Toward a More Resilient Democracy: Addressing the Challenge of Algorithmic Culture Through Digital Game Design Pedagogies (66129)

Session Information: Design, Implementation & Assessment of Innovative Technologies in Education
Session Chair: Kurt Thumlert

Friday, January 6, 2023 (15:10)
Session: Session 4
Room: 322A
Presentation Type:Oral Presentation

All presentation times are UTC-10 (Pacific/Honolulu)

Media scholars assert that we are experiencing an algorithmic turn in digital culture. Algorithms increasingly mediate experiences of self, culture, agency, and sociopolitical possibility; they compile data about us, address us, organize architectures of ‘choice’, and otherwise personalize, predict, and delimit horizons of visibility, community, and learning. As educational theorists argue, big data techniques are implicated in forms of identity construction/interpellation, new surveillance cultures, and in perpetuating discrimination/racism. While educators argue that students need to have critical knowledge ‘about’ algorithmic systems, this paper asserts that resilient actors in contemporary democracies require pragmatic competences – technical know-how – of the interactive logic and intermediary operations in play. This paper speaks to the opportunities of transdisciplinary pedagogies for understanding algorithmic culture through digital game design. As games are, at their core, algorithmic, we ask: What and how do students learn through game design pedagogies that emphasize the aesthetic, protocological, and procedural systems common to both digital games and to algorithms? How might maker pedagogies enable learners to open the ‘black box’ of algorithmic culture and address questions about interactivity, identity construction, ideology, and democratic agency, and impacted questions about surveillance and privacy? How do game design pedagogies provide nuanced spaces for hands-on understanding of algorithmic procedures, where narrative systems, conditional logic, and complex parametric/algorithmic relationships are interwoven at the level of artefactual making? We map how digital game design advances critical algorithmic literacies as skilled practice, enabling students to explore how algorithms can work towards their own critical and creative purposes.

Authors:
Kurt Thumlert, York University, Canada
Suzanne de Castell, University of British Columbia, Canada
Jennifer Jenson, University of British Columbia, Canada


About the Presenter(s)
Professor Kurt Thumlert is a University Associate Professor/Senior Lecturer at York University in Canada

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Posted by Clive Staples Lewis

Last updated: 2023-02-23 23:45:00