Image: Should I be the person hiding my head in the sand?

Jo Iacovides  distributed an e-mail containing a list of contact details and descriptions from all of the people who expressed an interest.  I didn’t see it before I arrived in Milton Keynes, but I’m surprised at some of the people on it.  Ian Martin, from the T320 course team and the TT380 chair, is here across from me.  Several people from my Twitter stream, like Doug Clow, are here.  Some people I see on the PlanetOU blogs, like Ray Corrigan and Colin Chambers, are also here.  Not all of the 36 people who expressed an interest are here.  There are 24 people here.  There’s a disparate number of women present.  The two organizers are female and then there are three other women physically present, plus Rita Tingle via Elluminate.  That’s not very many!

Quite a number of people are interested in motivation and engagement.  Some people, like Jo and the guy next me (who is it again?), are interested in methodology.  The guy next me is particularly interested in assessing learning in games and the methodology for that.

There will be a wiki for the people in this group.  One of the first things they want to create a page for is an inventory of where and what games are used at The Open University.  One of the problems at the OU is that it’s so compartmentalized.  There are all kinds of neat people and projects, but it’s so difficult to find out about them, so one of the goals is to introduce us all and harvest our shared knowledge, whether that’s for “blue skies” research or applied use.

What do I want?  I’m very firmly embedded in an the OU’s distance education context.  My love of teaching is one of the three pillars in my life, along with building communities, and playing games.  It’s not just about World of Warcraft, but about the game theory and metaphorical aspects that both motivate and encourage people to persist.  As Tony Nixon mentioned, there’s a lot of boring stuff in games, but players still persist.  Some people have called World of Warcraft “World of Workcraft”.  I think one of the reasons they persist is because of community and peer pressure.  So I’m also interested in the mechanisms in games that encourage and support them in forming their own communities of practice for learning and inquiry.  My end goal is to trans to transfer these successful (in gaming) methodologies into online pedagogies.  I want to encourage students to become more “Susans” than being satisfied with being “Roberts”, particularly in online courses, where it’s difficult to maintain motivation and persist when you, as a student, are basically alone.

This involves both qualitative and quantitative research.  I know my contexts, but some of the methodological bits—connective ethnography and analysis—I’d love to discuss.  Plus I just love hearing ideas and thinking about things.  And, if it involves playing and doing things along the way with real students, all the better!   I’m therefore keen to make connections and find like-minded people with whom to collaborate on those topics within the community in which I, however, tenuously, belong.

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Image: A recent guild meeting where Irana (left) was initiated into The One. As always, there was dancing, but things got a little “hot.”

Colleagues from the Institute of Educational Technology (IET) and Maths, Computing and Technology at The Open University (OU) are inviting other OU staff interested in gaming research to a meeting next week in Milton Keynes. Here’s part of the blurb from the DigiLab post describing the event:

On Thursday, 21st October, Jo Iacovides (IET) and Marian Petre (Computing) are hosting an informal discussion on gaming research, with the aim of getting people from the OU who are interested in the area to meet up. Whether it’s using games for learning, considering game design, using gaming as a medium for understanding strategy or interaction, or anything else game-related, it would be great to hear from you.

As I’m interested in motivation, learning, and communities of practice formation within World of Warcraft, this is right up my alley. I know Jo Iacovides, one of the organizers, is also interested in some similar topics, as we’ve corresponded previously, but I’m eager to make some other connections.  I doubt it will get as “heated” as some of my guild meetings, but it should be interesting.

PS: If anyone knows of cheap ways to get from Milton Keynes Central to The Open University, please let me know! I currently use the Raffles taxi service and it’s about £5.00 each way; the taxi fare is almost as much as my rail fare from London. Thanks.

Tony Hirst (@psychemedia) built a Google custom search engine that scraped the profiles of Twitter users employing the #altc2010 hashtag for website addresses.  For a laugh, I typed in “World of Warcraft”, not expecting much to show up other than myself.  Well, I was there, but so was mention of a poster and a talk entitled “Cultural Capital and Community Development in the Pursuit of Dragon Slaying (Massively Multiplayer Guild Culture as a Model for e-L:earning)” at the 2007 Alt-C conference by David White.  That pointed me to an Alt-C talk and a GLS one in 2007.  So, not long before I started my Ph.D., David was already out there talking about this.  Ouch!  The “ouch” part is that I met him earlier this year at a gaming-related discussion panel.  He was chairing my table, but  we were discussing  digital residents and visitors.  David follows me on Twitter too!  World of Warcraft has never come up.

The abstract mentions guilds, World of Warcraft, social capital, and communities of practice.  His description is eerily similar to my current focus.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a matching paper for the talk.  There’s just the GLS 2007 26-minute talk embedded in the blog pos from Tall Blog.  I’d best add this to my list of things to investigate soon.  It sounds very, very relevant.  Perhaps he has something I can build on or I will obtain some ideas on how to differentiate my work.  I am also interested in seeing his ethnographic approach and what he discovered.  This is a challenge, not a disaster.  There is always something different you can do.  You just need to find it.

iVERG is a group of collaborating academics and professionals from universities worldwide. Research on virtual environments for use in learning and teaching is diverse and complex and draws upon specialisms in education, computing, sociology, psychology and anthropology.

It has an important contribution to make to the effective uses of these environments which are being increasingly taken up by a wide range of educational institutions worldwide. Although they have an intrinsic appeal founded upon their origins within gaming and social networking, immersive virtual environments need research informed practice to ensure their effective educational use.
From: http://www.iverg.com/iVERG/Index.html

They’re looking for people to join them, including students conducting research in associated areas.  The two-page application form asks for a 200-word biography.  I was struggling for something to write when it occurred to me to check my very old, but still maintained, “About Me” page, which had a blurb.  I took that as the starting point and came up with:

Michelle finished her Bachelor of Science degree in honours computing science at the University of Regina (Canada) in October 1995. She then joined the University of Zürich’s (Switzerland) Software Engineering Group, led by Dr. Helmut Schauer, and the Artificial Intelligence Lab, led by Dr. Rolf Pfeifer. While in Switzerland, she worked with Peter Schauble’s team at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology on the EuroSpider project. She’s a co-author with Kenrick Mock of several IRC-based games, including Risky Business and Acrophobia. She’s a long-time member of the IDEAs Lab in the School of Informatics at the University of Sussex, where she’s currently working on a Ph.D. under the direction of the Lab’s head Dr. Judith Good. Michelle’s part-time Ph.D., started in 2008, combines her lifelong love of teaching, community building, and gaming to examine learning and motivation in World of Warcraft (WoW). She also teaches, writes, and chairs courses at The Open University on accessibility, online learning, Open Source, PHP, and e-business technologies. In 2010, she completed the two-year Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice and got a second character to Level 80 in WoW. She’s active on Twitter as @Eingang.

I suppose I’d like to see what other people have said.  I hate writing about myself, but it’s probably “good enough.”  Now, off to post the application.

Kind of like high 5, but not. Thank you Mark Hawker for memeing me, & posting the rules (although feeling a bit Déjà vu on this one, wondering if black holes are really just meme collisions):

* Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
* Share seven facts about yourself in the post – some random, some weird.
* Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
* Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

[From SocialTech: Random 7]

Now, on to the 7º of Ein!

1. 1st º: Most people are familiar with my pseudonym of “Eingang” or “Ein” for short. Most people, however, don’t know that it comes one of my first trips to Switzerland where I saw “Eingang” posted on entrances to highways and parking lots all over the country. I discuss this more at length in the Evolution of Eingang and Cognomen Command blog entries on my personal blog. I strongly believe in the power of self-naming to control who we are and what we want to be.

2. 
   The Stargate Window Decoration

   Me Singing “Moonlight Shadow” (excerpt)

   2nd º: Although I’m very literal-minded and things can seem very black and white, ideal qualities in someone who is comfortable in dealing with computers, I also have a bit of an artistic side. I occasionally like to draw, write poetry, make handmade cards, and sing.

   
   Autumn Leaf

   Singing happens quite a lot when I’m happy. The other things when I have a lot of spare time or when I’m wanting to make something special for someone. This Christmas’s artistic adventure was making a stained glass plastic Stargate window decoration for someone as a Secret Santa gift.

   Last year I made different Christmas cards for almost everybody. Some used stamps. Some were drawn. Some were layered. Some used recycled Christmas paper. It was a lot of fun to do, but it can be fairly time-consuming unless you’re making multiples of the same card design.

3. 3rd º: Book storage is a problem many people I know have. I’ve solved it by storing my books in many different countries and many different formats. I have books stashed away in an apartment in Zürich (Switzerland), boxed up in Edmonton (Canada), and here in London (England). The vast majority of my collection is paperbacks, but I also have a sizeable number of electronic books (especially science fiction) and Audible audiobooks. I’ve been a member of Audible for five years. I especially love unabridged audiobooks for my weekly commute to the University of Sussex. They’re also good for sending me off to sleep. I set my iPod to deactivate after 30 minutes and start the current audiobook playing on very, very low volume. I usually only manage about fifteen minutes before I’m gone. It’s highly effective.

4. 4th º: I left home when I was sixteen prior to finishing high school. I was just starting grade 12, my last year of high school, when I left home. It took me another four years to finish that last year of school by distance education, night classes, and summer courses. Memo to kids: Be cool, stay in school! I did graduate with honours, but my way was a lot harder. I then self-funded my way through university, graduating with honours from honours computing and with a $32,000 NSERC post-graduate award, which I didn’t end up using. At one point in my undergraduate degree, I was taking courses from three different universities located in three different provinces of Canada in the same term. After graduating, I started trying to find a place to do a Ph.D. I’m still doing a Ph.D. now. I’ve pretty much well continuously been in school since I left home.

5. 5th º: In my spare time, such that it is, I run a random acts of kindness World of Warcraft (WoW) guild called The One. My primary character is named Elsheindra and she’s a healer; I’m not much into hack and slash. A guild is a collection of people who play together. The One has been together almost four years now. It’s relatively small, but we still have quite a few of our original members, which is quite impressive, I think.

   
   Elsheindra, night elf

   
   Mr. IBM in the Park

   While I’m confessing about World of Warcraft, I might as well admit that I met my current partner while running a multi-guild alliance together. We’ve been happily living together (that’s in real life, not virtual life) for two years. We bought a house together in London earlier this year, my first house ever, after a lifetime of renting. WoW and Plurk friends will probably know that I’m disgustingly happy with Mr. IBM (AKA Basil in World of Warcraft).

   Running The One is where I first started experimenting with Wikis. Atlassian was kind enough to donate a free license of their commercial, Java-based Confluence Wiki software for the guild to use. Although it’s been difficult to get people collaborating on content, it has been very interesting trying to adapt a Wiki to all kinds of purposes, like forums and private messaging. It’s given me an appreciation of the power of tagging and dynamic content display, too. I love things that tie my interests of community building with Internet technologies together.

6. 6th º: Although I like people and I seem to be an extrovert, I don’t actually like lots of people in the same place at the same time or very, very busy places. As a result, I tend to stay in my home a lot. I particularly dislike London train stations during the commuter rush, where the train stations become a seething mass of humanity. That’s way too many people for my comfort. I even have trouble with the local Sainsbury’s sometimes. I’m most comfortable in small groups of five or six people.

7. 7th º: I love soups. I adore soups. I figure you can never have too much soup (sort of like garlic, another favourite). If I’m cooking and it doesn’t involve soup, I think people are shocked. Some of my favourites include Spicy Bread & Garlic Soup and Thai Hot ‘n Sour Mushroom Soup. I’ve also posted recipes for Pistou Sauce, which goes good on French vegetable soup, and 10-Spice Powder. I am a person who has a crockpot and loves using it!

8. 8th º (bonus): I hate having my picture taken. I’ve always hated having my picture taken. I’m not sure of the reason for it. On the plus side, I don’t take pictures of other people normally either. Win-win, as far as I’m concerned!

Now comes the fun part: subjecting other people to this same adventure. I tag:

1. Tony Hirst
2. Martin Weller
3. Howard Rheingold
4. Jim Hendler
5. AJ Cann
6. Sarah Horrigan
7. Monty Paul

I think this is some interesting research, but obviously not applicable to every learning situation. Physical processes, like volcanos, weather, chemical reactions, etc. are very appropriate for model building. Or maybe I just need to change my understanding of what constitutes a model? For example, I’m teaching students how to program in JavaScript. In a way, a program is sort of like a model and we give students programming projects where they model some kind of answer to a stated problem to demonstrate their understanding of the process. Most students do not implement the solution correctly intially, so they need to refine their understanding of the problem and its solution over several iterations. Failure is forcing them into a state of conceptual change and as they repair their assumptions and their “model” code, they are learning valuable lessons about what works and the process of both developing and fixing. I guess, in fact, I’ve been doing this all along; I just didn’t have a name for it!