October 2009 Archives

With the growing pervasiveness of new technology, educators are focusing on media literacy as an increasingly important and relevant skill for students to have. This encourages a wealth of other journalism-related proficiencies, such as having a critical eye and evaluating the accuracy of information.

Link TV is an independent media outlet (including online fora and a satellite television channel) that seeks to foster these very skills through a project called Know the News (KtN). Link TV hosts two online tools called Remix the News and News Challenge, both of which are games that encourage students to reflect on the source of the news and how it is delivered; however, the ability to be critical is not one that is limited solely to the consumption of news broadcasts, but one that plays into a more basic literacy of information analysis. It becomes a question of pedagogy: by explicitly stating their aims to encourage media literacy, is KtN successful? Bloom's Taxonomy is a model worth investigating as a constructive means of assessing the efficacy of Remix the News, News Challenge and the overall objectives of the KtN project.

The vast majority of the Gazette's digital work, especially from the earlier years, is in quiz form. This article is only going to look at the games they made, a virtual Voting Arcade from September 2004 and two interactive mazes from 2009.

For a few hours on Thursday October 15th, the news was enraptured by a single story: a hot air balloon carrying a six-year-old boy had become untethered and was floating over Colorado. It had all the elements of a human interest story: a child in peril, a grief-stricken family, a catchy name. Falcon Heene, better known as "Balloon Boy" was the single subject of cable news, news websites, and the Twitter trending topic list. It was the "Baby Jessica" of 2009. Some held their breath, praying for the safe landing of the airborn kid, while others joked at the seemingly improbable situation. As it played out, those who laughed first indeed laughed last.

It is not surprisingly that two games quickly appeared related to Balloon Boy's story. But to understand the shape they have taken, it is worth recounting how the event unfolded in the media.

Alternate Reality Games have gained in popularity largely as a result of the infrastructural possibilities provided by the Internet. In games like World Without Oil, Superstruct, and Aftershock, players were geographically distributed across not only the United States, but the world. In the case of World Without Oil and Superstruct, the scenarios constructed for the game took on a global scale. In one regard, the popularity of these games can be ascribed to their broad audience: a tiny fraction of the population is a lot when your possible audience includes everyone with an Internet connection. So what happens when you take the Alternate Reality Game model and translate it locally?

We have used the term Community Games to mean something broader than the Alternate Reality Game genre that has developed. Community games need not have fantastic plotlines and an unfolding story to ensnare their participants. Instead, they need to provide a way for people to engage with local subjects. The local community game is a relatively untouched area. It needs a low barrier to entry so as to appeal to a large party of a relatively small audience, make local material relevant, and provide incentive to play. We have two examples of this type of game, the first of which is Knight News Challenge winner Beanstock'd Game.

The challenges that Colorado's policymakers face as they attempt to balance their state's budget are familiar to governments nationwide. In the face of the worst economic downtown since the Great Depression, municipalities of all levels have experienced dramatic drops in tax revenue and consequently serious gaps between their revenues and expenditures. This has forced many communities and governments to make painful cuts into public services or raise taxes on an economically-distressed population in efforts to close their budget gaps. Many of these cuts are dramatic and would be unheard of a few years go. For instance, Colorado's legislators, in the face of an almost $600 million deficit, is considering completely eliminating all of its $660 million general-fund spending for higher education, according to a recent article in the Denver Business Journal.

Colorado Backseat Budgeter is an interactive tool that presents the user with this difficult task of balancing the Colorado state budget. Budgeter is sponsored by Colorado State University's Bighorn Leadership Development Program and developed through EngagedPublic.com which seeks to promote "consensus, collaboration and creativity in the public sphere." While I could not find an explicit purpose statement anywhere within the Budgeter's documentation, in an article at Chronicle.com, Brenda Morrison, the director of the Bighorn Program states that "'by putting themselves in the governor's shoes,' people will better understand how the system works."

Supreme Decision is the second game produced by OurCourts.org with the intention of better informing middle school students of the inner workings of the judicial system, as well as their civic rights and responsibilities. Like its sibling game—Do I Have a Right?—this game has been endorsed by (former) Supreme Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and is touted for using the driving force behind 'new media' as a means of educating its target audience. 

The game attempts to portray the decision-making process within the Supreme Court in all its complexities, while simultaneously teaching children about the First Amendment, particularly as it relates to students in a school environment. The OurCourts.org website also provides a teacher's guide that accompanies the game, which explicitly emphasizes the difficulty of settling court cases like that depicted in the game. The question to ask here is not whether a game is the most effective medium for this message, but whether or not this message is conveyed effectively through this particular game.