Category Archives: Academia

Academia, Life

Sunday in Amsterdam

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So, I got lots of sleep last night. About 12 hours!

Got up to find that I missed breakfast and the cool pastry shop nearby was closed on Sundays! 🙁

Went across the street down a ways to a cafe and had a Dutch pancake with apple and a coffee. Quite nice, actually.



Thought of these while eating/waiting for the check:

  • The Netherlands will start to ban smoking in cafes and bars starting July 1… that’s like two days from now! I wonder what the people will do while waiting for their checks. It takes forever to get your check here. No more smoking… they’ll have to order more coffee…
  • The Dutch probably have really well-conditioned butts since they sit on bicycle saddles all the time.
  • The prostitutes and owners of the booths they rent could do a much better job at marketing their wares (whares?). For example, instead of plain tile, why not do some fancy mosaics in those booths? What about themed booths of some sort? Catholic school girl booth, nurse booth, etc. How about a free Dutch pancake with each trick?

See what you can come up with if you have lots of free time to let the mind wander while waiting for your bill?




Then went shopping in the museum plaza. Horrible photo above of the plaza. I’m trying to get copies of photos from others here who actually have their cameras with them and why there are so few photos of buildings so far.  Cool tulip vases at the Museum Shop.



Academia, Life

Latest update from The Netherlands

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On Friday I went to a couple of the morning sessions at ICLS.



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)

Continue reading Latest update from The Netherlands →

Academia, Life

Some photos from Thursday in Amsterdam

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As I said in the last post, I went with ESTG (the Everyday Science and Technology Group–Phil Bell’s group pretty much) to Amsterdam. We broke up into three parties after visiting Puccini, a chocolate store (apparently, quite famous), and the Bloemenmarkt (flower market) together.







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!]

Academia, Life

OMG lots of stuff

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but I’ll have to write about it in more detail later. Here’s a real quick summary:

  • I went with another student to Amsterdam on Tuesday while pre-conference workshops were going on. We mostly walked around the shopping district and downtown. We ended with the Red Light District and an Irish pub. It was pretty fun. The Red Light District was underwhelming, imho, but I think we went too early to see anything and it was broad daylight.
  • On Wed, attended the conference and then skipped out of the late afternoon stuff to sleep. Damn that jetlag. Went to dinner with a bunch of CoE folk including a few alums.
  • On Thursday, I was part of a presentation/poster session on expertise development in everyday contexts. I think it went well and I got lots of helpful feedback on my poster and ideas. Here’s a copy of the poster I used. Later, I’ll make a page on this site detailing the drafts and the eventual paper I’m writing based off the poster.

Chen Leet Noobs poster


  • Then the ESTG group went to Amsterdam again. 🙂
Academia, Life

no more free access from my hotel…

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So, I got stuck in a smoking room which was causing me problems breathing while I was sleeping. I was able to get switched to a non-smoking room (with no view, no remote control, and 2 broken light bulbs). Unfortunately, the free hotspot I was able to get from my old room isn’t reachable. 🙁

So, updates sporadically.

Sitting in the opening presentation now… Normally, I’d try live blogging, but screw it.

Academia, Life

The Netherlands

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So I’m sitting in my room at the NH Centre Utrecht hotel writing this post. It’s a little after midnight, local time, which I guess means it’s like 4pm Pacific and still Monday…

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!

Continue reading The Netherlands →

Academia, Life

New laptop! er… I mean, I resigned from TEP.

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On Friday I told Phil Bell, my adviser, that yes I would accept an RA position with the Learning in Informal and Formal Environments (LIFE) Center. This meant that on Saturday, I emailed the Teacher Education Program (TEP) folks that I wouldn’t be returning to the tech instructor position I’ve had for the last 3 years.

TEP is going through a pretty exciting renewal process right now with the newly designed program debuting this quarter. It has an added online web community component that is being worked on over the summer, so it was relatively difficult for me to leave at a time when I could probably give some really handy advise.

Doing research with the LIFE Center, however, is too good to pass up. In a meeting with Phil last Tuesday, he basically informed me that I could continue doing my own research but just figure out a way to integrate it with the bigger LIFE stuff. He also said that we’ve talked about it before. The thing with Phil, though, is that I think we’re not always on the same page, so I’ve never really felt comfortable with joining LIFE for fear of having to put my WoW stuff aside. I figure, it’s still not super clear exactly what’s expected of me, but whatever. I can deal with change and set boundaries.

Anyway, it makes sense to collaborate with other LIFE people however it unfolds. Obviously, my data speaks of an informal setting where learning occurs. With the Center’s focus on innovation, leadership, collaboration, expertise, etc. it makes complete sense for me to join since those are essentially what I’m interested in, too.

All this typing is leading to the big news, though: I figure I need to return the laptop that I’m using right now to TEP, so I shopped around for a replacement! 🙂

I was going to wait until the end of the summer since I can probably hold onto the TEP MacBook Pro until they get a replacement for me, but since I’ll be traveling for a month this summer, I decided I needed a gaming laptop for Mass Effect, Age of Conan, World of Warcraft, and the Warhammer beta. I also decided, however, that I don’t need a top of the line gaming laptop since it’ll only be a month, so those crazy $6000 laptops from Falcon Northwest were off-limits.

Instead, I bought a $1350 Asus G1Sn-A1. The important bit is that it has a nVidia 9500M GS video card, which is basically the same as the 8600M GT that looks like it was popular last year. I know later this year, there are supposed to be mobile versions of the video card I have in my desktop system right now, which tells me that the one I just bought will be a little less powerful than my desktop’s, so this laptop certainly won’t be a desktop replacement for me. It should be totally fine for at least a year, though; probably at least two years. I mean this (older) MacBook Pro has an X1600 in it and it still runs TF2 fine.

There was another laptop that I could’ve gotten: a Sager NP2092. It was cheaper by about $150 but didn’t have as nice a warranty (Asus has a 1 year accident coverage on top of the standard hardware failure warranty!). The Sager also didn’t have as many ports and such. Only VGA out, for example.

What’s weird is that there’s also no DVI port on the Asus, but it has HDMI and maybe that’s the newer standard… I dunno; haven’t really kept up with hardware changes in a couple of years, but I thought HDMI was for TVs and stuff.

it’s amazing how much one can learn about laptops/notebooks in two days through sites like notebookreview.com

Academia, Games Research

Chat transcripts of the Convergence Conference

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I’m having technical difficulties uploading the videos I recorded during the Convergence Conference on Virtual Worlds that occurred in World of Warcraft earlier this month. Those videos will be uploaded shortly. Meanwhile here’s the chat transcripts from the three sessions.

Yes, I started a Rickroll… 🙂 Slightly disorganized, since the panelists and attendees were all using guild chat, but I didn’t mind the chaos. Read about the session and panelists at http://convergentsystems.pbwiki.com/Session%201

  • 20080510conference.txt – Chat from Convergence Conference, Day 2, Sat May 10. Panel session. Questions included learning in VWs.

A little less disorganized. Chat backchannel with Terror Novas about making it more orderly, but I felt uncomfortable with the idea of enforcing control. Maybe it’s a generational thing? I thought the stream of info was fine and that the panelist answers could just be in a separate channel, rather than forcing non-panelists into silence as seemed to be suggested. Read about the session and panelists at http://convergentsystems.pbwiki.com/Session+2

A massive info dump where lots of attendees discussed answers to the day’s questions. Afterwards there was an in-game wedding and then a raid on Sentinel Hill. For the Horde! Read about the session at http://convergentsystems.pbwiki.com/Session+3

Also, check out my screenshots!

Convergence Conference in World of Warcraft, May 9-11, 2008
Academia, Games Research, Life

Videos of the science conference in WoW forthcoming…

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but right now it occupies about 200GB of my hard drive and I ran out of disk space to actually compress the files! So yesterday, after dropping SG off at the airport, we went to Fry’s so I could get a new external hard drive. $100 for 500GB! I remember when I paid $550 for 340MB or so (early 90s)… (and of course even crazier about 10 years before that when my dad bought our first computer…)

So anyway, videos of the World of Warcraft conference that was held in WoW will be compressed soon and uploaded to a server somewhere… 🙂

Academia, Games Research

Second Life vs. WoW, as panel session… Fight!

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Today, tomorrow, and Sunday, there is a conference on virtual worlds research being held in World of Warcraft (noon Eastern Time, Earthen Ring, US, Horde side, Science guild). If you can’t join, you can watch the live feed each day at World2Worlds.

I’ll write-up full comments after this weekend when Gray and Song Gong (house guests who need someone to play boardgames with!) leave.

I have to say, though, that the panelists and moderators and that whole format worked a lot more in WoW than what I’ve seen similarly attempted in Second Life, but part of it was that I knew exactly how to manipulate WoW’s interface so that I could easily follow the chat. I also was able to /chatlog it all and Frapsed it all as a half-size movie to my HD. Now I have to compress the videos for storage (my HD is FULL!).