I used to think that I was quite good at being social, and that I only dropped all my balls when I was trying to juggle too many different colored balls. But now I am not so sure. Maybe I was only good at being social when I had nothing to say? Now that I reading so much, learning new things, making new connections, I feel I don’t have the time to sit and share them. I want to blog. I want to vlog and twitter should be easy, right? I mean 140 characters. Easy!?! Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that those who speak loudest have nothing to say. There are many loud speakers who have lots of lovely insights to share. What I am saying is that I have found when I speak loudest, I am saying the least. What I want to incorporate now in my online social life is to speak loudly (or at least a little louder), while still saying something. How does one begin? I am not sure, but one thought has struck me while listening to my partner practice a talk, or while reading a good friend’s thesis draft. You have to tell a story. And you have to have a moral/point to the story. Whether it is an academic text, a lecture, or a blog post – you have to tell a story. I am going back to the original idea of this blog’s title. I am a sum of my parts – the budding academic, the mother, the friend, the partner – and each of those parts has a multitude of little stories hidden within my own fuzzy boundaries. Right now I need to read/edit more of this text – but tonight I am going to tell you a story of the first time I felt like I had something to say. I may have been blogging for 5 years here, and I may have been teaching for longer than that… but this weekend I felt like what I had to say was important and added to my field for the first time. It left me feeling strong and buoyant :-)

The theme of my life at the moment seems to be ‘habits’ – breaking bad ones and establishing good ones. To that end, I have spent quite some time thinking about what to do with all my various social media sites. I have had this site a long time. Do I want to keep it? I thought about retiring it several times, but I think I would miss it. But I am also not happy with the way I have neglected it. Should I use it as a research log for my new research projects and to document my change of department? OR should I make it completely personal (but that is as boring/mundane as a purely research site)? Maybe I should buy my name URL and set up a single presence there and point to all the other little bits…. And all those little bits. I am pretty tired of facebook. I have met with my old high school friends. If they want to talk more, we can meet over email/IM. I still like twitter, but it has also proved to be a great academic resource. Amazing how much you can find within 140 characters. YouTube has been fun and I want to vlog more. I have not really flickr’d as much, but that has been replaced by vlogging, I think.

Obviously I am not ready to make a decision yet. Before I do anything too drastic (like shutting a 5 year old site down), I want to give it more time/thought. I feel a lot of affection for this site. Maybe I need to make a conscious effort to blog here regularly until it becomes habit again – as long as it does not sound contrived. I have my thesis to blog, so it is not like there is *nothing* to talk about ;-).What are your thoughts?

Hursomhelst, there will not be thesis blogging here this week because I am finishing the write-up for the IR10 article called, Negotiating blended spaces: How Swedish youth are using video sharing sites as a performative arena. Maybe I should Google Docs it this week. Jill did that with some of her work and I really like the idea. I will definitely do it with my thesis introduction.

Today I sat in a cafe and re-read Jill’s chapter in her book Blogging on community and network. I liked her comment on how the affordances of the blogging platform lend themselves to slow and fast conversation. When I first started my thesis, I was all ready to discuss blogs as a way of mediating conversation. Somewhere in these past 5 years, however, what became even more interesting to me – and what I kept coming back to whether I meant to or not – was how community practices influenced the fast and slow conversations. But I digress. Jill wrote about how the new is valued in blogging because the front page always shows the newest information – even if it is not the best post or the most representative. She calls this point of enrty fast conversation. Slow conversation, on the other hand, is what happens when feedback is garnered from topics that people may have found through google searches which would point a new reader to the archives rather than the main page. I would like to add a bit to the end of the fast and slow conversation comparison. Rather than defining the conversation as to the potential speed, I would like to add ‘entry point’ to the end of the term – as in there is an entry point for potentially fast conversation, etc. And while I really like the idea and see where the fast, slow dichotomy is coming from, I add ‘entry point’ because once the conversation has been initiated it has the potential to become quite fast and may attract other participants.

What was also not included in this dichotomy was the influence of RSS. Or rather that RSS can exist somewhere between the fast and slow entrance points of conversation. It seems that both RSS reading patterns and  even the reader used can change the entry point.  Some readers (i.e., the tool) can search and create a stream for keywords in addition to main RSS feeds. There are also readers that allow blogging straight from the tool, but which make both tagging and linking more difficult, thus resulting in a lower awareness of trackbacks/feedback. My point here is not to attack what I think is a fairly sound description of fast and slow conversation (entry points), rather to point out that RSS may be an in-between point. Maybe I have just missed it, but I feel that there is very little research on the way that RSS has influenced interaction between bloggers. Which leads my wandering mind to the rate of blogging in the midst of this twitter/facebook craze. Many of the people in my own blogging CofP’s blog has become strangely quite, while their twitter feed and facebook pages overflow with info. Does this mean that blogging is becoming more like publishing and less like a conversation? Or should conversational affordances of blogging now include a qualifier for quality and rate of response? I will have to give this more thought.

In the meantime, go and read Jill’s book. There is a lot of good stuff in there!

My daughters unfinished game she made during the course. None of the kids finished their game – but that was not really the point (thus the title of the class).

This week Gabriel and I have been co-teaching a course called Learning to learn Scratch. The class is made up of 20 kids from a local 3rd grade. The kids use a puzzle piece method to create small games in two class sessions, and on Monday they will present their work in the new part of the lab on 10 big screens in front of their family, friends and the local media.

The kids have worked great together and despite the gorgeous weather, we have had trouble getting them outside to take breaks and play tag in the sun.

Gabriel and I have had high hopes for this class. Our pedagogical goal has been to model ways of solving problems that integrate analog, digital, and cognitive skill sets. Gabriel has taught similar courses many times, but this has been my first time so I thought I would take a few minutes to sit down and reflect a bit on the experience.

The first day the kids and I went through a three hour tutorial where we made a princess and firefly game. It was both complex and simple and I thought, ‘Wow! How are the kids EVER going to remember this!!’. I voiced this to Gabriel, but he smiled and assured me that the kids retain more than they even think they did. And after watching them begin on their own games yesterday, I see that he was right. Fairly complex scripts that have some characters wait while others complete a task, backgrounds that switch or that whip characters through portals are just a few of the things the kids were able to do after very little prompting. I am so impressed at their abilities after just ONE tutorial.

The media has also been quite interested in our little class. We have had the visits from both the local newspapers, a tv crew and a radio guy. And I was a bit surprised on the questions they chose to focus on. You could almost say that they were very ‘media panic’ focused (should talk with Simon about this at some point). In the class you see here, only two girls were signed up. They made a hamster game while one group of boys made a war game. The two other boy groups both made fairly neutral games that involved chases and fantasy beings. Rather than looking at all the games, the hamster and war game were set against each other in a discourse that was both somewhat gendered and with a focus on ‘computer games=violence’. I think it is an unfair association towards the hard work these kids have put into their games. On the whole, the games were very neutral and fun. Yes, there was one slightly violent game, but the actual game turned out to be fairly tame and also provides an opportunity to discuss issues with your student/child about the themes he or she uses in their game.

You can check out the media coverage in the following links. They should be active for a month from today.

Radio
VF
VK (only in paper format. Will scan and link soon)
Local TV news

All in all, the class sees to have been a great success. The kids have been enthusiastic, and the games fun. The real measure of success, however, will be if one or two download the program and continue coding at home. If nothing else, I hope that we have shown them a different view of what they can achieve with a little excitement, a lot of curiosity, and a willingness to learn and try new things.

cross posted from the HUMlab blog

Have gone to Spain for the week!

Back soon for all the thesis push fun!