Erica E. Bailin, a second year Academic Professional in the Wave I Middle Years Program at the Gary K. Herberger Young Scholars Academy [HYSA] on Arizona State University’s West Campus, is a gifted specialist with expertise teaching English, Social Studies, and Technology. Prior to becoming a part of HYSA, she worked in the Paradise Valley Unified School District as a classroom teacher, gifted cluster teacher, gifted pull-out teacher for honors reading and mathematics, and an instructor for the Digital Learning Center for the Gifted. She has been involved in curriculum development projects, provided local and international professional development classes for educators interested in technology and gifted education, presents seminars for parents of gifted children, and has served on numerous committees and task forces.
She earned her Bachelor’s degree in Elementary Education from Arizona State University and as a lifelong learner, she is continuing her academic career as a Sun Devil by pursuing a Master’s degree in Educational Technology from the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College and another in Social and Cultural Pedagogy from the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. Her research interests include educational technology, gaming and its impact on society and cultures, social identity, global education, and reality television, popular culture and its impact on youth. She is also a student fellow for the Center for Games and Impact at Arizona State University and a past president and current member of Kappa Delta Pi, the International Honor Society in Education.
As an active member of the community, she has been an athletic director and coach for basketball, softball, volleyball and track and field. Breast Cancer Awareness, the American Diabetes Association, and the Boys & Girls Club are among the organizations she supports.
Tyler Jones is a graduate student in the Master of Arts in Rhetoric and Composition at Arizona State University and a graduate of Barrett, The Honors College and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at ASU with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature. His area of interest and focus is on videogames and rhetoric, particularly how identity is formed and defined as well as how situated and embodied meanings in videogames work to create a more interactive and meaningful learning experience. The root question follows the line of James Paul Gee’s book What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, which is how can educators implement the qualities of good videogames into academics. Prior to attending ASU, Tyler Jones served in the United States Marine Corps and was deployed in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2004 and 2005. Currently, he is working on a curriculum design under the guidance of Dr. James Gee using the videogame Fallout 3 as the primary text supplemented by pertinent selections from the literature on videogames and the use of videogames in academia.
Jeff Holmes is a PhD student in Rhetoric and Composition in the Department of English at Arizona State University, as well as a life-long gamer. His research focuses on how communities collectively construct identities, how users conceptualize their actions in both virtual and non-virtual space, and how gaming and play extend to multiple sites beyond the traditional boundaries of ‘gamespace.’ In particular, he is interested in persistent virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft, and the people dedicated to creating, maintaining, and changing these spaces. He has a level 85 Hunter as well as a stable of mid-level alts.
John Carter McKnight is a fourth-year PhD candidate at Arizona State University, in Human & Social Dimensions of Science and Technology. His work examines the emergence of law and governance in online communities.
In addition to an appointment as Adjunct Professor of Law at ASU’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, he has developed and taught a range of graduate and undergraduate courses in games studies and and the anthropology of online communities.
He has practiced corporate finance law with global law firms in New York and San Francisco, served as officer and director of nonprofit organizations involved in science education and policy, and was Prelaw Services Coordinator at ASU.
Eric Keylor is a PhD. candidate in Educational Technology at Arizona State University. Eric makes video games for learning and is currently working on a Newtonian physics game for his dissertation research. Before attending Arizona State University, he worked on PeaceMaker (http://www.peacemakergame.com/), a video game about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, while attending the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University. He designed and ran the National High School Game Academy (http://www.cmu.edu/enrollment/pre-college/game.html), a pre-college program hosted by the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University, and he was also faculty at the Entertainment Technology Center – Silicon Valley, where he co-advised student projects involving major clients including Siemens and the International School of the Peninsula. He was also a member of the design team for iCivics (http://www.icivics.org/), Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s video games to teach civics to middle school students. He is currently a pre-post doc at the Entertainment Technology Center, where he is contributing to the development of the Working Examples Project (http://workingexamples.org).