Starting AoIR with a Bang: Ignite Talks

And I've arrived at the 2012 Association of Internet Researchers conference – my annual pilgrimage to catch up with the family. We start with a quick burst of Ignite talks, which itself begins with John Carter McKnight. He notes the two fundamental axioms of video games studies: games teach, and games don't teach. The Red Cross has posed the question: Is there a way for first-person shooter games to include a more accuracy representation of international humanitarian law? Such laws are not especially firm, of course - much different from the rules in video games, which are more like gravity - they cannot easily be circumvented. Rules in games emerge from the interplay of designers, users, the community, and objects; rules in military engagements are a mixture of firm laws and interpretable, social rules. The way the Red Cross approached its challenge is to ignore the uses of games, though: it focussed only on the firm rules, not on the social learning of rules. Soldiers make split-second decisions based on their training; how might games be used to inculcate humanitarian training into soldiers, then?

Alex Halavais follows on by discussing the questions which keep popping up on the AoIR list – about how to do research, where to find relevant publications. Part of the problem is also the slow speed of academic publication, of course. Can we use the Net more effectively to facilitate this? Some of us blog, some of us share course syllabi, or perhaps we could set up a shared AoIR GitHub or some other shared editable space? Additionally, videos, exercises, software tutorials, and other materials could also be shared. Perhaps we could organise a pre-conference session for the rapid sharing of methods, too? How far could we take this, in fact – could we better record what we're doing, could our peers provide better feedback on our research, could we have a badge system for research experience, what?

Finally, Jeremy Knotts discusses Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) – the latest craze in university education, so to speak. Leading higher education institutions are madly rushing into this area, but what is the space of open education? Technology is often neutralised, and physical space dissolved in the process – but something happens in the physical world we engage with, and we must consider the spaces and objects of online study. Jeremy's focus is on Coursera, where he is a participant observer: he records his journeys between physical study spaces, allowing the locations to contribute to the process of studying; he has RFIDed his books to enable them to automatically tweet random sentences as he places them on his bookstand; he has worked with his university library to enable rarely checked-out books to tweet their contents, too. A new bookmark is being placed in library books, too, which encourages library users to document their uses of these books. Such experiments trouble uncritical assumptions about MOOCs, enabling them to be viewed as assemblages of humans, technologies, and spaces in which learning is not human, but post-human.