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 [...]

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 [...]

It’s a little late in the game for me to start reviewing episodes of Lost on this site with there being only two or three episodes to go, depending on how you cut it. But last night’s episode was such a significant piece of the show’s mythology and worked for me on so many levels, [...]

I don’t normally write about television here as, well, I barely watch it anymore. But as we’re now at the midway point of the final season of Lost, I thought I’d put down a few random thoughts I’ve had recently regarding Lost and games. In graduate school the last several years, Lost was one of [...]

Both gaming and music blogs have been abuzz the last few days over Harmonix’s announcement that they’re developing a new Rock Band Network in which any band — unsigned, indie, or major label — can submit tracks for download and purchase via Rock Band. That is, they’re starting a new digital distribution method for music, [...]

Whew, what a tiring month. Since mid-May, I’ve been out and about at several interesting conferences — all games-related and all communities that I’d like to continue to be a part of in the coming years. First, I was on a panel about promoting the “designer mindset” at the Games For Change (G4C) festival at [...]

It’s been a long road, but I’m happy to announce that I’ve accepted a position as the School of Education, Health, and Society C. Michael Armstrong Professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. It’s an endowed, tenure-track, joint position between the School of Education, Health, and Society (EHS) and Miami’s Armstrong Interactive Media Studies (AIMS) [...]

Okay, I normally don’t make these kinds of posts to my blog, and I feel like I should preface this by form of apology. People (us nerds especially) tend to get very bent out of shape when someone decries or criticizes their favorite media franchises, and I’ll do that here — um, the criticizing, not [...]

I don’t post about music very much anymore, not because I’m not listening to anything, but because I feel like since I hit my mid-thirties, I’m always (at best) a few months behind everyone else. Oh well, I’ll thrown caution to the wind and talk a little bit about a genre of music that I’ve [...]