Seminar (presence) will be held on Thursdays from 10:00-12:00 (german time), starting with April 9th to July 16th 2009

From the description:

A player is usually intrinsically motivated and angst-free to experience and practice new knowledge in a problem-oriented and highly contextualised manner, bound to fail and retry in a controlled artificial environment – and even has fun doing so.
If the factual, practical, or reflective game-knowledge could be transfered to the player’s everyday life, we’d have an ideal educational setting (or a bloody massacre) at hand.
The stunning visuals of contemporary computergames lead to a common fallacy in the understanding of play: We don’t play games because they resemble reality. We play them because they don’t.

This seminar deals with ludic simulations, known as games, from a practical, theoretical and reflective point of view. One goal is to shed light on inherent antagonistic sides of games and media in general: Rule-bound compliance and stability, as well as an appropriatable and configurable space of possibilities. Further questions concern the use of games and play for (educational) representation of complex systems or ethical behaviour.

Conceptually this seminar takes place in its second term and is related to Pedagogical Media Theory, a major of the international MA study ePedagogyDesign. Students who have visited the previous seminar “Games, Play and Education” (summer term 2008) or “Pedagogical Media Theory exemplified by Game Based Learning” (winter term 2008/09) and already know how to apply the key texts on cognition, media, games and play – i.e. learning theories, medium and form, theories of games and play – may use this lecture as project seminar and are invited to draft, design, realise and reflect on a game usable for educational purposes.

I’m still not quite sure how to manage this option parallel to the quite time consuming offline-seminar here in Hamburg; probably with an assessive colloqium as a start, loose support during the term, and an online work-in-progress presentation in the last third of the course.

This term – winter 2008 – my seminar focussed on basics of media theory and their application to the understanding, use and creation of games in an educational frame. While my last seminar dealt mainly with learning theories and motivation, the view turned to media in general, in culture, communication and creation.
Taking a closer look at ‘New Media’ – networked digital media – isn’t simply learning about new channels for educative content. It may be a change from a receptive, interpretative, centralised form of communication to a configurative, collaborative, decentralised one. Both its’ (at this time) predominant traits, digitality supporting its role as recursive media-simulating metamedium, and networking supporting its role as global social medium, may influence the way we perceive information, knowledge and learning.
This seminar had a focus on ludic simulations, known as games and toys. These share some traits with digital media, but also may shed light on two inherent antagonistic sides: Rule-bound compliance and stability, as well as an appropriatable and configurable space of possibilities.

The seminar was divided into three parts:
First, theories of media and cognition by Marshal McLuhan, Scott McCloud, Niklas Luhmann, Gregory Bateson, Heinz von Foerster and Bertold Brecht, spiced up by examples and questions. What defines a medium? What medium is suited for which kind of content? How does a medium influence one’s cognition and culture?
Second, theories of game, play and gamedesign by Gregory Bateson, Brian Sutton-Smith, Roger Caillois, Johan Huizinga, Gonzalo Frasca, Chris Crawford and Kurt Squire, with samples abound. Questions here are: What defines a rule based game, what free playing? What can be ‘learned’ by playing, seen from a media theoretical point of view? How can games support educational intentions?
Third, project work including the conceptualisation, realisation and reflection of an edcuational game.

Review

Participation was moderate, compared to 2008 summerterm’s “Games, Play and Education”, with about 22 students from Hamburg and one student from Helsinki (via Skype).
Since I received strong positive feedback on the project-oriented structure of the seminar, but this time also had to cover a wide range of media theory, I stocked up the amount of texts to read, often dividing the students into two groups to read – and present – two different texts each session. In hindsight this didn’t work out as planned, since many texts – like Luhmann, McLuhan or Bateson – were both important for the conceptual understanding of media, but also quite hard to grasp. Discussion among students were also hindered. Future seminars will be held with one (or less) text per session, but accompanied by a small list of questions to direct the students’ attention to core concepts. Smaller or easier texts can still be read in multiple groups, as long as the subject is closely related to provide for a lively controverse discussion.

What I deemed quite successful for the topic of media theory was the example of diverse non-mainstream-media to represent strengths and weaknesses of media, like micro-content-videos (commoncraft-show), comics (McCloud), common seminar situations, and (digital) game examples. Translating educational content into an unfamiliar form provided by game requirements also proved inspirational for the students, who came up with six quite diverse projects, ranging from dedicated analog card-games to shooter-modifications to design-concepts.
Remarkable: Last term there were only digital game projects (one excellent one lost due to HD-crash!)of mostly analytical or conceptual nature; this time there was a dominance of analog game projects, which, due to their nature as handicraft-projects, got finished, and were testplayed by the seminar. I hope I can put them up in our Wiki.

There was also the experiment to use a shared wiki, with Ralf and Christina working on related or quite disparate topics. Creating (an, any) order to prevent the wiki slipping into chaos is quite the challenge, especially if the scrutiny of order and categorisation themselves is one of the main topics of the seminars. We’ll see how this’ll turn out over the next terms.

The goal was to give a theoretical and practical insight into games and play both in general, and more specific as means for learning within and about rule systems. Games and toys as interactive and changeable microcosms of rules, of perpetuation, variation and transgression, may deliver interesting insights into basically similar systems which are harder to access, change, or understand – like education or media.

The seminar started with about 50 students (mostly teachers-to-be) crammed into an ICT-seminar room laid out for about 20 people; and it was meant to work with an additional five online students from Finland and Spain. As communication platform I planned to use Skype-Video and/or Adobe Connect, as presentation and collaboration plattform there was a smartboard and ten Macintosh-computers in the room, with access to the faculty’s online communciation system ‘EduCommSy’ with a dedicated project room for announcements, links, reading materials, tasks, discussions, attached Wiki etc.

The second session showed that I was too optimistic in trying to attend to the needs and questions of a mixed presence and online audience that big and diverse, while at the same time handle, maintain and troubleshoot the technic, and also verbally and medially deliver coherent content and suggestions. The Skype-connections and Adobe Connect tended to break down or froze, the webcam had to be directed to the speaker in the seminar. During the third session, my Apple MacBook Pro with iSight Webcam I was using as communication-interface suffered a fatal hardware crash, taking texts and drafts with it. Bad Karma.
From that point, I decided to split the seminar into an asynchronous online and offline seminar; not in the spirit of the game, but at least technically reliable, and, though requiring a higher workload, better to manage for me.

The interests and preconceptions shown by the students in games in general were – to speak mildly – very diverse, from students who hadn’t played at all (not even board- or cardgames) to professional working with commercial games. The approach of integrating all these different takes later on showed to be a mistake, it heightened the burden for me to dig for relevant questions, tasks and source texts, and irritated many students, who were longing for a clear, strong lead and a coherent linear path through the seminar.
Interestingly many students in the beginning complained about the high amount of theoretical texts I uploaded to the Community System (though they liked the ease of access to the texts), while the remaining students later on, in the feedback session, expressed the wish for more theoretical texts and sessions.
This was probably due to the functional split of the seminar, which combined a theoretical foundation in the first eight session with a practical project group approach in the remaining six sessions. After the first theoretical half of the seminar, the number of students was down to about 18, but kept stable and highly motivated till the end of the seminar.
This is – and will be – a problem for me: How to downsize a seminar to a workable groupsize without explicit exclusions? How to integrate the students’ diverse interests in a topic without losing coherence and thus foster disorientation?

On the other hand I was surprised how inventive and motivated some groups tackled their projects, and how much dedication flowed into games and programs. Although some groups restrained themselves to the ’safer’ approach of analysing existing games or genres, there were also some highly ambitious goals I hope will stand out as ‘work in progress’ in the end, due to the sheer amount of technical, creative and theoretical expertise it will probably cost to finalise them ‘for real’.

There is a Wiki as virtual collaborative workspace/showroom attached to the seminar’s online EduCommSy-project room, where you can browse notes on the seminar and the groups’ projects. The projects will (hopefully) be finalised in September:
http://www.commsywiki.uni-hamburg.de/wikis/197543/1186929/

Thanks!

The next international Seminar is said to be in the begin of October and should be held in Barcelona (great!).

I thougt about if a BarCamp as a open Structure for this Seminar might be right decision. For those of you who don’t know yet what a BarCamp is:

BarCamp is an ad-hoc unconference born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from attendees.

Anyone with something to contribute or with the desire to learn is welcome and invited to join.

When you come, be prepared to share with barcampers.

When you leave, be prepared to share it with the world.

Source: barcamp.org
In my opinion the Part of exchanging knowledge should be implemented much more in our coming up meetings. In our last Seminar I recognised that everybody is working on very interesting stuff, somehow related to our common interest. I’d love to hear/see more of that. I was very much impressed by what Nora & Co and Linda showed us.

At Barcamp.org you can not only find hints on organizing a BarCamp but also Rules of BarCamps and Information on BarCamps close to your plaze like in Helsinki on the 10th May or Amsterdam had his 4th on April 5th.
In Germany are a lot of BarCamps and Alex and me are going to participate in the EduCamp from April 18th till April 20th in Ilmenau.

So may be this kind of (un-)conference is suiteable for our coming up ePedagogy meetings but what do you think?

The seminar will take place with synchronous sessions at tuesdays, from 12:00 to 14:00 german time (13:00 to 15:00 Finland time), where you should be available to participate via internet connection, and asynchronous, self-organised project work in groups of two to four students.
For questions or requests for participation as student or guest, please mail to wey-han.tan [at] uni-hamburg.de.

If you want to enroll, or if you have any questions, please leave a comment or write a mail to christina.ferner@uni-hamburg.de

Maybe especially the lecture-series “Medien & Bildung” might be interesting (for those who understand german). We even have one international speaker: Geert Lovink from Amsterdam University, Founder and Director of the Institute of Network Cultures

see http://mms.uni-hamburg.de/lehre/rvlsose06.html for further details.