Prompt: Write about your game experience and connect it explicitly to teaching and learning, as well as principles of and research about multimedia that you are aware of to date.
Personal History:
I am a passenger leaning out the window, virtual breeze in my hair as friends and family take turns navigating me through PC, console, and virtual games. Thus, my personal multimedia game experience is enveloped with my sister and husband’s exploration of games. My sister is a senior environment artist for Sony Santa Monica in LA and has worked on God of War, Overdrive, and Ratchet and Clank. My husband is a PC gamer playing MMOs like WOW, Sea of Thieves and Halo. I respect the twenty years they have spent playing and therefore honing the muscle memory and social navigation skills required to “fit in” in these environments. However, I feel that I don't quite “fit in” and don’t often jump into playing because I can’t get past noob stage. But I love watching people play and playing on the fringe so I can stay connected to these amazing environments.
The most gaming I have done is in World of Warcraft. I spent 10 years playing a mage character. Yes, this is in direct violation of what I just said. I got pulled in one night as I was at dinner with my husband, sister, brother-in-law, and father. From one sentence to the next, our language went from English to game speak, and I immediately lost the thread of the conversation and did not have the vocabulary to keep up. In order to speak with my family, I needed to learn to speak gamer so I joined WOW which is where I most often communicated with my family as we gathered or raided dungeons together. I also learned about game addiction, social negotiation, time management, commerce, social discovery. Recently, my family has picked up collaborative gaming like Overcooked and That’s you! As we can use our mobile devices to interact through multimedia together without taking turns to play. I now mostly play Beat Saber but look forward to collaborative VR games.
What I know:
Research that I have collected for evidence based instructional practices centered around multimedia include Information processing and searching strategies, Sweller’s cognitive load theory, and problem-based learning. Information processing theory is based on the idea that humans analyze information from the environment using working memory for actively manipulating information and long-term memory for passively holding information so that it can be used in the future. Which leads into cognitive load theory which is that human cognitive architecture (working and long-term memory) has limited capacity and duration. Working memory limitations are critical when acquiring novel information based on culturally important knowledge that we have not specifically evolved to acquire. Several cognitive load effects rely on information the the human brain has evolved to process being used to facilitate the acquisition of new, cultural knowledge. This then connects to problem based learning as a student-centered pedagogical strategy that poses significant, contextualized, real-world, ill-structured situations while providing resources, guidance, instruction, and opportunities for reflection to learners as they develop content knowledge and problem-solving skills. The next step in my research is to discover how multimedia could be used to address these theoretical approaches and pedagogies.
Newly discovered research about multimedia
Gagn, R. M., and Glaser, R. (1987). Foundations in learning research. In R. M. Gagn (Ed.). Instructional technology foundations (pp. 49-83). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Hoffman, B., & Ritchie, D. (1997). Using multimedia to overcome the problems with problem based learning. In Instructional Science (Vol. 25). Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Savolainen, R. (2016). Information seeking and searching strategies as plans and patterns of action. Journal of Documentation, 72(6), 1154–1180. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-03-2016-0033
Reeves, T. C., Herrington, J., & Oliver, R. (2005). Design Research: A Socially Responsible Approach to Instructional Technology Research in Higher Education. In Journal of Computing in Higher Education Spring (Vol. 16, Issue 2). http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/
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