Projects

2019-21 Mobility, Language, Education: Challenges in M-Learning An interdisciplinary research project that brings together specialists in applied linguistics, language education, digital literacies, e-learning, m-learning, and experimental psychology to explore, examine, document, design, and develop pedagogies for mobile language teaching and learning that utilize language-embedded interactions characteristic of contemporary multimodal digital communication.

2018-22 Missing Modalities: Learning, Communicating, and Making Sense of Aroma A joint university research initiative with Dr. Melanie McBride (IRDL Member, Co-Investigator and Research Lead), Kurt Thumlert, Co-Investigator (York University Research Lead) and Jason Nolan, Principal Investigator (School of Early Childhood Studies, Ryerson University).

2018 Shifting Ground: Relocating Pedagogical Innovation from Schools to Communities This symposium brings together a group of emerging and established, local and international scholars to engage with community members, graduate students, school-based and non-formal educators, and others interested in mobilizing knowledge and exchanging research projects and practices concerned with community-based pedagogical innovation.

Up Skilling for the 21st Century: Teaching with Digital Games The primary goal of this project is to address an immediate need in the Peel District School Board (PDSB) to document existing teaching and learning practices around 21st century competencies in classrooms, to create effective professional development for teachers in innovative teaching practices, and to foster a network of creation, collaboration, and communication around transformative pedagogical practices.

2017 Parents Reaching Out Grant This project assisted parents interested in updating their digital skills as part of Ontario’s PRO Grants designed to support parents in identifying barriers to parent engagement in their own community and to find local solutions to involve more parents in support of student achievement, human rights and equity, and well-being.

2016-17 New Media Modules The new media modules were developed by an interdisciplinary team of Ontario-based university faculty members, York university students (teacher candidates), practicing teachers,  game designers, critical makers, digital storytellers, and artists. There are currently four modules: learning through game design, learning through digital storytelling, learning through critical making, and wikijamming (an extension of critical making, playable on our new media modules wiki). Modules learning outcomes are designed around the principle of production pedagogies. Each module invites students to not only engage in theories surrounding new media and new literacies and learning through situated making and design, but to also undertake a culminating self-directed (individual or group) production pedagogy project.

2015-16 Playing to Learn Playing to Learn implements a  game developed by the Ministry of Education that intended to introduced Grades 7 and 8 students to concepts in physical and human geography. The researchers assessed the impact of the game and sought to understand how teachers could be best supported in the use of game-based technology in the classroom.

2014-2019 Think, Design, Play: Re-Fusing the Digital Divide This 5-year study explores the relationship among 21st century skills, computational competencies, and game development. The results of the study show a direct correlation between game design and the development of computational competencies and offer analysis of how students understand and take part in an increasing algorithmic culture.

TLE: Transforming Learning Everywhere Implementation Study TLE is a 5-year project with the ambitious goal of transforming learning environments across the district by integrating new instructional practices with innovative technology use, including 1:1 iPad distribution.

2013-16 Embodying the Tween: Living Girlhood in Global and Digital Spaces This project examines the tensions between the commercial constructions of youth cultures and the lived experiences of the embodied young person. It addresses how the tween girl is framed by the cultural industries of girlhood and how she engages with such framings. ISBN-13: 978-1433121753

Kids Get Game: Game Development Pathways to STEM Achievement for Teachers and Learners This project addresses a number of well documented needs for girls and boys in low income schools and communities. Namely, this project responds directly to the following needs and problems: the inequitable access to technological resources for girls and boys in low-income schools; the ongoing gender divisions among you people related to access and training in technology generally, leaving girls and woman marginalized from STEM fields; and the lack of technology training for teachers.

2012-16 Young People’s Media Industries in Canada Canadian children’s and youth media has largely been ignored as a field of study in Canadian communication studies. The children’s and youth cultural industries in Canada are successful both nationally and globally. This project made a significant contribution to the scholarship in this area.

2011-2016 AMD After School Game Production Club To combat the lagging technical skill set and shrinking world of social and educational opportunity for low-income students, our research, in partnership with AMD, establishes a program for primary- and secondary-level students to acquire computer programming skills through game development. The program offers participants an opportunity to gain useful skills and knowledge, to mentor and be mentored, and to develop their overall confidence and technical skills. Over the course of several camps and workshops, our researchers create a unique environment for kids to develop computer games using Game Maker and to make wearable tech. For each event, critical thinking spaces are designed to encourage participants to challenge cultural norms on which games are “appropriate” for girls and boys to play and to talk about their gaming experiences while taking risks in their play and designs.

2019-22 Evangelisms, Entanglements and Superfans: Young People’s Creative Labour in the Visibility Economy This project explores how children’s media and entertainment companies harness young people’s creative labour to promote intellectual properties, and considers the implications of this for how we define young people’s labour within digital capitalism.

Feminists in Games is funded by a Cana­dian SSHRC Partnership Grant and is an endeavour created with the purpose of assume­bling an inter­national research association of digital media researchers from a full range of salient disciplines to begin build­ing ‘connective tis­sue’ between and among them, so as to (a) better under­stand the origins and con­sequences of this gendered digital divide, and (b) intervene in its reproduction. The activ­i­ties and goals of FiG include: 1) 2, 3-day Gen­der and Dig­i­tal Games Research Symposia (Toronto/Vancouver) 2) Using the col­lec­tive crit­i­cal con­sid­er­a­tion and feed­back from the afore­men­tioned meet­ings to build an asso­ci­a­tion in which aca­d­e­mic part­ners will engage indus­try part­ners in the sub­se­quent con­duct of the research, includ­ing an industry-side imple­men­ta­tion and eval­u­a­tion of the research findings. See Dames Making Games (Toronto), Pixelles (Montreal) and XX game jam (Bristol, UK). 3) Cre­at­ing knowl­edge trans­fer between acad­emy and indus­try in the form of a web 2.0 inter­ac­tive data­base for gender-focused research for the games industry. Visit Project Website: www.feministsingames.com

Prove It To Me (PiTME) seeks to contribute to knowledge about the ways in which, and the processes by which, digital games do (and can further) support educationally worthwhile forms of learning, identifying and explaining the epistemic affordances of a range of ludic forms—for of course these are not all the same. There are three parts of the study: playing with educational games, playing with popular digital games, and creating digital games. Teachers and students can select which parts of the study they wish to participate in. The research questions for the digital game play portion of the study focus on transfer of training from the gaming environment to the real world: How do knowledge and skills transfer from one situation to the other? What best supports that transference? How might we measure that? And does such measured change identify deep learning that is sustained over time, rather than just temporary effects? The research questions for the digital game design and development part of the study focus on the ways in which students use digital games to communicate and demonstrate their knowledge: How, and in what ways, does school-based knowledge change when delivered through a game in comparison to traditional, text-based forms of communication? How might this knowledge be evaluated/assessed? How does game development impact students’ orientations towards and skills in science, technology engineering, and mathematics (STEM)?

Open VULab is an open source software tool that researchers can use to conduct remote usability testing. What is unique about Open VULab is that researchers can record video and audio of remote users’ interactions with their computer without the need to install an application on the users’ computer. Open VULab stores the data, including audio and video, in a relational database that the researcher can query for later analysis. OpenVU Lab project website.

York University is a core institution in the FLUID project, which is funded by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This ambitious international project is attempting to boost the user experience by creating a user interface architecture that is consistent, modular, re-usable, and built with inter-changeable components. fluidproject.org

Blended Learning For Soft Skills Development Interest in delivering blended programs is growing with the increasing desire of Canadian organizations to empower workplace learning. The focus of this project is to compare the learning impact/outcomes of four different blended learning strategies for soft-skills development. It will involve York University’s Institute for Research on Learning Technologies, Schulich School of Business, and hundreds of Scotiabank employees who will be randomly assigned to parallel course offerings using different blending strategies: self-directed e-learning, a blend of classes and e-learning, a blend of coaching and e-learning, and a blend of stretch action-learning projects and e-learning. Learning impact/outcomes will be evaluated and compared using a multi-method research approach. Blended Learning project website.

Project Mosaica is affiliated with IRLT, and presents contemporary Jewish culture in its current form on the World Wide Web. The project examines Jewish culture in the arts, and uses the Web in particular as an interactive cultural environment. Jews have always lived in diasporas–scattered and dispersed–and this project is devoted to exploring the positive aspects of diaspora’s creative and cultural promise in modern Jewish life. www.mosaica.ca

Future Campus is a portal for leaders in higher education who are re-thinking or re-designing teaching and learning in the 21st century. The portal has links to technology solutions from around the world, as well as teaching, learning and technology roundtables, planning resources, standards, and an extensive list of EdTech Centres. future-campus.org