Are we raising the standards of language use or just playing games?

Given the current state of play with respect to literacy 'crises' in Western democracies, this article revisits the 'language games' that often inform these concerns, examining their rules and who benefits from them. It argues that to focus narrowly on the technical aspects of language, as the current emphasis does, misses the point of what is at stake for students: those who advocates claim to want to help. Drawing on twenty semi-structured interviews and observations of teachers in primary and secondary schools within Queensland (Australia), the article outlines four perspectives on language use and how these variously position students as literate and illiterate. It concludes that we now need a different game plan to address students' use of language, one that provokes a stance and praxis in keeping with a more inclusive politics and which provides real challenges to broader social constraints.

Commonising the enclosure : online games and reforming intellectual property regimes

Online computer gamers are a creative bunch, from the mayhem of first-person shooters (FPS) to the more social experiences of massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG), gamers are producing new content for their favourite titles at an amazing rate. This paper explores the rewriting of the boundaries in the production and ownership of intellectual property in the computer games industry. The purpose is to examine the potential for computer game studies to contribute to an understanding of an alternative intellectual property regime known as the commons. This paper will explore how computer games users establish commons-like formations, specific to the digital environment, that extend the confines of current intellectual property rights. It will argue that the productive activities of online gamers are not motivated by the traditional logic of market-based incentives. This represents a new condition which may contribute to a reformation of the privatising enclosure of the intellectual property system.
Keywords: massive multiplayer online

Researching kids and computer games : games, game play and literacy in the twenty first century

Videogames, and young people's engagement with them, are of growing interest to education. This paper reports on initial find ings from the study: Literacy in the Digital World of the Twenty First Century: Leaming from computer games, focussing on the opportunities offered by studying young people's immersion in game play for understanding more about contemporary forms of  engagement and textuality, new forms of literacy,community and identity multimodality, and the implications of such forms and changes for contemporary literacy and English education. Taking videogames as examples of global, ICT-based popular culture, where meaning is built from muhimodal elements, and where young players have to he actively teaming and involved in order to play, the project asks how English and literacy education might benefit from examining videogames, as rich exemplars of contemporary digital culture, and the ways in which young people make use of them, to improve the teaching of print and multi modal forms of literacy.

Computer games – pushing at the boundaries of literacy

The need to expand traditional, print-based versions of literacy to also incorporate attention to multimodal forms of text and literacy in the English curriculum is now well established. Much can be learnt about students and their literacy practices from the exploration of their engagement with digital culture – particularly videogames – from their out-of-school lifeworlds. However, the emerging set of skills and competencies or, the ‘new’ literacies and literacy practices associated with multiple and ever-emerging genres generated through information and communications technologies, present challenges in terms of how they might be conceptualised as literacy (or not) and how the multiple dimensions entailed in gameplay are increasingly a part of what it means to be literate in the 21st century. Drawing on two case studies of classroom work, the paper describes approaches to conceptualising the complexity of digital texts and their access, production and distribution and the opportunity to create spaces where students could interact, socialise and learn in both the real and virtual world. Dimensions such as play, interactivity, action, movement and time raise challenging questions about the limits and possibilities of constructing games and gameplay as texts and literacy practices that push the boundaries of literacy.

Research methodologies in creative practice : literacy in the digital age of the twenty first century - learning from computer games

Literacy remains one of the central goals of schooling, but the ways in which it is understood are changing. The growth of the networked society, and the spread of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT), has brought about significant changes to traditional forms of literacy. Older, print based forms now take their place alongside a mix of newer multi-modal forms, where a wide range of elements such as image, sound, movement, light, colour and interactivity often supplant the printed word and contribute to the ways in which meaning is made. For young people to be fully literate in the twenty-first century, they need to have clear understandings about the ways in which these forms of literacy combine to persuade, present a point of view, argue a case or win the viewers’ sympathies. They need to know how to use them themselves, and to be aware of the ways in which others use them. They need to understand how digital texts organise and prioritise knowledge and information, and to recognise and be critically informed about the global context in which this occurs. That is, to be effective members of society, students need to become critical and capable users of both print and multimodal literacy, and be able to bring informed and analytic perspectives to bear on all texts, both print and digital, that they encounter in everyday life.

This is part of schools’ larger challenge to build robust connections between school and the world beyond, to meet the needs of all students, and to counter problems of alienation and marginalisation, particularly amongst students in the middle years. This means finding ways to be relevant and useful for all students, and to provide them with the skills and knowledge they will need in the ICT-based world of the Twentyfirst century. With respect to literacy education, engagement and technology, we urgently need more information as to how this might be best achieved.

A framework for the design of privacy preserving pervasive healthcare

Privacy is an important aspect of pervasive and ubiquitous computing systems, and, in particular, pervasive healthcare. With reference to previous approaches on developing privacy sensitive pervasive healthcare applications, we detail a framework for the design of such systems that aims to minimise the impact of privacy on such systems. In reviewing previous approaches, we extract and combine common elements in order to unify the approaches and create a more formal methodology for designing privacy mechanisms in pervasive healthcare applications. In doing so we also consider the manner in which ubiquitous technologies impact on privacy and methods for reducing this impact. We demonstrate how the framework can be applied by using examples from the previous approaches. In addressing privacy issues, the framework aims to remove a large obstacle to deployment of pervasive healthcare systems, acceptance of the technology.

A probabilistic model with parsinomious representation for sensor fusion in recognizing activity in pervasive environment

To tackle the problem of increasing numbers of state transition parameters when the number of sensors increases, we present a probabilistic model together with several parsinomious representations for sensor fusion. These include context specific independence (CSI), mixtures of smaller multinomials and softmax function representations to compactly represent the state transitions of a large number of sensors. The model is evaluated on real-world data acquired through ubiquitous sensors in recognizing daily morning activities. The results show that the combination of CSI and mixtures of smaller multinomials achieves comparable performance with much fewer parameters.

Use of electronic games by young children and fundamental movement skills?

This study investigated associations between pre-school children's time spent playing electronic games and their fundamental movement skills. In 2009, 53 children had physical activity (Actigraph accelerometer counts per minute), parent proxy-report of child's time in interactive and non-interactive electronic games (min./week), and movement skill (Test of Gross Motor Development–2) assessed. Hierarchical linear regression, adjusting for age (range = 3–6 years), sex (Step 1), and physical activity (cpm; M = 687, SD = 175.42; Step 2), examined the relationship between time in (a) non-interactive and (b) interactive electronic games and locomotor and object control skill. More than half (59%, n = 31) of the children were female. Adjusted time in interactive game use was associated with object control but not locomotor skill. Adjusted time in non-interactive game use had no association with object control or locomotor skill. Greater time spent playing interactive electronic games is associated with higher object control skill proficiency in these young children. Longitudinal and experimental research is required to determine if playing these games improves object control skills or if children with greater object control skill proficiency prefer and play these games.

Sharing the moment : on the Olympic Games as spectacle

Article examining the 'sale' of Olympics drawing on Kant's aesthetics of beauty in the Critique of Judgment.

Games and movement

Videogames give us new bodies able to move through the world with grace and precision. In this conversation session, we explore how the form of dance can follow on from the function of the game's rules.