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Remix artist Pogo’s Disney remix “Alice” In 2009, I came across the inspiring work of self-taught Australian remix musician Nick Bertke (aka “Pogo”). As a media teacher doing remix in my own media production classes, I was interested in learning more about Pogo and his creative process. So I interviewed him about it. What I [...]

  “Gee and other educators worry that students who are comfortable participating in and exchanging knowledge through affinity spaces are being de-skilled as they enter the classroom”- Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture Every day, I’m struck by the differences between the experiences I have in situated affinity spaces and those of my educational communities of practice [...]

Gamers enjoying the “retro recroom” at gamercamp Institutional and informal game play: What’s at stake for learning? The image above is from Gamercamp, a Toronto gaming unconference where I moderated a panel on “Play”. What I saw there and pictured above was an awesome example of truly holistic, situated, informal learning. And the kind of [...]

My second Machinima: Epic Journey: Travel forms in WoW Have you ever wanted to fly (like a bird)? This is just one more thing you can experience in a synthetic world that you can’t do in reality. And I stress the word “experience” versus activity – because the brain doesn’t distinguish between “real” or “unreal” [...]

“The reward, in other words, doesn’t have to be a useful or fun thing in itself, it need only be an obvious outward sign that the wearer of it has done some difficult work to get it.” – Edward Castronova, Synthetic Worlds : The business and culture of online games (2005) This is a screengrab [...]

My first-year teaching at an inner city school was one of the most challenging, yet rewarding, of my life. Despite five years instructing post-graduate industry tech courses at the college level, I was very much the noob high school teacher. But it wasn’t just any high school but a program for at-risk learners, aged 18-20, [...]

Every day I read the tweets of fellow educators it’s clear that the battle for technology adoption is still going strong. It’s also clear that endless panics – moral and otherwise – are a part of the problem. Just today, wired educator and author Will Richardson described the challenge of teaching critical (technological) literacies without [...]

“Every gram – sorry, byte – of personal information these feckless data-packrats collect on us should be as carefully accounted for as our weapons-grade radioisotopes, because once the seals have cracked, there is no going back.” – Cory Doctorow Every day, all around the world, people are sharing enormous amounts of personal information and data [...]