An Article and a Presentation

Dr. Richard Ferdig over at U. Florida edited a special issue of the Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia on educational video games. He included my article, “New media resistance: Barriers to implementation of computer video games in the classroom.” I did a qualitative review of the research and found six barriers to using video games for classroom purposes:

Barriers included negative perceptions toward video games as educational components; the difficulty of providing state of the art graphics in educational video games; a lack of adequate computing hardware in the classrooms to run advanced video games; a school day divided by short class periods which hindered long term engagement in complex games; a lack of real world affordances; and a lack of alignment to state standards.

This paper was an expansion of one I delivered at AERA 2006. Check out the abstract at this link. If you are on a university connection, there’s a good chance you can access the full text. Check out the rest of the issue for six other articles on educational gaming.

In other news, I’ve been invited to speak at the Fall TECSIG meeting in Austin this October. TECSIG is the Technology Coordinators Special Interest Group, the largest SIG in the Texas Computer Education Association (TCEA). TCEA is the largest state organization for technology in education, and holds one of the biggest educational computing conferences in the nation at the Austin Convention Center every February. In my presentation at the October meeting, I’ll touch on research surrounding instructional games and demo a virtual interactive environment or two.

References
Rice, J. W. (2007). New media resistance: Barriers to implementation of computer video games in the classroom. Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia. 16(3), 249-261.