Jason Nolan

The International Handbook of Virtual Learning Environments

xi Biographies of Editors and Contributors xii

Beyond gamification: reconceptualizing game-based learning in early childhood environments

The recent promotion and adoption of digital game-based learning (DGBL) in K-12 education presents compelling opportunities as well as challenges for early childhood educators who seek to critically, equitably and holistically support the learning and play of todays so-called digital natives. However, with most DGBL initiatives focused on the increasingly standardized ‘accountability’ models found in K-12 educational institutions, the authors ask whose priorities, identities and notions of play this model reinforces or neglects. Drawing on the literatures of early childhood studies, game-based learning, and game studies, they seek to illuminate the informal contexts of play within the ‘hidden’ and ‘null’ curricula of DGBL that do not fit within the efficiency models of mainstream education in North America. In the absence of a common critical or theoretical foundation for DGBL, they propose a conceptual framework that challenges what they regard to be the institutionally nullified dimensions of autonomy, play, affinity and space that are essential to DGBL. They contend that these dimensions are ideally situated within the inclusive and play-based curriculum early childhood learning environments, and that the early years constitute a critically significant, yet overlooked, location for more holistic and inclusive thinking on DGBL.

GimpGirl grows up: Women with disabilities rethinking, redefining, and reclaiming community

In this article, we undertake a reflective narrative inquiry into the GimpGirl Community (GGC), an online group of women with disabilities. We explore 12 years of GGC activity through community archives and auto-biographic narratives of GGC organizers, to understand how these women actively created a safe and open space for like-minded individuals, how community members used diverse online technologies for community building and social interaction, and how these online tools allow some members to experiment with their notions of self and identity outside dominant discourses. Our analysis of the lived experiences of GGC members reveals how they challenge the boundary between ‘abled’ and ‘disabled,’ and enact agency beyond their marginalization as women and as individuals with disabilities.

Hacking human: data-archaeology and surveillance in social networks

In this paper, we describe the techniques, methods and context for hacking humans using publicly available information found on the Internet.

Embodied Semiosis: Autistic ‘Stimming’ as Sensory Praxis

Within the medicalized semiotic domain of autism as disease, autistic sensory experience is classified as a sensory integration ‘disorder’. The senses, sensory perception and integration are, for autistics, the authority and the warrant by which disablement and psychiatric intervention are rationalized as the purview of medical and institutional power/knowledge. This positioning reinforces and produces a normative sensory ideal. This semiosis of medicalized discursive practices reduces the disabled person to an essentialized biological body. It is also a semiotic process that discursively constructs the autistic in a deficit-driven language of disease rather than difference. Recognizing the discursive and semiotic nature of disablement, autistic self-advocates (also self-identified as ‘neurodiverse’) coined the term ‘neurotypical’ to define non-autistic subjectivity, sensory orientations and social norms on their own terms. As with deaf culture, the neurodiversity movement defines itself as a social and cultural identity rather than impairment. In this chapter, the authors, who are both autistic, explore the possibilities for new literacies of neurodiverse expression and epistemologies that are more self-reflexive about the nature of the semiotics to configure and periodize a sensory imaginary to engage the nullified and revolutionary experience of feeling, sensing and understanding beyond the neurotypical.

Difference and the Internet: When Ethnic Community Goes On-line

The idea of virtual community is embedded in a deep matrix of McLuhan’s Global Village and the dominant Western cultural influence, Although there is space on-line for an infinite number of virtual communities, they tend to reflect real-world groupings and organizations based on notions of difference. In this context, difference can be seen as perceived variation based on dissimilar characteristics where groupings resemble communities in which members share at least one common interest. And it is this sense of difference that informs our exploration of “virtual ethnicity” (Poster, 1999) in an on-line environment we call Serbia.web. Ethnicity is one such common intersection that helps define a community. Ethnicity is often tied to bioregionality, common geographical colocation, and it is a struggle to maintain ethnic ties as groups spread across the globe under the influence of events such as those in the former Yugoslavia, and in Afghanistan. Since large movements of different ethnic groups around the world are almost commonplace for diasporic reasons, ethnic groups are often faced with the tension of assimilating to new regions and maintaining a sense of ethnic identity. Many groups cultivate on-line communities to ensure that their ethnic identity will not be lost by developing, and participating in, on-line communities.

The Technology of Difference: ASCII, Hegemony, and the Internet

Saturday night. My partner, Yuka, is translating Orphan at My Door by Canadian Children’s author Jean Little into Japanese2 (Little, 2001). Her plan is to translate it into a web-page diary in a format known as a blog (Cooper, 2001; Power, 2001). Blogging will allow her to maintain an on-line journal, where each entry is not just a static web page, but forms part of a chronologically ordered interactive database. A group of Japanese scholars, friends, and her editor will be able to follow the progress and make suggestions, and the finished product will be downloaded by the publisher and printed. A novel approach, to translate an orphan’s diary using an on-line diary-writing tool.