I have some rather wonderful news to pass along — my wife Liz Ellcessor and I have both accepted faculty positions at Indiana University in Bloomington. We’ll be leaving Miami University this summer and starting at Indiana in the Fall semester. Liz will be starting as an assistant professor in IU’s Department of Communication and [...]

I’m thrilled to be the coordinator for Miami’s Global Game Jam site this year, and it’s my pleasure to announce that registration is now open! Miami’s Global Game Jam 2012 site has all of the pertinent details, such as location (Benton Hall on Miami’s campus), cost ($50 for non-students, $40 for students, $25 for a [...]

I just noticed I haven’t updated my blog in a while — I’m much more active on Twitter these days. But, in the hopes of further getting the word out for a truly wonderful conference run by my old colleagues in Madison, I thought I’d post about the CFP for the 8th (!) Games+Learning+Society Conference, [...]

I forgot to mention last week that I appeared on the latest Brainy Gamer podcast, episode #33, on April 4th, 2011. This was an interview that I did back in early March, while at the Game Developer’s Conference. The Brainy Gamer is the excellent, excellent blog of Michael Abbott, a Theatre professor at Wabash College [...]

So, wow, the last few days have been interesting. I’m assuming that many of you are finding this blog post because I just linked to it from Twitter on the #ims211 hashtag. Here’s my take on how all of this came to be, and what I think about it. If you’re new to my blog, [...]

The call for proposals has been released for the Games+Learning+Society 7.0 conference, held yearly in the historic Memorial Union on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Links: The conference website, the PDF call, and the submissions page. Here’s the entire call in text form: CALL FOR PAPERS Games+Learning+Society Conference 7.0 http://glsconference.org June 15-17, 2011 [...]

This past weekend was the third annual Global Game Jam. Featuring over 4000 participants around the planet — from the largest, the Nordic Game Jam at ITU-Copenhagen, Denmark to my old pals in Madison, Wisconsin, USA to Malaysia — the event featured 48 consecutive hours of participants eventually making nearly 1500 games. This was the [...]

This week, I’ve been back in Madison for the 6th annual Games+Learning+Society conference. I presented twice, served as a host/discussant once, and ingested a great amount of excellent food and knowledge dozens of times. That’s me above, in the glasses and black shirt, randomly assigned to an amazingly talented group of designers and learning scientists [...]

I had a relatively successful AERA visit this week — I presented a poster at a sparsely-attended, but still great structured poster session (got to catch up with friends from UW and Arizona State), and we received some great commentary by Jim Gee on the importance of studying online communities around games. The subsequent roundtables [...]