Planning the next Sprint

With the newest version of the manuscript out of the way it is time once more to move the focus a little bit.

With the manuscript getting close to being complete, at least relatively speaking, it is time to think about life beyond it.

One thing I definitely plan on concentrating in is disseminating the results of my ph.d. work. I mean not only academically but also making them available to the game-based learning practitioners.

In this (re-)starting Sprint I’ll focus on the ACE 2009 Conference and my presentation there. I’ll also start the blog where I will publish all the results of my study in a practice-oriented way.

I think that is the best option to go; the blog will offer the results of my work in a popularized form whereas the academic version will the Ph.D. thesis and related articles themselves.

Staying Up-To-Date with TweetDeck

TweetDeck has this amazing feature of following the tweets related to your search key words. I’ve used it for a week to track news related to game-based learning and it’s working like a charm!

Most tweets in Twitter contain nothing useful to the average user. In fact the typical user seems to tweet highly useful and really interesting stuff once in a while. The problem is that by following someone you get also the not-so-interesting stuff.

Using the searches provides another channel of potentially interesting tweets. And it’s not restricted to the peeps you follow, either. There’s some tweaking needed, however: The keywords Game-based learning produced a search feed that has a very high signal-to-noise ratio but when I tried the same with the keywords game design, the ratio was so low that the search feed was practically useless.

So you need to narrow your search by additional keywords to achieve the desired signal-to-noise ratio and the desired tweet frequency.  It’s worth a try!

Motivation Boost + 1

My paper has just been accepted to the ACE 2009 conference in the full paper category. The conference is in Athens on October 29th to 31st. This is  bit of a surprise as I hadn’t noted the acceptance notification deadline at all. It’s nice to have my research work be still considered relevant although I don’t work as a full-time academic at the moment.

Eclipse Process Framework Composer Rocks (well, kind of)

When I was looking for a tool to do the process modeling work with I ended up with Eclipse Process Framework Composer (EPFC). While the UI seemed a bit unintuitive, I was positive it would suffice. After all, the OpenUp people among others had used it to describe their software processes.

After that I’ve alternated between cursing and praising EPFC. The UI is still the biggest hurdle, but when you figure out what to do and what not to, it gets a little bit easier. (I mean, how much better would it be with consistent keyboard shortcuts?)

But it has also dawned to me that with EPFC I can make the fruits of my labor accessible to future users and utilizers more easily than just in the form of a written Ph.D. dissertation. You see, all the tasks, activities, roles and work products that processes are described with in EPFC can have descriptions and guidance, so I can practically include the results of my research in the process models themselves.

In addition to that, there’s a publish feature in EPFC that allows me to publish whole process descriptions (with relationships, descriptions and guidance) into a website. You can see an example of what the published web version of a process library looks like in the EPF Practices Wiki. My goal is to publish the process modeling results related to my research both as a navigatable website and a EPFC method library for everyone to use. Open sourced of course.

Loading… (a New Online Journal)

From Gameology: Academic Gamers:

Loading… is a new Canadian journal of digital game studies. The journal’s objective is “to publish Canadian scholarship, research and art in the interdisciplinary field of digital games studies. Canadian perspectives and voices, especially cross- and inter-disciplinary studies are encouraged as is more technically focused work.”

The first issue is out, with several potentially interesting articles.

Orientation on Game Research

Lenny from the Acagamic has compiled a list of journal, events in 2007 and a small list of useful papers for those interested in Game research (already in November). As always there’s something that has escaped my attention. This time it’s the Game in’ Action conference in Göteborg, Sweden. The CfP seems to be on-going so that might be a good target for my second paper of the year.

Has anyone come up with additions to this list or similar well-updated lists?

2 New Game Research PhDs

From The Ludologist: Two new doctors of game research from ITU Copenhagen, two new PhD dissertations to read on your holidays Jonas Heide Smith‘s Plans and Purposes: How Videogame Goals Shape Player Behaviour and Miguel Sicart‘s Computer Games, Players, Ethics. Some heavy books, those.