Convergence of the Real and the Virtual: The First Scientific Conference in World of Warcraft
May 16, 2008
You may have heard your students talking about questing or getting their epic mounts or selling bars of gold on the auction house. If you have, you’re probably dealing with a World of Warcraft player.
As a long-standing gamer and a doctoral student interested in virtual worlds and games and their potential use for teaching, I was thrilled to learn that a recent issue of Science magazine called for participation in a unique conference – one that would take place within the massively multiplayer online game, World of Warcraft (WoW). For three days in May, participants in the Convergence of the Real and the Virtual conference created characters and joined players from around the world to participate in scholarly discussions about the game while hanging out in a virtual world.
The conference was comprised of three sessions: one about the possibilities for research within the game, one about the relationship between the game and the “real world,” and one about the future of such virtual worlds.
I was particularly drawn to the second session because it featured both Constance Steinkuehler who researches the potential for learning and literacy in games, and Julian Dibbell, who researches cultural and sociological aspects of games. These scholars are two of my most favorite within this community. This particular session shed some light on the learning potential in games.
Steinkuehler believes there’s serious learning and knowledge creation that occurs as a result of playing WoW. For instance one conference participant related a story about how his son wanted to find a specific pet within the game (yes, players can have virtual pets in the game) and spent several hours researching how to find and obtain such a pet. This example uniquely illustrates the development of critical thinking, research skills, and strategic planning - indispensable skills in high school, college and beyond. Other threads of discussion in this session included the notions of:
- How real is a friend in WoW?
- Are the relationships that are formed in-game meaningful?
- Is the social space of the game completely different from real life, or does it simply mimic real life?
- Can leadership be learned in WoW?
- Can skills developed within the game world transfer to the real world?
If you are interested in learning more about the potential for learning in games, I recommend you start with Steinkuehler’s work. After all, 10 million people play WoW; and some of them might be your students! -LAURA CHRISTOPHERSON


You’re probably all well aware of the threat posed to mankind by artificially intelligent machines, everyone’s seen The Terminator movies at least once or twice. So when I heard about the so-called “living content” available through 
Tired of kids doing the same games from your list of activities? Would you like to add the element of random chance into your curriculum, but still have solid academic (yet fun) online activities for kids to do? Let
Welcome to the Carnival of Education Career Fair! We’ve retracted the bleachers and set up the booths on the gymnasium floor so these brave teachers can see what they might be doing if they weren’t teaching (perish the thought).
Back in February, Jeremy blogged about
Ever have that student that just can’t seem to get a concept (especially in mathematics) without concrete examples? How about the ones that do better when they make something, rather than taking notes and doing calculations? That probably describes 50-85% of some classrooms. Well dear readers, we have some tools for you.
Instructify will host the 171st edition of 
So let’s be honest, most of us can’t afford fancy digital video cameras, and if even we could, we wouldn’t carry them around all the time. That’s why whenever something exciting happens, everyone whips out their trusty cell phone cameras in order to document it. The problem, however, is that they are phones first, and video cameras second (or third, or fourth), so the quality is generally lacking, especially in the resolution department.
In a May 4 article titled “
Do you like water? I know I do! I’m hooked on the stuff, in fact. Unfortunately, a lot of people die each year due to a lack of clean drinking water. That’s why the
I always thought that college was the time for experimentation, but as it turns out, there’s a lot of experimenting you can do in elementary school, too.
Who can resist a quiz game with digestive sound effects? I know I (and millions of others) can’t. If this sounds like something you, or perhaps a select number of your students would enjoy, check out