It looks like Obama’s education policy will be a third term for President George W. Bush. This is not change I can believe in. (Ravitch)
Posted on the “Teachers & Parents for Real Education Reform” blog
(via Nate)
Recently, someone asked a question of the Association of Internet Researchers mailing list regarding the use of actor-network theory (ANT) with the analysis of why (WoW) gamers have a negative stereotype.
A flurry of activity occurred commenting about the use of ANT. It’s not a method but a framework, for example.
I was excited because I am thinking of using ANT to look at WoW raiding practice, and since I wanted to get feedback, too, I posted the following:
Hey all!
Fascinating discussion.
I’ve recently starting reading about ANT and have been toying with the idea of analyzing how a raid in WoW works through an ANT lens, though I am unsure what it’ll get me more than using distributed cognition (Hutchins) or just simply describing the learning arrangement between various humans and nonhumans to get the job done.
I guess my problem with ANT is that it seems boundless in terms of macro vs. micro analysis. As has been mentioned, an actor network can be made up of actor networks. Where does one start?
So, for example, I have a 40 person raid group that learns to kill a boss over several weeks. It seems like each person should be considered an actor that had to be translated into the network. We’ve also collectively used certain addons and tools within the game to help us manage cognitive load and to make transparent some of the underworkings of the game. Does each of these addons get counted? Does each iteration of an addon get counted (40 people running the same addon in slightly different ways, positioned on the screen differently, paying attention to different parts of the addon, etc.)? Do specific functions of the addon get separated as individual actors? Do different elements of the UI get separated? To back up, do specific people get broken down to mind-body-fingers?
Latour (writing as Johnson) briefly mentions that a door closer, an actor that’s been delegated the task of making a hole back into a wall, can be further broken down into the mechanisms in the whole object (egs. a spring, a metal cylinder). Is it completely arbitrary where a researcher draws the line?
In Reassembling the Social, Latour emphasizes tracing associations, which is possibly an answer to my above questions. I could concentrate on describing practice in the raid activity as I see it (which is pretty much what I’ve been doing for a while now), but pay particular attention to describing the functions of specific things as they relate to other things. Do this as they come up. In turn, these associations lead to other things that come up. Is that no longer considered ANT but after-ANT?
Is it more useful to describe cognition and memory and material resources within an entity a la dcog than use ANT? (Though my prob with dcog is more that it seems like a snapshot-in-time where I am trying to document the change in practice. ANT seems like it inherently considers instability and change through the act of translation.) Is ANT reserved for bigger arguments about societal relationships? About translation being the leveraging or convincing of other actors to share tasks? Or maybe a dcog analysis is the way to use an ANT lens using my ethnographic mehod…
Lots of questions. Maybe better suited to a blog post, as I’m just throwing ideas out there without much experience with ANT and such… But I thought I’d throw them out since it seems to that me the fastest way to learn something is to make transparent what you don’t know. And my digital ears perked up when I saw Tamara’s first message in this thread. ANT and MMOGs!
thanks,
mark
NO ONE replied except Bonnie Nardi off list! 🙁
And even then, she gave me some good pointers to articles I should read without any editorial comments of her own. Gah, more reading! :p
Was it not clear enough? I don’t explain distributed cognition at all. I don’t explain ANT at all because I assume the people who were talking about it know more about it than I do. I don’t explain WoW raiding, either, but I thought they’d all know what I was talking about. Also, I didn’t want to make the email even longer than it was…
Ah well… I guess I’ll keep reading.
Just added this to the Leet Noobs page to reflect my change in emphasis:
[Edit Feb 13, 2009:
I’ve moved slightly away from thinking about WoW as a two phase (two stage) process. I mean, it is helpful and maybe ethnographically correct–as in some players see it that way–but the line between the stages is very blurred, especially for anyone leveling up a character after their first one.
I wrote a paper that started out as me describing these two stages more. I intended to include things such as chat data and video analysis to illustrate the stages better, but I didn’t have time to do that kind of analysis for the deadline, so instead I turned it into a “how did ethnography help me” kind of paper, which seemed to make sense since it was for a special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures on ethnography and games.
Well, the reviewers, editor, and I eventually agreed that I should reframe what I submitted into a description of the social dimensions of expertise found in both stage one and stage two of character development. It’s a much better paper now after the review process than it started out as, but I’m afraid it reads a little hacked together (because it *was* a little hacked together!). Yet, I’m happy to say that it will, in fact, be appearing in TWC this Spring! 🙂
As for “Leet Noobs,” I am considering using it as the title for my dissertation, which, at this point, looks like it will be recasting the various publications I have through the lens of Actor-Network Theory/Distributed Cognition (maybe some Activity Theory thrown in, to boot) and be done by December 2009.
]
Also, NSF was here last Friday and Saturday for a visit to the LIFE Center while “us kids” were doing our grad student inter-SLC conference. One of the NSF folks really digged my poster and requested it be sent to him. We ended up sending him the charts one instead since it has more data on it. 🙂
I’ve been remiss in posting when things of mine get published.
I just now updated the Papers page with this:
So, this year instead of being an instructor for the Teacher Education Program (TEP) here in the College of Education at the University of Washington (UW), I’m an RA (research assistant) for a National Science Foundation (NSF) funded Science of Learning Center (SLC) called LIFE (Learning in Informal and Formal Environments). (How many acronyms can I put in there? 🙂 )
There are six SLCs:
This past weekend the UW branch of LIFE (which also has branches at Stanford and SRI) hosted the second annual grad student and post-docs inter-center conference. It was pretty cool meeting all these other learning sciences students and hearing about their research. We were able to share tools and resources, findings, methods, theories and ideas, and some good drink and company at local bars after each day’s events.
There were a number of us interested in games for learning, from the use of virtual environments for studying the effects of 1st person vs. 3rd person POV on learning (Robb) to testing social vs. non-social feedback for navigation tasks (Dylan Arena), from task oriented vs. social oriented cultural learning goals (Amy) to collaborative activity-based multiplayer mouse control (Neema).
The first day, Sarah Walter from Stanford arrived early so we could meet and brainstorm proposals for upcoming conferences. She does almost the same research as me except that:
We quickly saw that it would be easy to start using the same coding scheme and collaborate on analyses so we could compare our settings and findings. We’re writing abstracts to submit to IR10 (Milwaukie, Oct) and DiGRA (London, Sept). Prob will also submit to GLS (Madison, June 10-12) but she’s going to be at CSCL in Greece (lucky!) at the same time as GLS.
On Friday, we had a full day of poster sessions and then workshops on inter and intra center collaboration. We need a match.com for researchers, one that pushes info to participants when something new of interest (maybe tag based) gets added rather than depending on us to go visit a site routinely. Does that exist?
Afterwards, dinner at Portage Bay Cafe was pretty good. Met Vanessa who researches media realism and its effects on arousal.
On Saturday, we had presentations and workshops on current research and tools. The workshop I went to was the video analysis one and ELAN (presented by Sarah Fish and Naomi Berlove of VL2) looks great!
On Sunday, the conference was technically over, but I spent the day working at a cafe with Sarah Lewis (also from Stanford), lunch with Turadg, Erin, Ruth, and Ido (all from CMU), and working at a different cafe with Turadg. Sarah and I talked a bit about our programs and profs and politics. Very informative. 🙂
Turadg showed me some cool stuff he’s been working on that might help me with my chart creation… using python and pickling and a make file and such rather than going through all the crazy manual steps I’ve been doing with a text editor, excel, sql, flash, and photoshop. He’s also working on a collective web tool for learning that I’ve agreed to help with (though honestly, I only have a fuzzy image of what it is) and runs the Open Education Research blog.
Anyway, for anyone interested, below is the poster I presented (based off of the paper I was working on last month) at the conference. Also, you can get the bigger PDF version (13 MB).
but I think it is too late now since the deadline was yesterday:
Since the players in this raid group have all been playing for about a year and have reached the highest level in the game, they could be seen as expert players. This was not because they were experts of the game mechanics, per se. Rather, these players had successfully accumulated and displayed social and cultural capital, which depended on a fluency of the game culture above and beyond fluency with the game artifact (Chen, forthcoming (from the TWC article that I revised last month)). This research focuses on the adaptive nature of the raid group’s expertise, where the individual experts had to learn to coordinate and communicate effectively with teammates such that the group itself became an acting, thinking entity.
This would have let readers of the visualization paper know better what I meant by expertise and why I called the paper as an exploration of expert chat development rather than chat of the move from novice to expert…
Let me back up.
A few months ago (August or Sept) I was asked by Constance Steinkuehler to submit a paper for a special issue on games for eLearning. I didn’t really have anything I could write about with any sort of warranted claims, but I figured that I should take advantage of an invited paper plus it’s generally a good move to say yes to Constance. 😉
So, I emailed her telling her that I wasn’t sure I could make any strong claims as most of my analysis work has yet to be done but that I’d give it a shot. I spent a bunch of time exploring the use of visuals, namely charts, to look at the chat data that I have. This took a while, and given the time that I had, I decided to write a paper on how I made the charts (sent draft around Thanksgiving), since after doing a quick search I couldn’t really find any papers of that type that dealt with qualitative data in education. (There’s stuff from other disciplines and there’s stuff on quantitative data.)
I got feedback from her (Dec), mostly to make the findings and discussion areas more substantial and to move the “how-to” section to an appendix. In other words, to change the paper to not a methods paper but rather one on expertise development, which was the topic under study.
Edited and sent (early Jan), feedback given with a 24 hour deadline (two days ago), edited and sent again (and actually I think it is much better now and includes some chat data along with the charts to strengthen claims), but this morning I woke up thinking… “there’s not enough framing in the paper. I could have described what I consider expertise with these players better.” Oh well….
Claims? Based on analysis of two nights in Molten Core, separated by a couple of months, the first of which we encounter Ragnaros for the first time and the second in which we defeated him:
Here’s a bunch of stuff that’s happened/been happening/going to happen:
I’m revising that paper on visualization of chat logs in WoW raiding to map onto expertise development today and tomorrow. One comment is that the section on how I made the charts should be put into an appendix and the paper should focus on the actual argument rather than be a methods paper. That’s spot on, but I needed Constance to confirm it for me. One problem, however, is that some of my lit review is relatively sparse, but I can beef them up a bit, drawing from the excellent expertise work being done by my fellows (ESTG) at the LIFE Center. Another problem, though, is my analysis isn’t as robust as it could be given that I haven’t had time to chart out all the raiding nights nor go into detail on specific nights to get a clear sense of exactly what is going on. But I guess I’ll have to do as much as I can in the next three days and hope it’s good/interesting/valid enough.
I played a lot of WoW over the holiday break, getting to level 80, getting pretty much the best gear I can get without raiding, etc. Now that classes have started and I’ve hit 80, I’ll probably cut back my WoW time significantly. My subscription is set to end in Feb… I don’t know at this point if I’ll be resubbing (again…).
In related news, I also tried out Tabula Rasa for a week or so. It would be much better with a regular group of people in a LAN party. As it is, it’s visceral and adrenalin pumping, but ultimately it feels like a grind and got too repetitive. It’s a free game right now until the servers shut down in Feb, so if you want to check it out (Windows only), let me know and I can play with for a bit…
I’m taking 4 courses this quarter rather than just working on my dissertation. All of these haven’t been offered during my stay here at UW before.
Anyway, all this work and new activity with the new quarter just starting up seems like complete bullshit against the backdrop of world events and the civilian deaths in Gaza. On the Red Square today were two protest groups standing at odds with each other on either side of the square, one group holding up signs like “Israel has a right to defend itself” and the other with signs like “As a Jew, I’m against Israel’s attacks against Gaza.” And meanwhile, we’re just walking through like this is completely normal. WTF is wrong with us?
I’ll post the draft when I get a chance. It was originally a paper on expertise development in WoW, submitted to Transformative Works and Culture, a new online journal. I didn’t have time to get into it as much as I wanted and turned the paper into one that highlighted ethnographic methods and how they were useful. I am now revising it, however, to be re-reframed back to being about expertise development, on the advise of the editors. Makes sense, and there’s plenty material… It’s just sort of haphazard now, though…
But anyway, I ended up cutting this paragraph out and thought it should be saved somewhere:
Part of the meaning players derived from playing World of Warcraft depended heavily on body performance. Playing successfully was not just a cognitive function but required experiential knowledge in a sort of physical sense—both the real aching, tired wrists and back after a long session of playing and the virtual movement and actions on-screen. For example, I experienced finding the “groove” for my character, hitting a particular tempo with the activation of his abilities that everything seemed to “flow” perfectly. While I don’t think “flow theory” (Csíkszentmihályi 1990) applies to most of the game, “flow” is an apt description of the perfect rhythm I was feeling and the muscle memory I was developing.
I’ve gotten a couple of requests for info about how I made those charts I was working on last month. Well, here’s a draft of the paper I am working on, Visualization of expert chat development in WoW (draft PDF). It describes how the charts were made in greater detail.
Here’s the abstract:
Abstract: This paper describes the visualization of chat log data in the massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft. Charts were created to get a general sense of chat trends in a specific player group engaged in “high-end raiding,” a 40-person collaborative activity. These charts helped identify patterns in the frequency of chat over time during two specific gaming sessions. The sessions represented significant moments in the raid group’s history: the first time a particular monster, Ragnaros, was fought and one of the first times he was defeated. The visualization process, while useful, is only one analysis tool in a fuller ethnographic account of expertise development in World of Warcraft.
If you have specific questions, feel free to ask! And feedback is certainly welcome!
Will Richardson at Weblogg-ed has a nice summary post about some other people’s posts on the future of classrooms and learning, including highlights from one by Bill Farren: Weblogg-ed » Networked Learning: Why Not?
What caught my eye was the pretty visual representations from Farren. eg:
