Tag Archives: lisa nakamura

Academia

Digital Media and Learning Conference, day 2

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I created a proper backchannel for the conference at todaysmeet, but the site went down after a couple of hours or so. (Not sure exactly when it went down, but Debbie Fields and Moses told me it wasn’t working about two hours after I created the channel.) I tweeted about it being down (since I originally also tweeted about it being up) and @buridan replied that I should check out etherpad. Etherpad is great!

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:

Shree, Chris, Moses, and Ben eating at El Charro, La Jolla Shores

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 🙂

Academia

Digital Media and Learning Conference, day 1

1 Comment

Met up with Moses Wolfenstein, Ben DeVane, and Sean Duncan and hung out with them in their room overlooking the beach, later at a cafe after walking a bit, then back in their room overlooking the beach. Have I mentioned the beach? Here’s a shot of not the beach but still a nice view from the cafe we went to:

view from Goldfish Cafe, La Jolla

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.

Moses at the Porter's Pub at UCSD