Today's Computer Games and Virtual Worlds Seminar at UC Irvine focuses on the huge growth of massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) among young virtual world denizens in recent years.
Currently, more than 200 MMOs/virtual worlds are aimed at the youth market, whose growth has particularly exploded in the past five years.
Seminar speakers Jackie
Marsh
, professor
of
Education at the
University
of
Sheffield in the
UK
, and Heather
Horst, socio cultural
anthropologist with the
UC
Humanities
Research
Institute at
UCI, address how this has changed children.
]
Marsh studies the
relationship
between
popular
culture,
media
and
new
technologies
and
young
children´s literacy
practices,
both
in
and
outside
school.
She will draw on the MMOs/virtual
world
Club
Penguin
and
Barbie
Girls for her presentation, exploring the ways children play, see the environments and transfer what they learn in virtual worlds to the real world. Marsh will also address the digital
literacy
practices
embedded
in
children's
engagement
with
sites
such
as
Club
Penguin.
Horst, who is also a research fellow in the MA Program in Digital Anthropology at University College in London, focuses her research on the relationship between place, space and new media.
She will talk about transformations in family life in light of new media.
A panel discussion runs from 3:30
to 5
p.m., followed by a reception, at 6011
Donald
Bren
Hall
on the UCI campus.
RSVP
to A9******@ic*.edu">
ve****@ic*.edu
.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.