Effective Use of Games in Academia
Posted by Celia Walter | 5 Aug, 2008Rafael C. Alvarado, Director of Academic Technology Services at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania writes for Educause Quarterly with Overcoming the Fear of Gaming: A Strategy for Incorporating Games into Teaching and Learning. Alvarado discusses opportunities for the effective use of immersive games in academia.
“Ultimately, to take full advantage of games as engines of learning, we should move from a critical approach to a creative one and encourage the innovative use and development of games (and gaming engines) within our colleges and universities as collaborative new media projects. Such projects would take advantage of our unique social arrangement of students, developers, and faculty and allow us to rely less on consumer culture to provide game content. The design of these games would be guided by the experience of managing the pedagogical outcomes of games in real-use contexts, forming a feedback loop that would identify and select for better games.”