Vita
Alice J. Robison
English Department
Arizona State University
Box 870302
Tempe, AZ 85287-0302
Education
Ph.D. English, University of Wisconsin–Madison, 2006
Advisors: Professor James Paul Gee and Assoc. Professor David Fleming
Major: Composition and Rhetoric (English Department)
Minor: Games, Learning and Society (School of Education)
Dissertation – Inventing Fun: Videogame Design as a Writing Process
M.A. English, University of Kansas, 2000
Concentration: Language, Literature and Composition
Current Appointment
Assistant Professor, Rhetoric and Composition Studies
English Department, Arizona State University
Areas of Specialty: digital literacies, social media, videogames, learning sciences
Research Affiliations
Faculty Researcher, SMALLab K-12 Embodied and Mediated Learning Project, ASU, 2008-present
Awards
Postdoctoral Fellowship, Comparative Media Studies, MIT, 2006-2008
UW-Madison Capstone Ph.D. Teaching Award (campus-wide award, given to 1-3 annually), 2005
UW-Madison Letters and Science Teaching Fellow Award (campus-wide award, given to 10 annually), 2004
Teaching Assistant of the Year, University of Kansas English Department, 2000
Single-Authored Publications, Peer-Reviewed
Robison, A.J. (in press). This is how we do it: A glimpse at Gamelab’s design process. eLearning.
Robison, A.J. (in press). New media literacies by design. In K. Tyner (Ed.), New Media Literacy. Taylor & Francis. Download: New Media Literacies By Design
Robison, A.J. (2008). The Design is the game: Writing games, teaching writing. Computers and Composition (25), pp. 359-370. Download: The Design is the Game
Robison, A.J. (2007). New media literacies at play in the 21st century. Journal of the Harvard Interactive Media Group, (1) 1. Cambridge, Mass.
Robison, A.J. (2007). Teaching the new media literacies. Journal of Media Literacy.
Robison, A.J. (2006). What videogame designers can teach literacy instructors. In Matzen, R. and Cheng-Levin, J. (Eds.), Reformation: The Teaching and learning of English in electronic environments. Taipei, Taiwan: Bookman Books.
Co-Authored Publications
Davidson, D. with Robison, A.J. (2009). Cross Media Communication. New York: Cengage Press.
Jenkins, H. (P.I.) with Purushotoma, R., Clinton, K.A., Weigel, M., and Robison, A.J. (2009). Confronting the challenges of participatory Culture: Media education for the 21st century. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Jenkins, H. and Robison, A.J. (2007). About Project NML. Journal of Media Literacy.
Jenkins, H. (P.I.) with Purushotoma, R., Clinton, K.A., Weigel, M., and Robison, A.J. (2006). Confronting the challenges of participatory Culture: Media education for the 21st century. (Available online from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Learning Initiative, http://digitallearning.macfound.org/site/c.enJLKQNlFiG/b.2029291/k.97E5/Occasional_Papers.htm)
Reilly, E.B. and Robison, A.J. (2007). Extending media literacy: How young people remix and transform media to serve their own interests. Youth Media Reporter 1, 96-101.
Selected Conference Presentations
“Embodying, Learning, and Designing Multimodally with SMALLab.” Presentation with Jennifer Clifton at the Games + Learning + Society Conference (GLS), Madison, Wisconsin, 2009.
“The Game School and SMALLab: Developing Theories and Practices Around Gaming Literacies.” Presentation at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), San Francisco, 2009.
“Play/Write: Connecting Games Research to Composition and Rhetoric Studies.” Co-chair, half-day workshop at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), San Francisco, 2009.
“New Media Literacies By Design: The Game School.” Media in Transition 6, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 2009.“Making Choices with Digital Media: A Discussion of the Ethics of Youth Participatory Culture.” Presentation at the American Educational Research Association (AERA), New York, 2008
“Changing Writing, Alternate Realities: Games and Game Theory in the Writing Classroom.” Presentation at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC),
New Orleans, 2008
“Inventing Fun: Designers and Teachers Team Up.” Presentation at the Games, Learning and Society Conference, Madison, Wisconsin, 2007
“New Literacy Studies and Video Games.” Symposium on videogames and the new literacy studies at the American Educational Research Association (AERA), Chicago, 2007
“How Videogames are Designed to Inspire Social Narratives: An Argument for Games as Instantiations of the New Literacy Studies.” Paper presented at the Thomas R. Watson Conference on Rhetoric and Composition, Louisville, KY, October, 2006
“What Videogame Designers Can Teach Writing Instructors.” Paper presented at 1UP: Perspectives from Scholars/Practitioners of Video Games, the inaugural Special Interest Group meeting at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), Chicago, IL, 2006
“Videogame Designers as Teachers.” Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association (AERA), Montreal, Canada, 2005
“Videogame Designers as Multiliteracy Pedagogues: An Analysis of the Designing Process.” Paper presented at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), San Francisco, CA, 2005
“The ‘Internal Design Grammar’ of Video Games.” Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association (AERA), San Diego, CA, 2004
“Technology is a Verb, Not a Noun: When Millennials Teach Us How to Research Them.” Paper presented at ‘Multiliteracies in the Contact Zone’: The Annual Meeting of the Association of International Applied Linguistics (AILA), University of Ghent, Belgium, 2003
Selected Invited Presentations and Workshops
“Videogames at the Library?! Using Games as Learning Tools.” Invited keynote to the Colorado Academic Library Consortium’s Annual Summit, Denver, May 23, 2008.
“Writing New Games: Designers Enacting the New Media Literacies Framework.” Invited panel speaker at the Engaging Learners through Gaming forum, Purdue University, October 11-12, 2007″Converging Identities at Play.” Presentation with Henry Jenkins at the Games, Learning and Society Conference, Madison, Wisconsin, 2007
“Learning Through Remixing.” Plenary discussion at the Media in Transition Conference (MiT5), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2007
“Inventing Fun through the Design of Social Experience.” Invited panel speaker at the Sandbox Symposium on Videogames, in conjunction with Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques (ACM SIGGRAPH), Boston, MA, 2006
“Imagining Readers and Players: Videogame Design as a Writing Process.” Invited keynote address to the Society for Technical Communication (Orlando Chapter), Orlando, FL, January 24, 2006
Courses at Arizona State University
English 105: Advanced First-Year Composition – The Jury Project
English 553: Technologies of Writing – Videogame Studies
English 654: Advanced Studies in Rhetoric and Composition – Digital Cultures and Social Media
Professional Advisory Boards
Advisory Board, Global Kids, Inc., New York City, 2008-Present
Advisory Board, PBS Engage Social Media Advisory Group, 2008-Present
Executive Committee, Games+Learning+Society, 2005-Present
Program Co-Chair, Media, Culture & Curriculum Special Interest Group, American Educational Research Association, 2009-Present
Reviewing
MIT University Press
International Journal of Cultural Studies
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication
International Journal of Learning and Media
New Media and Society
Professional Memberships
American Educational Research Association, 2004-Present
Conference on College Composition and Communication, 1998-Present
International Game Developers Association, 2005-Present
Modern Language Association, 1998-Present
International Society of the Learning Sciences, 2008-Present
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Former Academic Work, 1998-2008
Media Studies
Academic Advisor, 2006-2008
New Media Literacies Project
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Director: Professor Henry Jenkins
Distributed Learning
Adjunct Faculty, 2004-2007
Writing Program
Capella University
Director: Leslie Olsen
Writing Program Administration
Assistant Director, 2002-2004; 2005-2006
Writing Across the Curriculum Program
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Director: Bradley T. Hughes, Ph.D.
Outreach Coordinator, 2004-2005
Writing Center
University of Wisconsin-Madison
Director: Bradley T. Hughes, Ph.D.
Service
Admissions Committee, Comparative Media Studies Graduate Program, MIT, 2007
Senior Research Fellow, Games and Professional Practice Simulations (GAPPS), 2004-2006
Senior Research Fellow, “Room 130″ Videogames and Literacy Learning Research (Directed by James Paul Gee), 2003-2004
Co-Chair First Annual Games+Learning+Society Conference, 2005
Graduate Courses
New Media Literacies (MIT)
Videogame Theory and Analysis (MIT)
Teaching Writing in the Disciplines (UW-Madison Writing Center)
Designing Writing Assignments (UW-Madison Writing Center)
Responding to Student Writing (UW-Madison Writing Center)
Writing Statements of Teaching Philosophy (UW-Madison Writing Center)
A Dissertator’s Primer (UW-Madison Writing Center)
Undergraduate Courses
Beginning Composition (2 sections, University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Intermediate Composition (4 sections, University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Composition and Literature (4 sections, U. of Kansas)
Composition (4 sections, U. of Kansas)
Theses Supervised
Kristina Drzaic, MIT Comparative Media Studies Master’s Thesis, 2007
Neal Grigsby, MIT Comparative Media Studies Master’s Thesis, 2007
Peter Rauch, MIT Comparative Media Studies Master’s Thesis, 2007
Dan Roy, MIT Comparative Media Studies Master’s Thesis, 2007
