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CMS News Archives
Scot Osterweil, the creative director of the Education Arcade, a games and learning research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wants games incorporated into classrooms in manageable ways - and for them to become more than just "automated tests tricked out as games."
The key, he says, is good game design and a realistic understanding of how much game play teachers can allow in their classes, given limited time and resources.
"Let kids play games outside the classroom, but get 'game skills' into classrooms," he says. "Also, use kids' experience of games to deepen their understanding and get academic ideas into a play space."
From "Video games start to shape classroom curriculum," by CMS alum Huma Yusef
Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl Olson will present findings from their book, Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do (Simon & Schuster, 2008), including the complex ways in which video games may benefit or disadvantage children. They will also talk about myths and politics in media violence research, and how they influence the views of academics and mass media. Lawrence Kutner, Ph.D. and Cheryl K. Olson, Sc.D. are cofounders and co-directors (with Eugene Beresin, M.D.) of the Center for Mental Health and Media at Massachusetts General Hospital. They are both on the psychiatry faculty of Harvard Medical School. Kutner received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota and trained at the Mayo Clinic. He's a licensed psychologist and a Fellow of the American Psychological Association. He wrote the "Parent & Child" column for the New York Times as well as five books on child development. Olson was principal investigator for a $1.5 million study funded by the U.S. Department of Justice on the effects of video games on young teenagers, which formed the basis for Grand Theft Childhood. She has a Doctor of Science degree in health and social behavior from the Harvard School of Public Health, and a postdoctoral certificate in pharmaceutical medicine from the University of Basel.
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A conversation with Junot Díaz, regarding questions of genre and secondary world construction in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and the Caribbean, and the failure of realism as a narrative strategy to describe the deep history of the New World. Díaz is the Rudge (1948) and Nancy Allen Professor of Writing at MIT. He is the author of Drown and The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the John Sargent First Novel Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize.
CMS Co-Director Henry Jenkins last month joined the likes of Madeleine Albright, Craig Newmark, and Former U.S. Solicitor General Theodore Olson for a panel on how public policy and private initiatives can better meet the public's information needs.
Jenkins participated in a similar panel at Aspen last year on media and values and blogged about the experience:
As I found myself making small talk with everyone from the heads of major media companies to former members of the Bush administration, the one topic which seemed to have captured everyone's interest was Harry Potter. Almost everyone had stories to tell about the experience of reading the final book in the series. In Convergence Culture, I suggested that fan communities might offer us better chances to talk about shared values across the ideological divides that currently shape American politics because they offer us shared fantasies and common reference points. Well, this was a pretty dramatic illustration of that principle at work.
Use the cheery pink power of bubblegum to convince your fellow citizens to join a popular revolt against a repressive government.
While doing so, you stop policemen by popping bubbles in their faces.
This is the premise of Gumbeat, a new video game developed as part of an annual joint collaboration between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Singapore's digital media students.
Read more at the Straits Times . . .
Four women from Harvard Book Store stood at the back of the Brattle Theater last night, before the crowds arrived, giggling. "I have the biggest literary crush on him," said one, referring to the evening's reader -- MIT professor, Boston Review fiction editor, Pulitzer Prize-winner -- Junot Diaz, a man, it appeared from listening to the women's chatter, with many charms.
"Oh my god," said another, "sometimes I imagine just walking around Cambridge and bumping into him. 'Oh, are you Junot?'"
"He kisses everyone," said a third.
Read the rest at The Boston Phoenix . . .
Move over Batman and Spidey, Gotham has a new hero: average New Yorkers whose random acts of civic courage are being logged on a new Web site called Hero Reports. A collection tool designed to lend statistical weight to compassionate acts, Hero Reports was launched by MIT Media lab student Alyssa Wright with support from The Center for Future Civic Media.
Read more at the School Library Journal . . .
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