I went to Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) in early July. Saw a lot of people. Robin joined me for part of it, and we shopped for toys and nail polish together, sometimes with Cynthia D’Angelo. We went to the horse races (which was totally rad). I had some very, very awesome breakfasts (dim sum type buns) from a hole-in-the-wall across the street from my hotel with Ben DeVane and Ben Shapiro.

From CSCL 2011

This was the first time I’ve been to CSCL. It’s the sister conference to the International Conference for the Learning Sciences (ICLS) (which I have been to a couple of times and feel pretty well at home in). They switch off which one happens every year, so next year it’ll be ICLS (in Sydney!), followed by CSCL (in Madison right before GLS) in 2013. I most went because, let’s face it, it’s freaking HONG KONG! But also, I went because I figured it makes sense for me to broaden my network a bit now that I’ve graduated and am semi-looking for a job.

The community around CSCL is very, very compelling. Everyone is so friendly and supportive and open. The organization feels sort of like a start-up of engineers where we all just show up and *do stuff* each day as we talk about the work and think about how it could be better. I sort of volunteered to help out with the website (and maybe luckily they haven’t needed the help yet).

There was a little bit of hypocrisy in the stated desires of the organizers and the actual line up of presentations. I kept hearing that researchers should focus more on informal contexts, acknowledging the everyday learning that occurs in all settings and how it is often disconnected from school life. Yet most of the presentations I saw were squarely rooted in classroom improvement or support with (digital) technology. Maybe in a couple of years a lot more focus will be on informal learning. /shrug

I presented the actor-network theory chapter from my dissertation, detailing how a user-created mod to World of Warcraft was assigned a role/responsibility/task by the group I studied for a specific fight (Ragnaros in Molten Core) in a way that was not intentional by the creator of the mod. (paper) One of the questions I got was, “yes, but, how does this help classrooms?” d’oh!

If you’re interested, the general answer is that I am part of a group that values learning in all settings that matter and have consequential meaning-making to their participants. Yes, of course, classrooms matter, and, yes, of course, learning in certain settings affects learning in others. But my research doesn’t focus on bridging that gap. Instead it’s important because hardly anyone in the learning sciences even understands what goes on in gaming (sub)cultures/settings, so I explain and detail what happens in those settings and show that, yes, people learn in those settings. AND in this description, it is quite easy to start thinking about other settings and see that, wow, the group of gamers I chronicled self-organize and learn and take up certain material resources in a way that sounds awfully familiar in other settings. The real question becomes, “how can we foster people to be critical and agentive in their own learning, like the group I studied, no matter what setting they’re in?”

We arranged the chairs haphazardly so that the audience had to sort of figure out where to sit and rearrange their space, but unfortunately, most of them ended up just picking seats that looked the most comfy (since half the seats were plastic fold-ups) and we weren’t smart enough to mix up the location of the types of chairs.

We put up signs demarcating where the magic circle of our presentation began.

The prezi worked pretty well with only a couple of “uh.. how do I get back to that previous bit?” moments, mostly because we forgot to set the pathing right for Moses’s bit. It’s not as pretty as I think it could be but there’s a mangle of collaborative presentation theme to everything we did, so whatever… :)

We each introduced ourselves, then I did a 5 min intro of the mangle, followed by 2 minute fire hose presentations (Ben, Moses, me, Sarah, Sara) (and we went over 2 minutes pretty consistently but that was fine since the constraint made us conscious of it so it worked), then a brief summary of common themes, and finally open room discussion that went really, really well. Forgot to add another audience constraint of having anyone who wanted to ask a question have to go through an intermediary but we didn’t need it since the conversation and participation was good. Hillary said that it was because we set the tone well from the get-go as informal and conversational. Lisa Nakamura said it was the most fun session at the conference! wooooot!

The other sessions I went to today were also great. I’ll write about them if I get a chance, but off to go eat dinner right now! Maybe the zoo or seaworld tomorrow!

Down at the bottom right is an IM client which works like todaysmeet does. But the main portion of etherpad’s real estate is on the left showing a google doc-like collaborative writing space. Some of us have been using it to take notes and write commentary about the conference sessions.

Since we just published the url openly, we got some random person named “badass” who came in and defaced our pad, but Jeremy cleaned it up. (I kinda wonder if badass is Alice Robison who plans on using a backchannel during her session tomorrow and was asking me about etherpad…)

Go check out the pad if you want to read up on the sessions I went to today.

http://etherpad.com/eSPRnZTy9d

Or just check out this dinner:

After dinner, we met up with Sarah Walter who flew in this evening and Sara Grimes via skype, since she was at her sodo hotel, and went over our presentation that we’re giving tomorrow about the mangle of play.

Here’s our original abstract:

The mangle of play: Game challenges and player workarounds
Participants: Mark Chen (University of Washington), Ben DeVane (University of Wisconsin, Madison), Sara M. Grimes (Simon Fraser University), Sarah E. Walter (Stanford University), Moses Wolfenstein (University of Wisconsin, Madison)
Diverse forms of participation in gaming often manifest as subversive resistance to prescribed forms of play. Recent research highlighting the variety of in and out-of-game practices players employ in negotiating obstacles includes looking at modding and cheating practices (Postigo, 2008, Consalvo, 2007) to knowledge sharing in online forums (Steinkuehler & Duncan, 2008). Gaming, as exemplified by these studies, consists of acts of accommodation and resistance in a complex “mangle of play” (Steinkuehler, 2006), where players appropriate and orchestrate distributed networks of resources to accomplish their gaming goals. In this session, we will describe how particular gamers pushed at or circumvented obstacles imposed by different game spaces.  We will discuss how leadership was negotiated in World of Warcraft (WoW), how a particular WoW group enrolled a mod to troubleshoot failures, the experience of newcomers to a stable gaming group in the Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO), how young children overcame design limitations in Club Penguin and BarbieGirls, and how players resisted the prescribed and normative play-based activity structures in Civilization III. Following our descriptions will be a whole-room discussion on obstacles and their workarounds to gaming.

We had some crazy ideas about how we could involve the audience tomorrow and/or how we could demonstrate the resistance/accommodation dialectic that Pickering was referring to with his original “mangle of practice” idea. I think tomorrow will be great, but charades presentations would have been even awesomer. :)

Also, I’ve been enjoying meeting new people or people I haven’t seen in a while, like Lisa Nakamura who is great, and meeting people who I first met through Facebook and Twitter, such as Hillary @ludditeatheart, Evonne @amoration, Flourish @flourish, and Jenny @tunabananas :)

We then caught a shuttle up to the conference registration, opening talk by Craig Watkins, and then after talk reception.

Two most memorable things from the opening were:

1. Henry Jenkins framed participatory culture as different than web 2.0, saying that he sometimes says that participatory culture started as early as web -10 back in the 1860s/70s when youth were creating their own activists news networks and even used the acronym “LOL!”
2. Craig Watkins describing the shift from MySpace to Facebook in just 2 or 3 years among black and latino youth and how many of them engage with the web through their mobile devices. That the digital divide is not about access anymore but more about a participation in different arenas sort of divide.

When Henry was doing his thing he mentioned that he likes to tweet now and is sometimes frustrated with the 155 character limitation, likening it to how the youth back in web -10 had to individually set the type for their newsprints. I immediately tweeted that Henry must be part of some twitter elite and has access to 155 characters since everyone else gets 140. I don’t think anyone got that joke… but then I noticed that starting about 5 minutes in, we had about half a dozen people tweeting the exact same salient points from both Henry and Craig, so I decided to stop tweeting… I think Ian Bogost complained about the #dml2010 spam. :)

Another hella funny thing was hearing about how @dthickey’s cell phone was stolen by a sea gull *while* he was talking with his wife! She heard him screaming profanities, wings flapping, and then a seal bark, so Dan spent 3 hours where the seals were searching for his phone… eventually bought a Droid to replace it…

During the reception, I kept seeing people I know but didn’t get a chance to really talk or say hi, and I also kept seeing people who I swear I’ve seen somewhere else, possibly at IR10. I really ought to introduce myself if we’re gonna keep bumping into each other…

Noted that a lot of LIFE people are here: Roy Pea, Brigid Barron, Reed Stevens, Veronique Mertl, Robb Lindgren, Sarah Walter (though, she’s arriving tomorrow). It feels kind of odd seeing one part of my academic life starting to collide with another.

Also excited that Lisa Nakamura recognized me and said hi. And I love how almost the first thing she said was why isn’t anyone looking at various Asian populations who are just as disproportionately represented socioeconomically as blacks and latinos. (It’s quite true in Seattle…) Every time I see Lisa, I try to namedrop Reed College and Beth Kolko (though I didn’t get a chance to this time) because I wonder if she remembers me, so it’s great to be recognized without prompting. Also, I’ve had dinner with her husband in Denmark, and I could probably namedrop Julian. :)

Anyway, Moses and I ducked out from the reception early to go get sandwiches from Porter’s Pub.

The thing is, I don’t really want to do a powerpoint slideshow. A couple of weeks ago, while brainstorming with ESTG different ways for how a conference session could be more participatory, Phil quickly showed me prezi.com. (The conference session mentioned is the one I’m in with Moses Wolfenstein, Ben DeVane, Sara Grimes, and Sarah Walter at the Digital Media and Learning conf later this month!)

Here’s my prezi so far:

What’s cool about prezi is that it isn’t as linear as powerpoint can be. You can zoom in and out of points of interest, which works really well, since it lets one load a presentation with a ton of info that can be dived into or not, depending on the circumstances of the presenting. I think what I’m going to try to do is fill my prezi in as much as possible but then just cover the high-level stuff in 15 minutes. At the same time, I’ll share the url with the search committee and they can explore different avenues of my research independently of me giving the presentation. What’d be cool is if people could comment with a live twitter feed or somesuch at the same time as a presentation… or maybe non-live comments a la YouTube.