Liz Owens Boltz

• Doctor of Philosophy in Educational Psychology & Educational Technology
• Program Coordinator at Michigan State University

The recent face‐to‐face school closures due to COVID‐19 pushed teachers to quickly move their instruction online and support their students remotely. Whilst there has been a considerable push for technology integration in schools in recent years, there has been little focus on how to prepare teachers to teach online given that traditional schooling...

Historical empathy has increasingly been recognized as a multidimensional construct that involves both cognitive and affective dimensions. Research suggests that engaging learners with diverse historical perspectives in activities like debate, writing, and role play can be more effective for historical empathy than traditional instruction. Although...

Slower-paced narrative, puzzle, and mystery-based games have long held a place in the videogame medium; but in recent years, a subset of these games (sometimes called walking simulators) has received increased attention. However, little of this discussion has addressed the potential these games may hold for learning. In this paper, we analyze a sam...

Of all the social and emotional skills video games might support, empathy has perhaps garnered the most attention, and the most hype. But what is empathy, really, and how easy is it to move the needle on players' skills in this area? The panel members will dissect prevalent beliefs and debunk myths related to empathy in games, as well as discuss th...

Historical empathy has increasingly been recognized as a multidimensional construct that involves both cognitive and affective dimensions (see Endacott & Brooks, 2013). Research suggests that engaging learners with diverse historical perspectives in activities like debate, writing, and role play can be more effective for historical empathy than tra...

In 2009, following the announcement of the retirement of Supreme Court Justice David Souter, Justice Sonia Sotomayor was the first Hispanic and third woman in history to be nominated to the Supreme Court of the United States. Despite a strong, impressive track record as a justice and a legal scholar, Sotomayor found herself in a somewhat defensive...

Recent academic research into the use of games for educational purposes has focused almost exclusively on video games. In this study, we explore player perceptions of board games with regards to education. We started with a large dataset of 7,806,486 reviews of 53,960 games collected from the BoardGameGeek website. We performed a keyword search for...

Discussions of ethics within in-service teacher education tend to focus on microethical concerns (e.g., discipline) that deal with decision making at interpersonal levels. Issues concerning educational technology are no exception. Yet, as teachers choose and are expected to integrate technological devices (e.g., laptops) and sociotechnical systems...

Historical empathy is a multidimensional construct that involves both the cognitive recognition of the perspectives of others as well as affective engagement with the lived experiences of people in the past. Actively engaging learners with diverse historical perspectives in activities like debate, writing, and role play has been shown to be more ef...

Background. Player-generated reviews of video games represent a large, rich, and under-explored source of data for exploring what makes for an effective game. Aim. We explore whether existing theory, in the form of a comprehensive gaming taxonomy, suitably captures the issues that players raise when they review games. Method. User-submitted game re...

Presentation link: http://edutech.educ.msu.edu/2017/03/15/designing-the-ultimate-pd-experience/

Learning activities that engage students with different historical perspectives tend to promote historical empathy more effectively than traditional, textbook and lecture based methods of instruction (Levstik & Barton, 2011). Several studies have investigated the effectiveness of instructional practices like debate, writing/reflection, and role pla...

Workshop resources: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1cErQG9bSifdgXH2jB07CSMXdnSk9l9Tt2XiWvC16rR4/edit#slide=id.g1c26f24d21_0_27

In this chapter, we develop a definition of e-leadership that extends from the business sector to encompass educational contexts. We describe schools as complex ecologies and dynamic organizations that require a change in both traditional forms of leadership and more recent ICT use. We use the RAT (Replace, Amplify, Transform) framework to explain...

This roundtable discussion will focus on play that happens at the margins, which often goes counter to intended designed activities yet results in rich, meaningful experiences for players. Designers and researchers of games often focus on effective design in regards to certain goals, such as: best practices for teaching with games, social action, e...

In our research, we talked to four early-career teachers who have adopted blended instruction practices for their classrooms. Through systems-based thinking that held in view awareness of self, learners, context, pedagogy, and interaction, these teachers established a blended classroom driven by a consistent vision and manifested through complex an...

Foundations of Serious Games (MI830) professor Carrie Heeter and doctoral student Liz Owens Boltz, a student in the class, discuss the use of GroupTweet to transform passive recorded mini-lectures into active learning from an instructor and student perspective.

This study examines reviews of some of the highest and lowest ranked video games on VideoGameGeek.com in order to determine what features video game players see as contributing to or detracting from enjoyment in games as well as how these features align with an established taxonomy of game features. Results suggest that players perceive features li...

This presentation explores an online, graduate-level educational technology course at Michigan State University that approaches learning as an active, socially-mediated construction of knowledge. We will discuss how projects in this highly-rated course allow students to “learn by design”, through creating authentic teaching artifacts (e.g. podcasts...

Historical empathy is a fundamental construct that facilitates awareness of multiple perspectives and enables learners to appreciate the complex situational and social factors that have influenced historical events. Research has shown that students exposed to traditional, lecture-based instruction tend to put forward naïve explanations for historic...

What makes an educational game effective, playable, and engaging over time is a multi-faceted and complex issue. Some scholars have pointed to the importance of themes in providing a game's setting and story, as they provide important first impressions of the suitability of a game for educational purposes (Mayer & Harris, 2010; Sicart, 2009). In co...