Fiona Barnett's photo of Fab@Home

Last year, Jeremy Hunsinger and I set up an etherpad for the conference where anyone attending could collaboratively take notes and chat about the sessions. This year, I set up the same thing with a Google doc and blasted the url to Twitter periodically. I’m disappointed in the turn-out of the gdoc use, especially given that the theme of many of the talks was about collective and collaborative/participatory production and understanding of cultural artifacts, curricula, etc. I saw many people using laptops and iPads to take notes, but those notes will forever be sequestered, not shared. :(

My reasoning is that together we can attend everything. There were 7 concurrent tracks. Together we could have let everyone learn about each one.

As it is, I think the few of us who used the gdoc hit about a quarter of the sessions. I think for next year I’ll suggest an official gdoc or other collaborative note-taking tool be used.

There was also some backchannel activity in an IRC which got pretty snarky. I think that’s fine and quite entertaining but I wish naysayers in that backchannel would ask questions during the sessions they had particular problems with.

Overall, the type of talk around digital media literacies and games took a step backwards, I think… or maybe just treaded water from last year. There’s two things that contributed to this I think. It seemed like this year there were many more people coming from non-profits and non-academic places, so they had to be caught up with new-to-them ideas. Additionally, there was a confluence of people from different disciplinary backgrounds, so they too needed to step back a bit to lay some foundational common language down. One example was the IRC discussion about the label “gamer” and whether someone is a “hardcore” vs. “casual” gamer. I think it was a useful discussion, and, yes, it did help me better articulate things in my head. Yet games people such as the scholars who regularly attend GLS had already covered that ground a year or two ago.

Two highlights of the talks, besides the ignite talks, for me were both in a constructive/destructive technologies panel. Dan Perkel gave a fascinating study of deviantART community-based discussion regarding the sharing of work, ownership, privacy, “safe” space, and the nature of the interwebs. Stuart Geiger gave a very entertaining and eye-opening talk about Wikipedia bots and collective response to automated procedures, touching on guidelines and policies and how they affect user behavior and participation.

Next year, DML (March 1-3) will be in San Francisco right before GDC (March 5-9), so I won’t have to choose between the two again!

Resources:

Anyway, my netbook died last year so I decided to try a tablet for a while to see if it would meet my conference needs. (Rooted NookColor with a custom Android OS = cheap tablet)

I took some notes on Gerry Stahl’s talk in the eLearning session using Springpad and midway decided to try the WordPress app for Android. (I’ll paste that in later.) Let’s see how it works out.

Stahl is going over how he looked at chat data of virtual math teams, working collaboratively using conversation analysis modifed for online discourse. [Need to get his paper to look at lit review and modifications.]

Focus on structure of timescales. Longer sequence of 10 discourse moves made up of a series of adjacency pairs is the scale that worked. 10 cognitive steps. Each adjacency pair played one of the steps. The cognition was visible in the chat turns. Wow.

Stahl makes claim that his is first paper that exposes long sequence as cognitive unit.

[Discussion covered Brigid Barron, reminds me of Jay Lemke's timescales]

Kate Starbird- More than the usual suspects

3d avatar programming environment for kids
Embodied cognition
The use of own body to visualize how to program avatars
[Reminds me of Stephanie's work with gestures]

Distributed cognition among different representational states (imagined, embodied, computer?, something else). The learning is happening in the movement between states.

Carlos Monroy- Emerging contexts for science ed: Embedding a forensics science game in a virtual world

invoked McGonigal who was at UW on her book tour last night

webadventures.rice.edu
Monroy covering forensics one with a CSI wrapper that was created for a museum and embedded in Whyville

Have completion rates (17% or so)
Used a post survey for why they stopped

Graph of quitting points. Most quitters quit in first 1/3 of game
Spontaneous collaboration thru Whyville forums
This is a case that emphasizes importance of collaboration for informal learning

[If collaboration is so important, how does one design for it?]

And, man, look at my most popular pages:

Title	Views
Home page	26
Deus Ex and Deus Ex: Invisible War	16
The Witcher	12
Splinter Cell vs. Hitman 2	11
Half-Life 2 mods	4
Dr. Video Games: Reflections of a PhD Graduate	3
Dissertation ready for download	3
A bunch of short game reviews	2
Communication, Coordination, and Camaraderie in WoW	2
Bike USA: July 10-20, 2000 – Wall Drug, Badlands, Kadoka, Murdo, Valentine, Norfolk, Fremont, Omaha	1

That’s from today but it’s pretty much the same top ones every day. A large portion of my site visitors are interested in Deus Ex, The Witcher, Hitman, and Splinter Cell. A part of me feels like I really ought to capitalize on that somehow…

And what’s more? Why, check out these search terms that got people to my site:

Search	Views
hitman 2	9
deus ex	6
the witcher	5
half life 2 mod	3
deus ex inventory	3
deus ex 2 invisible war	2
overland maps in neverwinter nights	2
ashton kutcher naked	2
deus ex 2 inventory screen	2
colossus movie	2

Lol. I swear I don’t have a thing for Ashton Kutcher… though I guess writing this post will make my website even more relevant for that search term. :/

(Now, why did I just add ashton kutcher to my tag list?? This makes me think of GNU and other self-referential acronyms… THIS POST IS NOT ABOUT ASHTON KUTCHER! There hopefully, that’ll satisfy the google bots.)

[Edit: Oh.. it was a post on cmgp (which is now archived on my website) about ashton kutcher... lol. Yes, I can do searches on my own website, thanks. Still.. doing a google search shows that my website doesn't appear in the first 10 pages of results. Someone's gotta really be digging deep for those photos to try clicking on my link...]

But now that you’re here… maybe a new game could be to take the headline generated by Linkbait Generator and then actually write something on that topic…

So, here goes:

1. Games are a valueless activity.
2. Games promote violence.
3. Games are addictive.
4. Games drive new technologies.
5. Games are not serious.

Actually, that was very, very easy.

I said it at IR10 and SoP, and I’ll say it again. 1. Twitter is a horrible backchannel tool since it is too open, too 140 character limited, too persistent, and 2. it’s NOT a backchannel when you project it behind the speaker!!!

Personally, I think snark and irreverence is perfectly fine in a backchannel, so long as it’s also constructive, productive, informative, and on topic. I think their reactions to the content of the bc is overreactionary, but it’s all besides the point because the conference organizers shouldn’t have been broadcasting it in the first place. It’s a BACKchannel!

I seem to continually go back and forth from consuming to producing. or maybe it’s just that I’ve been working a lot on my dissertation stuff and that’s filling my productivity needs to stay happy. or maybe I keep finding cool feeds to subscribe to so that my time has to continually be spent on consumption. or maybe I’m in a rut.

whatever. here’s a post. from a phone! ironic that I keep finding ways to be connected yet instead of saving me time or letting me be more productive, I end up consuming more. yet… maybe consuming more means I *am* being productive in a general self-improvement sense.

I’m rambling now. there’s a new post by someone I follow that needs reading. back to sporadicity. email or comment if u want tips for some good feeds to follow / consume.