Gaming as Epistemic Practice

This paper explores into the constitutive entanglement of material (also digital) artifacts and activities of collaborative learning. Drawing on examples of students building the “University of the Future” in the virtual world of Minecraft, we depict how the epistemic function and the material qualities of the shared artifact are intertwined with the students’ efforts to articulate and transform their ideas and conception of the subject matter (the conception of higher education which underlies the “University of the Future”). Challenging techno-centric as well as human-centered notions of technology, we argue for an emergent nature of epistemic artifacts.