2013 Summit Programme - The Centre for Excellence in Media ...

PARALLEL SESSION 2: Thursday 19th 14.45 - 15.25
PARTICIPATORY LEARNING:
Gameful Pedagogy and Collaborative Play: Reflections on
the NetsX Project
Anna Feigenbaum and Alexander Feigenbaum
Cantor
9128
abstracts
While digital games have been used in classrooms for decades, there has been
a heightened interest in incorporating these games in recent years spawned by the
transformative influences of digital technologies and social media that are changing
the ways we conceive of education. These changes have caused a ‘crisis of significance’
wherein we must work with students to shift our educational practices to better
suit the ‘networked information environment’ that characterises our time. Current
students’ increased digital literacy and demand for feedback align to game playing
skills: “multitasking, goal orientation, positive attitude and a collaborative style”. In
this environment, digital and internet-based games have increased in value in recent
years.
This case study paper engages with the rise of ‘gameful pedagogies’ introducing
NetsX, a term-length research project developed for a Youth Culture and Protest
module around gameful design principles to encourage peer-to-peer collaboration
and engagement. The paper situates NetsX in recent scholarship discussing how
gameful principles were used to design a low-cost, highly iterable curriculum that
incorporates freely available collaborative online resources, namely Google Docs,
Wordpress, and Wikipedia. The paper concludes by discussing current limitations and
future possibilities for expanding the NetsX framework within and beyond a media history
research student project.
Keywords: collaborative learning, gameful pedagogy, gamification, social
media, wikipedia.
Anna Feigenbaum is a lecturer in Media and Politics at Bournemouth University.
Her practice-based educational research focuses on collaborative learning and
emergent technologies. Anna’s publications and open education resources can be
explored at http://annafeigenbaum.com/
Alexander Feigenbaum recently graduated with a BA from the University of
Wisconsin, Madison. He is interested in the intersections between games, art and
learning. His work can be found at http://amadeusgamezart.wordpress.com/
Media Education Summit 2013 23