I guess a bullet list is easiest. Conferences for this year:

1. iConference – February 8-11, Seattle – attended
2. Digital Media and Learning (DML) – March 3-5, LA – attending
3. Cultural Studies Association (CSA) – March 24-26, Chicago – Not attending since it conflicts with iSLC but helped form the Workshop on Cultures in Game/worlds with Jeremy Hunsinger and Adrienne Massanari.
4. inter-Science of Learning Center (iSLC) – March 25-27, DC – Creating a prototype poster on the actor-network theory chapter of my dissertation.
5. National Association for Research in Science Teaching (NARST) – April 3-6, Orlando – Sandy Toro Martell is running a panel on games and science ed with Doug Clark, Alex Games, Robb Lindgren, Reed Stevens, Debora B. Wisneski, Heather Toomey Zimmerman, and Susan M. Land. (I think I missed a couple of names…)
6. American Educational Researchers Association (AERA) – April 8-12, New Orleans – “The Enrollment of a New Technology and the Subsequent Redistribution of Roles and Responsibilities in an Online Game” (roundtable paper) is a shortened early version of my dissertation chapter on ANT and WoW. It doesn’t go into much depth and primarily acts to introduce game concepts and the network of technical resources in the game. I’m also in a panel “Socially Situated Expert Practice In and Around Gaming” with Phil Bell, Leah Bricker, Sean Duncan, Rebecca Reynolds, and Moses Wolfenstein.
7. ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) – May 7-12, Vancouver – Considering attending since it’s so close, but didn’t submit anything and it’s hella expensive (~$1000).
8. Games Learning Society Conference (GLS) – June 15-17, Madison, WI – Moses and I are keen to organize a panel on games and learning dissertations
9. Foundations of Digital Games (FDG) – June 28-July 1, Bourdeux, France – Probably not going since I didn’t submit anything, but many of my colleagues in computer science are. This is the same conference that used to be on a cruise ship. I am a reviewer, though, and now that I’ve seen all the papers that got submitted, I regret not submitting something since my work wouldn’t have competed with anyone else’s submission. Oh well.
10. Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) – July 4-8, Hong Kong – The sister conference to ICLS, one of the main conferences in my field. My paper presentation “How a New Actor Was Temporarily Enrolled Into the Network of Game Playing” is a more refined version of my write-up on the mangle and assemblage involved with playing WoW. The version for AERA lays the groundwork for thinking about the sociomaterial nature of games and learning, while this one will get into detailed nuances of my specific case. (The longest, most detailed version of the write-up is in review at a journal.)
11. Casual Connect – July 19-21, Seattle – Might not be going due to cost (~$400) and I may be conferenced out. But I have a strong desire to network with the industry better.
12. family reunion – July 25-August 3, Hawaii
13. SIGGRAPH – August 7-11, Vancouver – Reviewed for this but didn’t submit anything. This, like CHI (both ACM conferences) is quite expensive (~$1000). Also, like CHI, it’s in Vancouver, which makes it tempting, oh so tempting.
14. Digital Media and Learning Research Associates Summer Institute – August 15-19, UC Irvine – Woot! Only 12 of us got in to this week-long program. My project will be to create a web-mediated interactive and visualized version of my dissertation!
15. Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) – September 14-17, Utrecht, The Netherlands – I love Utrecht and Amsterdam. Kris Ask is organizing a panel on theorycrafting! I’m thinking I might submit something on the dissolution of a raid group in WoW (chapter 4 of the diss).
16. Internet Research (IR12) – October 10-13, Seattle – Angling to be on a panel with Sean Duncan, Mia Consalvo, and TL Taylor. Current plan is to present something on boardgamegeek users who create custom versions of out-of-print board games.

Draft papers for the above conferences:

• The Enrollment of a New Technology and the Subsequent Redistribution of Roles and Responsibilities in an Online Game – meant to be a shorter introduction to actor-network theory (Latour) and how the threat meter modification was adopted into my gaming group’s practice
• How a New Actor Was Temporarily Enrolled Into the Network of Game Playing – meant to be a longer discussion on actor-network theory in relation to the mangle of (gaming) practice (Pickering; Steinkuehler) and the assemblage of play (TL Taylor) and a deeper look into the ramifications of dynamic, destabilized networks

Comparing the two papers above… I should and will spend some time to make them much more significantly different. I don’t want to present the same thing at both places.

• Proposal for DML Summer Institute