TAG TALK – FRIDAY MARCH 18 at 12:15pm in the Hexagram Resource Room (EV-11-705)
Jeremy Hunsinger, Applying COTS games in class: The twice hidden curriculum of computer games
While building custom designed games for classrooms is costly, and learning game engines to design games is significantly challenging for most academics, many consumer off-the-shelf games come with user-enabled scenario design tools that any interested academic should be able to learn and master. In this talk, I hope to explore some of the issues with one particular design tool as I have come to apply it in the design of curriculum for a course in Global Politics for majors in International Studies. Civilization 4 comes with scenarios and scenario editors, which combined with its age and cross platform capacities makes it a strong candidate for application in this class. However, the choice came not only with the implicit curriculums of computing in the classroom, but added other hidden curriculums implicit in the design and use of COTS games in the classroom. This talk introduces the concept of the hidden curriculum, translates it to the design of COTS games/scenarios for the classroom, and considers the existence of hidden curriculums within the games itself through a narrative of developing modules for the Global Politics Course.
Jeremy Hunsinger received his Ph.D. in Science and Technology Studies from Virginia Tech. He teaches in the Political Science and related programs. His research agenda analyzes the transformations of knowledge in the modes of production in the information age. His current research project examines innovation, expertise, knowledge production and distributions in hacklabs and hackerspaces. At Virginia Tech, he was one of the founders of the Center for Digital Discourse and Culture, and a 2006 Scholar Fellow. He attended the Oxford Internet Institute’s 2004 Summer Doctoral Programme and was an instructor there in 2009. He was Graduate Fellow of the NSF Workshop on Values in Information Systems Design in 2005 and 2010. He was an Ethics Fellow at the Center for Information Policy Research at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee in 2007-2010. He was co-editor of the journal Learning Inquiry and has published in FastCapitalism, The Information Society, Social Epistemology and other leading academic journals. He recently also co-edited a special issue on Learning and Research in Virtual Worlds for Learning, Media,& Technology. He co-edited theInternational Handbook of Virtual Learning Environments and the International Handbook of Internet Research and has edited or contributed to several other volumes.