E1n1verse

Credit: Michelle A. Hoyle Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 License

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.

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I was reading through Chapter 4 of Silverman’s (2010) Doing Qualitative Research.  This chapter looks at the methodological approaches that different students take.  This is, of course, an important part of having a framework from which to hang your analysis.  There are so many choices.  He starts off with some descriptions of students describing their work as discourse analysis, narrative, analysis, and hermeneutics.  At first I thought this was related to something I’d looked up earlier in the month, heutagogy, but it’s just that they both start with “he”.  Wikipedia defines hermeneutics like this:

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).

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I signed up today for the new George Siemens and Stephen Downes connectivism course Personal Learning Environments Networks and Knowledge 2010 (PLENK2010).  This is a follow-on from last year’s massive online open course CCK09.  I didn’t have much time last year for CCK09, but I did attend a few Elluminate sessions.  In fact, that’s where I originated the concept of “Big OER” and “little OER” based on Martin Weller’s Pedagogy of Abundance presentation I attended as part of that course.  I thought it would be interesting to lurk around the edges of the new course. The course’s description is:

In the last five years, the twin concepts of the personal learning environment (PLE) and personal learning network (PLN) have been offered as alternatives to more traditional environments such as the learning management system (LMS) and institutionally-based courses.

During that time, a substantial body of research has been produced by thinkers, technologists and practitioners in the field. Dozens of studies, reviews, conference presentations, concept papers and diagrams are now available.

The purpose of this course will be to clarify and substantiate, from the context of this new research, the concepts of personal learning environments and networks. Course facilitators and participants will analyze the research literature and evaluate it against their own experience with the intent of developing a comprehensive understanding of personal learning environments and networks.
Downes, Siemens, and Cormier (2010)

The course just kicked off this week and the first topic involves social networks, personal learning networks, and personal learning environments.  While I was reading through some of the postings on PLEs versus PLNs, it suddenly occurred to me that a massively online open course, especially one with this kind of structure, is not too dissimilar to the learning that occurs in MMORPGs.  In fact, I’d argue that good game players need to construct their own personal learning networks in order to understand the game and improve their playing. They’re both about social construction of knowledge.

I think a great idea for a paper is contrasting the formal and informal learning networks people build in an MOOC like PLENK2010 and in  MMORPGs.  It could even be fleshed out with some interviews with 4 or 5 players about how/what they use during the course of game playing.  I envision it should be possible to construct some GPLN (game player learning network) diagrams similar to the PLN diagrams that Scott Leslie collected.  Here, for example, is Martin Weller’s PLN:

I could make a similar diagram for myself, but with a specific game-playing focus.  I’m sure I could easily entice some other, more hard-core players, to make similar diagrams, if not as actual graphics at least as a list.  I really think there is something here.  The key point though is, even if there is, what does it mean if there is a similarity?  That I don’t know.  Any ideas?

Downes, S., Siemens, G. & Cormier, D. (2010) Personal Learning Environments Networks and Knowledge ~ PLENK 2010, [online] web site. Available from: http://connect.downes.ca/

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Doing Qualitative Research: The Book

Chapter 2 of David Silverman’s Doing Qualitative Research:  A Practical Handbook (2010, p.16) asks students to consider why they believe a qualitative approach is appropriate for their possible research topics.  In fact, I had not initially considered a qualitative approach at all.  With my background in artificial intelligence, software engineering, and information retrieval, I was tending towards quantitative methodologies.  Information retrieval is very much about calculations and measurement, so that was a natural fit. Wikipedia (2010) describes the qualitative method as one that “investigates the why and how of decision making, not just what, where, when.”

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Image: Elsheindra and the 24 other members of Team EverREDy successfully heal Valithria Dreamwalker in Icecrown Citadel. Here, the challenge isn’t to slay the dragon, but to heal her. While whether she lives or dies isn’t a matter of perspective, how you react to finding someone else has done your thesis work can be a challenge to rise to or a disaster. It’s all in how you look at it.

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.

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While watching the ALT-C 2010 Twitter stream, I saw a posting from the iVERG group inviting people interested in gaming and virtual worlds to check them out.   I visited their home page to discover it’s a consortium of academics investigating virtual worlds for use in learning and teaching:

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.

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Back in April, I posted my first preliminary study to look at motivation, community formation, and learning in World of Warcraft.  When I was crafting my ethics approval for that study and future studies, I was very concerned with maintaining the privacy of the individuals participating.  The first survey was designed specifically to not require any personally identifiable information, although participants did have the option of giving an e-mail address if they wanted to participate in future studies or if they did not mind being contacted for any follow-up questions.

A problem arises, however, in following participants across multiple studies.  This is somewhat related to longitudinal studies where repeated observations are collected over long periods of time from the same participants.  The purpose of such studies is to help distinguish actual effects from short-term causes.  However, longitudinal studies aren’t the only time researchers may want to track participants across time and across multiple studies.  That would also be useful to help me build a more complex, detailed picture of participants, even though I intend to be asking different questions in different surveys.

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Photo by Abizem / CC BY-NC

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.

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