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Credit: Photo by Michelle A. Hoyle under an Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license

Last month, amidst the busyness and stresses of my life, an important event passed by without fanfare or notice: I published my first open access article in the Journal of Interactive Media in Education, a recently relaunched journal co-edited by Martin Weller.

It’s “only” a book review of Kurt Squire’s Video Games and Learning: Teaching Participatory Culture in the Digital Age, but it has a few firsts of its own. It’s the first thing I’ve “formally” published on video games, learning, and community. It’s also the first item published in a traditional academic forum since book reviews and conference papers in 1997/1998. That is a big dry spell, I agree! I’m working on making 2012 the year I turn things around. From small beginnings can come big things, so here’s to more firsts!

Hoyle, M.A. (2012). ‘Book Review: From N00B to Community Organizer: A Review of Kurt Squire’s ‘Video Games and Learning: Teaching and Participatory in the Digital Age’’. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, JIME Special Issue on Open Educational Resources [online]. Available from: http://jime.open.ac.uk/jime/article/view/2012-06 [Accessed April 15, 2012].

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I was talking about my recent posters the other day with Teetee/Pi. He was asking me questions about how to interpret Figure 3 which shows the clustered output that results after feeding similarity data into the multidimensional scaling algorithm. I didn’t have a copy of the page handy, so I pulled up the PDF version and happened to notice that the one-page version of my poster, destined for an ordinary sheet of paper, no longer had my name or my e-mail contact address on it. The only thing on it was a pointer to the three-page version of the poster on this web site.
Oops! Oops! Oops!
I was short on time when it was decided that a handout-sized version of information was needed, so I’d had my Sweetie build me the single page and the three-page versions based on the finished poster design. He got a little overzealous about saving space and, well, managed to axe the contact and affiliation information. It was missing off of the three-page version, too.
Alas, I didn’t discover this until after the Open Day, so the damage has probably already been done. Nevertheless, I’ve prepared new versions of both documents with this information intact and added page numbers, where appropriate, to boot.
Live and learn! Don’t be so concerned with the content that you fail to see the forest through the individual trees!
Downloadable Resources:
- A4 (regular page) handout sheet
- 3-page PDF version

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Today was the Open Day for the Human-Centred Technology group at the University of Sussex. IDEAs , my research lab, is part of the overall HCT group and a major participatant in the organization and presentation of the Open Day event, the first of which was held last year. I was unable to attend or to help out much with the organization as the event fell outside my scheduled university days. It was decided that we needed copious quantities of posters and every Ph.D. student was expected to make a poster about their project. Apparently this was timely as second- and third-year students were also expected to produce a poster for the department.
I spent oodles of time in April designing the look of the poster and then populating it with text. The finished version of the poster looked pretty good in its A1 size (~90cm by 60cm). Designing the poster in the absence of any input and with lots of nice-looking graphics to possibly incorporate led to a poster that was quite dense and text-heavy, although it had a fair bit of white space, too. A week before the event, the Lab decided that we should also have colour handouts to go along with every poster. Just shrinking down my poster from its large A1 size to A4 (regular paper size) resulted in a page that was legible (but not for readers with poor vision) with tiny graphics. The EinSweetie, who had more time, took the original poster and produced a handout version with not quite so much of the text and graphics on it. As a lot of the crucial detail had been cut, we also decided to make a short multi-page PDF version of the original poster text which could be downloaded. The URL was included on the handout sheet.
Doing the poster was very interesting, especially after my longish absence from working on my Ph.D., as it helped remind me of some of the major issues arising out of my research. A look at the big picture is often very helpful in clarifying your position and your journey. My examination or generation of the big picture led to me to realize that I was developing the fingerprints and the methodology for producing them, but then I wasn’t using the notion of the fingerprint itself anywhere after that point — something I’d completely overlooked, being caught up in the minutia of analysis for ages. I was so struck by this and other revelations that I had them make up a second laminated full-page version of my poster to hang in my office to remind me of the big picture. Life is so much improved when you can see where you’re going.
Downloadable Resources:
- A4 (regular page) handout sheet
- 3-page PDF version

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