A busy week, though looking back I don’t know why or what filled it. However I know it took me all week to get an ethics approval application in, which mostly involved filling in a few boxes.
Lots of presentations at the beginning of the week from the students I’m teaching on Play and Games. They came back with initial concepts for their serious board game designs. Quite a lot of good work, and we were quite impressed with a smattering of proper citations and name checking in the talks. Some nice ideas coming out, though many still have their heads stuck in the Monopoly space.
The previous week I was impressed with the quality of the Play and Games essays, and finally after collating, double marking, remarking and all the other tedious admin stuff that makes up teaching we got them finished and back to the students. It probably isn’t methodologically accurate but we did see a massive increase in the students marks between last year and this year. The average mark last year was 51, and this year’s average is 61. There are probably lots of factors in the mix, but I do think that between Ian and myself we got the students to actually read, dissect and analyse academic articles. As well as getting them to think through constructing an argument, writing coherently and lastly doing proper citations and referencing (big thanks to Ian who I think did most of the work on it). Phew… it paid off.
The choices of essay topic were interesting as well, considering that, apart from one, they are all boys. I gave them a choice of four topics, with some starter texts on each. 23 wrote about girls and gaming, 22 wrote about immersion, 11 on simulation vs narrative and only 2 on definition.
Segueing onto something completely different, On Friday I went to the DCRC’s Pervasive/Invasive seminar/workshop on the ethics of pervasive media. A bunch of interesting talks, much interesting chat, and one big realization for me. That we’re already there in discussion the ethics of these things, pervasive media is not something way off, we are in that posthuman space already. Which marries up with a few other things I’ve been reading and pondering recently by way of Katherine Hayles and Andy Miah. The Future Has Arrived. Though I’m sure Sam will pull me up on my loose attitude towards thinking about this and what we can or cannot do or say about how we create, imagine and relate our present and future.