This article discusses video games as "attractors" to "affinity spaces." It argues that affinity spaces are key sites today where people teach and learn 21st Century skills. While affinity spaces are proliferating on the Internet as interest-and-passion-driven sites devoted to a common set of endeavors, they are not new, just…

Culture can be understood as systems that produce and reproduce meaning, or as stable sets of meanings within a community. The authors illustrate how educational games produce and reproduce meaning, both related to the content being addressed and about the educational process itself. Educational games also rely on shared meanings and norms, which…

This article explores the design processes in creating a pro-social mobile game, "Litter Leader." Following the Egyptian Revolution, "Litter Leader," a game designed for Android devices, was created to foster community change among Egyptian youth. By tracing the meaning-making that occurred with 20 Egyptian youth who playtested…

In 2014, researchers at the Pullias Center for Higher Education at the University of Southern California (USC) received a grant from the U.S. Department of Education's Fund for the Improvement in Postsecondary Education's First in the World program to do research aimed at understanding how games can be used to cultivate college knowledge and…

The maker movement, with its focus on-hands on learning through creating with familiar materials, has seen growth in both formal and informal learning spaces. This article examines three informal learning spaces that have redesigned their space (or a portion of it) to accommodate several tenets of the maker movement and in various ways have become…

Many resources now punctuate the maker movement landscape. However, some schools and communities still struggle to understand this burgeoning movement. How do we define these spaces and differentiate them from previous labs and shops? Through a multidimensional framework, stakeholders should consider how the structure, access, staffing, and tools…

Higher education institutions have been playing a pivotal role in the emergence and elaboration of the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement. Initially, pioneering institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have led the conceptualization of OER, providing models of sustainable initiatives. Following the forerunners,…

Digital gaming communities are nuanced and developing. The eSports community has advanced in noticeable ways and represents the highest form of online competitive play for digital gaming environments. Due to the high stakes nature of eSports, its participants sit on the very edge of strategic planning boundaries and push the ceiling of…

This article explores the critical need to articulate computing as a creative discipline and the potential for gender and ethnic diversity that such efforts enable. By embracing a culture shift within the discipline and using games as a medium of discourse, we can engage students and faculty in a broader definition of computing. The transformative…

This special issue expands our understanding of teaching and learning through video game play, with specific attention to culture. The issue gives insight into the ways educators, researchers, and developers should be discussing and designing for impactful learner-centered game-based learning experiences. The issue features forward-thinking…

This article is written in the first-person, from the perspective of Steven Canning, a SUNY Potsdam instructor of educational technology and part-time professional gamer, with contributions from Anthony Betrus, Professor of Educational Technology at SUNY Potsdam. The author delves deeply into the world of professional online gaming, or eSports,…

Games, play, and learning have a long and embedded history that outdates digital games by many years. However, video games, computing, and technology have significant and historically documented diversity issues, which privilege whites and males as content producers, computing and gaming experts, and STEM learners and employees. Many aspects of…

What would it take for instructional design to qualify as a bona fide applied discipline? First and foremost, a fundamental requirement is a testable and tested theoretical base. Untested rationales until verified remain in limbo. Secondly, the discipline's applied prescriptions must be demonstrably traceable to the theoretical base once it is…

This article describes the crossroads between learning analytics and learner engagement. The authors do this by describing specific challenges of using analytics to support student engagement from three distinct perspectives: pedagogical considerations, technological issues, and interface design concerns. While engaging online learners presents a…

Learning technologies are now commonplace in education, and generate large volumes of educational data. Scholars have argued that analytics can and should be employed to optimize learning and learning environments. This article explores what is really meant by "analytics", describes the current best-known examples of institutional…