Magical Children - RPG for kids

I ran a session in my experimental RPG about Magical Children with 8 players yesterday, aged 6-43 (7 children one grown man, three boys and four girls!). I use a liberally adopted version of D&D rules and a whole lot of improvisation and spin the story very much on the spot. The premise is that in 2012 something happened awakening magical abilities in children (and possibly some adults) and subsequently special summer camps have been developed for such kids in Iceland - in other countries special schools have been set up .... yep - there is definitely a Pottereseque element at play here... The summer camp Huggusnudur is where three campaigns they have been on so far are based... and in the last one there is serious involvement of sci fi, what with the enemy being a mysterious alien. It is implied that somehow the 'event' of 2012 is connected to these alien visitations, but this remains unclear and for a later date to specify (or not). I experimented with allowing the players to have cell phones and this has some interesting consequences.... running a game with this large number of players, especially children, is a challenge, but on the whole I think we had a lot of fun. The last part of the adventure was complete instant creation where they had a class in IT magic, in which they conjured forth a ship, a spaceship, a sword, a star, a chair and last but not least a dragon's egg! All items that will be crucial in their future endeavours - after they return the Princess the rescued from Gomliholkur the alien to her palace in the mountains.... or while this goes on, I'm not sure.

My daughters and their friends have really enjoyed these session, even though they have been few and far between. They get their creative juices flowing - there is a lot of laughter (I enjoy going for things being a bit loony) .... there is excitement and even occasionally it gets a little bit scary.... It is important to have simple mechanics - my approach to DM-ing clearly favours story and fun above technicalities - just like my teaching style does. I really recommend trying this out - getting to know a little bit about RPGs and then just setting up a little game - if it fails miserably that's a lesson in itself, like we say in Reykjavík:

það fer ekki verr en illa!

Good gaming!

Leaving Mundania

I was inspired to sit down and write by one of my  cultural heroes, Cory Doctorow, by his comments in this interview, on how blogging is a powerful mnemonic device. This interview also reminded me of what I, of course, know to be true (not least now after reading Outliers) that practice makes perfect, and thus, by writing this blog I'm not wasting time from other stuff I could do in connection with either my job as a teacher or my role as a graduate student.

Anyway, I finished Leaving Mundania by Lizzie Stark just recently. This is a non-fiction book about Larping. It's a very interesting read.

The subject is fascinating. We get to know all kinds of different approaches to larping, from the traditional foam weapons and calling out damage to the weird and fascinating world of Nordic Art Larp. Stark has no previous knowledge or experience with table top RPGs so this also makes for an interesting and fresh approach.

The writing is personal and captivating, even moving in places. I especially found her confession concerning how she resents the fact that her husband is not her first reader to be moving, and it made me wonder how that will have gone down.... (208).

I highly recommend this book to anyone with a serious interest in gaming, and the weird and wonderful variety of human endeavours.... It serves well to quench prejudice people have against this hobby, even though I see a number of problems in getting started - mostly problems concerning time and effort. However, her discussion of the so-called 'free-form' format, a mix between larp and table-top, is something I'm definitely going to look into...

Icelandic Speculative Fiction Festival

Spent yesterday afternoon well listening to readings from and speculations on new Icelandic speculative fiction - or 'furðusögur' as the current phrase goes. Part of the discussion revolves around the way to translate various trade terms and how to approach coining various terms in Icelandic. All the works had a sort of teenage / young adult focus and these are (with one exception) young authors steeped in the genres of fantasy and sf. I was very much impressed and only slightly annoyed by the fact that there was no coffee to be had ..... in no particular order I 'll tell you about what I saw and heard - I'm confident some of these guys will go far:

Hildur Knútsdóttir (renowned for her extremely interesting take on the fashion world in Iceland) read from her new novel 'the Prophecy' (Spádómurinn). She said she had always loved fantasy and other speculative fiction, but been annoyed how it seemed to be possible to change everything except gender roles in such works. Therefore she wrote a book where all the characters are female, except for one fish. This books sounded like a really weird and wonderful piece and I look forward to reading it / reading it to my daughter. Be warned that Knútsdóttir is a feminist.

Gunnar Theódór Eggertsson read from his new novel 'The Stone Freaks' (Steinskrípin). He is a very interesting guy, with a passion for animal rights. Anyway this is a dystopian future novel where the world has literally turned to stone and weird, vaguely Lovecraftian, monsters roam the earth. I really loved the passages he read and describing familiar streets in Reykjavík in this very weird state gave me the chills.... a book I really look forward to reading!

Kjartan Yngvi Björnsson & Snæbjörn Brynjarson read from their novel 'Raven-eye' (Hrafnsauga). I enjoyed this, but it was a bit confusing because I missed their intro. This is a classic high-fantasy work, complete with a map and everything, and is the winner of this years award for children's fiction. I had a few words with the authors and this is an interesting book - and they envision as a series - definitely something worth following!

Ragnheiður Gestsdóttir was the most senior author to address the gathering. She gave a lively talk on how reality and fantasy are interrelated and how speculative fiction has not gained status in the literary world and is looked down upon still today. She apparantly is the mother of Kjartan Yngvi Björnsson and if I understood her correctly his reading of fantasy led to her reading and eventually writing fantasy!  A lively and inspiring talk

Emil Hjörvar Petersen author of Saga Eftirlifenda and Heljarþröm (hard to translate.... ), the first two in a trilogy where characters from the Norse Pantheon act out the last parts of their saga in modern and future times, gave a talk on how Norse mythology (and mutatis mutandis mythology in general) influences fantasy and speculative fiction. Neil Gaiman is his all time hero (confirmed from the podium and when I chatted with him) and he had some interesting examples and concepts to tackle this important issue.

I have to say that this project was ambitious and I feel that there is a lot of promise in these writers - not least because of how varied they are. The plan is to repeat this event in one year and maybe, maybe, I'll say something about how philosophy and speculative fiction are intertwined .... in my opinion fantasy and sf are the most important vehicles for critical and imaginative reflection on life, the universe and everything.....

A messy speculation on art, fantasy and Hugo

I watched the movie Hugo last night and I enjoyed it. I especially liked the magician / film maker who was at the centre of the plot, and it got me thinking about the past, my grandmother, art, fantasy and games. Recently the cultural program Víðsjá on RÚV in Iceland had a special program dedicated to the memory of John Cage in celebration of the fact that he would have become one hundred years old sometime around now. I love Cage, not so much for his music, but for his methods and character and the attitude towards art expressed in his use of coincidence ..... and 4.33 has to be the weirdest piece of music ever.... It seems to me a very interesting fact that JRR Tolkien and Cage were more or less contemporaries, and this odd train of thought here leads me to my point, if a point it be... That the connection between speculative fiction and avant garde art seems to me to have been weak - to the point that each cultural sphere might be ignorant of the other and possibly even hostile.

Finally, I would like to mention how it seems that the art world has ignored the culture of gaming to a large extent. An exception I have come across is Nordic art LARP which seems to me to be a very interesting phenomenon that I will be exploring further in the future.... a nice presentation of this is to be found in Johanna MacDonald's interesting talk.... 

Self directed scholarship

I like this quote from Taleb, and I think it ties interestingly in with some discussions currently going on among some of my friends on Facebook concerning the wonders of the Internet. This also brings thoughts about deschooling and democratic schooling into a certain relief .... my learning has always been both inside and outside the institutions where I study and work and I find that a certain dynamic balance can be achieved - but that clearly the institutions can be stifling and soul-killing, no doubt about that .... Taleb's current MO of working on his book while seeking advice and editing on Facebook is also very interesting!

CHAPTER ON EDUCATION
Self directed scholarship has an aesthetic dimension. For a long time I had on the wall of my study the following quote by Jacques Le Goff, the great French medievalist, who believes that the Renaissance came out of independent humanists, not professional scholars. He examined the striking contrast in period paintings, drawings and renditions that compare Medieval university members and humanists:

"One is a professor surrounded and besieged by huddled students. The other is a solitary scholar, sitting in the tranquility and privacy of his chambers, at ease in the spacious and comfy room where his thoughts can move freely. Here we encounter the tumult of schools, the dust of classrooms, the indifference to beauty in collective workplaces,
There, it is all order and beauty,
Luxe, calme et volupté "

Punk Uncle

Well, I recently partook in a short and sweet revival of Uncle Moss  (Mosi Frændi) my band - started in 1987....revived in style in 2009  and 2010 (dormant since)   I joined a bit later. I mostly play drums and sometimes I vocalise (not singing, not rapping.... something .... ). We do not fit the classic angry working class disenfranchised stereotype often associated with punk - we rather fit into a (vaguely) Icelandic tradition of middle class (semi-) 'arty' sort of punk. Our focus has primarily been on poking fun at pop music (and recently punk) and having a laugh - doing covers of all kinds of songs and also writing our own variety of dadaistic punk songs, excellent simple rock songs and other stuff that well.... We have a solid DIY ethos, and we do not place a very large emphasis on virtuosity in our playing styles - and maintain our youthful charm by not practicing.

The reason we got together this time was Rock in Reykjavík 2.0 - organised by Wim Van Hooste, a Belgian doctor who is crazy about Icelandic underground music; for his birthday - a big salute to him! The classic Rock in Reykjavík film which depicted the Icelandic punk scene of the early Eighties also had a birthday (30)... of course we were not in that film - but I feel that we very much belong to the tradition started .... or ongoing .... in it....

As is my wont I started digging around and thinking a bit about punk music and stumbled across some stuff on Crass (a band I never listened to) and was fascinated to find out that Penny Rimbaud, one of the founders of Crass was an upper class kind of bohemian born in 1943! He is a die-hard anarchist and idealist, and sees punk as a progression of the underground culture represented by poets like Rimbaud, the Beats, the hippies etc..... The story of the band's rise and fall, the struggles with-in it - and also the way that anarcho-punk distinguishes itself from commercial punk is an interesting one - when you look into any cultural phenomenon you'll find a lot more intricacies and complexity than you'd expect.

So I home to bang a bit more on me drums and scream into the microphone in years to come, nothing like it really....

Perdido Street Station

 

Having already become one of my all time favorite authors, Perdido Street Station brought Miéville closer to the top of that list. A truly magnificent and mind boggling fantasy, mixing problems of not inter-racial love, but love between species, with deeply insightful musings on the nature of science, religion, artificial intelligence, language and cities.... all spiced up with some of the most exquisite monsters and villains ever to show up in a novel. Miéville here clearly abides by the excellent principle that more is more and weaves a complex and mind blowing web that captures cognitively, emotionally and morally: the dilemma faced by Isaac den Grimnebulin when he knows what his friend the Garuda is really guilty of - knowing his noble participation in their common fight against the Slakemoths..... to think that this was his second novel is truly astonishing....

I also think that the seeds for the creation of the ambassadors in Embassytown are to be found in this book, more on that later possibly....

An interesting review to be found here. 

Role Playing to Kill a Mockingbird

I just finished a short adventure with a group of my students where Atticus was left in a ditch after Calpurnia had hit on him, and the kids discover a dungeon and rescue Dill; Nathan then turns out to be a serial killer.....

A lot of fun and I'm convinced that this method has enormous potential. Here, as elsewhere in school work the effort and concentration is lacking, but it's possible to make up for that as you go along. Even though they had forgot their character sheets and were really sceptical a story was created, we reflected on the characters and English was spoken throughout....

I'll be gathering more points shortly....

Spirituality, education and letting being be

In one of my favorite philosophy books by one of my favorite philosophers, Paul K. Feyerabend (on whom I have blogged earlier) he has this idea that when Being is addressed it answers, and the answer is in line with, takes the form and shape of the address. Thus true science, art, religion and spirituality are addresses to Being: and all such addresses receive answers that may seemingly 'prove' the various systems that they stem from. This is a kind of relativism, and yet it isn't.....

I am concerned about education and the way it's headed. I worry that too much policy, evaluation and ideology are detrimental to true education; true education being and address to Being. I also think that too much interference in the work of teachers and parents in the name of some overarching ideal on morality, health etc. is dangerous. I find that some kind of Panopticonal Big Brother lurks behind a lot of this stuff... and all this stuff fogs our minds and hinders us in addressing Being with our own true voices.

Of course: this idea of a 'true' address - or a 'true' voice is not relativism, and yet I feel no need to explain - I think people intuitively know it when they see it; and overexplaining it kills it.

So: education is about all kinds of people engaging with all kinds of kids and people in ways they see fit creating a multitude of voices who have an opportunity to address Being in their own voices - some loud and clear, others weaker: yet striving to be authentic....

Democratic Schools and incidental learning

I've recently been unschooling myself on unschooling, and particularly been watching videos and reading stuff on the Sudbury Valley School. A very telling part of the documentary is this piece on 'the sleeping student'. I'm not entirely and in all ways convinced that this is the best way to organise a school, but by golly it's interesting to think about. I find that a student could just as well sleep like this instead of sleeping in a classroom.... I also believe that their idea that most true learning is incidental is an important one, especially in languages and most important life skills - special 'classes' in for example happiness are therefore completely bogus. I find that my learning in life has primarily been incidental, and I think that more time spent on following one's interests and passions would be time well spent.... this is very important to me with the upcoming test period which I find to be an enormous waste of my and students' energy.... more on that later if the great spirit moves me to write on that ....

fantasy, poetry and philosophy

Cleverly Ursula le Guin wrote (she has never written otherwise) that fantasy, like poetry speaks the language of the night. I really like that. Maybe in some way it could be said that fantasy and poetry belong to the night, while philosophy and science belong to the day. Enlightenment: say no more squire. However the relationship of fantasy, poetry and philosophy is much more complex. The philosopher father in Barker's novel Sacrament is an interesting, and rather scathing, comment by a fantasist on modern philosophy - what a boring and sad horrible little character that guy is, and, of course, Barker studied philosophy - but found it way way too small for his all-encompassing mind and spirit....  All my favorite sf and fantasy authors deal with highly complex philosophical and existential issues in their work, le Guin, Miéville, Banks and Stephenson, and do so in ways much more interesting and captivating than most philosophers (sorry guys) do... Of course: they feed of academic philosophy and science but they rework it  in very appealing ways. It's interesting how they refer to them, also, by for example having characters own old books, like in Embassytown, of having characters discuss them, like when Stephenson discusses Husserl in Anathem..... 

Another weird cultural fact is how the contemporary art world and the world of sf and fantasy seem to be completely separate. It seems to me that fantasy and sf aficionados, reading their weird books and playing even weirder games are quite reactionary when it comes to visual art, and vice versa that contemporary artists (and intellectuals to a large extent) seem to look down up on the fantasists as being childish and escapist, which is a serious misconception and very superficial. 

So, while I may be wrong, it seems to me that there is enormous potential in opening these cultural spheres that are all very dear to my heart: sf and fantasy, philosophy and contemporary art  to each other and create more interesting and crazy works to propel the human spirit into the next weird chapter of its insane journey through the space-time-continuum.

Gamification, playfulness, role playing games and education

Yeah, well a pretty long title. Currently I'm engaged in getting acquainted with the wondrous world of Role Playing Games. I'm really enjoying it - if nothing more comes out of it I'll have become acquainted with a great hobby - but it could also signal a host of interesting approaches and projects for education.... currently there is a discussion starting in Iceland about how university students (and secondary school students too) seem to be alienated from there studies and do not seem to be really engaged. In this interesting article by Sarah J. Mann one of the solutions to this could be more play and creativity in the schools and academia. Well.... gaming seems to be an excellent way to approach that.... In my opinion tabletop and live role-playing seem to be a far superior solution to video games...

So, gaming, philosophical debating, dancing and active research would be the order of the day in my dream school....

Incidental learning

The American pragmatist Richard Rorty said somewhere that a university was a place where you could find any book on any subject and someone to discuss it with. I think that's a pretty neat idea; a similar point was made rather forcefully by the protagonist in the film Good Will Hunting. I think learning is something that happens (or doesn't) and like all good things in this universe can not be forced. Growing up in a house with many curious books and interesting magazines and stuff lying about learning came to me naturally. A true treasure came my way some time in my preteen years when my uncle moved to Canada to do his PhD in Biology. He left behind a large stack of records. Pink Floyd, Supertramp, Frank Zappa, Bugsy Malone.... and shyly I dove in and tried  listening to most of it. This profoundly influenced me and opened up a world of possibilities, to do with ways of making music, but also to ways of thinking and being hitherto unimagined.... and though the music per se was great it was also this feeling of being privy to something weird and wonderful, shared by me and the universe (and of course my uncle .... ) . I've (mostly) enjoyed being a student and then a teacher; but I find that the most important learning takes place in a personal way and incidentally - you follow a path where you meet your clues and build your self into something completely unique - you may choose to share some of it - other things you keep secret. My friend who is a historian once told me a story of a guy who kept a diary all his life, and on the day before he died he burned it; leaving all that information and history to blow in the wind. My friend is an unusual historian because he found this to be an intensely beautiful story, and I sort of get that, I'm not sure though....

Some are of the opinion that this sort of incidental learning is under threat with the advent of the net - but I am not. The way someone stumbles across something weird and interesting, like my blog for instance, can be part of something new in this person's weird and wonderful tale of being....

Second DM experience

I mastered a game today where I adapted DnD rules, translated a managed the first half of an adventure in a kind of Harry Potter in Iceland kind of environment, with my daughters and nieces as the play group. A very interesting experience - I was better prepared than last time and more confident but still I need to clear up a few snags. The main point is similar to my former thoughts on the connection between games and discussions is the need for focus. I also would like to work on skills in evoking atmosphere, I have had a bell and a djembe at hand, but not put them to use .... this will change.

I find the DnD system to be way to complex, but, at the same time inspiring and interesting. I'm looking at more varieties of game mechanics and find that I'm at the start of an interesting journey....

Philosophy as clarity

Oscar Brenifier has an interesting approach to philosophy and its practice. One of his basic tenets is that philosophy is about creating concepts; an idea he connects to Deleuze. To create concepts we need to think. In order to think we need to be clear. If we have an idea we can put words to it; a useful thought can be put in one sentence or one word. If you are unable to formulate your thoughts clearly your thoughts are confused. If you think you understand something but are unable to say it, find words for it, you have not understood it. Thinking is difficult so people avoid it as hard as they can, hiding behind feelings, authority and whatnot.

And taking it further; thinking demands that you abandon your self, that you die and move into the sphere of thinking. This actually works and working in this manner gives interesting and weird moments of clarity.

My next step will be to revisit philosophy texts with this methodology and idea in mind.

Philosophical facilitation and GM-ing

I tried facilitating a workshop in a demanding seminar on practical philosophy and it was alright but I lost it towards the end, not in the sense that I went crazy, but lost the focus and slipped out of the role. I am pretty confident that the role of managing a game, as DM or GM is similar, and I'm interested in mastering both arts. Now: I think the current method of training teachers is completely inadequate because they don't really instill this skill of taking real charge of an actual group of human beings for a certain period of time... like a facilitator or a GM does - without being authoritarian or 'strict' in an old fashioned boring sense....

Jung

Clearly a guy I need to learn more about - seems to me a lot of the stuff in positive psychology was already there in the early psychoanalysts, but now they've dressed it up with a lot of statistics and scientific dribble to make it seem acceptable. It seems to me that his work might be extremely boring so it's a question of approaching it differently, like with many a thinker and philosopher. The idea of the archetypes, of the urge to religion, the rejection of everything being about sex and the inclusion of mythology art and literature are extremely valuable. I'm also confident that this approach could be important in understanding the appeal of fantasy literature and can give us tools to approach works by crazy guys like Clive Barker (whom for some reason I haven't blogged on yet, but I truly admire, and am freaked out by) and Michael Moorcock. 

Embassytown

As I promised a 'blot' on Embassytown on Twitter recently - so here goes....

I'm profoundly grateful to my wonderful wife, Bryndís, for giving me The City and the City by China Miéville a while back, as a gift for the Icelandic 'holiday' - 'husbandsday' (Bóndadagur). Since then I've been working my way through his work; King Rat and Iron Council and now Embassytown. Miéville is the definite master of fantasy writing now, and with Embassytown he emerges as a fully fledged sf author too. In my mind he now assumes a position right up there with le Guin.

Embassytown is a true incredible absoloutely mind blowing masterpiece. It is a study in semiotics, frontier politics, colonialism, machine psychology and cyborg culture. His aliens are so wonderfully alien, and his mind blowing conception of the dual Language, 'cut and turn'. The basic idea is an alien race that speaks only the Truth. They cannot lie - these are the Ariekei, or 'Hosts' - the story takes place in Embassytown which is an outpost of Bremen and functions as a go-between for commerce with the Hosts. The humans have managed to create dual persons - 'ambassadors' who can actually speak Language, one of them speaking Cut the other Turn (confused yet?) .... they have such interesting names as EdGar, and SibYl. When the two have sex it is considered masturbation....

Then of course, as is wont in such tales, trouble arrives.... but I'm not going to spoil that.

To make it even more interesting this is the central idea, but it is framed by the concept of Immer. Now for example le Guin invented the 'ansibil' which is a device which you can use to communicate instantaneously from any two points in the Universe. The Immer is similar, except you can travel through it and arrive in places extremely far apart in the normal physical sense.... Embassytown is on the outskirts of the known Immer, and is thus a frontiertown and discoveries further of await at the end of the book, which could easily be followed up.

Miéville is fascinated by dual realities (The City and the City, omg) - and words like 'non-place' and 'cross-hatching' crop up all over his ouevre. I suggest to anyone interested in stretching their mind and imagination - plus anyone with a nerdy obsession with the philosophy of language to read Embassytown - the best place to start is The City and the City (no aliens there, and the weirdness is very very weird, while not supernatural or alien in nature, just, well really weird, I could do a little blog on that but not now.)

Experience - reading

Well, now I'm in France and then all the environment in Blogger turns French - c'est ci bon! Anyway, now I have two blogs to write and the first one is very simple. I find that development, personal, professional, whatever is achieved through experiences and challenges - well of course this is rather a platitude I suppose, but my idea is that these experiences can not be planned and organised, they arise as a kind of a, well, cooperative process of self and being - I can not express it more clearly - Feyerabend somewhere says that if address Being it answers - interesting from that profoundly atheist and materialist guy - .... a rather convoluted introduction to explain my presence in a house in Argenteuil outside Paris preparing to enter a few days of fierce introduction of Philosophical Practice with people from all over the world under the guidance of Oscar Brenifier and Isabelle Millon ....

I'll fill you in on this as we proceed....

Now on a different note I have a similar concept of reading. I for example went to the library to find a specific book (incidentally on Philosophical Practice) but decided to pick up a copy of Colin Wilson's book on Jung. A rather weird but highly readable book - I'm almost finished with it - I find Jung to be rather obnoxious guy, but I admit to being deeply intrigued by his thinking - and - as Wilson clearly makes the case and sentences Jung to be  a Romantic, I'm afraid am guilty of that same charge.

Part of what explains my lack of patience and even fear of the modern version of atheism ....

More, or not, on all these things at a later date....

Entering the World of Darkness

Had my second RPG experience with experienced GM Helgi Már Friðgeirsson and four enthusiastic colleagues last week. He used the World of Darkness system to set up a situation where we were on a plane, which was then (predictably?) hijaacked and crashed - I actually, more or less successfully, managed to land the plane. This system differs in significant ways from Dungeons and Dragons. The setting for play is usually closer to the so - called 'real' world. The mechanics of the game, the use of dice is much simpler. The characters are more realistic; the basic traits of vampires and werewolves are human and the goal of the game is to try to maintain your humanity.... but the game we played was entirely with purely human characters and (it's not quite finished) as of yet no supernatural elements have emerged. The concept of each character having a 'virtue' and a 'vice' and the fact that indulging your vice can boost your 'willpower' is an extremely interesting one. You also have as a character a scale called 'Morality' or 'Humanity' and this increases or decreases according to actions you take.  Example of a character sheet.

I've been thinking about how to apply this sort of thinking to teaching literature to the uninitiated with maybe not too much time. My latest idea, which would not involve too much effort on my part, would be to teach the idea of the structure of characters in this system, and simply get the students in groups to create sheets for characters in the work we're dealing with, and possibly ideas for how to apply events in the work to a game setting. This could be an interesting and creative approach. I like the idea of quantifying certain character elements, and clearly this is an excellent way to boost emotional and psychological vocabulary.

I'm thinking about developing a new game session for kids in DnD, and my plan is to translate most of the stuff into Icelandic to make it a smoother experience. I also need to consider my equipment - I've got plenty of stories in mind, no problem there.....


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First Dungeon Master experience!

I had a DnD session with my ten year old daughter and her friend club - two boys and one girl, four altogether. I mixed up a few readymade characters I found online and two stories. I had a problem because I mismatched the characters and the monsters, the characters were way to strong for the monsters. I am a firm believer in learning by doing and from experience and didn't spend too much time preparing. Next time I think I'm going to try creating my own story, monsters and characters and then presenting it in Icelandic, and simplify the format.... possibly I'll try buying a readymade adventure in DnD or some other format and sticking to that.

I find the details involved in DnD kind of daunting, but, I find the basic idea immensely fascinating and I am firm in my resolve to apply these methods in my teaching. Later this term I'm teaching To Kill a Mockingbird and I'm going to experiment with a simple RPG in connection with that, I'm not quite sure how but it'll come to me. Furthermore I plan on offering an elective next term devoted to the concept - more on that soon!

DnD with my daughter and friends

Tomorrow I'm premiering as a DM - I've prepared a quick adventure for my daughter's friends' club - printed out characters that look interesting, found some nice monsters, bought a manual, decided to use some plastic and a chessboard and pieces, got my dice ready, and found and changed a little bit a version of the pied piper that I found on one of the many sites devoted to this subject - I'm looking forward to it yet feel a bit anxious.... I'll get back with the results!

Role Playing Games

Well, after a long time of preparation I played my first round of Dungeons and Dragons as an adult, and my first real round ever, to be fair. This is kind of surprising given my nerdy tendencies and affection for fantasy and sf. What I really find interesting about RPG's on a wider pedagogical and experiential level is my amazement as to why this concept has not gained a wider following. It seems to me that this combination of games, drama, creativity and socialization has potential to compete with theatre, art galleries, novel reading, video games and poetry recitings (though I also wonder why those are not more common). Furthermore, it seems that the possibilities that lie in adapting this format to teaching are endless. The popularization of 'gamification' in marketing and such has mostly been linked to adapting the format of video games to online experience (according to my limited research) - but it seems to me that applying RPG mechanics, puzzle solving and dice rolling to the class room setting offers a lot of enticing possibilities....

My next experience will be with another form of RPG (not DnD), but 'story telling' for a horror game....

speaking and interpreting and feelings

Tried something new recently in class as a prep for student presentations. I made them prepare short speeches, one the one hand in English and on the other hand in gibberish. I find that the teaching of gibberish has been neglected, and they were surprisingly, or not, bad at it. It's interesting how hard it is to say something in gibberish without recognisable words. I also asked them to convey emotions as they spoke and they were also complete rubbish at that. One guy was unable to convey the feeling 'anger'... So I'm going to introduce more drama and gibberish to my English classroom.

Creativity & engagement: giving students a choice....

I'm starting up my philosophy elective course this week. I use a textbook that is actually coauthored by me, Heimspeki fyrir þig (Philosophy for you) - I have all sorts of interesting projects that fill the semester, but an innovation I'm going to try this time around is to allow the students to choose the chapters that we'll deal with - the book has 12 and we'll cover 5-6. They then have to scan it and make the case for the chapters they like. I hope this will be interesting and I'll allow you to follow the progress here on the blog! Another project I've got cooking is orangising RPG's for teachers, like Dungeons and Dragons, with an eye to incorporating those kinds of games into my repertoire of teaching tools. I'm developing an idea on teaching as an art and so this kind of activity is like a painter trying a new kind of brush or you know.....