Grabbing a broom and sweeping the floor is a simple and determined action. It is easy to place it in time and space. Then, sweeping the floor is an action like any other. Nevertheless, it is an action that is unique and universal, historical and forgettable, present and ubiquitous. Sweeping is an action that mimics…

After the last Transmission of Motion seminar with Tim Ingold, I was left with a vivid picture of him, as he described his experience of playing the cello. His talk revolved around the notions of experience, creativity, and habit to question the differences of bodily automatisms and skilled craft. To understand the differences between habitual…

Let me start by saying that Tim Ingold gave an interesting talk – “On doing undergoing: Experience, Imagination and the Principle of Habit” – about what it means to do something habitually and to master a certain skill, which also raises more general questions about attention & intention, embodiment and cognitive systems. For Ingold, doing…

Lately, I am becoming increasingly fascinated by the embodied aspects of digital games and digital gameplay. If Brendan Keogh (2018) is to be believed, we cannot truly understand how we perceive and make sense of games without taking into account the fact that we are directing our eyes at the screen, aiming our ears at…

The first TiM session of 2019 had a great beginning. The guest was the anthropologist Tim Ingold. The talk was about “On Doing Undergoing: experience, imagination and the principle of habit”. We had the opportunity to have a glimpse of Ingold’s phenomenological approach in the context of his “dwelling perspective”. The guiding question for this session was:…

When I was 12, I remember my mother having problems to interact with our computer. She constantly complained about the problems she had with her eye-hand coordination when it came to moving the cursor or pointer. In other words, she had problems with the mouse. Looking back, I could now assume her discomfort was caused…

The last seminar by Nathalie Sinclair made me think about the relationship between mathematics, gestures and the role of our bodily movements in doing, learning, understanding mathematics.  Discussing the current position of touch-screen technologies, from the case of TouchCounts– an application Sinclair developed for mainly performing multiplication- we went on to think about multiplication as…

An apparent oxymoron was brought to the TiM seminar: tangible mathematics. Nathalie Sinclair introduced an interesting connection between embodied cognition in mathematics and digital technologies. Currently, she is working on the development of a multimodal app that helps young learners to expand the faculty of number sense. Sinclair alluded to the concept of multiplication as…

Initially, it was difficult to understand exactly what Nathalie Sinclair was talking about in her seminar, which was called “Multiplication as Experience: Whitehead, aesthetics and gesture-based, touchscreen technology”. It took some time before I realized that the educational tool that Sinclair proposed – TouchTimes, a touchscreen application with which young children practice the skill of…

The question that makes the title of this post is one that has been around for quite a while. Already in 2003, when the field of game studies was only just beginning to find its feet, James Paul Gee wrote What Video Games Have to Teach Us about Learning and Literacy, and many teachers and…