Proposal Title
Filling the Gaps Between Theory and Practice: Co-Developing the GameSpace Learning Laboratory
Proposal Type
Individual Presentation
Location
Olscamp 225: Designing Collaboration
Start Date
21-10-2017 2:15 PM
End Date
21-10-2017 3:30 PM
Abstract
Our goal in this collaborative presentation is to examine how the GameSpace Learning Lab might create future opportunities for furthering research, developing hands-on teaching practices, making WAC and WID connections with other departments, creating new or augmented course designs/offerings, and eventually influence the gaming industry as a whole.
Filling the Gaps Between Theory and Practice: Co-Developing the GameSpace Learning Laboratory
Olscamp 225: Designing Collaboration
Our goal in this collaborative presentation is to examine how the GameSpace Learning Lab might create future opportunities for furthering research, developing hands-on teaching practices, making WAC and WID connections with other departments, creating new or augmented course designs/offerings, and eventually influence the gaming industry as a whole.
Proposal
The practice of using technology, particularly video games and forms of play as impactful for learning, is not a new phenomenon. Scholars have noted that forms of play have existed since ancient times and that today’s technology has only created opportunities to immensely explore the often rich and curious worlds of these games. What is relatively new is the permeation of games into dedicated rhetoric and composition courses, mainstream research, and scholarship. In order to further understand and refine this kind of work, we created the GameSpace Learning Laboratory in the General Studies Writing program at BGSU.
Our goal in this presentation is to examine our collaboration and discussions that led to the creation of this lab, specifically the way that the gaming lab might bridge gaps in thinking about video games in terms of their production, consumption, and meaning-making possibilities. We hope to identify how a lab of this kind might create future opportunities for furthering research, developing hands-on teaching practices, making WAC and WID connections with other departments, creating new or augmented course designs/offerings, and eventually influence the gaming industry as a whole.
By providing what Adam Banks describes as “functional access” to gaming spaces, we hope to push both students and faculty toward not only “critical access” to gaming technologies, interfaces, and textual experiences, but also toward fostering “transformational access” to promote change and growth in student’s academic work and future lives as citizens.