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 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, [...]

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 [...]

In the next few weeks, we’re all likely to hear much about the crisis facing American schools, with the release of the film Waiting For Superman. Directed by Davis Guggenheim, the director behind An Inconvenient Truth, the film takes on school curricula, teacher unions, and fundamental structural problems with American schooling that some believe are [...]

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 [...]

I’m about to head out the door to attend this year’s American Educational Research Association in Denver, Colorado. I’ve got three presentations this year — one on Sunday, one on Monday, and one early on Tuesday — and would love to meet any readers of the blog who happen to be at the conference this [...]

Yesterday was the final day of the Global Game Jam here at Miami, and saw each of our five teams working madly (and blearily) toward completion of their games. As the participants — fueled by doughnuts — caught their third (or fourth or fifth) wind, the games started coming together. Art and sound assets were [...]