Connected Learning Summit 2019

Connected Learning During Disconnected Moments?
Hong-An Wu
This paper questions two common educational discourses that argues and advocates for the continual and further adoption of emerging technologies in the name of benefiting student learning by pointing out two specific unverified and perhaps unverifiable assumptions in these narratives: the position of technologies as obedient tools to serve higher-order cognitive functions and the position of technologies as coherent and bounded objects traversing through pedagogical exchanges. Afterward, this paper provides a provocation of how we, as educators and researchers, might move forward in addressing knowledge production around learning with technologies through the examination of moments when technologies don’t work.

Interests, Relationships, and Opportunities Within the 2018 Global Minecraft Mentor Program
Mathew Farber, Mia Kim Williams
Minecraft: Education Edition (Microsoft, 2016) has become a critical tool for learning for many classrooms, connecting students and teachers in game-based activity (Dikkers, 2015; Kafai & Burke, 2016). On the Minecraft: Education Edition website, a teacher can connect with mentors, review shared lessons, and download maps of generated worlds. In 2017 Microsoft Education launched the Global Minecraft Mentor Program to support teaching, learning, and innovation with the game. This research explores and describes this mentor space from the perspective of the participants. It seeks to understand the experiences of mentors within this space, entry points to onboard teachers who have little or no background in adapting Minecraft: Education Edition to their classrooms, and the extent to which connected learning principles manifest in the mentoring space. Research followed an explanatory sequential mixed method design. Two phases of data collection in this study beginning with quantitative data collection and analysis; the quantitative findings will inform the development and deployment of the qualitative data collection and analysis (Creswell, 2015). Data included survey responses, interview responses, artifacts provided by interview participants, and artifacts related to the Global Minecraft Mentor Program website.
Outputs & Insights From 12 Years of Game-Based Learning Research at the Danube-University Krems’ Center for Applied Game Studies
Nikolaus Koenig, Alexander Pfeiffer
For almost 12 years, the Center for Applied Game Studies at the Danube-University Krems, Austria, has conducted game-based learning research. Guided by the aim to enable classroom integration of game-based learning on a broad scale, this research has centered on the development of a gbl-toolkit for (and in cooperation with) teachers, enabling them to use game-based learning strategies within the context of current educational practice, while at the same time expanding their own knowledge and skills as gbl-experts. Currently, the toolkit contains tools to evaluate the pedagogical potential of digital games, to plan and conduct gbl-projects, and to exchange with other teachers and form an active gbl-community. The current step consists of the development of an educational game design tool and the first in a series of educational game editors for teachers. The talk will present these tools and discuss lessons learned from their development.