Greetings and Welcome from the Leveling Up Team
July 6, 2012
PROJECTS: Leveling Up
PRINCIPLES: Academically oriented, Interest-powered, Openly networked, Peer-supported, Production centered, Shared purpose
TAGS: Introduction
We are delighted to announce the opening of our new blog for our Leveling Up project team. We’ve been hard at work for the past academic year, launching new fieldwork on games and online communities that can teach us a thing or two about how young people learn in highly networked and interest-driven settings. As we start to analyze our data and reflect on what we’ve learned, we’d like to share our work in progress in hopes that we might invite engagement and formative feedback from a broader community of researchers, designers, educators, and learners.
We have a fantastic team of researchers who have been engaged in a diverse range of sites. This includes research with development teams at Media Molecule, Blizzard, and Valve, as well as research with player and maker communities of LittleBigPlanet 2, Starcraft, and Ravelry.com. As we move into the new academic year, we’ll be launching some new case studies and have new team members joining the mix, so please stay tuned!
What’s particularly exciting to us about this project is that it represents an interdisciplinary collaboration between a game designer (Katie) and an ethnographer (Mimi), and includes a team of scholars who come from diverse backgrounds. We have a starting team from Learning Sciences (Adam), Informatics (Yong Ming), Communications (Rachel), and Sociology (Matt). This means we are intent on not just social scientific inquiry into what makes player and developer communities tick, but also how we can make these insights useful for folks seeking to design educational environments, games, and online communities.
As we move forward in sharing stories from the field, we’ll use the principles of connected learning as a set of orienting guideposts that help us understand patterns that cut across development, design, play, and social engagement. We hope you enjoy these glimpses into our fieldwork and emerging analysis as much as we’ve enjoyed engaging with these communities of activated learners and makers.
Katie and Mimi
