My colleague and friend Adeline Koh, Director of DH@Stockton, assistant professor of literature at Richard Stockton College, and organizer of THATCamp Digital Pedagogy, has invited me to run a workshop:
I am writing to invite you to give a workshop for THATCamp Digital Pedagogy, to be held by Richard Stockton College at the Carnegie Center, Atlantic City June 17th and 18th 2014. We would like you to consider offering a one-to-two hour workshop on introducing games into pedagogy on June 17th. I have long admired your work on cultural studies, digital technology and race, and know that your expertise in gaming and pedagogy would be extremely valuable to our participants. We very much hope to be able to have you as one of our presenters.
My workshop will be a riff on the teaching (with) video games material that I have been working on over the past few years:
Towards a (New) Video Game Pedagogy: Critical Players Not Digital Natives
When teaching with video games, It is not enough to assume that students are “digital natives” and always willing to think about or work with video games. Rather what we think about and how we talk about games is as important as how we learn from and work with games in the classroom. In other words, dropping a game into a class is not as easy as plug and play. Therefore, this workshop is about developing a medium-specific pedagogy, a philosophy of teaching with technology, and the practices of close playing, group play, and critical approaches to games. We will specifically consider the challenges of using any new medium or technology in the classroom to think about developing different kinds of proficiencies, vocabularies, and low- and high-tech strategies for integrating games and gaming.
I am looking forward to visiting Atlantic City, New Jersey for the first time!