First step is to install NoteScraper for Evernote. Once that’s done, I use the following steps:

1. Log into your Kindle account at http://kindle.amazon.com/ using Safari.
2. Click on the link to your books (https://kindle.amazon.com/your_reading).
3. Locate the book with notes you want to export in that list and click the title of it.
4. Scroll down to where notes start and choose “show your highlights only” (this also shows your notes).
5. Assuming NoteScraper for Evernote is correctly installed and the Apple global Script Menu is visible on the top menu bar, choose “Export Kindle notes to Evernote”.
6. You’ll be asked for some tags, a notebook to add it to (Kindle Notes), and whether you want each note to have its own note.
7. Done. It’s in Evernote now.

It can then be copied and pasted into DevonThink (the tool I use) or other electronic journal or writing tools you may use.

Don’t use a Mac? You can perform the first four steps and then manually copy the content from the web page to wherever you like, but formatting and appearance won’t likely be as nice.

I’ve quickly posted this based on my how-to in my own research journal in response to a Twitter question by Catulla. I’ll add some illustrative screenshots later.

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Image: I can just imagine this Blood Furnace boss exhorting people “L2P!” as he kills them over and over.

It is day two of the writing regime. Today’s plan is writing 750 words, writing CMA feedback, and working on the paper. I was musing last night about the approach to the paper, thinking that having an abstract or an introduction actually makes it easier to write because it provides a focus for the paper’s direction. I have heard other people say that it makes sense to leave the introduction to the last because then you know what you’ve written. I think the former approach might be more sensible for me. I can always go back and revise the introduction if it does not reflect what I end up doing. Focus, however, is priceless.

In addition to an introduction or an abstract, a title might also help. I was experimenting with variants of “L2P! Learn To Play Or…”. I thought that was clever, as it’s something you often see more experienced, impatient players saying to players who they think are not living up to their expectations in terms of expertise or speed. In the context of my work, however, it probably makes more sense to say “P2L! Play To Learn”, but I’m not sure how many people will get that. Nevertheless, a title is a starting point. I had both before I started my keynote writing and that turned out well. Perhaps I can incorporate the factoid into the abstract.

Abstract:

“L2P! L2P!” This is the exhortation you might encounter in massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) when other players around you believe your skill or speed in playing is inadequate. It means “learn to play”. In this paper, we demonstrate how L2P has been turned on its axis to yoke the trials of play to the game of learning. 39 World of Warcraft players primarily playing in Europe submitted essays answering the question “Why do you play World of Warcraft?” in a 2010 study.

Using a grounded theory approach and discourse analysis, the essays were analyzed to ascertain the contributors’ motivations for playing and their reasons for persisting in playing. Yee’s player motivational framework subcomponents (Yee 2005; Yee 2006) were applied to each essay and contrasted with Bartle’s original player typology (Bartle 1996; Bartle 2003) in aggregate to determine overall, general motives these players had. While participants were not asked to write explicitly about learning and many did not provide any examples, several contributions are examined here as case studies of mundane and unusual examples, illustrating what these adults are playing to learn–a learning that goes beyond dungeons, dragons, and dwarves.

That does not seem too bad as a first go. I need to check on the discourse analysis; it might not be completely true. I also have no idea how I am going to write up the grounded theory bit appropriately, but at least that is accurate. I definitely followed that kind of approach in tagging the essays. I need to find some time to pore through the James Paul Gee’s book on discourse analysis. I just saw someone else in #phdchat mention it again yesterday. It keeps cropping up and I keep not reading it, even after I went to buy it and then realized I already had. That is trying to tell me something, if I would only listen. I also need to check on what to call Yee’s framework.

References:

Bartle, R. (1996) ‘Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs’, Journal of MUD Research, 1 (1). Also available from: http://www.mud.co.uk/richard/hcds.htm (Accessed April 22, 2011).

Bartle, R. (2003) Designing Virtual Worlds. New Riders Publishing.

Yee, N. (2005) A Model of Player Motivations, [online] Daedalus Project. Available from: http://www.nickyee.com/daedalus/archives/001298.php?page=1 (Accessed March 31, 2011).

Yee, N. (2006) ‘Motivations for Play in Online Games’, CyberPsychology & Behavior, 9 (6), pp:772-775. Also available from: http://www.liebertonline.com/doi/abs/10.1089/cpb.2006.9.772 (Accessed March 31, 2011).

Image: Photograph of street near Elephant and Castle on a rainy day in London through rain-streaked window

I’m about halfway through my initial coding of the motivation essays collected last April.  I should have been done this months ago, but I’ve somehow been scared to do it.  I think the big reason behind that is I’m afraid that I’m doing it or will do it incorrectly.  As I am going through and creating codes, I cannot help but feel that I am not always focussing on the motivation issue, which is the primary question. I am generally coding for content or themes I see appearing in the essays.  As an example, an essay may express that the author is more likely to assist someone else if they feel that other person has put some effort and thought into their character.  That is not their motivation for playing, but I have still created a code for it as “assist others”.  When I get to the end and review the list, I will not be able to tell which ones refer to motivation.  Some probably are where a participant has expressed it as a motivation, but other instances, even of the same code, might just be a theme that was raised.

At the moment, I have the following free nodes in NVivo:

Feeling a little insecure, I thought it might be time to consult a book I bought late last year but had yet to open: The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers by Johnny Saldaña (2009).  While I have many books now on research methods and specifically on qualitative analysis, I have found it difficult to get a grasp on the mechanics of coding.  I am somewhat reassured to read in the first chapter that “Rarely will anyone get coding right the first time” (p.10).

Saldaña differentiates between themes and codes, based on work of Rossman & Rallis: “think of a category as a word or phrase describing some segment of your data that is explicit, whereas a theme is a phrase or sentence describing some more subtle and tacit processes.” (Saldaña 2009, p. 13, his emphasis).  He goes on to say that “SECURITY can be a code, but A FALSE SENSE OF SECURITY can be a theme.”   He recommends avoiding coding thematically initially and to instead note potential themes down in an analytic memo.

In examining my list, aren’t most of my existing codes themes rather than categories, even if they’re a single word?  Maybe not necessarily.  If an essay’s author says they play World of Warcraft as stress relief, “stress relief” is an explicit thing.  That’s a category?   I am still unsure.  For the moment, I think I will continue on as I am.  This is only the first iteration and I can always improve it later.  However, I think I should start explicit coding some passages as “motivation” to delineate it from other points of interest that may also arise within a given essay and then go back and do the same for essays prior to case S1-028.

I suspected I was deviating from the main goals of the survey while doing my coding.  Saldaña addresses this by supporting the recommendation of Auerbach & Silverstein to make a one-page  summary of your research concerns, central research question, theoretical framework, goals of the study, and any other major issues (Saldaña 2009, p.18).  Then, keep that in front of you to aid you in maintaining your focus during coding.  Some questions were suggested as being applicable to coding field notes for all research by Emerson, Fretz, & Shaw (quoted in Saldaña 2009, p. 18):

1. What are people doing?
2. How, exactly, do they do this?  What specific means and/or strategies do they use?
3. How do members talk about, characterize, and understand what is going on?
4. What assumptions are they making?
5. What do I see going on here?  What did I learn from these notes?
6. What did I include them?

I have trouble seeing the applicability of those questions to my current task.  I do, however, agree with Saldaña’s addition of “What strikes you?”, suggested by Creswell (Saldaña, 2009, p.18).  I suspect it is that question that helps save all my existing work from having been useless, even if I did forget the purpose behind the study at times.

One thing I know I have not done is be rigorous about the codebook or code list.  MacQueen (quoted in Saldaña 2009, p. 21) recommends that a codebook entry should contain “the code, a brief definition, a full definition, guidelines for when to use the code, guidelines for when not to use the code, and examples.”  As I have created codes, I usually have not done any of that, although the odd one here or there has a brief description.  I have a plan to go back and “clean up” the codes.  For example, some codes need to be merged, like “exploration” and “exploring”.  Perhaps I can review how the codes have been used and write up descriptions for them at that point as well.

At the moment, I feel very much like the person looking through a rain-streaked window: everything is distorted and unclear. If I persevere, the hope is eventually the rain will stop and the streaks will fade away.

References:

Saldaña, J. (2009) The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers, London, United Kingdom, Sage Publications Ltd.

Doing Qualitative Research: The Book

I was reading Chapter 3 of David Silverberg’s Doing Qualitative Research: A Practical Handbook (Silverman, 2010 p.17-42) in September.  In it he gives three research diaries of Ph.D. students he had, detailing how they went from the start of their research projects, through methodology choice, and then through to data analysis.  While it was quite striking how coherent and “painless” the stories were, the more relevant realization I took away from it was the importance of having a framework around which to direct your research and to make sense of your data.  In two of the cases, the students used conversational analysis, a ethnomethodological approach.

Conversation analysis (commonly abbreviated as CA) is the study of talk in interaction (both verbal and non-verbal in situations of everyday life). CA generally attempts to describe the orderliness, structure and sequential patterns of interaction, whether institutional (in school, a doctor’s surgery, court or elsewhere) or in casual conversation.
Wikipedia (2010a)

In my case, conversational analysis wouldn’t be appropriate, because it requires audio or video data of conversations and then a detailed transcription is made.  The inductive data-driven analysis part to explain discovered patterns is a process I want to emulate, so I need a similar approach.  That reminded me that some of James Paul Gee’s work used discourse analysis (or what I think is discourse analysis) and that might be an appropriate framework for me to use to structure my own research.

Unfortunately, I think standard discourse analysis isn’t quite correct.  According to Wikipedia (2010b):

Discourse analysis (DA), or discourse studies, is a general term for a number of approaches to analyzing written, spoken, signed language use or any significant semiotic event.

The objects of discourse analysis—discourse, writing, talk, conversation, communicative event, etc.—are variously defined in terms of coherent sequences of sentences, propositions, speech acts or turns-at-talk. Contrary to much of traditional linguistics, discourse analysts not only study language use ‘beyond the sentence boundary’, but also prefer to analyze ‘naturally occurring’ language use, and not invented examples. This is known as corpus linguistics; text linguistics is related.

James Paul Gee’s use of discourse in social linguistics differentiates between “Discourse” (big Discourse) and “discourse” (little discourse).  Discourse (big) is a combination of the language and its contextual environment, such as behaviour, values, perspectives, etc., so it’s a form of situated language analysis.  He also looks at Discourse communities as part of that context.  A seminal work in discourse analysis is Gee’s An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method (1999).  I wonder if I should acquire this?  I note a second edition was released in 2005.  I’ve put in a request to the OU library to have their copy recalled and mailed to me.

References

Silverman, D. (2010) Doing Qualitative Research: A Practical Handbook, 3rd edition, London, United Kingdom, Sage Publications Ltd.

Wikipedia. (2010a) Conversation Analysis, [online] web page, Wikipedia. Available from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversation_analysis (Accessed September 15, 2010).

Wikipedia. (2010b) Discourse Analysis, [online] web page, Wikipedia. Available from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse (Accessed September 15, 2010).

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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.

Hermeneutics (English pronunciation: /hɜrməˈnjuːtɨks/) is the study of interpretation theory, and can be either the art of interpretation, or the theory and practice of interpretation. Traditional hermeneutics — which includes Biblical hermeneutics — refers to the study of the interpretation of written texts, especially texts in the areas of literature, religion and law. Contemporary, or modern, hermeneutics encompasses not only issues involving the written text, but everything in the interpretative process. This includes verbal and nonverbal forms of communication as well as prior aspects that affect communication, such as presuppositions, preunderstandings, the meaning and philosophy of language, and semiotics.[1] Philosophical hermeneutics refers primarily to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s theory of knowledge as developed in Truth and Method, and sometimes to Paul Ricoeur.[2] Hermeneutic consistency refers to analysis of texts for coherent explanation. A hermeneutic (singular) refers to one particular method or strand of interpretation.
Wikipedia (2010)

It’s apparently related to computational semiotics or used in computational semiotics.  That reminds me of James Paul Gee again because he talks about the semiotics of things in his What Video Games Have To Teach Us about Learning and Literacy (2007).  Is it another sign that I need to be looking at Gee’s book on discourse analysis (Gee 2011)?

References

Gee, J.P. (2007) What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, 2nd edition, New York, NY, United States, Palgrave Macmillan.

Gee, J.P. (2011) An Introduction to Discourse Analysis Theory and Method, 3rd edition, Abingdon, United Kingdom, Routledge.

Silverman, D. (2010) Doing Qualitative Research: A Practical Handbook, 3rd edition, London, United Kingdom, Sage Publications Ltd.

Wikipedia. (2010) Hermeneutics, [online] web page, Wikipedia. Available from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermeneutics (Accessed September 21, 2010).

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.

My friend Howard Rheingold was asking on Twitter recently about how people use DEVONThink, a personal information manager for the Macintosh.  While Howard’s relatively new to DEVONthink, I’ve been using DEVONthink Pro since 2005.

NotePad Deluxe

My research journal started life as a hardcover notebook in 1997, written by hand.  I migrated all the notes in 2002 to  Ibrium’s NotePad Deluxe, a Macintosh notepad program.  NotePad Deluxe allowed you to create hierarchies of notes using topics, which looked like folders.  Some standard Macintosh file/folder-like options were also available, like labelling, so notes in the list could be coloured.  In addition, you could embed all kinds of objects in a note, like images or sounds.  I often used this capability to,  for example, embed LaTeX mathematical formulae typeset in specialist applications.  It also supported RTF export and import.  As a result, standard text formatting was also available.

Image: My research journal in NotePad Deluxe.  On the right, you can see the hierarchies of topics and notes.  The icons at the top right let you switch between the topics hierarchy, the saved search section, a help manual, a global clipboard, and the trash.  At the bottom, there’s a quick find search form.  The arrows to the left of the form allow you to go backwards/forwards amongst occurrences of your search term in the current note.

Basic writing and organizing content worked well initially.  As my research continued, I more frequently needed to find something I’d written before.  With NotePad Deluxe’s find function, you could match words or parts of words or even case, and you could restrict it to a particular note or topic, if desired. It was easy to tab through the occurrences in a particular note and then automatically advance to the next note containing the search term.  It also had a batch search that saved search results and showed the results as a list of notes.

It wasn’t enough.  The files/folders method of organization wasn’t flexible enough to permit you to organize the material in different ways.  For example, continuing on from the chronological format mandated by a written notebook, I primarily organized my notes into topics representing the year and month.  The topic named “0009″ contained all the notes for September 2000.  Within the the topic, individual notes were named with a number representing the day of the month and then a title.  A note entitled “11: Calc. Similarity of 2 Docs” was written on the 11th of the month.  At the top of each entry, I included some keywords that could be used for later searches.  If I wanted the notes organized by keywords, I could fake it by manually creating “batch searches” for each keyword. The searches were saved between sessions, but they weren’t automatically updated.  So if I added a new note using an existing keyword, the saved search results wouldn’t reflect that.  I’d need to create the search over again.

I also wanted to be able to insert a link to previous work appearing in the notes database.  NotePad Deluxe allowed you to insert hyperlinks to websites but there was no mechanism to point to another note from within a note.  The closest you could get was making an alias to the note in your hierarchy, similar to file aliases in the operating system.  The linked note would appear italicized in the topic list  and was really just a pointer to the actual note.  This was the mechanism they used for their “batch search” saved searches, in fact.

While NotePad Deluxe may have been adequate initially for me and acceptable for the journalist Mikael Blomkvist in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy, it wasn’t sufficient for my burgeoning journal of notes, snippets, and diagrams.  I wanted more flexibility in viewing/organizing my notes and a way of creating relationships between my notes.  Something a little more modern looking would have been nice too.  The interface was functional but not very aesthetically pleasing, although you could provide your own texture.  Something better was needed.

In the next posting, I’ll look at Eastgate System’s Tinderbox, a tool for notes, and my next attempt at creating an electronic research journal.

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WoW Learning Project Questions PDF image

The V.C. was doing a surprise (to us) departmental visit last month. We had a bit of notice and it was decided that everyone doing projects in our research group should produce a one-page summary of their work. This could then be presented to the V.C. I whipped up the following. As I haven’t completed the analysis for my recent survey into motivations in World of Warcraft, I couldn’t include any of that, so I focussed on the underlying ideas in the project.

Downloadable Resources:

• WoW Learning Research Project A4 poster (230 KB PDF)

The One and Friends at the start of Razorgore encounter in Blackwing Lair in March of 2010

I’m now in week two of my first survey into learning, communities of practice, and World of Warcraft in support of my doctorate. The first part of the survey is collecting some in-game demographic details, such as how long people have played, what their first character was, favourite professions, etc. The meat of the survey, however, is a short answer question about why people play World of Warcraft.

I am still looking for additional responses and the survey is scheduled to close at the end of this weekend (April 18th). If you play World of Warcraft or know other players, I would be grateful if you could encourage them to visit the survey information page and participate. On completion, participants will be given a code to enter a draw for three Blizzard store pets as prizes.

Tweet, ask in guild, ask at university, or poke your workmates to pass the word along. Just remember that it’s only open to those 18 years or older as I’m interested in examining adults and learning and there are restrictions on participation in things by those younger than 18.

Thanks!

• Survey 1: Why Do You Play World of Warcraft