This last portion of class has helped me to better synthesize how informal and formal learning spaces interact with one another. I think this was facilitated in particular when I reflected upon my affinity space interactions in the Unity community forums for the affinity space presentation project. The Unity community forums were certainly an informal […]

Hi everyone! I have completed my affinity space project for INTE 5320. What an amazing experience! I put together a presentation on participating in an affinity space–the Unity Community Forums–using Camtasia Studio 9 (a free trial from TechSmith), and my video includes interactive elements that wouldn’t work on YouTube, so the video is available on […]

My second experience with a Twitter chat went better than first—even though it took place only a few minutes after the first ended! This Twitter chat was based around the hashtag #XPLAP (which stands for Explore Like a Pirate, and comes from the title of a book about game-based learning written by Michael Matera, who […]

The very first Twitter chat I ever even saw was the Twitter chat for #edtechbridge. I ran across it while planning to participate in a different Twitter chat for my INTE 5320 class (that second Twitter chat will be the subject of my second of these posts reviewing Twitter chats), and because it was related […]

I read the article “Can the professor come out and play? Establishing critical gaming group for faculty” by Trent Hergenrader. The article is a companion piece of sorts to one I’d read previously (they occur at the same university), and this article focuses on the author’s proposed plan to create a self-sustaining critical gaming group […]

My thoughts on the Unity user community forums have deepened since my last post. I’ve been doing a great deal of reflection upon my observations and interactions throughout the space, and I ultimately feel a strongly positive-leaning attitude toward it. What’s really started to become clear to me is just how many traits of a […]

These last few weeks, I’ve been playing the excellent Mass Effect: Andromeda. I unabashedly loved the other games in the Mass Effect series, and I’ve been looking forward to this game for almost five years now. My opinion heading into the game is probably already quite apparent. Andromeda is a 3rd person science fiction RPG […]

With this third update on affinity spaces, some of the larger traits of the different Unity3D forums have had time to become clear.  For one, different areas of the Unity3D forums have different average, and surprisingly consistent, frequency of new posts. In Getting Started, for instance, new forum threads are only created once every one […]

The article I read this week was “Questing as learning: iterative course design using game inspired elements” (Dikkers, 2016). This article explored six successive courses the author designed using a core concept of “questing.” In this case, the inspiration of questing was directly borrowed from video games, as Dikkers speaks to RPGs in the opening […]

This section of class was particularly challenging, especially as we talked about some serious modern topics that have affected “video gaming” at large and many people beyond. Our readings were particularly important in this portion of our class. As with any form of art or technology—and particularly in video games that exist at a confluence […]

I am unsure how much meaning to ascribe to the interactions (or lack thereof) that I’ve encountered on the Unity3D forums as of late. It’s certainly been a huge learning experience in terms of how the affinity space actually operates, and it’s changed some of my thoughts about the tacit guidelines that their forum operates […]

The article I ready for scholarly critique this section, “The place of videogames in the digital humanities” (Hergenrader, 2016), felt like an outlier of sorts. It was published in the reputable On the Horizon, and its topic was one immediately relevant to both the topic of study of this class and a topic of personal […]

The game I’ve played this cycle is Risk of Rain from Hopoo Games (a two-student team from the University of Washington). Risk of Rain is a third-person rogue-lite platformer where the player progresses forward through ten levels of varying styles and enemies, defeating bosses and collecting upgrades along the way. The difficulty of the game […]

­­­The first thing that I noticed upon entering the Unity Community Support Forums is that its use appears to be quite fluid. The Unity website states that the forums are to “Voice your opinion, show what you’re working on, and check out the cool things others are doing.” Meanwhile, Unity also has a separate “Answers” […]

1 & 2: I understood games to be a broader field than simply video games (which is typically where my head goes first when I hear “games”)—however, when it comes to the relationship between games and learning, I was fairly certain that almost all research is devoted to using video games as educational tools. It […]

“A framework for understanding game-based teaching and learning” from Holmes and Gee (2016) was one of the better constructed and more nuanced articles I’ve read for scholarly critique in INTE 5320. The purpose of the article was to propose a “framework for understanding and differentiating among different forms of game-based teaching learning,” and that’s exactly […]

“An academic home for play: games as unifying influences in higher education” (Herro & Clark, 2016) is a great introduction to one university’s bold foray into games-based learning (GBL). Herro, an assistant professor, and Clark, a graduate student, detail examples of programs of study in GBL from Clemson University’s new School of Education. The purpose […]

The game I played that I would like to talk about is an “Escape the Room” game at Engima Escape Rooms in Boulder, CO http://www.enigmaboulder.com. (I highly recommend everyone go there or try a similar game near you). The idea behind the game is that you are (voluntarily) locked in a room with your friends […]

I joined INTE 5320 due to both personal and professional interest. On the one hand, I have a personal interest in video games and game development, and even though this isn’t a game development course, the theory behind games and learner engagement definitely appears to be widely applicable beyond just the realm of gamification in […]

As someone who lives in Colorado, cycling is a huge part of the culture here, and frequent “bike to work days” and competition are a part of the corporate landscape. This is why I chose to read and critique the article “Gamification and social dynamics behind corporate cycling campaigns” (Millonig, Wunsch, Stibe, Seer, Dai, Schechtner, […]

Well, we find ourselves in the second to last week in INTE 5340. What a great class it’s been! But to keep on track with the way these reflections are supposed to be structured: what I learned over the past two weeks about digital storytelling. At first, I wasn’t sure how exactly I would respond […]

I also did a second daily create assignment this week. This one asked people to imagine an invention that would require people to have to think in new ways / retrain themselves how to use something. In this case, creating a computer keyboard (from a public domain image) where none of the keys are in […]

This daily create assignment for the DS106 portion of our class was to taken an image of some location (a public domain one in this case) and caption it with some sort of happy slogan that didn’t make sense with the place. In this case, I paired a mountain with the Great Plains.

The final digital story I decided to critique for INTE 5340 was 360° Sync Yosemite VR 360 Adventure Archives. This was a 360 video meant to be used as a synchronous 360 VR experience to go along with a YouTube video that I had previously critiqued. I thought it would be a great idea to […]

The chapter 8 reading this week was a nice capstone to the entirety of this book. While I think that the academic theory that’s discussed throughout (most) of the rest of the book is where most of the interesting points of discussion are, seeing this practical application in the Master’s program nicely rounded out all […]

The digital story I critiqued this week was A Colorado Day Hike. This was a video of a climb up Square Top mountain with a few Colorado blogger’s and Sierra Trading Post’s blogger and videographer. The criteria I critiqued the story on were economy, media application, and sense of audience.   Economy As tends to […]

The assignment from the DS106 portion of our class that I created this week was to create a character using only a 256-pixel grid. It was called 256 Points. I decided to create a hiker! The Story Behind the Story This project seemed like an interesting one to tackle because it dealt with having a […]

This week I read a how-to article on keeping a trail log while hiking: How to Keep a Trail Log While Hiking. While it’s something I hadn’t thought about, a trail log can help a hiker stay on track and find their way back off of a trail later—it can even be a reminder of […]

These last two weeks were very busy. With the end of the semester fast approaching, I’m getting ready to start preparing both portions of the final portfolio for INTE 5340. What I’ve come to realize over these past two weeks of class is the importance of learner-centered education. This course is a fairly independent one […]

The digital story I critiqued this week was GeoVegas 360 Video – Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area. Once again, I was curious to see how a 360-degree video worked within the context of filming the outdoors. Though this one was slightly different from the usual hiking video (since it was a drive through a […]