Panel Abstract for 2005 EGO Conference
EGO Conference, University of Florida, 27 - 29 October 2005.
Panel Overview
This panel discusses openly available and accessible digital media and the conversations and communities it creates. Each presentation focuses on a particular online communication form and its use and implications for scholarship and in building community knowledge.
Laurie Taylor
"Game Studies Connecting to the World at Large:
An Academic, and Activist use of the Blogosphere"
This presentation will cover the use of blogs in game studies, a new field that often operates as a subfield within English. Because of the relatively new nature of game studies and because of its interdisciplinary nature, game studies as a field began largely in relation to several online journals like Game Studies, JoDI, and NMEDIAC. In addition to these, game studies has also grown at an astonishing rate, with several available and forthcoming edited collections and manuscripts on game studies along with a new journal Games and Culture. While growing at such a quick pace, game studies has tried to bridge interdisciplinary boundaries and boundaries between academia and the rest of the world through the use of blogs.
Beginning with my own experience working on the collaborative blog AcademicGamers, I explain how AcademicGamers has connected multiple fields and allowed for theory that operates actively, connecting to members outside of game studies and outside of academia. This presentation will cover several academic game studies blogs to determine the elements that allow and situate these blogs as academic and professional discussion areas. It will then turn to methods of further using blogs and other Open Systems for the development of shared knowledge that connects academia internally, connecting multiple disciplines, and externally, with both industry and non-academics. Using the examples of game studies blogs like GrandTextAuto, Ludology, Ludonauts, PrintCulture, and AcademicGamers, I suggest possible models for other academic discussions using technology like blogs and Google discussion groups because of the manner in which these technologies open and connect academic discussions to members of the community at large, to graduate and undergraduate students, and to professors and other scholars.
Phil Sandifer
"What Do You Do With a Complete Idiot: Terminal
Stupidity and Wikipedia"
This presentation will deal with a practical downside of open knowledge projects based around the ideal that "anyone can contribute," namely the fact that "anyone" can and will include a substantial number of idiots. The question, then, is what one does with idiotic contributions, to say nothing of what one does with idiots in the social communities that inevitably surround such projects. How does one maintain quality of content while still allowing people who are detrimental to the quality of the content to contribute? Does one sacrifice quality? Openness? Does one have to sacrifice at all?
I will address the problem through the example of Wikipedia, a user- created encyclopedia that anybody can edit and write articles for with ease. Based on case studies and discussions with users of the project, I will offer a picture of how one open project deals with idiocy. From these case studies, I will offer several possible models of how one can establish a working relationship between the demands of knowledge and the demands of openness, and try to offer a new perspective on both open projects and on terminal stupidity.
Zach Whalen
"Scholarly Fandom: Configuring Expertise in
Online Fan Communities"
One of the most significant developments in the online world is the relatively recent explosion of online fan communities in the form of messageboard. With the ease of installing software platforms like phpBB and UBB, any dedicated fan site has at its core a well-developed forum community. The focus of these forums vary, but the format can be geared toward a collective problem-solving model, particularly in the case of Alternate Reality Games. One forum in particular, the messageboard dedicated to the novel House of Leaves, blends the fan model and problem solving model in a format that resembles an academic hierarchy where contributors value in relation to the community depends on the quality of their contributions, and quality posts often amount to particularly clever literary analyses of the novel or attention to detail in tracking down intertextual references. In other words, a good post resembles a good academic article, and it is my argument that understanding the dynamics of a self-regulating forum community contributes to understanding what it means to do scholarship in a public community. In this paper, I will discuss the House of Leaves forum in some detail, noting particular trends or events in its history, and draw parallels to the world of literary scholarship in an attempt to frame the social dynamics underlying academic communities.
Laurie's Presentation/Writing Notes
Abstract: "Game Studies Connecting to the World at Large: An Academic, and Activist use of the Blogosphere"
This presentation will cover the use of blogs in game studies, a new field that often operates as a subfield within English. Because of the relatively new nature of game studies and because of its interdisciplinary nature, game studies as a field began largely in relation to several online journals like Game Studies, JoDI, and NMEDIAC. In addition to these, game studies has also grown at an astonishing rate, with several available and forthcoming edited collections and manuscripts on game studies along with a new journal Games and Culture. While growing at such a quick pace, game studies has tried to bridge interdisciplinary boundaries and boundaries between academia and the rest of the world through the use of blogs.
Beginning with my own experience working on the collaborative blog AcademicGamers, I explain how AcademicGamers has connected multiple fields and allowed for theory that operates actively, connecting to members outside of game studies and outside of academia. This presentation will cover several academic game studies blogs to determine the elements that allow and situate these blogs as academic and professional discussion areas. It will then turn to methods of further using blogs and other Open Systems for the development of shared knowledge that connects academia internally, connecting multiple disciplines, and externally, with both industry and non-academics. Using the examples of game studies blogs like GrandTextAuto, Ludology, Ludonauts, PrintCulture, and AcademicGamers, I suggest possible models for other academic discussions using technology like blogs and Google discussion groups because of the manner in which these technologies open and connect academic discussions to members of the community at large, to graduate and undergraduate students, and to professors and other scholars.
Works Cited
Academic-Gamers
GrandTextAuto.org
Watercoolergames.org
Taylor, Laurie and Brendan Riley. "Open Source and Academia."
Computers and Composition Online (Spring 2004):
http://www.bgsu.edu/cconline/tayloriley/intro.html
from this, how
open source teaching and what we teach our students needs to be
replicated in our research in a way that can also connect with our
students and with nonacademics
Jenkins, Henry. "Blog This." Technology Review (March
2002): 91.
"We're at a lull between waves of commercialization in digital
media, and bloggers are seizing the momemt, potentially increasing
cultural diversity and lowering barriers to cultural participation."
Licona, Adela C. "(B)orderlands' Rhetorics and Representations:
The Transformative Potential of Feminist Third-Space Scholarship and Zines." NWSA Journal 17.2 (2005): 104-129.
discusses power of zines to build communities, produce knowledge, and to share information; same is applicable to blogs, but blogs use internet
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/blogosphere/cat_pedagogy.html
Crafton, Donald. "Collaborative Research, Doc?" Cinema Journal 44.1 (Fall 2004): 138-142.
on the collaborative benefits of digital media like blogs; and, if collaboration is really what academia wants--and it should be--academia needs to change some of its policies
Sauer, Igor M., Dominik Bialek, Ekaterina Efimova, Ruth Scwartlander, Gesine Pless, and Peter Neuhaus. "'Blogs' and 'Wikis' are Valuable Software Tools for Communication Within Research Groups." Artificial Organs 29.1 (January 2005): 82-83.
82 "Appropriate software tools may improve communication and ease access to knowledge for research groups. A weblog is a website which contains periodic, chronologically ordered posts on a common webpage, whereas a wiki is hypertext-based collaborative software that enables documents to be authored collectively using a web browser. Although not primarily intended for use as an intranet-based collaborative knowledge warehouse, both blogs and wikis have the potential to offer all the features of complex and expensive IT solutions. These tools enable the team members to share knowledge simply and quickly--the collective knowledge base of the group can be efficiently managed and navigated."
Godwin-Jones, Robert. "EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES: Blogs and Wikis: Environments for On-line Collaboration." Learning Language & Technology 7.2 (May 2003): 12-16.
Robert Godwin-Jones, in "EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES: Blogs and Wikis: Environments for On-line Collaboration," dicusses the possibilities for blogs in education because of their fundamental collaborative structure and the implied interaction and conversations that the blogging format encourages.
Notes
http://www.villagevoice.com/arts/0515,edsuppdayal,62903,12.html What if professors could lecture 24-7? Blog culture invades academia. What does anyone think about this article in regards to Academic Gamers and the whole gaming-blog phenomenon? A bunch of you are often quiet on the blog, and this would be an easy way to make your first (or second or third post). Post a link to the article on Academic Gamers with a blurb on your thoughts about the issue, maybe: -how blogs and academic blogging relates to teaching -making academic jargon more accessible, perhaps -how it relates to being quiet or verbose on the blog, why are some people quiet and why won't some people be quiet (me) -how it relates to game studies -how it relates to the internet as a wide area conversation space, -how it relates to academic publishing -how it relates to studies of the novel (epistolary tradition and letters) -how it relates to community writing -what do you think posting on the blog will do for your job/career? Nothing? Get contacts? Disseminate your scholarship? -with the most recent MLA conference discussing that English has come to be seen as inaccessible, how does or could blogging help alleviate that? -does blogging allow our scholarship to better/further connect with people not in the ivory tower? Is or could blogging be radical in this sense? -If we blog, should we have our students blog? Why or why not? Someone post on this and get involved! Laurie ------- Forwarded Message http://www.villagevoice.com/arts/0515,edsuppdayal,62903,12.html What if professors could lecture 24-7? Blog culture invades academia. by Geeta Dayal April 12th, 2005 4:38 PM Imagine if the great thinkers of the past could have blogged, bouncing ideas off each other in real time, engaging in rapid-fire debates across borders. Would it have led to some kind of intellectual utopia, or total chaos? Would we be regaled with post after post from Adorno complaining about what he had for lunch that day? Even if Blogger and Movable Type had existed back then, Adorno still might not have blogged about anything at all. Despite the ongoing media blitz about blogging, and the eye-popping stats?according to a recent report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 7 percent of the 120 million U.S. adults who use the Internet said they have created a blog or Web-based diary, and blog readership jumped by 58 percent in 2004?the majority of professors and academic types still don't have blogs. Academic bloggers are increasing in number, but they're still a distinct minority. "It takes a certain kind of style, patience, and openness to non-specialists," explains Jay Rosen, associate professor at NYU's journalism department and author of the influential media blog PressThink. "You actually have to communicate with the public. It's really for those who want to enter into public debate somehow, and despite all the blather you hear about 'public intellectuals' there are very few academics who want to do that." Say you're already a public intellectual. Why start a blog? "I started blogging because I wanted to understand it," says Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, who blogs at lessig.org. "I write about the intersection between technology and policy, and this is an important intersection to understand." Lessig found that blogging opened up his sphere of interaction considerably. "I've published a bunch of articles in law reviews, and I think I've gotten maybe a total of 10 letters about them in the history of my career as an academic," he says. "I publish stuff on the blog, I get literally hundreds of e-mails about things all the time." Lessig even went so far as to set up his 1999 book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace as a wiki, so that Internet users worldwide can update and add to the text. The raging "blawgosphere"?blogs by law school profs, students, and grads?is one of the most organized and lively pockets of online academic discourse. Meta-sites like blawg.org and lawprofessorblogs.com collate and monitor hundreds of law-related blogs. Law blogs, media blogs, and politics blogs all seem like natural choices for a general audience of Net readers. And if you're an academic who's ever published a paper with the word cyberspace in it, you're pretty much required to have a blog as a matter of course. But what about, say, the theoretical physics blogosphere? It's a little less happening, but there are a few stars. Sean Carroll, an assistant professor of physics at the University of Chicago and co-author of papers with mind-warping titles like "Classical Stabilization of Homogeneous Extra Dimensions," tries, admirably, to explain his arcane world in his blog, Preposterous Universe. "It can serve a useful purpose in providing some expert commentary when something hits the news, like Hawking's ideas about black holes last summer," says Carroll. "And I like to think that it does provide a window into the wider concerns of an academic scientist when I talk about dinosaurs or theater or music. Writing it has made me more disciplined and careful about my ideas and how I express them; you can't get away with things in front of a thousand readers that you might in casual conversation." Eszter Hargittai, an assistant professor at Northwestern and blogger at the group academic blog crookedtimber.org and her own esztersblog.com, chimes in, saying, "First, I take much more care in discussing something when it is going to be read by hundreds or thousands of people than I do when I'm making a comment to someone in passing in the hallway. Second, on blogs that attract considerable commenting, the feedback from readers can be valuable. Even if people disagree or misunderstand, the various reactions are a good reality check." For some in the academy, blogging offers an escape valve, a forum for free expression that's not bound to the constraints of their fields. "Academic work on music is so bloodless most of the time," says Jon Dale, who is finishing his Ph.D. dissertation on post-punk at the University of Adelaide in Australia and blogs at Worlds of Possibility). "There's a writing style common to so much academia, especially musicology and cultural studies, that saps music of all its life force." British cultural theorist Mark Fisher, author of the renegade cultural studies blog K-Punk, says, "The way I understood theory?primarily through popular culture?is generally detested in universities. Most dealings with the academy have been literally clinically depressing." For him, K-Punk "seemed like the space?the only space?in which to maintain a kind of discourse that had started in the music press and the art schools, but which had all but died out, with appalling cultural and political consequences." Many academics are quick to establish a separation between their university work?which, after all, is what pays the bills?and their presence online. Wayne Marshall (wayneandwax.com), a lecturer at Brown, says that he blogs only in lowercase letters to drive home the distinction that his blog is separate from his academic work in ethnomusicology. And the professors who use blogs to blow off steam about the day-to-day drudgery of their jobs?grading papers, writing recommendations for ungrateful students, fighting for tenure?often choose to remain anonymous. So it's difficult to tell who wrote the tantalizing rant that began: "Summers is an idiot." Blogs constitute a burgeoning field of study too; there are academic conferences on blogging, along with grad students writing papers and even dissertations on the subject?like Cameron Marlow, founder of blog-monitoring service blogdex.net, who is at the M.I.T. Media Lab, where he is finishing his doctorate on blogging, and danah boyd of UC Berkeley ( zephoria.org), who is studying the hows and whys of online social networks. For some, blogging fills a gap. "I have always tried to write in a public language for a general readership," says NYU's Rosen, "and I had been fascinated by the writing on the Web as far back as '95 and '96. I didn't realize it at the time, of course, but what I really wanted was a weblog." Josh Kortbein, a philosophy Ph.D. candidate at the University of Minnesota, started his blog) Internet light-years ago?in 1999. To paraphrase Brian Eno on the Velvet Underground, not everyone read Josh's blog, but everyone who did started one. "I write my blog because I wish that things were different, and I'm thinking about how to make them that way."