Visiting with Game Designers in Budapest

I (virtually) visited a Political Ecology and Environmental Justice graduate class in Budapest to help them with their game design projects a few weeks back. I thought it was a great session, and I hope the students got useful feedback from me and my co-panelists. My full write-up and recording of the visit are on my …

“Collaborative Overload”: Professional Team Performance Through a Management Lens

From the Jan/Feb 2016 Harvard Business Review: Collaborative Overload. Emphasis mine: “Research we’ve done across more than 300 organizations shows that the distribution of collaborative work is often extremely lopsided. In most cases, 20% to 35% of value-added collaborations come from only 3% to 5% of employees…As a recent study led by Ning Li, of …

“Do Black Students Benefit as Grad Rates Increase?” (Often: No)

From the new report: Rising Tide II: Do Black Students Benefit as Grad Rates Increase? Emphasis mine: “[Andrew Nichols]: Our data show that almost 70 percent of the schools we studied increased graduation rates for black students from 2003-2013. However, those gains lagged behind those of white students, so more than half of institutions (53 percent) …

10 Tips for Building a Student Blog Network

From Laura Gibb’s Anatomy of an Online Course: 10 Tips for Building a Student Blog Network, this is a great mix of logistical streamlining and helping students achieve ownership.The great part about learning and teaching how to use blogs is how transferable the knowledge is; this isn’t like learning how to navigate a piece of proprietary …

Teaching Anthropology of/Through Games at UMass Amherst

Teaching Anthropology of/Through Games collects UMass Amherst professor Krista Harper’s reports on developing and teaching a class in Fall 2014 on anthropology, games, and how the two interact. I helped Krista develop the game design activities for her students, focused on having students explore models from seminal anthropology journal articles with game structures. The students did …

Where do faculty leave the innovation-decision process?

A rich-for-mining research article that could inform any strategy  for instructional innovation (while this is focused on physics, there’s a lot to draw from for any discipline): “Use of research-based instructional strategies in introductory physics: Where do faculty leave the innovation-decision process?” (2012) DOI:10.1103/PhysRevSTPER.8.020104 I recommend at least skimming through to the Discussion and Conclusions …

The main unit of instructional change in higher ed? The academic department.

A lot to chew on with this article! Here’s a few choice quotes: “Instead of steady-state interactions, a change agent may encourage the development of new ideas (emergent change) by connecting faculty members that do not usually interact and thus may have diverse perspectives…” “Because of these periphery nodes, this department may require prolonged support before …

Two recent studies on games and gamification in undergraduate classrooms.

The articles linked and abstracted below are both have many significant implications for using games and game-like designs for learning, but the key takeaway is that we can’t just say certain implementations of gameful learning work because they look and feel “right.” I’m so glad to see more assessment start rolling out, so we have …

Serious Games for Education

From Karl Kapp’s post: Abstracts of Three Meta-Analysis Studies of Serious Games: Serious games were found to be more effective in terms of learning and retention than conventional instruction methods. Mixed results concerning if learning games are more motivating or not than traditional instruction. Games should be supplemented with other instruction methods. Games should be played …

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