UberNoggin

Several people have asked to see the chapter from my dissertation that I referred to last week at ReLIVE 08 so I thought I’d post the draft HERE. Please note, though, that this is NOT a finished chapter. It’s still a working draft and has errors here and there, a few incomplete citations, missing charts, and some other work to be done. The full draft should be ready this spring.

I’m happy to share it but don’t think it’s all finished

WOW! ReLIVE last week was an awesome time. So many incredible, smart, innovative people in one place. I was blown away. Not only was I impressed with everyone I was lucky enough to meet, the conference organizers did an amazing job putting it all together. I have pages and pages of notes so I’m going to try to cook them down into some bullet points and provide links to handy things in hopes of providing some goodies for those of you who coulnd’t attend. Pardon my bullets but it seems the easiest way…

Me, Mark (Roo) and Ted laughing at Relive

• Open University: I didn’t know much about the school before I was invited to help with the conference but the more I learn the more impressed I am. They have a quarter of a million students, spead out across the globe, learning at a distance. If anyone has a need to innovate it’s these folks and they seem to be getting it right. The campus in Milton Keynes is full of bright folks who think about distance ed all the time and are coming up with great ways to make it work better.
• Citing my work: For the first time ever my work was cited in a presentation that I actually got to attend Margaret Derrington gave a talk about teaching ESL in SL and cited my faceted classification to compare the features of Skype to SL. It was really great to know that my work is useful to someone.
• Brilliant Brits!: Some of my favorite people live in the UK so I don’t get to see them very often. Not only did I get to see them last week, I made some new friends and had a few FaceMeat (meeting someone face to face who you know online) experiences.
  • Paul Hollins: JISC CETIS This guy is my subversive role model. We did a talk together and completely scrapped our slides opting instead to just sit with the audience and have a conversation centered around a few points regarding educational affordances of virtual worlds. It was great!
  • Bill Thompson: Freelance writer and technology critic. I met Bill this summer in Brazil of all places and coulnd’t wait to see him again. He’s brilliant, succinct, and downright lovely to be around. If you’re interested in technology be sure to read his stuff.

• • Anna Peachey: Open University. Anna and her crew organized the conference. It was flawless and full of great sessions and tons of tea breaks. Plus she wore wings to introduce the keynote on the first day!

• • Annabeth Robinson: AKA Angrybeth. Her work in SL (The Port and otherplaces) is brilliant and I’m so happy I got to FaceMeat her!
  • Roo Reynolds: BBC social media smarty-pants. Roo is the face of BBC interactive stuff and not only is he cool, he’s innovative and smart. His closing keynote was great (and not just because he mentioned me lots LOL)
  • Tons of other people!!!!!! You know who you are, you incredibly awesome folks!!!
• Social Media at a conference: Barry Joseph from Global Kids talked at SLCC about the three audiences we face in today’s conferences: Here (the people in the current shared physical space), There, (the people in the shared synchronous media space) and Then (the people who will watch, read, and discuss the event at a later time through blogs, videos, tweets and other forms).  ReLIVE did a great job of making sure that all three audiences were addressed. The Twitters alone were well worth following.
• Capturing the experience: Roo attended as many sessions as he could, took notes and photographs and then gave a plenary that summarized the whole two days brilliantly. Looking back, it’s a tough thing to do to sum up an event and try to present it with its full richness and context. I’m still thinking about how to combine the tweets, videos, photos, slideshows etc into one form that I can share.

Meanwhile, lots of stuff is out there about the conference. If you know of a link I didn’t include please leave it in the comments.

- Photos on Flickr

- Videos: Day 1 Day 2

- Tweets

- Blogs: here, here, here

I love Twitter almost as much as I love coffee…and that’s A LOT! But I dislike that I can only go back in my own Twitter history a certain amount.  Well, no more thanks to Twistory! Now I can turn my Twitter history (or any public Twitter account for that matter) into an online diary on my google calendar.

With a couple of clicks I was able to convert my Twitter history into a calendar as you can see in the pic above. This would be super useful for organizations who use Twitter for announcements, students using Twitter to post project updates and many more great applications.

Go check it out!

Also…still in alpha but Tweeple Twak looks like it’s going to be interesting too!

You probably already know that I’m a full-blown Google junky (all praise our technology overlords) but their latest tool makes me especially happy. Voice and Video in gmail chat!

Skype has saved lots of folks lots of high phone bills but all it has ever done for me is suck down my memory and processor. It’s done this with every computer I’ve used it on and I’ve been looking for a suitable replacement for a while now. Now I have it!

Go! Sign up and embrace the goodness. Need to know how? Aliza Sherman over at Web Worker Daily has a great post about how to use it.

I’ve been playing MMORPGs for close to ten years. I’ve been studying them for nearly as long. But recently, I’ve run into something that has me flumoxed.

I can’t figure out just how people make friends in an MMORPG.

Now, I’ve had friends in MMORPGs before. I was the leader of a large guild in Star Wars Galaxies. I joined guilds in World of Warcraft. Part of what kept me coming back to these games over the years was that there were players in them I enjoyed spending time with. But something has changed.

For the last month and a half I’ve been playing Warhammer Online (which rocks, btw) and I have yet to make a single connection with another player. There are a mix of reasons for this:

• I’m a casual player, logging in for 60-90 min at a time and not on a regular schedule
• I tend to want to complete things on my own time, not wanting to wait for other people to figure things out or taking the bother to coordinate with other players
• Warhammer’s scenarios (similar to raids in WoW) and public quests are constructed for casual gamers by assigning you to a group or allowing you to join in when other players are working on a task

All that in mind, I understand why I might not have made any connections just yet but in recent days I’ve decided to try to conduct a small experiment of sorts. I set out with the explicit purpose of making friends. Just to see if I could do it.

I tried to chat with a group in a scenario but folks are too busy trying to stay alive to chat. I spoke up a bit in a public quest, made a few jokes. People joined in but then disapeared as soon as the quest was finished.

I don’t think I’m the only one having this issue with Warhammer. There are loads of guilds but they all seem a bit…well, desperate. I’ve been invited to join countless guilds but no one has ever tried to actually talk to me. Instead, while in town, I just get these random invites to join without any conversation or screening. My guess is that guilds may be the only way to get acquanted with a group of people but it’s sort of like going to a party where you don’t know anyone and hoping for the best. The worst that can happen is that you leave the guild and look for another to join. But what does it say about the game itself that this is only option for making social connections with other players?

This is absolutely brilliant! Maybe CNN should be presenting the Azaroth exit polls. Could this be a more accurate sampling of voter sentiment than “likely voter” LAN-line phone calls?