 |  |  | Christian Spielvogel, an Associate Professor of Communication at Hope College, is applying for a FIPSE (Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education) dissemination grant to develop and implement up to ten web-based, collaborative role-playing simulations and games for introductory and general education courses in higher education.
We are looking for a psychologist who might be interested in joining the grant team to author a role-playing simulation. This type of "massively multiplayer" simulation is especially well-suited to role-playing narratives rooted in complex systems, processes, contexts, or extended case studies, and can serve as an effective way to integrate applied contexts with theoretically based ideas.
Each simulation will be supported by the Serious Sims open-source software platform that Spielvogel and collaborators at Hope College created with financial support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.
Modeled after social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, Serious Sims integrates networked collaboration with multi-modal content and anonymous online role-playing to enable students to generate knowledge as readers, authors, actors, and audience members.
Content management tools enable authors to easily upload their content, so no programming or design skills are required.
The FIPSE proposal will be bolstered by two successfully tested prototypes, "A Marriage of Cultures" and the "Valley Sim."
Laurie Ginsberg’s (Western Michigan University) "A Marriage of Cultures" is a simulation intended for anthropology and women’s studies students developed around the narrative framework of a cross-cultural wedding between an American man and a Japanese woman.
Players learn about conflicting views of family responsibility, courtship, kinship, religious identity, and ideals of love as members of the Takahashi and Mancini families in the weeks leading up to Tom Mancini and Aya Takahashi’s wedding.
Christian Spielvogel’s Valley Sim is an online simulation of the American Civil War based on primary documents featured in the award-winning "Valley of the Shadow" digital archive.
Players experience and debate the war’s epochal events as avatars based on the lives of residents from two wartime communities whose original diaries and letters have been digitized in the Valley archive.
Authors will receive a stipend and opportunity to publish their simulation as well as co-author chapter in an anthology about digital learning
If you’re interested in more information about this grant opportunity, please view a trailer based on a recent pilot of the Valley Sim prototype at Penn State University:
http://courseware.e-education.psu.edu/courses/video/valleySim.html
and feel free to contact project director Christian Spielvogel at spielvogel@hope.edu
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