About Melanie McBride is a researcher at Ryerson University’s Experiential Design and Gaming Environments (EDGE) lab. See her About page for more information.
|
By Melanie, on March 23rd, 2011 “In search of diamonds” Blocky mix (minecraft machinima)
Last week I finally got around to playing the lavatacular 8-bit sandbox PC game Minecraft! In addition to having lots of fun, I’m also thinking all the great forms of learning it engages. Bryan Alexander, was among the first to identify the educational virtues of the game’s [...]
By Melanie, on February 5th, 2011 Know your Meme: Leeroy Jenkins (if you don’t know this meme, read on :)
“By convergence, I mean the flow of content across multiple media platforms, the cooperation of multiple media industries, and the migratory behaviour of media audiences who will go almost anywhere in search of the kinds of entertainment experiences [...]
By Melanie, on December 5th, 2010 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 [...]
By Melanie, on September 22nd, 2010
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 [...]
By Melanie, on September 8th, 2010 “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)
[...]
By Melanie, on November 9th, 2009 My first machinima – Virtual World Learning v. H1N1
The above “news report” on H1N1 and virtual worlds is part of an assignment I just completed for an additional qualification course in Media at York University. The idea was to create two news reports in two different media. I chose to do a print [...]
By Melanie, on September 27th, 2009
As a media producer, educator and outspoken advocate of emergent media pedagogy (social and participatory media, Remix culture, Open Source publishing and production, Creative Commons open licensing and citizen media in all forms), I’m delighted to announce the launch of my (full disclosure) partner, author, Liam O’Donnell‘s newest graphic novel, Media Meltdown. While I [...]
By Melanie, on July 3rd, 2009 I was recently solicited for my thoughts on the key priorities for 21st Century learning and surprised myself – and my client – with the answer. Prior to this query, I might have rhymed off the usual classroom2.0 mantra: blogging, social media, virtual worlds, mobile technology and, of course, multi-tasking. But the more I reflected [...]
By Melanie, on April 3rd, 2009 Mozilla/Creative Commons Open Education Course – Seminar 1 View more presentations from philipp.
These are the slides from our first session of the Mozilla Open Education course. As you can see, this is a truly inspired project that combines big picture vision (open education as a movement) with practical outcomes (using Mozilla/CC to create applied [...]
By Melanie, on March 30th, 2009 This coming week I’ll be starting Mozilla’s open education course as a component of my ongoing professional learning and development with emergent digital pedagogies. From the course objectives:
“The course helps educators develop basic skills in three three broad areas — open licensing, open technology, and open pedagogy — to help them apply ‘open’ in [...]
|
|
Reader comments