Constance Steinkuehler is an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Educational Communications and Technology division of Curriculum and Instruction. After researching and developing online learning environments designed specifically for learning for five years, she shifted her focus toward the documentation and analysis of more naturally occurring online learning environments, specifically those designed for play (massively multiplayer online games or MMOGs). Her dissertation in the Literacy Studies program in Curriculum & Instruction is a two year online cognitive ethnography of the game Lineage, focusing specifically on the forms of cognition, learning, and literacy recruited from those who game.

She earned her PhD in Curriculum & Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2005, her MS degree in Educational Psychology in 2000, and before that, three simultaneous BAs in 1993 at the University of Missouri-Columbia in Mathematics, English, and Religious Studies. She teaches Research in Online Virtual Worlds; Analyzing Online Social Interaction; and Critical Instructional Practices on the Internet, and runs the annual Games, Learning, and Society Conference held each June here in Madison. She was an associate lecturer in Educational Psychology, a Spencer fellow, and writes online for Joystick101.org and Terra Nova.

Current interests include the ways in which online play spaces align (or fail to align) with practices valued outside the game, rethinking notions of what it means to be "literate" in a globally networked online world, youth culture, and issues of gender and identity. She has been a siege princess, a mon calamari dancer, a human priest herbal/alchemist with a penchant for flowers in dangerous places, Wu the Lotus Blossom with a best friend named Dawn Star, a pudgy spaceman who orders around many small vegetable-ish creatures, a pink Master Chief, the misunderstood hero of the story, the last chance at world salvation destined to save the world (and the princess), god, and the master of a very big big ball.

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