Creative Maze

Presentation by Constance Steinkuehler (University of Wisconsin-Madison) for the 2010 NMC Symposium on New Media & Learning (March, 2010, http://www.nmc.org/2010-nml-symposium)

American schools largely remain locked within a Ford type factory model of industry and efficiency; games, on the other hand, are forward leaning, recruiting intellectual practices, dispositions, and forms of social organization that are aligned with many of todays new capitalist workplaces. Massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) in particular function as naturally occurring, self-sustaining, indigenous online communities of learning and practice, and their study tells can us something important about how such communities form and function. In this presentation, Constance will detail research on commercial online games and how the constellation of intellectual practices that constitute gameplay in such spaces coalesce into a form of cosmopolitanism found in the least likely of places, in the context of pop culture. Games are incubators of a new pop cosmopolitanism a Discourse or way of being in the world marked by a willingness and ability to navigate an increasingly globalized and therefore diverse, networked, socio-technical world. If our world is indeed increasingly flat, then gaming communities such as those found in MMOs, are, in some respects, our proverbial canaries in the coalmine.

http://www.nmc.org/2010-nml-symposium/steinkuehler-keynote

Video by HVXSilverstar http://www.youtube.com/user/HVXSilverstar

Duration : 0:58:42

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