While in the Boston area for MIT5 last weekend, I stopped by the ECA (Eastern Communications Association) conference to check things out. While there, I attended a roundtable that advertised itself as follows:

“This roundtable discussion examines the work of James Paul Gee’s and Henry
Jenkin’s contentions that online gaming is the next pedagogical trend in
education. Thus, the participants will engage in a discussion of the online game,
World of Warcraft. This discussion will focus primarily on the communication
concepts students learn and apply while “gaming” and how applied
communication educators can incorporate students’ interest in gaming to
enhance their educational ones”.

I would say that the roundtable did address these issues, but the only speaker that caught my attention in terms of innovative uses of new technology was a professor from Penn State McKeesport, who is using a closed blogging community to teach newswriting.

The rest of the roundtable centered around a high school student who very articulately explained his interest in World of Warcraft and the types of communication skills he feels he is developing through collaboration and team work with others in the game. As the roundtable progressed, I became suddenly aware that the high school student was in fact, the son of the moderator of the panel. For some reason, that didn’t sit well with me. The panel was adamantly opposed to my use of the word “coached” to describe his ability to metacognitively reflect on his interaction with the game. I simply meant that other
In the hall way, after the session, this spokesperson for World of Warcraft was with a small group of us having a more informal discussion. Here, in this more informal setting, he said that to get to the level where one would collaborate with others and engage in team building, one has to be put in approximately 40 hours of playing time. FORTY HOURS! He said, and I quote as accurately as possible, “That’s why it wouldn’t work in an educational setting. I was trying to tell them that last night.”

What would you make of that? Would you think that he was asked not to mention that during the roundtable because it would ruin the panel’s argument? I am not opposed to in-depth discussions about the use of new technologies to teach and learn. This needs to happen more often and more concretely. The WOW high school student’s comment came at a time when I was suggesting that what we need is to have educational games and simulations that use similar techniques to MMOPRGs, but that are designed to teach specific educational concepts. But please, let’s not pretend that out-of-the-box MMOPRGs are well-suited for educational purposes without research and when your case study himself says it won’t work.

I know it’s Wednesday, and I should have been blogging the event as it happened. However, that didn’t happen. Instead of specific sessions, I am going to give my overall impressions of the conference. Several days ago, Henry Jenkins requested feedback on his blog, although he is several thoughts past that by now. I am slow and I am going to embrace my slowness and revive this blog at my own, several-days-past-relevant pace.
First, the plenary sessions were phenomenal. Great speakers, with their messages kept very short and long q & a sessions. The topics were provocative and apropos. The plenary session that tied it all together for me was late in the day on Saturday and had a message that we need to take Fair Use back in academic institutions. The Center for Social Media at American University, if I understood correctly, has been working with documentary film makers to create a set of accepted Fair Use practices that their insurers will also stand behind. They are starting a similar process with media literacy educators to craft discipline specific fair use practices. This was the message that my own presentation needed at the end–and I am glad to have found something I was looking for at this conference. Definitely check out the podcasts of the plenary sessions.
I really enjoyed the model of having panel speakers each give their presentation (which usually meant reading a paper) and then the audience could participate in discussion. Most of the sessions I went to really did leave enough time for a rich discussion. I was disappointed by the number of papers read verbatim (as opposed to actually presenting), but I know that is a reflection of discipline-specific practice. I understand that the reading of a paper reveals the richness of the text in question, but I can read–when I’m watching a presentation, I expect a different kind of explanation. What’s interesting is that this practice of reading papers was disconnected from the plenary sessions, where the speakers did not read from papers at all.
Another interesting aspect of the conference was that it was simulcast in Second Life. It was referred to in one of the first plenary session and I filed that information away. Some people in the overflow room were simultaneously watching the video feed of the conference and hanging out in SL. On Sunday morning, I did not have the opportunity to go back into Cambridge. On a whim, I decided to see if they were still broadcasting the last session in SL. It took me a bit of searching the blogosphere to figure out where to go (it wasn’t advertised on the MIT5 site), but once I got registered with the group I needed to, I zipped over the closing plenary session. There were a number of people watching with me, including colleagues from Australia and Greece who had been experiencing the entire conference from their geographically disparate locations. It caused me to step back from a minute and reflect that the conference that I had been attending was in fact experienced in a completely different way by a completely different community.