Understanding games education – an open (re)source

ETC Press is a publishing imprint with a twist, being interested in the participatory future of content creation across multiple media.

Great credibility and open source  adds up to a great way to transform learning!

ETC Press  is an academic, open source, multimedia, publishing imprint affiliated with the Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and in partnership with Lulu.comETC Press has an affiliation with the Institute for the Future of the Book and MediaCommons, sharing in the exploration of the evolution of discourse.

ETC Press also has an agreement with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) to place ETC Press publications in the ACM Digital Portal, and another with Feedbooks to place ETC Press texts in their e-reading platform. Also, ETC Press publications will be in the ThoughtMesh.

ETC Press publications focus on issues revolving around entertainment technologies as they are applied across a variety of fields.

Thanks to a tweet from @lernys I’ve now happily downloaded a copy of Ludoliteracy: Defining, Understanding, and Supporting Games Education, by José P. Zagal.

[cover thumbnail]This is free and looks like a very worthwhile read. Grab yourself a copy.

Book Description:

It seems like teaching about games should be easy. After all, students enjoy engaging with course content and have extensive experience with videogames. However, games education can be surprisingly complex.

This book explores ludoliteracy, or the question of what it means to understand games, by looking at the challenges and problems faced by students taking games-related classes. In response to these challenges, this book then describes how online learning environments can be used to support learning about games by helping students get more from their experiences with games, and helping students use what they know to establish deeper understanding.

Based on the findings from a series of research studies, Ludoliteracy examines the broader implications for supporting games education.

Check out more Current Titles on games, media, design, communications and social networks.

Cool class project

I’m really enjoying reading The Thinking Stick at the moment, mainly because Jeff pushes the boundaries non-stop. I love these thoughts from I don’t want to integrate it, I want to embed it.

What I want..is technology to be embedded into the classroom. Into the learning environment. I am tired of trying to integrate it into a process, a classroom, or a curriculum that was never made to integrate technology to begin with.No, what I want is to start at the very bottom and embed technology tools, skills, and standards into lessons, our classrooms, and our outcomes……What if we truly acted like technology was just part of us, part of education, part of educating students today. What if we start embedding it and stopped integrating it?

Jeff models this every day for us. What about this coll class project – Teen Tek.

Perhaps you have some teens who would enjoy this too. Or perhaps you can adapt this idea for your own students in some way.