Dr. Jimmie Ivory in Communications here on campus has been working extremely hard to initiate a gamer/virtual worlds colloquium series on campus. His hard work has paid off as the first speak in the series will be Dr. Dmitri Williams from the Annenberg School at USC. More on his talk follows:

2009 VT G.A.M.E.R. Lab Virtual Guest Scholar
(via videoconference)

Dr. Dmitri Williams
Annenberg School for Communication,
University of Southern California

“The mapping principle and other oddities:
Recent findings from the Virtual Worlds Exploratorium”

Thursday, 26 February 2009
12:30 p.m. – 1:30 p.m.    
123A Burruss Hall

• Open to all Virginia Tech faculty, staff, and students.
• Scholar’s presentation will be followed by Q&A and discussion.

Dmitri Williams is an Assistant Professor at the Annenberg School for
Communication at the University of Southern California. His research
interests lie in the social impacts of newcommunication technologies and
online communities, with a special interest in games and virtual worlds.

More on the series and upcoming talks can be found on the series flyer.

As part of the Learning Without Boundaries Project, sponsored in part by the Virginia Governor’s Productivity Investment Fund, we’re developing applications for the iPod Touch. Besides investigating the use of free and fee-based applications, we are in the process of developing our own prototypes. Of course, it helps to see what’s out there to compare and gain inspiration. Below is a quick demonstration of a tangram application that is very well done and provides many insights to design and development.

Playing Spore on iPod Touch.

On an admittedly small scale, we are working with a single middle school science teacher and her class to design an endogenous game experience with Spore.  Our ambition is to take a gradual approach by working a lesson plan at a time and then expanding to other topics, classrooms, and schools.

Of course, there are those who are much more ambitious, which is the case of Quest to Learn (Q2L). As the mission statement notes, Quest balances:

traditional academic needs with the reality that students today can and do learn in different ways, often through work with digital media, games, online networks, and mobile technologies…Quest supports a dynamic curriculum that uses the underlying design principles of games to create highly immersive, game-like learning experiences for students. Games and other forms of digital media also model the complexity and promise of “systems.” Understanding and accounting for this complexity is a fundamental literacy of the 21st century.

This sounds like a very timely, well-conceived plan for teaching middle and high school students in the 21st century.  It will certainly provide an interesting case study and petri dish for many of the theoretical principles and design statements being covered in our class. Also, it will be interesting to compare our small efforts in rural southwest Virgina to the urban setting of New York City.

This week the class is officially starting a 10-week playtesting session with games and platforms of their choice. One team has selected Civilization IV, one Spore, and a third Second Life. I am tagging along wth the Spore team as I prepare a book chapter discussing the incorporation of Cell and Creature stages into a middle school science class in the area.

"Xi Bao" - my creature just after making land.

As I play Spore I’m trying to keep in mind ideas from Gee’s, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (2ed). We’re using this text to help better justify and articulate why spending up to 50 hours (and more) of course time playing COTS video games and exploring Second Life. This being the first week, I have nothing more to report that I’ve made it past the Cell Stage. My creature, who still retains his cell name (”xi bao” is Mandarin for “cell”), admittedly not a creative moniker.

Critically Engaging the 21st Century Learner in Visual Worlds and Virtual Environments
41st Annual Conference
International Visual Literacy Association (IVLA)
www.ivla.org

CALL for PROPOSALS
Proposals due: March 21st 2009

DePaul University, Chicago, Illinois- USA
October 6-9, 2009

You are cordially invited to submit a proposal for the 41st Annual Conference of the International Visual Literacy Association (IVLA), October 6-9, 2009, in Chicago, Illinois.  IVLA’s annual conference provides scholars and researchers, teachers and students, artists, and other professionals with interests and activities relating to the multi-disciplinary field of Visual Literacy, an opportunity to present their work, and constructively interact with peers. The conference facilitates exchange of best and innovative practices, presentation of research results, discussion of work in progress, and showcase of art installations. Paper presentations, symposia and panel sessions, roundtable discussions, workshops and demonstrations, poster sessions, and visual exhibits are invited.

Game On! Blacksburg, VA

NEW! Teacher Session: This year, IVLA is organizing a special half-day session for K-12 educators who can also earn CPDUs through their attendance. This half-day session will be filled with useful and practical information about visual literacy. Teachers will have the opportunity to learn more about visual literacy and how it can be integrated into the curriculum, as well as receive practical advice and suggestions for projects. For this session, we are looking for lively, captivating topics, hands-on activities, instructional and learning strategies, standards-based projects, quality resources, and clear evaluation rubrics that teachers can put to immediate use with their students. Topics need to be short, creative, and directly related to K-12 education. If you feel that you have a topic that will fit into this special session, please submit your proposal as a teacher session. NB SIGTE members please identify yourselves in your proposal submission!

IVLA 2009 CfP - Full details