Exploring Teacher Use of an Online Forum to Develop Game-Based Learning Literacy

Game-based learning researchers have emphasized the importance of teachers' game literacy and knowledge of pedagogical approaches involved in successfully adopting an instructional approach (Bell and Gresalfi, 2017). In this paper, we describe findings from an online resource that teachers used to generate a repository of games for use both during their involvement in a Masters in Learning Technologies program and after the completion of the program. We argue that such a repository providing information on games in terms of their technology, pedagogy, and content may prove useful for teachers searching for games to align with their area of practice. This paper presents a descriptive analysis of a sample of 82 posts posted from September 2010-November 2016 to demonstrate participants' emerging proficiency in assessing games for their technological, pedagogical, and content-related affordances and constraints (as supported by the Game Network Analysis (GaNA) framework) (Shah & Foster, 2015). The paper also presents a case example to illustrate a forum user's developing game literacy and the community and contextual factors that influence post content. We conclude with implications for future research. [For the complete proceedings, see ED579395.]