ulises mejias

The video from Georgetown University’s Scholarly Communications Symposium, Social Media: Implicatons for Teaching and Learning, is now available.

Even though I had the difficult task of presenting the “dissenting” view, I learned a lot from participating in the session and I really enjoyed meeting the folks at Georgetown. Here’s the blurb about the event from the [...]

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My colleague Pat Clark and I are conducting a multiplayer scenario analysis (similar to an Alternate Reality Game) to explore the topic of racism on campus. It’s called osw3go.net. We seek to involve our community (although the rest of you can observe) in a constructive dialogue about what we can do, individually and [...]

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Here’s a project for FLEFF I just launched. You are all invited to participate!

Can you help a bunch of ghosts wage topological war, one Google Map at a time?
Welcome to Open Space, the Alternate Reality Game hosted by the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF).
An Alternate Reality Game (ARG) is an interactive, multiplayer Web-based [...]

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I’ll be presenting a paper at this year’s SUNY Conference on Instructional Technology (CIT 2009).
Active Learning, Social Media, and Serious Games: Case Studies
Dr. Ulises A. Mejias
Friday May 22, 10:15 – 10:45 am
Alternate Reality Games, played with everyday communication and information technologies, can be used as forms of active learning and research that involve students in [...]

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I’m currently coordinating a second (s)ARG. Here’s the info:
What would you do if you were not able to graduate because of cuts to SUNY Oswego’s budget? Stop panicking…. start acting!
Save Oswego! is an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) developed as a class project for the courses Social Networks and the Web and Videogame Theory and Analysis [...]

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I’m going to be coordinating a couple of ARGs this Spring. Here’s the announcement for the first one. Please join us!
‘Stop Gold Farming!’ is an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) developed for the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival. It could be called an experiment in collective storytelling, a radical new media project, or an internet ‘hoax’ [...]

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Here is my summary of this month’s discussion at the iDC forum. The archive of the discussion can be found here.
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It’s time to wrap up this discussion on the question of ‘How does social media educate?’ I would like to thank everyone who contributed to it, even by lurking! As the moderator, the one responsible [...]

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Perhaps it’s not surprising that Foucault, the “panopticon guy”, is characterized as a thinker of power, discipline, and punishment. But as Deleuze (1995) points out, Foucault also believed that we are increasingly moving away from being societies based on discipline to societies based on control. According to Deleuze’s reading of Foucault: “We’re moving toward control [...]

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[UPDATE: Raph Koster has replied to this post over at his blog, and Gus offers some interesting thoughts as well.]
The September 2006 issue of Harper’s Magazine (contents not online, unfortunately) has a piece titled Grand Theft Education: Literacy in the Age of Video Games. It is a conversation between Jane Avrich (author and English teacher), [...]

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A case can be made that Social Software contributes to the commodification of knowledge and social interactions, or that it is simply a way for companies to make money off your labor/data. But as we know, there’s more to it than that. Social Software can also embody a set of social practices that are downright, [...]

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