EdTech600

One of my favorite Internet pundits.

Florida Virtual High School faces down-sizing amid competition.

Katie is a Professor in the School of Computing and Digital Media at DePaul University, and former Director of the Center for Transformative Media at Parsons the New School for Design, a research center focused on emerging trends in design and media. She locates her work in the field of game design and serves as the Executive Director of a non-profit called the Institute of Play that is focused on games and learning. Katie led the team that founded Quest to Learn in 2009, a 6-12th grade public school in New York City, and is helping to remix the model in Chicago at a new charter school called ChicagoQuest. Katie is co-author of Rules of Play, a textbook on game design, The Game Design Reader, Quest to Learn: Growing a School for Digital Kids, and editor of The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning, all from MIT Press. She has worked as a game designer for over 10 years and is a former co-editor of The International Journal of Learning and Media. She was an early advocate of the then-hidden world of machinima and continues to be interested in connections between game design, learning, and transformative modes of play.

 Institute of Play

I really like this graphic and the idea of viewing the things we can create in a game -- either as part of the game, as in Farmville, or as Machinima, as in Halo. The section this particular page is from, the "Games As" guides, has some interesting creativity-sparking ways of looking at games and using games in education. It doesn't start and end with just playing the game. In a way, this sort of exploration might be similar to the advanced reading Mortimer Adled espouses in "How to Read a Book." By that I mean that, just as reading a book can be done on many levels, so can playing a game. The more you explore a book or game, the more you get out of it and the more you truly learn from it.