Welcome to pop.cosmo

Welcome to the new pop.cosmo blog! This site has been created so that we might be able to share our research findings more quickly and efficiently with a broader audience than academic print journals sometimes allow. Toward that end, I’m kicking it off with a quick note about who we are, what we’re up to, and what you might expect from the conversations herein. Keep an eye on us! We welcome your comments & participation.

Who we are.
We are a research team with the Games, Learning & Society Initiative at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that studies cognition & learning in the context of massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) or virtual worlds. Constance Steinkuehler is Principal Investigator. With the help of a generous grant from the MacArthur Foundation, we investigate key literacy practices that constitute successful MMO gameplay & how those literacy practices connect up with life and learning beyond the virtual worlds themselves. These MMO practices we mostly investigate include:

• collaborative problem solving such as what you find in in-game boss hunts, instances and raids (and what we’ve found looks a lot like cross functional teams),
• digital media literacy that goes beyond the reading and writing of print text to include multimodal, multimedia “texts” such as machinima etc,
• science literacy such as hypothesis testing, model based reasoning, and evidence based argumentation,
• computational literacy (the ability to interpret and express ideas through computational means) such as that found in game modding communities,
• guild leadership and how those experiences might prepare a person for leadership beyond the game,
• reciprocal apprenticeship and the complex ways that gamers mentor one another into gamer culture and practices, and finally
• pop cosmopolitanism, or the ways that virtual worlds are becoming novel contexts for the development of new forms of civic engagement in a global, networked world.

What we’re up to.
Much of our work consists of empirical documentation & analysis of these kinds of practices in the context of MMOs. Then, with that understanding in place, we develop after school instructional programs based on MMOs to help kids and young adults develop core competencies. In other words, we use MMOs as a kind of gateway drug to get kids involved in what we see as core 21st century skills (that are often under-emphasized in classrooms).

What this blog is for.
And the whole point of this blog is to share our findings before they’ve grown so much dust on them that they’re no longer useful.