With its ethnic diversity and soccer-crazy immigrants, cities such as Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver become unique places to experience a month-long spectacle that dwarfs the Olympics.

“Canada is a wonderful place to watch the game, partly because people shift allegiances as they go along,” said Pablo Idahosa, a social science professor in 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies. “People, once their team is out there's that disappointment, but then they can go on to cheer for another team.”

The complete story is available on .

The post Professor Pablo Idahosa: Canadian World Cup fans shift allegiances as tournament unfolds appeared first on Research & Innovation.

91��ɫ's Faculty of Education will host its annual research forum on technology in education today, from 2 to 4pm in 280N 91��ɫ Lanes.

Professor Jennifer Jenson (right) will present "Baroque Baroque Revolution: High Culture Gets Game". In today’s “super-saturated, socially networked, Second Life, massively multiplayer, online, keyed-in, content generating, 2.0, ‘glocal’” culture, the world of Baroque music, to many people, not only feels like a relic from an inaccessible past, but it often looks that way as well. In this talk, Jenson will attempt to show how play, its practices, contexts and discourses are mobilized, and how some of this might be theorized and reapplied through a design-based research project that created a Baroque music game.

Professor Ron Owston (left) will look at computer game development as a literacy activity in his presentation. According to Owston, serious gaming has become a burgeoning research field over the last several years. Most research to date has looked at students as players of computer games. But what happens when students are given the opportunity to be developers of their own games? In his presentation, Owston will give an overview of a large multisite study he, together with faculty colleagues and graduate students, conducted that examined the impact on literacy skills of Grade 4 students who created their own computer games. He will then review the findings of two other pilot studies he led that grew out of this work, as well as talk briefly about a research tool he is developing for remotely recording users’ interactions with computer screens.

Professor Chloë Brushwood Rose (right) will speak about community-based media pedagogy and production in a globalized world. She will outline the Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada-funded study she is undertaking with researchers from Montreal's McGill University and the University of New Hampshire in Durham, NH, which aims to pay critical attention to the proliferation of community video production programs in urban centres across North America, their pedagogies, and the videos produced through them. The researchers are conducting a comparative study of three projects in New 91��ɫ City, Toronto and Montreal that explore a number of central research themes relating to media pedagogies.

This event is free and open to the community. Following the presentations, there will be a wine and cheese reception. For more information, contact , communications coordinator, Office of the Dean, Faculty of Education, at ext. 58024.

The post Faculty of Education forum this afternoon looks at technology in education appeared first on Research & Innovation.