• Journal of the Korean BIBLIA Society for library and Information Science
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• v.31 no.2
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• pp.223-266
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• 2020

Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) are played by millions of people around the world. Within MMORPGs, players explore, solve mysteries, craft items, battle against dungeon or raid bosses, or compete against other players, all while using a variety of information and information behaviors. Role-players in MMORPGs develop identities and engage in interactive storytelling with other role-players as their characters. An ethnographic approach combining overt participant observation and engagement, semi-structured interviews, and artifact collection was used to explore and describe the social information behaviors of role-players through the lens of the theory of information worlds. The social types evident in the role-playing community in WildStar, a science fantasy-themed MMORPG, are closely interrelated to and differentiated by social norms and information values that dictate acceptable characters, stories, character actions, and appropriate lore sources as well as how to role-play without violating the boundary between in- and out-of-character information worlds. Role-players maintained the in-character and out-of-character boundary using a set of specific information behaviors to enable engaging and immersive role-playing experiences. Implications of the findings for the theory of information worlds as well as potential applications of role-playing and MMORPGs are also discussed.

• Journal of Appropriate Technology
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• v.6 no.2
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• pp.151-162
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• 2020

Education is one of the priority sectors specified in Tanzania, and it has committed to provide 11 years of compulsory free basic education for all from pre-primary to lower secondary level. Despite the Government's efforts to provide free basic education to all children, there are 2.0 million (23.2 per cent) out of 8.5 million children at the primary school age of 7-13, who are out of school in Tanzania. The ICT class should be offered as a regular class in all secondary schools in Tanzania, recommended by the ministry of education. However, many schools are struggling to implement this mandate. Most of schools offer the ICT class with theory without any real hardware. Some schools were given with computers but they were not maintained for operation. There is a huge task to make ICT education universal. Main issues include: remoteness (off-grid area), lack of ICT teachers, lack of resources such as hardware, infrastructure, and lack of practical lessons or projects to be used at schools. An innovative blended ICT/STEM education program is being conducted not only for Tanzanian public and private/international schools, but also for out-of-school adolescents through institutions, NGO centers, home visits and at the E3 Empower academy center. For effective STEM education to take place and remain sustainable, more practical curriculum, and close-up teacher support need to be accompanied concurrently. Practical, project-based simple coding lessons have been developed and employed that students experience true learning. The effectiveness of the curriculum has been demonstrated in various project centers, and it showed that students are showing new interests in exploring new discovery, even though this was a totally new area for them. It has been designed for an easy replication, thus students who learned can repeat the lessons themselves to other students. The ultimate purpose of this project is to have IT education offered as universally as possible throughout the whole Tanzania. Quality education for all children is a key for better future for all. Previously it was hoped that education with discipline will improve the active learning. But now more than ever, we believe that children have the ability to learn on their own with given proper STEM education tools, guidelines and environment. This gives promising hope to all of us, including those in the developing countries.