Editor

Where does the study of games fit within ARVEL? As games editor for this publication, I have a few ideas about what the answer to this question might be, and Ill offer a handful of thoughts on the matter here. However, there are also a number of salient reasons for leaving the question open as we embark upon this new endeavor. Just to name two, the field of games and learning is in the process of growing and expanding, and at the same time the concept of virtual worlds (or virtual environments) appears to be more dynamic now than it did even two or three years ago. As a result of the ongoing changes to research, theory, and practice around games and learning, I both expect and hope that the question of where games fit in ARVEL will in large part be defined through the growth of this publication over time. Still, some direction is certainly called for as we begin this journey. In the words of the inimitable Bilbo Baggins, It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to. (Tolkien, 1954) Hence to provide us with at least some minimal guidance as we step onto the road, here are a few of my impressions about where and how digital games based research fits into the ARVEL landscape.

To begin with, it seems likely that games are going to play an increasingly significant role in ARVEL in the near future, simply by virtue of the fact that games based learning is making significant headway in classrooms and other formal learning venues. With a recent spike in the development of effective games for learning from companies like Filament Games (Marino, 2010), and the successful implementation of game design based educational models like Quest2Learn (Salen et al, 2010), games are becoming an increasingly important feature in the landscape of educational practice. In fact, if you were at theGames+Learning+Societyconference last month, you might have noticed that more of the program than ever before was devoted to work around developing and using both digital and analog games in formal educational settings. Hence, as the A in ARVEL stands for Applied, grabbing hold of the games for learning trend and doing research around it that is meaningful for practitioners will likely be increasingly important for the ARVEL community as we move forward.

Following from this, I believe ARVEL is becoming an especially strong venue for games based work that includes studies of both the big virtual worlds like Second Life (Cooper et al, 2009), World of Warcraft (Steinkuehler, 2010), and Quest Atlantis (Barab, Gresalfi, & Ingram-Goble, 2010), and smaller digital ecologies, or micro-worlds as

theyve been referred to by a number of scholars (Ito, 2007; Games & Squire, 2011). After all, many of these micro-worlds are seeing deployment in classrooms (Rosenheck, Perry, & Klopfer, 2011; Tabula Digita, 2011), afterschool settings (Gee & Hayes, 2010), and informal learning environments (Dede, Ketelhut, & Ruess, 2003). Within the ARVEL framework of applied research for learning, this means theres space in a venue like this one for everything from response to intervention style studies that evaluate the use of a particular game, to reports on new developments around games for learning, to considerations of blended efforts that work to integrate digital games with face to face interaction.

In addition, there is also clearly space within ARVEL to look for lessons from the development of video games as designed experiences (Squire, 2011) or as models of situated and embodied learning (Gee & Hayes, 2011) that can inform the development of learning in formal and informal environments. Current work on3D GameLabfrom ARVELs own Lisa Dawley serves as just one example of applied (or translational) research that is taking place in this vein. Excitement around the topic of gamification, evident among both practitioners and some educational researchers, also provides a strong indication that game influenced design is likely to be an increasingly pertinent topic for the ARVEL community. In this latter regard, ARVEL in general and this publication in particular hold a great deal of promise for helping us to develop more nuanced understandings of what it means to make an experience more game-like, and what aspects of gamification do and do not hold promise in educational settings.

Of course, gamification is just one of many emerging practices and artifacts that promises to help define what role games research is likely to play for ARVEL. The release of the beta version of the game Minecraft by Marcus Notch Pearson late last year was met by almost immediate adoption into game-based learning curricula (Aubrecht, 2011; Gillispie, 2011). As Minecraft moves towards gold release later this year, it will continue to provide just one tool for both collaboration in the tradition of action research, and other forms of applied games and learning research that can inform educational practices. Of equal import is the ongoing release of new middleware tools that allow children and adults with little knowledge of programming to develop games and game-like experiences. Googles branching narrative toolGoogle Breadcrumband the game creation applicationStencyloffer us just two examples of increasingly powerful tools that open up opportunities for teachers, learners, and educational researchers to design and deploy games and game like experiences. Additionally, as new commercial games are released many of them like Little Big Planet 2 and even Portal 2 (its been a good year for sequels)

include level editors that offer new prospects for designing learning experiences for research and practice.

So, where will games and learning research fit in the ARVEL landscape? By my estimation, theyre likely to occupy a wide variety of roles as we push forward. Among other things, Thomas Malaby who did extensive ethnographic work at Linden Labs has noted that even Second Life owes a great deal of its structure and function to video games as a result of the experience many of the SL developers had in the industry prior to becoming Lindens (Malaby, 2009). In pursuing our agenda of applied research, ARVEL researchers will undoubtedly look both forward towards new and emerging game related developments, and back towards the core elements of games that predate the digital manifestations that continue to define many of our virtual environments. As we continue on the journey, together we will define and redefine how the study of games fits within the ARVEL landscape. To return again to the words of a certain hobbit, The Road goes ever on and on out from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone, and I must follow, if I can. (Tolkien, 1954) As we step out the door, we will surely be leaders and followers by turns, as we endeavor together to find out where games fit within ARVEL.

References

Aubrecht, M. (2011). How pecha kucha, as a visual medium, is ideal to demonstrate how games teach 21 stcentury skills. Presented at the 7 thannual Games+Learning+Society conference. Madison, WI. in June 2011.

Barab, S.A., Gresalfi, M. & Ingram-Goble, A. (2010). Transformational play: Using games to position person, content, and context.Educational Researcher .39 (7), pp. 525-536.

Cooper, T.L., Carroll, S.P., Liu, C., Franklin, T., & Chelberg, D. (2009) Using the virtual world of Second Life to create educational games for real world middle school science classrooms. Presented at the World Conference on Educational Multimedia, Hypermedia, and Telecommunications in Honolulu, HI. in June 2009.

Dede, C., Ketelhut, D. & Ruess, K. (2003). Motivation, usability, and learning outcomes in a prototype museum-based multiuser virtual environment. In P. Bell, R. Stevens, & T. Satwicz, (Eds.), Proceedings of the Fifth ICLS. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Games, A. & Squire, K.D. (2011). Searching for the fun in learning. In Tobias, S. & Fletcher, J.D. (Eds.),Computer games and instruction.Charlotte, NC:Information Age Publishing.

Gee, J.P. & Hayes, E.R. (2010).Women as gamers: The sims and 21 stcentury learning , New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

Gee, J.P. & Hayes, E.R. (2011)Language and learning in the digital age . New York, NY: Routledge

Gillispie, L. (2011).http://minecraftinschool.pbworks.com/w/page/37244189/FrontPage . Retrieved June 27, 2011.

Ito, M. (2007). Education v. entertainment: A culturalhistory of childrens software. In K. Salen (Ed.),Ecology of Games . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Malaby, T.M. (2009).Making virtual worlds: Linden lab and second life . Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Marino, M.T. (2010). Conceptualizing RTI in 21st-century secondary science classrooms: Video games' potential to provide tiered support and progress monitoring for students with learning disabilities.Learning disability quarterly 33 (4) pg. 299.

Rosenheck, L., Perry, J., & Klopfer, E. (2011). Beetles, beasties, and bunnies: Ubiquitous games for biology. Presented at the 7 thannual Games+Learning+Society conference. Madison, WI. in June, 2011.

Salen, K., Torres, R., Wolozin, L., Rufo-Tepper, R., & Shapiro, A. (2010).Quest to learn: Developing the school for digital kids . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Steinkuehler, C. (2010). Video games and digital literacies.Journal of adolescent and adult literacy .54 (1), pp. 61-63.

Squire, K.D. (2011).Video games and learning :Teaching and participatory culture in the digital age . New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Tabula Digita (2011).http://www.dimensionu.com/math/ . Retrieved June 27, 2011.

Tolkien, J.R.R. (1954)The fellowship of the ring . New York, NY: Ballantine Books.

Virtual Worlds: A Metaverse of Styles,

Annie Jeffery, ARVEL SuperNews Virtual Worlds Editor

Welcome, were really excited to launch this super newsletter and to begin working with all of you. First of all, I would like to introduce myself. My name is Annie Jeffery and Ill be your virtual worlds section editor. Originally an archaeologist, I have worked in educational technology since 1999 as educational technologist and instructional designer. Research interests have included social media, languages, multicultural education, biometrics and authentication, web 2.0 and intellectual property rights, languages, learning repositories and learning technology standards. I have been active in virtual teaching and researching since late 2006, taught virtual worlds classes for Boise State University since 2008. At present, I am busy working on my doctoral studies and my main focus of interest is the pedagogy of sound.

What do vision do I have for the virtual worlds section?

Virtual worlds have provided a fertile ground for collaboration and research, I feel that this newsletter could build on existing and create future communities of practice.

It could provide a forum to create new teams between practitioners and researchers, thereby sharing expertise and resources for all concerned. This would not only further professional development, but provide avenues for research in authentic educational environments. A blend of newsletter with in-world events, the create mini conferences in world would enable individual researchers to discuss their work with interested parties, share skills, expertise and research in an open, collaborative environment, which is also accessible to the wider world. The newsletter gives us an opportunity to:

debate the issue of where to now for virtual worlds research

discuss virtual worlds across their broad history of application and research; from MUDs, MOOs and MUSHs to Second Life, OpenSim,

provide access to a range of virtual worlds through the member network

disseminate events, news items, opportunities and conferences of ARVEL sig members and the wider world

encourage contributions from ARVEL SIG members for future newsletters

commission newsletter items from virtual world researchers across all academic disciplines

I also hope that you, our members, will suggest items or ideas that will help shape this newsletter to support your interests.

arvel supernews july 2011

Technology

lisa arvel sig supernews

learning arvel special

arvel supernews15

immersive learning research

arvel chairperson welcome

applied research

virtual learning worlds

virtual environments