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Contribution: This study extends the embedded expert literature by examining a cross-college partnership between engineering and education faculty and its impact on the engineering faculty’s teaching practices. Background: Previous embedded expert models focused on disciplinary expert models that required extensive educational training to prepare embedded experts to work with instructors to transform courses using active learning strategies. Intended Outcomes: This study employed a novel approach to the embedded expert model by utilizing science, math, and technology education faculty to support undergraduate engineering instructors in transforming teaching practices. Active learning strategies and culturally relevant pedagogy were emphasized in this multisemester transformation process. Anticipated outcomes included decreases in the drop, withdrawal, and failure rates in transformed courses, and an increase in overall GPA for students enrolled in these courses. Application Design: The embedded educational expert approach supported instructors in electrical engineering, biomedical engineering and academic inquiry scholarship, and chemical engineering. Course interventions included adaptive assessment, project-based learning (PBL), peer-assisted learning, and case studies. Findings: Observation, interview, survey, and course level support the multidisciplinary embedded expert model for transforming instructors’ teaching practices and improving student pass rates within multiple engineering departments.

Fanfiction is a work of fantasy in which fans write stories based on original books, movies, TV series, and other cultural and artistic forms of expression. This study looks into fanfiction dedicated to the popular TV series Breaking Bad. In particular, it examines how fans construct the (spoken) dialogues of their (written) stories. The article explores the pedagogic value of using fanfiction in educational contexts, focusing on the analysis, creation, and enactment of stories inspired by TV series and movies that feature a combination of narration and ‘written speech’. The article also offers practical recommendations for classroom and online activities that support the development of skills and understandings related to writing and orality. The effort of representing speech in a written form (i.e., writing dialogues and descriptions of conversations) can help students reflect, with the aid of the teacher, on the distinctiveness and specificity of written and spoken communication. By comparing, contrasting, and critiquing audiovisual and written texts (e.g., the episodes of a TV series and the transcriptions of its dialogues), and by creating their own dialogue-rich stories, students can improve their understanding of the idiosyncrasies of writing and orality across modes, thus advancing their literacy and critical skills as creative producers, not just consumers, of popular culture and media.

The widespread access to wireless and mobile connectivity, the increasing popularity of social media, and the pervasiveness of portable devices such as smartphones and tablets are offering unprecedented opportunities for expressing and sharing personal understandings and representations of the world. This technology-mediated and hyper-connected milieu offers a fertile ground for representing, enacting, and counteracting antisocial outlooks and behaviours such as prejudice, discrimination, and bullying. In the introduction, we propose a unified theoretical model to comprehend the idiosyncrasies of prejudice, discrimination, and bullying, in function of the analysis of user-generated Vines related to prejudice, which is presented in the second part of the article. In this study, we posit prejudice as one of the primary seeds of discrimination and bullying, and we then examine its multimodal representations on Vine, a social medium that offers a short-form apparatus for constructing and communicating meaning. This study contributes to the understanding of how prejudice is represented and interpreted on mobile social platforms and opens the field to research on how people depict and perceive sensitive issues through “condensed” forms of computer-mediated communication.

Before, during, and after concerts, fans of The Grateful Dead, Phish, Widespread Panic, and other improvisation-oriented jam bands, gather in venues' parking lots to share experiences, debate band related lore, buy and sell fan made goods, listen to music, and participate in numerous other scene-related activities. The interaction within these spaces, and with these spaces, fosters the social construction of knowledge, language, skills, norms, behaviors, and identities. By applying Gee's construct of “affinity space,” this article analyzes the different trajectories to learning and participation associated with one the most influential fandoms in the United States. The conceptualization of parking lots as affinity spaces sheds lights on informal learning practices experienced in physical settings that transcend the affordances offered by virtual communities, social media, and, more broadly, computer-mediated communication. Focusing on situated learning endeavors enacted in jam band parking lots in relation to formal educational practices, this study advocates for a renewed and joined approach to education and fandom studies through a sociocultural lens.

Engaging engineering faculty in transformative practices in course design and teaching is critical to student success, especially in fields like engineering where there are challenges with attrition and retention. This paper presents a current course transformation program in which engineering faculty transform the design of their courses and teaching practices to improve learning supported by embedded experts. In this program, embedded experts are education experts who work with engineering faculty in transforming courses to address the needs of their students. This evaluation study investigates the outcomes of course transformations on engineering student achievement and teaching practices. The results show an overall improvement in student achievement outcomes and indicate that it has helped participating faculty become more successful engineering educators.

Purpose – In this paper, the authors present the insights and takeaways related to their experience with the design and development of ProblemUp!, a card game focused on helping higher education students develop personal strategies to overcome challenges in college and in life. Design/methodology/approach – This paper presents a case study with analysis of and reflections on the design and development of an educational card game. Findings – The design and development of ProblemUp! has engendered a number of insights to analyze, design and implement games that can help students become successful learners in school and life, beyond subject matter. The authors realized that it is worthwhile to offer different opportunities for players to engage with the game (e.g. alternative sets of rules, face-to-face and online versions), while at the same time keeping the game affordable, accessible and fun to play. Ultimately, ProblemUp! reflects a social and playful approach to learning that can help students become st...

The goal of this article is to provide a conceptual framework to better understand digital games in learning and creative contexts through the dimensions of play, design, and participation. This framework can be used as a guiding tool for the selection, implementation, and evaluation of game-based approaches in formal and informal educational settings, as well as a blueprint for making sense of playful learning and creativity in virtual worlds and technology-mediated environments. In essence, this article seeks to answer the question “What are digital games and how can we make sense of them for learning and creativity?” The proposed visual model and conceptual framework, here defined as Playful Constructivism, is grounded on the learning theories of Situated Cognition, Social Constructivism, and Constructionism, and draws from play and game studies, design-based learning, and affinity spaces research. This framework is not intended as the “ultimate” conceptualization of game-based learning, but rather as an agile tool that can guide scholars, practitioners, and students through the affordances, challenges, and opportunities of implementing and using digital games in learning and creative contexts.

Creating, sharing, and critiquing user-generated content are increasingly common practices in online environments, as users become active producers, reviewers, and promoters, not just consumers, of content. This paper investigates the functions of the opening posts in an online discussion forum dedicated to user-generated game levels (i.e., mini-games) designed with the LittleBigPlanet digital game series. In the analyzed community, the first post of each thread plays a crucial role, as authors introduce themselves, present their work, and set the stage for discussion. Findings show that the opening post carries a variety of discursive functions: it serves as a creative presentation of content, a self-reflective disclosure of practices, and a passionate call to participation. Moreover, by artfully using these themes, participants construct the opening post as a “request for absolution.” Through an ethnographic discourse analysis approach that draws on politeness theory, this study furthers the understanding of how users discursively construct and seek to increase opportunities for interaction, peer feedback, and social learning in a creative online space.