This article reports on an unconventional collaborative event called Real-Time Research, a project that brought 25 participants together from radically divergent fields for a playful and somewhat improvisational investigation of what it means to do games and learning research. Real-Time Research took the form of a two-part workshop session at the ‘Games, Learning & Society’ (GLS) conference during the summer of 2008, in which attendees collaboratively designed and then conducted five research experiments that took place over the course of the two-day conference. The article reports on the results of those studies and the processes that generated them.
References
1.
AlexanderC. (1977) A Pattern Language: Towns, buildings, construction. New York: Oxford University Press.
2.
AndersonJ.R. (1995) Cognitive Psychology and Its Implications, 4th edn.New York: W.H. Freeman & Company.
BrownJ.S.ThomasD. (2006) You Play World of Warcraft? You're Hired! Why Multiplayer Games May Be the Best Kind of Job Training, Wired, 14(4).
5.
BrunerJ.S. (1987) Life as Narrative, Social Research, 54, 1–17.
6.
ByrnesJ.P. (1996) Cognitive Development and Learning in Instructional Contexts. Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon.
7.
CailloisR. (1962) Man, Play and Games, trans. BarashM., London: Thames & Hudson.
8.
CampbellD.T. (1969) Ethnocentrism of Disciplines and the Fish-Scale Model of Omniscience, in SherifM.SherifC.W. (Eds) Interdisciplinary Relationships in the Social Sciences, 328–348. Chicago: Aldine.
9.
CastronovaEdward (2001) Virtual Worlds: A first-hand account of the market and society on the cyberian frontier. CES working paper no. 618. Munich: Center for Economic Studies & Ifo Institute for Economic Research.
10.
ChapmanA. (2003) A Social Semiotic of Language and Learning in School Mathematics, in AndersonM.LudlowA. SáenzZellwegerS.CifarelliV. (Eds) Educational Perspectives on Mathematics as Semiosis: From thinking to interpreting to knowing, 129–148. Ottawa: Legas.
ConradC.SerlinR.C. (2005) The Sage Handbook for Research in Education: Engaging ideas and enriching inquiry. London: Sage.
13.
CreswellJ.W., (Ed.) (2008) Research Design: Qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches. London: Sage.
14.
DubbelsB.R. (2008) Video Games, Reading, and Transmedial Comprehension, in FerdigR.E. (Ed.) Handbook of Research on Effective Electronic Gaming in Education. Information Science Reference, vol. 1, 251–276. Hershey, PA: Ideal Group Inc.
15.
EriksonE.H. (1963) Childhood and Society, 2nd edn.New York: Norton.
GeeJ.P. (1999) An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and method. London: Routledge.
18.
GeeJ.P. (2003) What Videogames have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
19.
HammersleyM.AtkinsonP. (1986) Ethnography: Principles in practice. London: Routledge.
20.
HuizingaJ. (1938) Homo ludens: A study of the play element in culture. New York: Roy Publishers.
21.
HunickeR.ZimmermanE.LeBlancM. (2005) Game design workshop. Workshop presented at the Annual Games, Learning & Society (GLS) Conference, Madison WI, June 23–24.
22.
JenkinsH.III (2006) Convergence Culture. New York: New York University Press.
23.
LaurelB. (2003) SimSmarts: An interview with Will Wright, in LaurelB. (Ed.) Design Research: Methods and perspectives, 253–259. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
24.
LaveJ. (1988) Cognition in Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
SteinkuehlerC.A. (2004) Learning in Massively Multiplayer Online Games, in KafaiY.B.SandovalW.A.EnyedyN.NixonA.S.HerreraF. (Eds) Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference of the Learning Sciences, 521–528. Mahwah: Erlbaum.
28.
SteinkuehlerC. (2008) Massively Multiplayer Online Games as an Educational Technology: An outline for research, Educational Technology, 48(1), 10–21.
29.
SteinkuehlerC.KingB. (2009) Digital Literacies for the Disengaged: Creating after school contexts to support boys' game-based literacy skills, On the Horizon, 17(1), 47–59.
30.
Sutton-SmithB. (2001) The Ambiguity of Play. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
31.
VygotskyL.S. (1978) Mind in Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
32.
WohlwendK.E. (2007) More Than a Child's Work: Framing teacher discourse about play, InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies, 3(1), 1–25.
33.
ZimmermanE.FortugnoN. (2006) Game Design Essentials. Workshop presented at the Annual Games, Learning & Society (GLS) Conference, Madison WI, June 15–16.
