Machinima and education: linking film culture and gaming culture

Excerpt from: Machinima and education, Diane Carr (Futurelab)
Film and media educators cite similar advantages. Matt Kelland, Creative Director of Short Fuze has been running film-making workshops in schools. Matt argues that machinima offers educators:

“…sets, costumes, stunts and special effects that would be impractical or impossible on a student budget. You can very quickly film a scene many times over, reusing the dialogue and choreography, and see the effect of different styles and techniques. Plus a student can be simultaneously actor, director, writer, cameraman, set designer, lighting engineer, sound engineer, and editor, thus allowing them to appreciate the totality of the film-making process.”

This article is a very general introduction to Machinima, but useful for those interested in this emerging culture. Futurelab itself has a LOT of web papers/articles that may of interest to some looking at the convergence of education and the digital age. A few that are in personal interest areas to me include:

Travels in time and space

August 2007

Primary and secondary schools in Kent have been discovering how to use a geographical information system (GIS) to find out more about the geography and history of their local landscape. Kim Thomas talked to lecturer Jason Sawle and teacher Gerard O’Sullivan about the project.

Travelling between worlds

December 2006

Edith Ackerman is a distinguished developmental psychologist who now teaches in the School of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Here she talks to Kim Thomas about how the interaction between physical and virtual spaces supports children’s learning.

Open thinking and open spaces

November 2006

Bruce Jilk is an American architect whose innovative, flexible designs for schools have gained him worldwide recognition. At the recent Futurelab conference, he talked about how his designs reflected his learner-centred philosophy. Kim Thomas met up with him over coffee to hear his thoughts on architecture, schools and learning.

Children photographing their social worlds

August 2006

What does the world look like through a child’s eyes? Teachers and researchers are often involved in attempts to find out how children think about and perceive things, and one useful method is photography.

The future of history

June 2006

There was a time when the only resources history teachers had at their disposal were textbooks. These days ICT has the potential to make a vast pool of information and research tools available to students. Kim Thomas takes a look at the history classroom of the future.

Virtual Worlds: more than a game

August 2005

Large-scale online games, set in immersive 3D virtual worlds, have received interest from the learning community due to their inherently social nature and the strength of the communities that exist within and around them.