betajames

I want to begin by acknowledging Karl Stolley’s call to action that we “hold our colleagues and students accountable for their technological choices just as they would be held accountable for any other rhetorical choice.” I want to begin with this acknowledgement because I think this is one of the things our roundtable is about. My particular choices related to digital methods have been largely informed by two things: bad luck and paranoia.

My bad luck is rather particular here. I mourned the loss of Google’s Buzz, Reader, and Wave, all of which I used for academic purposes. I had a blog on Posterous before Twitter acquired those responsible for the platform and caused a service shutdown. AppDotNet, an alternative to Twitter, recently became, as Mashable’s Christina Warren observes, “a bit like Schrödinger's cat — both alive and dead at the same time.” 

I mention these services and tools because my past experiences inform my present methods, most of which now involve paid services. I use NewsBlur for my RSS feeds, Pinboard for my bookmarking needs, and Posthaven for online writing. NewsBlur and Pinboard are both run by single individuals and a two-person team is responsible for Posthaven. I have only good things to say about them. I value these services and what I do with them enough to pay for them.

I don’t have a high opinion of free, and I’m not alone. The Atlantic’s Alan Jacobs suggests some companies offer their online services for free so they don’t have to provide real support for users. The Globe and Mail’s Amber MacArthur observes how “free is proving to be a serious threat to our privacy.” The Guardian’s Steven Poole notes that “we obediently conduct our own self-surveillance and voluntarily upload the data to companies who profit from it.” So, while Jacobs notes a lack of company responsibility when it comes to free services and tools, MacArthur and Poole connect ideas of free to privacy and surveillance. 

For as appealing as free might be, there are often consequences for choosing such services and tools. There is a now common refrain regarding the use of free services: “If you’re not paying for it, you’re the product.” But there’s at least an additional wrinkle here that deserves attention. Given recent news about the relationships between the National Security Agency and major tech companies, perhaps it would be more accurate for us to say, “if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product, and the object of surveillance.”

I’m concerned about the influence of surveillance on our digital methods. I even worry about using services and tools that contribute to the normalization of surveillance and the surveillance of normalcy. Such worry informs why I still prefer handwritten drafts and print books and journals over digital and online versions. In keeping at least some of my everyday methods offline, no one else can lay any claim to them. Marginal notes are my own, not kept in the cloud. Article drafts are my own, not data-mined for targeted advertising. 

I realize these choices in digital methods could paint me as a privileged academic flush with cash, or a paranoid delusional with a tinfoil hat. I don’t think I’m necessarily either of these. I’d just like us to value what we do enough to pay for it, to not leave ourselves and our work vulnerable to the whims of tech companies who depend on the allure of free. 

A step toward such valuing might involve department and program funding and support for website hosting and premium accounts at independent online services, or maybe just a specific stipend devoted to the development and maintenance of digital methods. Perhaps some departments and programs already have such funding in place. If so, I’m heartened to know there are others who value and hold accountable our technological choices, just as I know my roundtable colleagues do.

Since I had my first Two Hearted Ale, my introduction to craft beer has been slow and steady. I pick up the latest and greatest from Bell's, Brewery Vivant, Dark Horse, Founders, Greenbush, Short's, and others about once a month, often along with something from an out-of-state brewery or two that just started distributing in Michigan. And I keep track of what I drink in a notebook and sometimes take a picture for posterity. 

However, my introduction to writing about beer has been slower and not quite as steady. Beyond Make Mine Potato and a couple of beer-store and brewery blogs, I don't know much about beer writing. So, when I learned of Craft Writing: Beer, The Digital, and Craft Culture, I just jumped at the opportunity to go. 

The drive south on I-75 tested my patience between Dayton and Cincinnati, but I got into Lexington, checked in at my hotel, and walked over to Country Boy Brewing for the night-before get-together. I really couldn't imagine a better start to the conference. I got to meet UK people I'd only known via Twitter, sample some good food, and have some really good beer. 

The next morning, coffee and a breakfast pastry from Sunrise Bakery (recommended by a UK person) soothed what little hangover I had and energized me for the walk to the UK campus and the Craft Writing conference. And I was able to sit in the back row and joke with Twitter friends before things got started.

Conference organizer Jeff Rice began by talking about why we were all there. "You're here because you believe in the story of craft beer," he said. Of course, Rice also talked about writing, how it is integral to craft beer, sparking and sustaining our interest in craft beer, shaping our relationships with and teaching us a lot about craft beer. Variations of Rice's comments came up in each following session.

The first session had Stan Hieronymous, Julie Johnson, and Teri Fahrendorf discussing (among other things) the influence of writing related to craft beer and the rise of both, but what stood out to me was a near-seamless interweaving of personal, professional, and industrial histories. There were echoes of such interweaving in subsequent talks by Roger Baylor and Jeremy Cowan and in Garrett Oliver's keynote, during which he mentioned the brewers' commonality of the "diversion of an intended path." Oliver also implored those in attendance to ask who they thought they were going to be, what they sacrificed, and who helped them along in becoming brewers. 

The speakers prior to Oliver addressed these questions, but perhaps none more than Fahrendorf and Cowan. Both spoke with energy and humor about their craft-beer lives, Cowan detailing in frank terms about what happens when "you let an English major start a brewery" and Fahrendorf marking her development from computer programmer to brewer to founder of the Pink Boots Society and beyond. Again, these were interwoven histories, seamlessly personal and professional stories.

Now, I'm glossing here because there are already some conference recaps out online and they're better than what I could attempt to provide. The most comprehensive and arguably best I've read is by Jessica Miller of heybrewtiful.com: "Beer Nerds Unite Over Kentucky Craft Writing Symposium." Kevin Patterson of Lexington's The Beer Trappe offers a similar, pointed perspective with "The Elephant in the Craft Beer Room." Conference speaker Roger Baylor's "Not so simple a symposium"  and Hoperatives' "Writing About Beer" are alike in their more experiential notes on the conference. And Shea Anderson spins a few conclusions from an additional viewpoint: "5 Valuable Marketing Insights from Craft Beer Writing Conference." 

I direct attention to Miller and others because these writers and their pieces gave me more of what the conference did: an education. There were plenty of names mentioned and faces seen I didn't recognize but that were respected if not revered by many in attendance. Learning about what people like Michael Jackson, Stan Hieronymous, Julie Johnson, Teri Fahrendorf, Garrett Oliver, and others have done and, in many cases, continue to do for craft beer and for writing was invaluable. 

Craft beer culture is still an entity I'm coming to know. And I'm coming to know it as much through writing as through beer. Countless books and beers were mentioned throughout the conference and now I have so much more to read and to drink. I plan to start with the Baylor-recommended Tastes of Paradise, by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, and something out of my six-pack sampler from The Beer Trappe. 

The courier Tolstoy later heard that getting shot changes a person. He didn't know if that was true, but he remembered how odd he felt recovering at Doc Mitchell's. Like he shouldn't have been there. Like he should have instead remained in the shallow grave atop the hill overlooking Goodsprings, where Benny had left him to die.

Benny. That was what else Tolstoy remembered, how Benny had raised the gun to Tolstoy's face. That gun was the last memory of whatever life he had before. What an awful thing to have. The memory of the gun unsettled him. Tolstoy didn't wish it on anyone else. 

So, as he stepped out into the Mojave, Tolstoy resolved to never let violence be anyone's last memory of him. And that included Benny, if Tolstoy ever managed to find him. 

Confronting Joe Cobb and his Powder Gangers proved an early challenge, though. Even when left with no options for peace, Tolstoy refused to leave Goodsprings in endless anticipation of terror. The choice to empower and enable the residents of Goodsprings to fight for their town was a difficult one. He watched, not impartial, as Sunny Smiles, Trudy, and others cut down Cobb and his men. Tolstoy helped clean up after as best he could, gathering armor, weapons, and other items for trade at the general store. The persistence of Joe Cobb's corpse upon Tolstoy's every return to the town would continue to disturb him in the days to come. 

Before I begin in earnest, I want to thank my friend and fellow BGSU alum Matthew Barbee for the invitation to speak with you this afternoon. I also want to offer a preemptive thank-you to everyone present, including those listening in, for your attention and patience. The ideas I’m talking about today are still pretty green, so I’m thankful for your understanding. Also, my presentation style may be a bit unconventional and jarring, so please let me know if I’m moving too fast or if some aspect is just too distracting.

Last Friday, 27 September 2013, I was among the presenters at Network Detroit: Digital Humanities Theory and Practice. Below is a rough transcript.

Good morning. My contribution to this panel is an argument for understanding certain kinds of proprietary software as “institutionware.” I’ll get to what I mean by that in a second, but first a little background.

I am influenced and inspired by Georgia Tech professor and game designer Ian Bogost and media theorist and author Douglas Rushkoff. In a Gamasutra column, Bogost recasts gamification, the use of game thinking and game mechanics to engage users in solving problems, as exploitationware. He does this to connect gamification to “better known practices of software fraud” and to “situate gamification within a larger set of pernicious practices in the high-tech marketplace.” Similarly, in an Authors@Google talk, Douglas Rushkoff comments on the “awful, but brilliant” nature of Blackboard. 

[clip of "Authors@Google: Douglas Rushkoff," 7:38-9:10 - "From the student or teacher's perspective, Blackboard is terrible. It's just awful. You run up consistently against these terrible obstacles and extremely difficult things, ways you've got to wrap your whole self and brain and course and life around what this program needs needs from you in order to comply with it. And most of us look and say, "Ugh, this is just an awful thing. This software is awful." If you look at it from what I'm calling the programmer's perspective, you see, "Oh no, Blackboard is brilliant." Because Blackboard wasn't written for me. Blackboard wasn't written for me as an educator or for that person as a student. Blackboard was written for the Blackboard company to dominate education in a very particular way. Blackboard was created to help create an equivalence between distance learning and real-life learning so that in your classroom you're actually using this technology as much as you would long distance...It's created not to promote the user's agency, but to decrease the user's agency and increase the institution's dependence on this piece of software."]   

Bogost and Rushkoff are both talking about software approaches not made for users but for the used. Building on their observations, I want to provide a definition and provide characteristics of institutionware. 

So, first, a definition: institutionware is software that supports and maintains traditional ideas under the guise of providing a service. The clearest examples of institutionware are Blackboard and Turnitin, the successes of which are tied to the institution of higher education. To a lesser extent, Microsoft Word, iTunes, and even Facebook, Google, and Twitter are forms of institutionware. It might be helpful to place these examples on a continuum, or even a Möbius strip because some appear more tied to particular institutions than others. All share similar characteristics, though, and Google’s movement into higher education makes it all the more deserving of a place on the strip. Much the same can be observed of Twitter, given its recent moves in support of the institution of television. 

Regardless of placement, institutionware aims to decrease user agency, increase user dependency, preserve market dominance, and contain features. These aims are achieved in a multitude of simultaneous ways, so I’ll try to keep them straight.

Institutionware decreases user agency and increase user dependency by demanding and reinforcing user compliance. I’m recalling here Rushkoff’s earlier comments, but I’m also thinking of Blackboard’s design choices. For example, the number of times Blackboard asks us to click OK represents a sort of endless acquiescence, an indicator of our eternal compliance. In this way, institutionware does not ask us “where do you want to go today?” but instead forces us to ask “what is thy bidding, my master?”

I quote from The Empire Strikes Back because the line is from an important scene. Until this point, we see Darth Vader only in positions of power. When we see Vader go down on one knee, before a hologram no less, it is poignant. We come to institutionware like Vader to the Emperor, subservient in spite of our own abilities and power. Institutionware holds it own external demands over the internal, individual desires of its users.

This is also part of how institutionware preserves market dominance. Compliance is evident here, too, but it is through a blanket of equivalence in systems and users. This equivalence is in acknowledgement of limited use. Examples of limited use include Blackboard for grades, iTunes for MP3s, Microsoft Word for essays, and Google for email. Because of limited use of institutionware, we may become as frustrated as comedian Hannibal Burress.

[clip of "Hannibal Buress on Odd Future and Young Jeezy," 1:05-1:13 - “Why does iTunes keep trying to get me to download a new version? I got a new version a couple of days ago. I’m fine with this version. It plays music.”] 

Institutionware works against limited use by introducing new features and updates, often with annoying regularity. Regular updates are similar to Blackboard’s persistent OKs, reminding us of our compliance, our inability to do anything but accept. 

These updates also have to do with how institutionware contains features. Institutionware is about containment. Features aren’t so much offered as contained, kept within an overall system so users have little reason to go elsewhere. Feature containment also works against limited use and helps further preserve market dominance. Furthermore, persistent, “feature-rich” updates tend to benefit the service providers more than the users. 

[clip of "Suicidal Tendencies - 'Institutionalized' Frontier Records," 3:05-3:35 - "…how do you know what my best interest is? How can you say what my best interest is? How can you say what my best interest is? What are you trying to say, I’m crazy? When I went to your schools, I went to your churches, I went to your institutional learning facilities? So how can you say I’m crazy? They say they’re gonna fix my brain, alleviate my suffering and my pain, but by the time they fix my head, mentally, I’ll be dead. I’m not crazy, institution. You’re the one who’s crazy, institution."

We can even see this with Microsoft Word’s Clippy, who is less of an enabler and more of an enforcer, indicative of how institutionware is about preserving the institution as it is and has been, enhancing and supporting rather than challenging and threatening. Blackboard and Turnitin, for example, are not out to question traditional methods of education but to scaffold them. Names alone are evidence. 

Here the transcript ends. The notes I worked from devolved into improvisation and speculation, fueling a discussion focused almost entirely on Blackboard. This was somewhat unfortunate, but Blackboard looms large in the minds of many educators. 

I feel comfortable admitting this development because I’m still very much thinking and working through the very idea of institutionware. It is by no means fully formed. Since this #detroitdh talk, I’ve come to see limited use as playing a larger part in institutionware overall. Limited use itself may be more of a defining characteristic of institutionware than user agency or dependency, market dominance or feature containment. Limited use may be what binds the other characteristics together. What this in turn says about the relationship between service providers and users is something yet to be determined. I look forward to finding out. 

"While it’s in Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn’s interests to attract as many users as possible – and clearly free is the way – there are obvious consequences: Users get to play without paying, but every few months we get kicked in the face when our digital profiles get abused." - Amber MacArthur, Free sucks. I want my privacy back. 

"When you're a free service, you get to say these magic words: 'X is offered as is.' You are off the hook for problems. If people don't like it they can go elsewhere." - Alan Jacobs, Take My Money, Please! The Strange Case of Free Web Services

"Research has shown that humans like getting rewards, but they hate losing what they already have much more than they value the same item as a reward. To be effective with this technique, you have to tell the player they have earned something, and then later tell them that they did not. The longer you allow the player to have the reward before you take it away, the more powerful is the effect." - Ramin Shokrizade, The Top F2P Monetization Tricks

"One of the secrets of success of a F2P game is the implementation of a powerful system of statistical analysis. Game data provides clues as to the users' behavior and preferences." - Pascal Luban, The Design of Free-to-Play Games: Part 1

VIDEO: https://www.dropbox.com/s/jh2bqmv9r28dwr0/RATLMS.mov

TRANSCRIPT: Good morning and welcome to session L.24, Reaching New Publics with Homegrown Learning Management Systems. My name is James Schirmer and I’m presenting in absentia for a very good reason: the birth of my first child. But I want to thank Brian and Quinn for allowing me to present in this manner. Please know that all are welcome to tweet about or at me. My Twitter handle is at the top right corner of most slides; our session and conference hashtags are at the top left. Also, a full transcript of this talk is available at betajames.net (and at betajames.posthaven.com).

Now, in talking about learning management systems, we talk about many things, including access and control. We talk about who has access to what information at which level as well as who controls that access and that information. We also talk about persistent and potential obstacles to access and control. In such discussions, it can be very easy to conflate a course and a learning management system. So, I hereby invite my colleagues on the panel and in the audience to challenge me if I appear to make such a conflation.

In talking about alternatives to learning management systems, I think we talk about access and control, too, but with an acknowledgement of honesty and openness. More of what we do as writing teachers may be exposed in LMS alternatives; things can get messy in having all or some of the construction laid bare. And I think there’s a public-ness to LMS alternatives that standard, traditional platforms like Blackboard lack. I see this as a net positive for alternatives, varied as they are.

New media and Web 2.0 technologies are more accessible and open by nature, sharing a similar degree of public-ness. As writing teachers, we can — and sometimes do — voice our LMS frustrations via social media, but these online spaces are also opportunities for us to connect pedagogical aims and goals in new ways. This is not necessarily a new thing anymore, but I think it’s an idea worth repeating because it is also shared in the do-it-yourself ethos. Open the course, expose the scaffolding, encourage more and varied interaction, get beyond the Blackboard box.

Using a computer keyboard, we can blog about yesterday’s class and tweet course updates, but it is through social media that the work we do may be public in unanticipated ways. Searching Twitter for hashtags like #englishsucks and phrases like “I hate writing” can be very revealing. I mention this, too, because I want to steer clear of triumphalism here. Moving from a standard, traditional LMS like Blackboard to an alternative doesn’t eliminate certain problems; it may only change them.

But we’re talking about such movement this morning for reasons in addition to access, control, messiness, and openness. I think it’s safe to say that we, as writing teachers, value these concepts to varying degrees. I want to extend things a bit, though. If we acknowledge that writing often constitutes public work, if we are interested in enhancing the status of first-year composition, we should rethink housing our courses in learning management systems. Do not mistake this statement for blind adherence to an ideal, though. Often enough, I still find myself singing the following song.

[clip of “I’m Against It” from the Marx Brothers film, Horse Feathers, ]
[LYRICS:
I don't know what they have to say,
It makes no difference anyway,
Whatever it is, I'm against it.
No matter what it is or who commenced it,
I'm against it.

Your proposition may be good,
But let's have one thing understood,
Whatever it is, I'm against it.
And even when you've changed it or condensed it,
I'm against it.] 

I admit my own resistance to Blackboard and to learning management systems in general. However, I must also admit my reservations about this resistance. Do I dislike Blackboard for what it is or do my frustrations deal with broader concerns about higher education? Are my operating methods and preferences just too different? Do I just need to be more patient, more willing to discover and learn how a particular LMS organizes and values the efforts of students and teachers alike? In an “Authors @ Google” lecture, Douglas Rushkoff explains the Blackboard situation a bit better than I can: 

[clip of "Authors@Google: Douglas Rushkoff," 7:38-9:10]
[From the student or teacher's perspective, Blackboard is terrible. It's just awful. You run up consistently against these terrible obstacles and extremely difficult things, ways you've got to wrap your whole self and brain and course and life around what this program needs needs from you in order to comply with it. And most of us look and say, "Ugh, this is just an awful thing. This software is awful." If you look at it from what I'm calling the programmer's perspective, you see, "Oh no, Blackboard is brilliant." Because Blackboard wasn't written for me. Blackboard wasn't written for me as an educator or for that person as a student. Blackboard was written for the Blackboard company to dominate education in a very particular way. Blackboard was created to help create an equivalence between distance learning and real-life learning so that in your classroom you're actually using this technology as much as you would long distance...It's created not to promote the user's agency, but to decrease the user's agency and increase the institution's dependence on this piece of software.]   

While I agree with Rushkoff, I no longer think of standard, traditional LMS platforms like Blackboard as software. Instead, I think of them as “institutionware.” For as much as Blackboard may be about preserving itself as the top LMS option, it is also about preserving the traditional aspects of higher education. Even more recent social media ‘features’ are about containment; blogs and wikis are stuck in the Blackboard box and mark the introduction of new environments and tools for learning but only serve lectures and exams. It’s all enough to make one rage against the machine.

[clip of "07 - Rage Against the Machine - Freedom (Live)," 4:15-4:45]
[LYRIC: anger is a gift] 

I agree with Zach de la Rocha that “anger is a gift.” When directing it in a productive way toward an issue or problem, clarity can often follow. I also agree with Matthew Gold’s perspective that the problem with learning management systems ‘lies in the conjunction of three words that should not appear together. Learning is not something that can be “managed” via a “system.”’ Given how we may use Blackboard or another platform, our course banners might as well read “Under Old Management.” Many of the faults of traditional LMS platforms are also the faults of higher education.

Still, the title of this talk isn’t “Rage Against The LMS.” Well, it was, but it isn’t anymore. In fact, my co-panelist Brian McNely has, in his words, “backed away from a militant anti-LMS perspective in everyday practice, in large part because it’s simply not conducive to getting things done with what we have…I don’t have the energy or influence to overturn my university’s LMS policy; I can offer my students interesting workarounds to the limitations of the LMS.” Like him, I’m more interested in how we might rise above the LMS, either through alternatives or by other means. 

[clip of "Henry Rollins/Black Flag 'Rise Above' Live, 0:25-0:55]
[LYRICS
Jealous cowards try to control
Rise above
We're gonna rise above
They distort what we say
Rise above
We're gonna rise above
Try and stop what we do
Rise above
When they can't do it themselves

We are tired of your abuse
Try to stop us it's no use

Society's arms of control
Rise above
We're gonna rise above]

Part of rising above the LMS may involve remembering that, as Sean Michael Morris writes in a piece for Hybrid Pedagogy, “the LMS is meant to help us think about teaching, not to do the teaching, or to tell us what teaching needs to occur. The LMS is not the course; it’s the launching pad for the course." In other words, we need to see the LMS as an opportunity to reconsider how and what it is we do as teachers.

This diagram is part of a blog entry by Lisa M. Lane in which she looks at how and where courses begin. According to Lane, starting in an LMS implies a teacher-centric model, closer connection with the college and its structures, greater concern for security and privacy, and emphasis on presentation and content over interactivity and community. Starting on the open web or a social media site implies a learner-centric model, greater connection with the outside world, and emphasis on community over content. 

Lane sees both starting options as doors, with the LMS linking out to social media and social media linking in or to the LMS. Whichever we choose “sets up different kinds of hierarchies, implies differences in pedagogy, and creates different kinds of opportunities for learning” (Lane). Similarly, William Beasley notes “there are good pedagogical reasons both for providing links that take students outside the LMS, and for bringing portions of the outside world into the LMS." 

This diagram is part of a blog entry by D’Arcy Norman in which he sees a role for the LMS in higher education “if for no other reason than the simple reality that most instructors, and many students, aren’t ready, willing, or able to forge their own solutions." Norman also acknowledges that “even a grassroots No-LMS environment eventually grows to resemble an LMS-like space." Through these diagrams, we can come to see the LMS in general as less of a learning management system and more of a learning mediated system. 

Now, in my own courses, I seek to rise above the LMS by incorporating simple, effective tools with a low barrier of entry. Here is one such example: Posterous, a soon-to-be defunct online writing service that allowed students to blog via email. Students and I were able to subscribe to and comment on each other’s blogs as well as personalize our online spaces. Twitter’s “acqui-hire” of the Posterous staff one year ago prefaced the announcement of a full-service shutdown on April 30. 

However, Twitter is (I hope) a more reliable online writing service used in many of my courses. Hashtags and/or specific tweeting times help foster community and that greater connection with the outside world mentioned earlier by Lisa Lane. 

Now, before turning things over to Brian and Quinn for more substantive inquiry, allow me to share a couple other, perhaps more interesting examples before closing with some persistent problems related to rising above the LMS. 

“Part storytelling workshop, part technology training, part critical interrogation of the digital landscape,” DS106 stands among the most unique and successful endeavors to engage students of all kinds in the development of skills for using technology as a tool for networking, sharing, narrating, and creative self-expression. Searching on Twitter for the hashtags #ds106 and#ds106radio will send you down a rabbit’s hole into a wonderland of digital artifacts of all kinds.  

In sharing this screenshot of materials for a web application development course posted on GitHub, it is worth noting that Karl Stolley uses Git, version control software, for just about everything he writes. But, for Stolley, posting his syllabi on GitHub is worth doing so that his materials “are a tad more easy to get ahold of” but it also changes how he writes the source of his materials, whether Markdown or HTML.  

And, as usual, we are at an interesting time in higher education. The MOOC looms over much discussion of academia’s future, but it also stands as another potential LMS alternative. Many MOOCs serve as a combination of approaches and strategies; some are united as much by Twitter hashtags as more traditional methods of instruction. So, with these examples, we’re once again back to the opening concerns of access, control, honesty, messiness, and openness.

As also mentioned earlier, rising above a standard, traditional LMS like Blackboard may not eliminate certain problems, only change them. Our position in a college or university may determine our ability to rise. We may be limited to engaging in the strategy explained by Brian McNely rather than implementing one of the “door” approaches explained by Lisa Lane. Using free online services invite archival, privacy, and reliability issues. Hosting and growing our own spaces requires time and vigilance we may not have. 

While there are among the persistent problems related to rising above the LMS, I want to remain optimistic. When we rise above the LMS, we assert as ourselves as activists as well as writing teachers. We show others what alternatives are possible in particular capacities. And I look forward to what Brian and Quinn are about to show us. So, to close as so many of my students do, here is my references page.

Thank you.

A description of GameLoop as well as notes on last year's unconference are available from co-runner Darius Kazemi here. 

"Art Games from a Fine Arts Perspective," Alex Myers presiding

The purpose of this session was to think about art games from an artist's perspective rather than that of a designer or developer. In Myers' opinion, using contemporary game design as a medium for expression is all fine and good, but that the placement of games in galleries is problematic in approach. 

First, there is the myth of the gallery. There is also the movement and removal of games themselves from arcades to homes and now to galleries. Art continues to move in comparable directions and Myers and session attendees rattled off many examples. Some were also quick to stress the need to challenge and question what we consider to be art games, to be mindful of using subversiveness as a crutch because we engage in passive participation in oppression every day. 

Furthermore, there are questions of accessibility and legitimacy and the importance of exploring alternative as well as traditional spaces for art and for games, of pursuing "art games for art games' sake." It was around this point that the overall discussion separated art and games, acknowledging how context comes through interaction (sort of) with both. This separation was not an issue as it appeared easier for some to understand how art and games might learn from each other, what it means to make art the focus of a game and if that's even really possible. 

In the midst of this part of the session, someone mentioned "MOMA retcons," how certain art movements rebelled and responded to the establishment only to be included and/or canonized later so that the general public might "step back and respect" them. Myers also took issue with dressing art up in videogame culture, expressing uncertainty with what such action accomplishes. 

To continue the separation and similarity aspect, this session made note of the player-predictability in games and the viewer-unpredictability of art. "What consequences can there be in the digital?" is an additional question that arose, however briefly, in the Philosophy and Videogames (development) session described below. 

As the session came to a close, there was a look to the future toward locative art games and emergent objectives, of using the "raw means of abstraction" as the essence of interaction to produce less obvious metaphors that might still be reminiscent of life experiences. In a final address of how to pass the time, a session attendee stated, "We had five minutes left two minutes ago." 

Among the artists and events mentioned: Duchamp, Cactus Squid, Brody Condon, the Machine Project, Deep Sea

"Why All Videogame Conferences Suck," Courtney Stanton presiding

Short answer: exclusionary practices. This is a continuing problem at conferences, so there was a stated concern of how to address it. Courtney shared her experiences with and knowledge of unconferences and workshops like No Show. Alex and Darius framed their K-12 and college-level classes as forms of outreach.

Part of the intent is to have more conversations in more places, to have more welcoming spaces as well as perhaps more separatist spaces, all so that the big conferences aren't the only spaces anymore and more people interested in videogames can say, "There's someone/something here for me."

It was around this point that Johnny(?) brought up issues of accessibility, stressing the potential complications of distance and physical spaces for those with special needs. Conferences tend to ignore, overlook, or assume too much when it comes to policies that ensure safe, welcoming spaces, but much the same also happens with regards to special-needs considerations.

So, how to community-organize for everyone? Attend to privilege, acknowledge the popularity of past panels, get away from predatory logic and what conferences tend to sell attendees on, realize that what happens at conferences is often someone's first impression of the industry.  

"Philosophy and Videogames (Development)," Darius Kazemi presiding

In true unconference spirit, this was sort of an impromptu session jammed in during the lunch hour. Darius started off by noting how architecting a game engine addresses philosophical questions and what it's like being forced to write those ontological rules, thereby revealing the purpose of the session overall. Attendees then shared their own reasons for being present, including ethics, the nonhuman turn, "old thinkers," games as reflections of humanity (or not), game tendencies, natural human states, absurdism, existentialism, inherent systems of meaning, theology, life and death in games, less definite spaces, what philosophy can provide, systems construction.

Of course, it proved impossible to address all these interests. One of the first questions raised was that of combat being the dominant/lone interaction of a game and how player perception can be influenced as a result, how we can come to see the "real" space on which a game space is based as "where people are supposed to get shot." This can be most pronounced in FPS games set in New York, Los Angeles, etc. 

So, how to get away from this possibility? Decenter player privilege, embrace the core ambiguity and flexibility of game design. This somehow led into thinking of the computer/system as adjudicator, a computer's sense of justice, and what it means to follow laws and rules vs. understanding them. Kirk can probably speak more and better about this, but there was another question raised: "When is a rule going to make something stupid happen?" One answer was the A.I. Director from the Left 4 Dead series. 

No one mentioned Bioshock during the session, which was nice. 

"Games That Hate You," Cameron Kunzleman presiding

Things got started with a focus on games that provide active punishment for playing them as well as the appeal of playing these kinds of games. There's a nostalgic aspect to them, to their punishing difficulty, but Cameron also wanted the discussion to move beyond this. Rather than just an address of difficulty and punishment, the discussion moved into the realm of clear disrespect for players and what we perceive as unfair. 

Hateful or not (perhaps), there needs to be respect and trust on the part of both the designer and the player of the game. Wrapped up in all this, too, are understandings of content value and experience and how games reward certain player behaviors or don't. There was mention of a game in which the player can realize that "you're fucked 5 minutes into a match." This led some to ask how can we as players tell when a game respects our time. During a sub-discussion concerning sadomasochistic aspects of games, one attendee admitted, "Alt+F4 is my safe word." 

I'm not sure this session stayed on topic as much as it could have. This is more of an observation than a complaint, though, given bits and pieces about motivational environments and the absence of them, the idea of "hard simplicity," how and why players react when a game denies, exhausts, or robs their agency, and how some violations of player expectations can be fun. 

"Women in Games," Courtney Stanton presiding

Unfortunately, I missed a good chunk of this session. It was clear upon entering the room, though, that this wasn't a session about portrayals of women in videogames but an industry/workplace talk. 

One woman shared her experience of being mistaken for a marketer instead of a programmer because she "dressed nice." A few others observed how sexism in the videogames monoculture can be just as bad in indie as AAA, if not worse. This is because the legal liability that exists in AAA doesn't have an equivalent in indie. 

There was also discussion of what it takes to be heard, the sacrifices and personality changes some women made to fit in with the guys. A later shift to education focused on priming the next generation, looking at the importance of support for those experiencing sexism as well as the worth in correction and even embarrassment for those causing it. We need to not only let people know that they're wrong but also show them how and why.

Similar to the earlier session about why videogame conferences suck, I felt exhausted at the end. 

"Roguelike-likes," ??? presiding

I spent too much time in my own head during this session, which began with some discussion of roguelike characteristics. These included procedural generation, discovery, capacity for surprise, permanent risk, adversity with interesting/intersecting consequences, and systems awareness. Regarding the roguelike aspects of accumulation and loss, one attendee commented, "The better you do, the more it hurts." In other words, the greater a player's progression through a roguelike, the worse a player's potential 'death' becomes. At the same time, starting over may not be so terrible, given acceptance of failure beforehand. A roguelike, then, forces us to admit that we have nothing to lose. Well, except maybe time. 

Having somewhat defined characteristics of roguelikes, discussion moved into the application of roguelike aspects to other kinds of games. After naming titles like Dark Souls and Fallout, the latter of which diverged into a discussion of sub-optimal builds, there was some brainstorming about FPS roguelikes, social roguelikes, and even how a movie like Groundhog Day could be seen as roguelike-like. 

Among roguelikes named: Nethack, Facade, Brogue, Spelunky, Epic Dungeon, Realm of the Mad God. 

After having to ignore so much just to get last week's entry written and posted, I almost find this week to be lacking things for me to note and observe. Then again, just as much may have happened this week as in weeks past, but other significant demands on my time perhaps kept me from noticing. (Every time I have to write/revise for publication during the semester, I swear I'll never do it again. This has happened five times.) 

In #112CWR, there was what I've come to see as the usual amount of confusion and dread toward the introduction of Mashup Scholarship, almost in parallel to the enthusiasm I still have for this unorthodox assignment. Part of my enthusiasm has to do with bias, of course. I remain enamored with the arguments of Lethem's "The Ecstasy of Influence" and Shields' Reality Hunger as well as mashup efforts like The Grey Album and Wugazi. And I still hold out hope for some kind of grand academic mashup of a disciplinary argument. However, part of the reason I ask students to put together their own academic mashups has to do with the potential of discovering just how scholarly sentences are constructed. It is my hope that by melding five different sources together into one cohesive essay students will learn a bit more about what discipline-specific writing is, if not does. So, if students see Pop Up Scholarship as a vehicle to vent about academic writing, Mashup Scholarship asks them to rise above raging against the machine and get more constructive.

What appears to be less constructive, though, are the facilitations, which have become less student-led class sessions and more a series of variant themes related to academic writing. Facilitations aren't so much group projects as a collection of individual performances about the same thing. Put simpler, #112CWR facilitations this semester tend toward mini-lectures. With just one more such session remaining, I have to be okay with this as it wouldn't be fair for me to come down on the last group with demands to do everything that previous groups might have not done. Plus, I think students often perform from prior experience, from what they know, and maybe not what's most helpful, but almost always what they perceive as easiest. If the comfortable or default setting for a facilitation is the mini-lecture, what does this say about professorial pedagogy?

In #342VS, facilitations are a bit better, with less lecture and more whole-class discussion of whatever readings I assigned that week. In some cases, these facilitations have been more media-heavy than the sessions I've led. I suspect that this often happens because students observe how I lead discussion and see what I fail to incorporate. In a way, then, #342VS facilitations build on or otherwise relate to the prior session and go from there. As a result, I think #342VS stands as a more cohesive endeavor with greater relationship between sessions each week and week to week. That each #112CWR session stands somewhat alone by contract is both interesting and troubling.

Having just begun #513DR facilitations, I'm rather impressed by students' collective abilities to conduct class without me.  As primary responsibilities for guiding discussion were on two fellow students, questions fell to This is a graduate-level course, so one could conceivably make the argument that graduate students should be able to hold a session without the professor. When I did contribute to the discussions of videogames in education and amateur/professional critics online, I almost felt as though I had interrupted the proceedings. I have every intention of attending next week's session, though. With scheduled facilitations on videogames as new media/rhetoric and 4chan and the online disinhibition effect, how could I not attend?

I do a disservice by grouping general thoughts about students' work over the last three weeks into a single entry. However, a multitude of demands on my time don't allow for much else. I've been asking a lot of students as of late and they've fulfilled my requests, yet all time allows is a lone, meager blog post to acknowledge and reflect. Of course, each undergraduate student received a quick progress report with more tailored details about how I see their recent work. I won't divulge such specifics here for a variety of reasons, instead taking a broader view, a longer picture of what's happening. So, let's begin…

Students don't like writing. To be more specific, students don't like academic writing. They see it as jargon, unnecessary, verbose. "Why should/would anyone write like this?" they ask. Such a question ties into not only important considerations of audience and purpose but it also remains a persistent, existential query for me as a teacher of writing. I don't discourage a question like that, instead encouraging students to ask by way of assignments like Pop Up Scholarship. And, more often than not, what comes out of such an assignment are the above criticisms. Rare is the question one of content; almost always is the question one of performance, of presentation. 

Variations of these questions also appear in upper-level and graduate courses, often with the same focus. Rather than discussing the argument put forth or the ideas presented, upper-level and graduate students address an assigned article from points of analysis literary and/or rhetorical. Their approaches are more deconstruction than New Criticism, more feminist and Marxist than reader-response. "If we can summarize an academic work in 50 words or 140 characters, why can't the original author?" they ask. 

I don't know if such inquiries are standard in college-level writing courses, but they seem to be in mine. I structure my courses to be spaces not just for writing, but critiquing writing. I don't want students' blind or blithe acceptance of the tenets of academic writing. Yes, I hope for them to grasp the nuances of what it means to put together a scholarly piece of writing, but I also hope for them to remain critical in the process. Besides, I'm not exactly the biggest fan of academic writing myself. There's an insurgent aspect to my pedagogy, I suppose.

Again, this is part of the reason for assignments like Pop Up Scholarship that ask and encourage students to change, comment, pick apart, and even poke fun at academic work. It's also part of the way toward foundational awareness, whether it be academic writing, videogame studies, or digital rhetoric. The first eight weeks or so of each course are strikingly similar in this regard. After the break, after having gained awareness if not knowledge of what's involved, students have the freedom for more individual exploration. Given students' reactions to freedom and open-endedness of certain assignments already undertaken, I expect there will be some accounts of stress post-break. 

I know that not all students are comfortable with the class structure. I know some would be content with or even prefer that I just give them information, straight from the scholarly horse's mouth. I know there are many reasons for this desire, too, but my general response to the majority of direct questions asked of me is this: I don't have all the answers, but I'm here to help you seek them, to offer perspective on what you discover. 

Contrary to what students might think, some of the best class sessions are those facilitated by fellow students. Even somewhat disastrous facilitations, like the one in #112CWR this week, can be instructive in myriad ways. This has me thinking about implementing less formal, straightforward groupwork in my courses. Rather than group facilitations, perhaps future courses will have discussion leaders, those who post the first and second online entries related to a week's readings for others to read and respond to. Students tend to like groupwork about as much as they like academic writing anyway.