[game_edu] Education Membership and Chapters?

[Jason Wertz]

I've been thinking about this concept as well. I'm in the Philadelphia area and we have a dense population of schools. Our IGDA meetings have been growing a lot lately but I have yet to see an increase in attendance from other academics. 

Lately I've become obsessed with the idea behind BarCamps (www.barcamp.org) and I've been thinking about organizing one for academics and students focused on game education. I like the idea of the BarCamp because the conference organizes itself once everyone arrives. It should be fairly easy to organize and a lot more laid back. Once the semester is over I have plans to try and put this together and see if a regular meeting or mini-conference can grow out of this experiment. 

My personal agenda for having such meetings would be to forge transfer agreements with other local institutions.


Jason Wertz
Assistant Professor, Computer Science
Montgomery County Community College
215.641.6308
http://faculty.mc3.edu/jwertz


>>> "S. Gold" <goldfile at gmail.com> 4/8/2008 11:33 AM >>>

So I have been giving a lot of thought to an idea I had at GDC and wanted to
get some feedback from the list to get their thoughts. This is very rough,
but hope that I might be able to get some useful feedback to improve upon
what it is we do. I must stress that this is just a feeler type of posting,
not an action item.

As we are all far flung from coast to coast, continent to continent, it is
rare, if ever we meet. When I went to Boston last year I found that there
were over 90 educators working in games in one area or another - all in the
same metro area. Now that is a lot of folks who have common interests.
However there was a lack of network and rarely if ever did they know one
another. The IGDA has chapters in some cities and even in those cities, not
all necessarily cater to the needs of educators or even allow students. Now
some schools have student chapters, however, those have no official ties to
our SIG although we try to provide them with information. My thought, what
if we create some sort of IGDA Education Chapter in areas that have more
than one school? A way to unify, if not help to create more bridges of
opportunity. I have no real formal suggestion for how to set these up. I
also don't know if this is something that we as a group want to do. I guess
I am throwing it out there to see if:
1. there is a need
2. how it would differ from an actual IGDA chapter
3. what you want from having an actual education chapter
4. where are some of the areas that would benefit from creating a chapter
(such as Boston or London or Sydney that have so many institutions in one
metro area)




Home of the 2006, 2004 and 2002 CASE and Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching's Pennsylvania Professors of the Year. 

This e-mail message and any files transmitted with it are intended for the use of the individual(s) or entity to which they are addressed and may contain information that is privileged, proprietary or confidential. If you are not an intended recipient, you may not use, distribute or duplicate any information contained within this message. If you have received this communication in error, please immediately destroy all occurrences of this message and notify the sender. Thank you. 

Montgomery County Community College 
340 DeKalb Pike, Blue Bell, PA, USA, 19422 
101 College Drive, Pottstown, PA, USA, 19464 
www.mc3.edu