York's Faculty of Education will host its annual research forum today, from 2 to 4pm in 280N York Lanes. This year's forum focuses on technology in education.
Professor Jennifer Jenson (right) will present "Baroque Baroque Revolution: High Culture Gets Game". In today’s “super-saturated, socially networked, Second Life, massively multiplayer, online, keyed-in, content generating, 2.0, ‘glocal’” culture, the world of Baroque music, to many people, not only feels like a relic from an inaccessible past, but it often looks that way as well. In this talk, Jenson will attempt to show how play, its practices, contexts and discourses are mobilized, and how some of this migh
t be theorized and reapplied through a design-based research project that created a Baroque music game.
Professor Ron Owston (left) will look at computer game development as a literacy activity in his presentation. According to Owston, serious gaming has become a burgeoning research field over the last several years. Most research to date has looked at students as players of computer games. But what happens when students are given the opportunity to be developers of their own games? In his presentation, Owston will give an overview of a large multisite study he, together with faculty colleagues and graduate students, conducted that examined the impact on literacy skills of Grade 4 students who created their own computer games. He will then review the findings of two other pilot studies he led that grew out of this work, as well as talk briefly about a research tool he is developing for remotely recording users’ interactions with computer screens.
Professor Chloë Brushwood Rose (right) will speak about community-based media pedagogy and production in a globalized world. She will outline the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada-funded study she is undertaking with researchers from Montreal's McGill University and the University of New Hampshire in Durham, NH, which aims to pay critical attention to the proliferation of community video production programs in urban centres across North America, their pedagogies, and the videos produced through them. The researchers are conducting a comparative study of three projects in New York City, Toronto and Montreal that explore a number of central research themes relating to media pedagogies.
This event is free and open to the community. Following the presentations, there will be a wine and cheese reception. For more information, contact Anderson Coward, communications coordinator, Office of the Dean, Faculty of Education, at ext. 58024.