It seemed odd to me that there was a lot of experimental or quantitative designs being presented. Or small comparison studies using quantitative measures to compare the two cases, I guess I mean. For example, one was comparing the use of computer mediated tools versus non-digital tools in a set of classrooms, studied using test scores as measures of success. Does that seem right to you? Not entirely to me.

(more on ICLS and photos of Utrecht/Amsterdam after the jump)

It’s a good first step, but I feel there’s so much more stuff going on in classrooms. What about long-term transfer? What about fostering a community of learners in a classroom so that they are more able to tackle future problems? And this is just stuff outside of the design of the experiment.

Confounding the experiment itself, what about the quality of the teacher in each classroom, the composition and dynamics of each classroom, etc. etc. Also, there was no description of the actual practice students engaged in with the different media tools. Are they more engaged, collaborative, talkative, on task, frustrated, etc. with the different tools? I mean, the findings don’t tell us anything about the actual goings-on in the classrooms and therefore fail to tell us what’s successful practice.

I was talking with Veronique after one session that included a presentation about distributed knowledge and collaboration. The presenter showed us research on the effect of using a tutorial and/or manual with a designed game-like activity that tested the successful sharing of knowledge. Findings generally showed that tutorials helped while manuals didn’t. But we question how useful this was on saying anything about distributed knowledge sharing in real-world contexts. In our research, the idea of sharing all info, which was possible in this game, is not possible with our participants, nor is it necessary for them to do what they do. For me, raiders in WoW don’t need to know what every other raider knows; they just have to be coordinated and trusting. For Vero, musicians also don’t need to know exactly what their band members know. I wonder if it is a difference between distributed knowledge, where knowledge is what is being measured, and distributed performance or activity, where people’s goal is doing stuff collaboratively rather than learning content knowledge.

In the late afternoon, I went back to the hotel to take nap. Then got up to meet Giovanna. We took about 30 min to find each other (there are so many churches in Utrecht with plazas right next to them). Then we met up with Therese, Alex, and Sheldon and had dinner at a great Greek place right next to The Dom, a huge-ass clock tower that rings for like 5 minutes every half hour or so and like 2 minutes every quarter hour (and makes it impossible to fall asleep from the hotel I was staying in).

While out we passed by some cool looking shops in Utrecht, right along the canal. Two or three comic book stores and two gaming stores. All closed.

The next day I met up with Giovanna and Sheldon and we went back to those shops, had brunch, and then to Amsterdam together.

We first went to my hotel, the Hotel Piet Hein, named after a privateer who captured a huge motherload of Spanish silver. The hotel is quite nice but damn, the wireless service isn’t working at the moment (writing this from a lobby laptop)! Then we walked around a bit.

Giovanna and I had been here twice already, so we basically walked around with Sheldon, checking out the main plaza, a novelty condom store called the Condomerie, the Bloemenmarkt, the Red Light District, and a Games Workshop store with some awesome minis on display!

One of the women pulled me aside and wouldn’t let go of my T-shirt. She promised a blowjob that would make me remember Amsterdam forever for just 50 euro. I decided I could remember Amsterdam just fine on my own. :)

We ended up eating dinner at a cafe near the lift bridges. After dinner they went back to Utrecht and I went to my hotel to sleep. Ah sleep.

Some people went off the Anne Frank house, some to the Van Gogh Museum, and others who had been to those places before checked out the Red Light District. Then we all met back at the central plaza at 6:30. Turns out the Anne Frank house was closed for some special reason that day, and the Van Gogh folk decided to shop instead since there was so little time before the museum closed (and since we found a cool shop called Hanazuki apparently run by an artists’ collective by the same name). :)

Then Giovanna and I stayed to try to find a cool shop we found on Tuesday and catch dinner in Amsterdam. The rest of them went back to Utrecht and got dinner over there.

The shop we found was open! Lots of cool little figurines and action figures designed by (street, urban, hip-hop, manga, skater culture) artists. Not sure how to describe it, but they’re pretty popular in magazines like Giant Robot.

Afterwards, Giovanna and I ate a hole-in-the-wall Chinese place, called Wing Kee, that was really quite good! [Edit: Looking it up on the web (now that I'm back in the States), one reviewer claims it's the best Chinese restaurant in Amsterdam!]

I’m here for a conference called ICLS 2008, the International Conference for the Learning Sciences, run by ISLS (replace “Conference” with “Society”). It’s held every two years, and this year it’s at the Utrecht University in The Netherlands. My first time in Europe! Wow!

It happened that my neighbor Beth (who is also on my committee, btw) coincidentally booked the same flight as me. She was on her way to Budapest with Amsterdam (Schipol) as a layover. So, I was able to ride with her to the airport in Seattle. :)

I was also able to bypass the long-ass check-in line for plebs and tag along with her in the elite first-class travelers line. That was cool, but as soon as I got up to the front and scanned my passport into the auto-kiosk thingie, it became clear that I should’ve changed my legal name or added it to my profile at the various travel websites I use a long time ago. Having the name on my ticket and my passport was a problem, and the person who tried to help me kept saying, “This will delay you. This will delay you.” like some sort of mantra instead of telling me something useful like how I could fix it. But then she whisked away my ticket and passport to an open podium and changed the name on my ticket in a lickety-split. Not much of a delay, I’d say…

Once I got to the gate (and saw Vero, Tiffany, and Leah real quick-like) I had to wait to try to get a seat number. Apparently, they overbooked the flight. Then it turned out that they were offering a $750 voucher for anyone willing to take the next flight. I volunteered since there was nothing pressing here that I needed to attend. (In fact, I have all day tomorrow to hang around and walk about, even.) The next flight left 2 hours later and stopped at Minneapolis first. It wasn’t so bad, and I got bumped to first-class for the Seattle to Minneapolis flight. (Got served dinner in actual ceramic bowls and silverware… Shouldn’t have eaten a Whopper right before getting on…) (photos taken with a cell-phone, btw, so they might suck)

The long part of the flight was alright, too (Solaris, Horton Hears a Who, The Devil Wears Prada, another dinner and a breakfast). The guy next to me on the international flight was in heated discussions with his son over his alcohol abuse right before we took off and then ended up drinking a bit of wine himself. Hmmm… He has the bladder of a wilderbeast or something, as he didn’t get up once during the whole 8 hour flight. Amazingly, I didn’t need to get up either, so it was alright (I was window, he was aisle).

I started to worry a little bit as I got off the plane in Amsterdam finally. Different official-type people told me different ways to get a ticket for the train to Utrecht. The Info attendant told me to get Euro coins from the bank (since she thought coins were cheaper than using a card). The banker told me to buy with credit card from the train ticket kiosk (since he charges a commission for money changes). The kiosk told me my card was not usable (both a VISA card and a debit card). The train Info woman (friendly-looking, but amazingly lazy or laid-back–not sure which) told me to go to a train ticket booth instead of a self-serve kiosk. The ticket booth people (two of them sitting next to each other) told me that sometimes the kiosks don’t work with some cards, but that my VISA card was fine (thank god). Then they each initially told me different platforms to wait on, finally agreeing on one. Thanks. (The train info posters they have posted around really ought to be color-coded, btw.) Finally, the train itself was unmarked. I basically looked at my phone for the time and trusted that the train I got on was the right one according to the time.

Got to Utrecht Centraal. Looked amazingly at the lack of useful signage. Asked a Info dude (again, friendly-looking, yet lazy or laid-back) told me that NH Centre hotel was just down the stairs, out the door, and down the street. The hotel lobby looked really nice. Unfortunately, there’s two NH hotels in Utrecht. So, a little trek through the city (man, there are bicyclists everywhere!) and I finally check in. Smoking room. I thought I requested a non-smoking. I’ll have to change it tomorrow if I can.

A little nap, and then dinner with Ben Devane (who’s getting married in two weeks–grats!) at a dingy falafel place nearby. He’s a guildie, so we wanted to meet up and talk DPS shit. Well, we actually ended up talking really briefly about our dissertation topics, about GLS (the Games Learning Society group at UWisc-Madison) and LIFE. I met him last year at the GLS conference (which he won’t be attending this year due to getting married at the same time :( ). We might be hanging out tomorrow a bit. I should probably call some UW CoE people who are here already, too, to see what they’re up to tomorrow.

Catch-all:

• We had the longest taxiing to the terminal after landing ever on record, I swear. Also, the highways here go *under* the airport runway! That doesn’t exist in the U.S.
• The emergency exit signs in the airport are hilarious. I’ll try to remember to snap a shot when I leave.
• There’s a surprising lack of billboards here. Nice!
• Lots of iPods on the train.
• Amsterdam is modern and ancient, slick and grimy. Heh.
• Not many pedestrians, mostly bicyclists.
• Everyone here looks attractive. Healthy, not overweight, delicate features…