digital humanities + pedagogy: a companion

Imagevisualization: a glossary

  • metadata: information about information. You’ll use metadata to describe attributes of your items, like their dates of creatine, sizes, etc.
  • Dublin Core: a specific kind of metadata used by Omeka. Dublin Core keeps descriptions consistent.
  • omeka.net (compared to Omeka.org): there are two kinds of Omeka sites. Omeka.net is already hosted, meaning that you don’t have to install anything. Omeka.org is customizable, but you have to be comfortable installing Omeka on a server.
  • GIS (Geographic Information System): an integration of hardware, software, and data designed to capture, store, manipulate, analyze, manage and present all types of geographical data.  GIS is a “tool-centric” approach to digital mapping.
  • neogeography: combines the complex techniques of cartography and GIS and places them within reach of users. Neogeography is a “user-centric” approach to digital mapping.

    gamification: a glossary

  • achievements: accomplishments such as exemplary performance on specific assignments
  • add-ons: expansion packs that adds new material, such as additional stories, new areas of exploration, new items, or more levels.
  • avatar: the character a player directs through a game.
  • dungeons: complex spaces that must be explored before they can be unlocked.
  • Easter egg: a hidden feature of a game
  • extrinsic motivation: motivation by means of tangible rewards or pressures, rather than pleasure (e.g. intrinsic motivation).
  • game choice: the pedagogical model. Justin Hodgson argues that, more than course readings, game choice shapes “content, structure, assignments, [and] activities” (50). Hodgson borrowed his Quest Line structure from World of Warcraft, whereas Benjamin Miller modeled his class on the gameplay of Legend of Zelda.
  • Game Master: the person who acts as an organizer, authority of rules, arbitrator, and moderator for a multiplayer game. Lee Sheldon discusses how a Game Master isn’t necessarily synonymous with a Game Designer: “A teacher need not be a game designer to be a Game Master, but, in most case, must be the Game Master. Just as you are in charge of the development, you continue to be in charge of the classroom” (220).
  • gamification: the application of game mechanics to non-game activities.
  • gild: a community in a role-playing game. Guilds can be comprised of any number of players, depending upon common goals and play style of the game.
  • hack: a clever or quick fix to a problem. It can also refer to a modification that allows users access to otherwise unavailable features (which might give the player an unfair advantage over opponents). McKenzie Wark wrote the book (A Hacker Manifesto) on it.
  • level chart: allows players to see one another’s scores. Scores are sometimes posted anonymously; other times, Game Masters use avatars to induce competition.
  • postmortem: a game development term, borrowed from medical examiners. In the game development, a game’s features, design, and development are autopsied. In a class, the corpse is the class itself. Teachers often schedule a postmortem for the last session to create a space for conversation about what worked and what didn’t.
  • quest: the levels through which players acquire skills.
  • random factor: ensures that the outcomes of player choices are not always predictable. Some teachers integrate dice to randomize groupings of students into GILDS, for example.
  • scaffolded instruction: guides students from smaller, simpler skills, to larger, more complicated ones.
  • stuckpoints: a term coined by Peter Elbow as a way of recasting failures as essential to writing development.
  • walkthrough: a step-by-step guide to obstacles, puzzles, or bosses. Players create walkthroughs for other players.

    gamification: related concepts

  • active learning: “experiencing the world in new ways, forming new affiliations, and preparation for future learning” (Gee 23).
  • critical learning: “learning to thinking of semiotic domains as design spaces that manipulate us in certain ways and that we can manipulate in certain ways” (Gee 43).
  • semiotic domains: “any set of practices that recruits one or more modalities to communicate distinctive types of meaning” (Gee 18).
  • multimodality: “In multimodal texts (texts that mix words and images), the images often communicate different things from the words. And the combination of the two modes communicates things that neither of the modes does separately. Thus, the idea of different sorts of multimodal literacy seems an important one. Both modes and multimodality go far beyond images and words to include sounds, music, movement, bodily sensations, and smells” (Gee 14).
  • disruption: somewhere between intervention and subversion, a “creative act that shifts the way a particular logic or paradigm is operating” (Flanagan12)
  • intervention: a specific types of subversion that relies upon direct action and engagement with political or social issues, a “‘stepping in,’ or interfering in any affair, so as to affect its course or issue’” (Flanagan 11).
  • subversion: “the turning of a thing upside down or uprooting it from its position; overturning, upsetting; overthrow of a law, rule, system, condition” (OED).

    gamification: a bibliography

  • Alberti, John. “The Game of Reading and Writing: How Video Games. Reframe Our Understanding of Literacy.” Computers and Composition 25.3 (2008): 258–269. Print.
  • Bogost, Ian. “Gamification Is Bullshit.” Ian Bogost. Web. 8 Apr. 2014.
  • Bogost, Ian. How to Do Things with Videogames. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Print.
  • Colby, Richard and Rebekah Shultz Colby. “A Pedagogy of Play: Integrating Computer Games into the Writing Classroom.” Computers and Composition 25.3 (2008): 300-312. Print.
  • Dignan, Aaron. Game Frame: Using Games as a Strategy for Success. New York: Free Press, 2011. Print.
  • Elbow, Peter. Writing without Teachers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Print.
  • Flanagan, Mary. Critical Play: Radical Game Design. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009. Print.
  • Hodgson, Justin. “Developing and Extending Gaming Pedagogy: Designing a Course as Game.” Eds. Colby, Richard, and John Alberti. Rhetoric/ Composition/play through Video Games: Reshaping Theory and Practice of Writing. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. 45-62. Print.
  • Gee, James Paul. What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Print.
  • Juul, Jesper. The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2013. Print.
  • McGonigal, Jane. Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. New York: Penguin Group, 2011. Print.
  • Miller, Benjamin. “Metaphor, Writer’s Block, and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Writing Process.” Eds. Colby, Richard, and John Alberti. Rhetoric/ Composition/play through Video Games: Reshaping Theory and Practice of Writing. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. 99-112. Print.
  • Sheldon, Lee. The Multiplayer Classroom Designing Coursework as a Game. Boston: Course Technology/Cengage Learning, 2012. Print.
  • Kapp, Karl M. The Gamification of Learning and Instruction: Game-Based Methods and Strategies for Training and Education. San Francisco: Pfeiffer, 2012. Print.
  • Wark, McKenzie. A Hacker Manifesto. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Print.