from e-learning to s-learning

I’ve been out of joint for a while in here although I have been sneaking in spontaniously from time to time this year. An advantage of taking a break in whatever one does is that once one “is back” one’s perspective on one’s perceptions has changed. Looking back then becomes a productive process of learning.

Something new in academicblogsphereworld to me is the term s-learning I’ve come across few days ago on I can’t remember what row of links I had followed. An eventual reader involved in educational games development may be interested in having a look at Mike Wesch‘s attempts: 1, 2.

games science or aspects of how things work

Games Science is the title of a new academic online mag I came across updating my blogroll a little while ago.  As well as Matter out of Place Torill Mortenson’s blog Thinking with my Fingers , to which I stuck for her description of a cyberethnographer’s  morning routines, has been overdue to link to.  For some or another reason at some point of time I stopped updating the blogroll of my foregoing blog ‘sblog so this is why I finally initiatorily added them over here.

In a recent entry  she pondered upon the current state of german game studies and first of all I wondered about her implication of german game studies necessarily having to be published in german? Zeph, who meanwhile has checked the referrerlinks of his blog,  too questions the category as its boundaries are blurring.   

Howsoever, I am sort of fascinated by this visualization, too. Way back when I began to read about academic concepts of  ‘virtual reality’, in my initial reading I found a wide interdisciplinary reception of the concept first of all spanning both branches of natural sciences and humanities. The reading hereby was reduced to german and english literature online and offline.  All the languages I don’t speak have been a concern for me which in the end at some point of research made me drop out the focus on “academic concepts of virtual reality”–I would never have been able to answer it sufficiently.

  

adrenaline

In an interview conducted a while ago I asked a gamer who high-frequently plays first-person shooter games for what happens while playing. As this was sort of a “big question” that could have been answered in various regards and areas of reflection, I specified myself in order to direct his introspection on the biophysical level I was interested in. I asked for “… the pouring out of adrenaline?” which prooved to be spot-on.

He reconfirmed my assumption and even stepped one forward by setting the “hint word” ‘adrenaline’ in a specific context which was ‘Angst’.

Note, the pour out of adrenaline e.g. could have been connected with ‘aggression’ in the first place too, which actually would imply a different starting point of reflection. I think I actually was thinking from the ‘aggression’ corner as that is what I had thought of earlier reflecting a personal friend of mine’s reasons to play shooter games and what had made me attentive to the physical pour out of said substance.

I then was described a practice he called verschnaufen [to breathe].

[..to be continued.]