Shaffer

David Williamson Shaffer

IDT 200 SurveyID Leader

Christine Crawford

Current Position

Associate Professor of Educational Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison (2006 – present)

Associate Professor of Curriculum and Instruction, University of Wisconsin-Madison (2006 – present)

Game Scientist, University of Wisconsin Academic Advanced Distributed Learning Colaboratory (2004 – present)

Education A.B. magna cum laude in History and East Asian Studies,

Harvard University (1987) M.S. in Media Arts and Sciences, Massachusetts Institute

of Technology (1996) Shaffer, D. W. (1996). Escher's world: Learning mathematics

through design in a digital studio. Unpublished masters thesis, Massachusetts Institute of technology, Cambridge, MA.

Ph.D. in Media Arts and Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1998) Shaffer, D. W. (1998). Expressive mathematics: Learning by

design. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA.

Escher’s World

Shaffer, D. W. (1997). Escher's world: Learning symmetry through mathematics and art. Symmetry: Culture and Science, 8(3-4), 369-393.

Shaffer, D. W. (1997). Learning mathematics through design: The anatomy of Escher's World. Journal of Mathematical Behavior, 16(2), 95-112.

Shaffer, D. W. (1996). Escher's world: Learning mathematics through design in a digital studio. Unpublished masters thesis, Massachusetts

Institute of technology, Cambridge, MA.

http://epistemicgames.org/eg/?cat=61

http://www.academiccolab.org/initiatives/gapps.html

http://website.education.wisc.edu/gls/GAPPS/index.htm

A Productive Approach to Learning and Media Literacy through Video Games and Simulations (Co-PI) Academic Advanced Distributed Learning Co-Laboratory Funder: MacArthur Foundation Amount: $1,800,000 (2006 – 2009)

National Science Foundation

CAREER AwardCAREER: Alternative Routes to Technology and Science (ARTS) Wisconsin Center for Education Research Funder: National Science Foundation Amount: $585,000 (2004-2009)

http://epistemicgames.org/eg/

http://www.academiccolab.org/initiatives/gapps.html

http://www.adlnet.gov/colabs/academic/index.aspx

http://website.education.wisc.edu/gls/

The Games

The Pandora Project

Journalism.net

Escher’s World

Why “epistemic?”

The word epistemology comes from the Greek root words episteme, meaning “knowledge” or “understanding,” and “logos,” meaning “thought” or “study.” Thus epistemology is the study of knowledge and what it means to know something.

Epistemic games are games that help players learn the ways of thinking–the epistemologies–of the digital age.

http://epistemicgames.org/eg/

Communities of Practice

“…a group of individuals with a common repertoire of knowledge about and ways of addressing similar (and often shared) problems and purposes.” from Lave and Wenger (1991)

An ideology or a way of “seeing, valuing, being in the world.” (Gee, 2005)

Epistemic frames

“the conventions of participation that individuals internalize when they become acculturated.”

Reproductive practices

The collection of activities through which individuals develop ways of thinking and reframe their identities and interests in relations to the community.

The means by which new members develop that epistemic frame.

“Thickly authentic”

activities are simultaneously aligned with the interests of the learners, the structure of a domain of knowledge, valued practices in the world, and the modes of assessment used

Epistemic Frames

Communities of Practice

Repertoire of knowledge

Reproductive practices

Thickly authentic learning contexts = epistemic games

Epistemic Frames

Communities of Practice

Repertoire of knowledge

Reproductive practices

Thickly authentic learning contexts = epistemic games

Interview with Dr. Shaffer

Dr. Shaffer was kind enough to respond to my email despite his busy schedule and the following are his responses to my questions.

Any website or article he refers to has been hyperlinked.

How did you become interested in games as a means to educate children?

I had been both a role-playing game player (and designer) and a computer programmer in high school and college. After graduating from college I became a teacher in the US and Nepal. When I came back from the peace corps I worked briefly at EDC (the Education Development Center in Boston) developing mathematics curriculum and software for an NSF project. As part of that I started using the Geometer’s Sketchpad and thinking about technology as a tool to help make education more engaging and meaningful. I returned to teaching for a few years, and then went to graduate school at the Media Lab at MIT, where I became interested in building computer-supported role playing games for learning.

Understanding a pedagogical praxis is such an effortful process – do you have a standard method for analyzing a CoP in order to develop an epistemic game?

Yes. It is called an epistemography and is described in the book and in a working paper (which is available online from my website epistemicgames.org and goes by the title of “The story behind the story.”

What advice do you have for future instructional designers and/or games researchers?

Build epistemic games ;-). But even more important, focus on building and especially on testing the “best” things that educational games can do, and work to transform schools to make that kind of learning possible, rather than focusing on building things that work in schools as they are. Schools need to do fundamentally different things than they do now (as I argue in How Computer Games Help Children Learn), so building tools to help them do what they already do only better is counter-productive in the long run.

References

www.epistemicgames.org http://www.academiccolab.org/initiatives/gapps.html http://website.education.wisc.edu/gls/GAPPS/

index.htm http://website.education.wisc.edu/gls/http:// www.academiccolab.org/initiatives/gapps.html http://www.adlnet.gov/colabs/academic/index.aspx http://www.garageband.com/artist/tintaguitar

Thank you!