Research Map

I'm excited about my research. I think it's a really cool thing in so many ways. Consequently, perhaps, when I explain it I tend to mention many of the ways that I think it's cool. I talk about how I want to incorporate the appeal of video games into this outside game experience. I talk about how the campers will have to work together and draw on each others' body of knowledge and experience. I talk about how, in the redesign of it that they will do after playing, they'll have to deconstruct the learning in order to pose new problems (quests) for their peers in the next iteration. I talk about how a game that moves players through real geographical space may more directly connect them to those spaces in culturally-meaningful ways (thus the spaces becomes valued places, and there are all sorts of environmental benefits here).

But a study that fully examines *all* these things would be difficult-to-impossible to undertake. I need a way to take into account many-to-most of these aspects and map their connections to my study, without spending too much time and energy on them.

The solution, inspired by my DRP colleagues last Tuesday, is to write a 1-5 page summary on each component and how it fits (and doesn't fit) into my study. The study draws from video game study, but it is not primarily a video game study. It draws from Environmental edcuation, but it is not an Env.Ed. study. Etc.

The thing I'm focusing on (to start with) is technology and/or place, and/or design. Does the game have promise as a learning tool? Does the game editor have promise as a design-based-learning tool? Does the physical immersion in geocultural space aid in rich learning?

Hmm. See? That's more than one thing. I need to ask myself all these (and more) questions, write up short answers, and pick which one (or which connection between two or three?) is most interesting to me, and to the the rest of the world, I suppose. I imagine all sorts of web-like connections between the areas, and I suspect it will a mess of overlaps, but Ihope this will help.