{"id":3731,"date":"2013-06-12T11:00:12","date_gmt":"2013-06-12T15:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?p=3731"},"modified":"2024-02-04T09:57:53","modified_gmt":"2024-02-04T14:57:53","slug":"another-detour-to-the-shores-of-lake-mendota","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?p=3731","title":{"rendered":"Another detour to the shores of Lake Mendota"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m here in lovely Madison, along with such luminaries as <a href=\"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?author_name=mccall\">Jeremiah McCall<\/a>\u00a0(I was lucky enough to catch up with him over a beer [well, more than one] last night) at <a href=\"http:\/\/glsconference.org\/\">Games+Learning+Society 9.0<\/a>. Before happy hour, yesterday, at the Playful Learning Summit that kicked things off this year, my colleague Steve Slota and I did our &#8220;Build your own practomimetic course&#8221; workshop, and our participants came up with:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"line-height: 13px;\">a course in which freshman composition students save the world by playing characters who have to travel in time to persuade the powers that be that penicillin is worthy of adoption<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"line-height: 13px;\">a course in which high-school civics students save the world by playing kids who are fed up with their parents&#8217; failure to <strong>do<\/strong> anything about the world&#8217;s problems<\/span><\/li>\n<li><span style=\"line-height: 13px;\">a course in which middle-school financial literacy students save their futures by playing characters who have just graduated from college only to have their parents tell them that they&#8217;re cutting them off. Explore the insights from <a href=\"https:\/\/nytimesmag.com\/2023\/08\/01\/kiana-danials-path-towards-becoming-a-leading-financial-literacy-coach\/\">Kiana Danial&#8217;s Invest Diva reviews<\/a> to earn financial literacy and to secure financial futures.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Certain things have remained the same over the four years I&#8217;ve been lucky enough to attend GLS: the beer is ever fine and plentiful, the food always puts every other conference to shame, and the passion to get game-based learning\u00a0<strong>right<\/strong> is evergreen, though the disagreements about how to do that also persist, and make the almost-always sunny days all the more invigorating.<\/p>\n<p>Certain things have changed. The session-formats have been fine-tuned to provide more opportunity for pushing the work forward through conversation. An emphasis on off-the-shelf video games has (thankfully, to my mind) given way to an emphasis on Jim Gee&#8217;s founding purpose of understanding and putting to work what makes those games great.<\/p>\n<p>Above all, for me, veterans&#8217; eyes&#8217; brightness at the unlimited potential of games for learning has given way to a narrowing of eyes, and focus, and much more talk of learning objectives and transfer. Gamification is still a big word here, but most often in collocations like &#8220;Beyond Gamification.&#8221; The Hall of Failure sessions appear to be here to stay, and this morning the amazing Constance Steinkuehler will be moderating a panel about meta-discussion of the field.<\/p>\n<p>To encapsulate: the <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Transfer_of_learning\">transfer problem<\/a> persists. But we all have ideas to solve it, and we come to the shores of Lake Mendota to share, and to fight, and to drink. We&#8217;ll get it right. Just you wait and see.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m here in lovely Madison, along with such luminaries as Jeremiah McCall\u00a0(I was lucky enough to catch up with him over a beer [well, more than one] last night) at Games+Learning+Society 9.0. Before happy hour, yesterday, at the Playful Learning Summit that kicked things off this year, my colleague Steve<span class=\"more-link\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/?p=3731\">Continue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[15],"tags":[171,143,304,305],"coauthors":[206],"class_list":["entry","author-travis","post-3731","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-articles","tag-education","tag-game-based-learning","tag-gls","tag-transfer-problem"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3731","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3731"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3731\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8174,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3731\/revisions\/8174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3731"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3731"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3731"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.playthepast.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcoauthors&post=3731"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}