Media-ludic approaches: Critical reflections on games and research practice

Emma Witkowski at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) and I will be editors of an upcoming special issue on "Media-ludic approaches: Critical reflections on games and research practice."

The deadline is September 1st 2017, the journal is the Danish mixed-language (English, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish) journal MedieKultur, with Kjetil Sandvik as main editor and Claus Toft-Nielsen as issue editor, and I can't wait to start the labour of love it will be to edit these articles. (and I wrote that with a straight face. I am discovering that I like editing.)

MedieKultur is open access, which in these times of insane pay-walls and publishing fees means you don't pay to publish and you don't pay to read! Media, Culture and Communication studies are also very strong and well developed in Denmark, which means that the articles will find a good audience and be treated by solid editors (beyond me and Emma). So since you are now almost convinced, here are the submission guidelines for authors.

From the CFP (Do go read the whole thing, it's not all that long and there's useful information):

The goals of this volume are in part to:

• Explore questions on games and media studies methods, collaborations and productions, and to ignite critical considerations of existing and imaginable alternative instruments of study.
• Examine the gaps and precarious methods in games research methods, for example covert ethnographic research, big data, socio-phenomenographical research, approaches to mixed methods (qualitative-quantitative) research, and small or single case studies.
• Question how research concepts from the study of games have travelled and how they are exportable to media and communications and other game/play fields.
• Expand on how the study of games raises new practical and ethical questions of established user/audience methods and theories.

By focusing on the question of methods in games research and media studies, this edition of MedieKultur presents a collection of innovative research perspectives, which can reach beyond the growing field of game studies and engage with interrelated subject areas such as audience studies, media sport studies, digital broadcasting, political economy, and leisure cultures research.

Non-hedonic what?

After having written a few articles on hedonism and pleasure in relation to games, I was interested when I found, in the latest issue of Journal of Communication, two articles discussing hedonism in relation to communication. While saying you are a hedonist today means saying you are focused only on indulging yourself, hedonism in the original meaning was not about indulgence, but about taking pleasure in your life. This pleasure could be had from many different sources, and one of the frequently discussed topics in antiquity, was if this pleasure was in itself a virtue to be strived for, or if it involved and possibly even was dependent on virtue. Plato, Socrates, Epicurus and Aristippus, among others, did not promote senseless indulgence, what they discussed was a life free of fear, and low on pain, and rather more filled with good things. If they came out on the less fear and pain, more peace and joy side, they argued this had been a good life. The rest was a matter of how to get there.

One of the discussions involved eudaimonia. Since this involved Aristotle and the stoics, both parties high on the virtue scale, we popularly tend to read this as the opposite of hedonism. This is also how Hofer, Allemand and Martin defines it:

From a process-based point of view, Oliver and Bartsch (2010) introduce the concept of appreciation, which is defined as "the perception of deeper meaning, the feeling of being moved, and the motivation to elaborate on thoughts and feelings inspired by the experience" (Oliver & Bartsch, 2010, p 76). This nonhedonic gratification is conceptualized... (Hofer, Martin & Allemand, 2014, p 62)

Hofer and friends here makes the leap from something being different from hedonism to something being not hedonism, and defines it by the absence of something, in this case, by defining hedonism as pleasure, as the absence of pleasure. This is not the Aristotelian nor the stoic definition of eudaimonia. Let us go to what we, for simplicity's sake, can assume is an authority, and check Encyclopædia Britannica: "eudaemonism, also spelled eudaimonism, or eudemonism,  in ethics, a self-realization theory that makes happiness or personal well-being the chief good for man." Encyclopædia Britannica's descriptions of both epicurean hedonism and utilitarian hedonism, they are obviously not such strong opponents that they exclude each other. Rather, eudaimonia is a way of experiencing pleasures that are closer to utilitarian hedonism than to epicurean hedonism, but which is still a pleasure-based ideal of the good life.

This also makes reasonable sense if we look at the definition of eudaimonic vs hedonic entertainment as used by Iliver and Raney, cited by Hofer et. al. Here eudaimonic entertainment is driven by a desire for insight and meaning, while hedonic entertainment is more purely for the pleasure. We are back to what appears to be related to the virtue-discussion of the old Greeks, where in this case insight and meaning is deemed more virtuous and hence nore in the line with the teachings of the stoics.

The error that got me started on all of this is the idea that eudaemonism and hedonism exclude each other to the point that the one becomes not hedonic. That is a leap too far. Just consider the viewing habits of those who watch so-called eudaimonic entertainment, that is entertainment that makes you think, where you learn something and understand something about yourself. There is personal growth and there is a sense of meaningfullness. Doesn't this bring pleasure? Even if the movie is sad, don't the viewers enjoy them? Personally, while I thoroughly enjoy silly movies, comedy and easy television series I can fall asleep to, I also love being challenged and forced to think and question. Actually, I will claim that when I take time to consider a very difficult concept, read a book that I need to read and reread to understand, and then perhaps even get so far as writing a scholarly article about it, I am extremely happy! I experience a very high level of pleasure, and feel like I have indulged indeed.

To me, that is a hedonistic experience. I am quite willing to claim it is also a eudaimonic experience. I am not, however, ready to say it's non-hedonic. For it to be non-hedonic, it would have to be pure pain. I occasionally do those things too, it's normally called "chores". But even those have an aspect of utilitarian hedonism, as me finishing my chores tend to lead to other good things, like the happiness of others (more hedons for the world!) and future happiness of myself. And so it goes, as a professor expressed it at a vaguely recollected lecture on philosophy more than 30 years ago: "If you ask why we do something for long enough, the final response is - because I want to be happy." And there it is.

By the way, the other article mentioning hedonism in that journal issue, the one about how narratives persuade, the suspension of disbelief and didactic vs hedonistic processing? That one made me very happy, and I will most likely be citing it in a hopefully soon to be seen article. Don't hold your breath though - academic publishing is very close to creating more dolors than hedons all around.

D or F?

Some time ago, I assessed a master's thesis at a Norwegian university (I do so regularly, at different universities). It was a half-assed piece of work, and I gave it a low mark, as I should. This didn't happen without discussion or resistance; the other assessor disagreed initially. We went through the thesis very thoroughly, and also read the descriptions of the use of the different grades in the Norwegian system. At the end we agreed that the grade was the only possible one, from the content and the descriptions. The internal assessor had hoped for a better grade for the student, but that's why we use external assessors in this system: in order to have qualified, unbiased readings.

In this process, the other assessor said something that stuck with me. "But when they apply abroad, they look at this grade, and our students don't have a chance, because in the US, the grades are used differently." The implication was that this paper would have gotten a much better grade in the US. Now, I can't grade according to a hypothetical standard in another country, so the argument didn't change anything. But it triggered a curiosity about the performance of American students vs Norwegian, because one of my impressions is that in the US, there is a much higher general failure rate. In Norway, if you start an education, you may not always excel, but you have a very high chance of finishing. My impression was that in the higher education in the US, the drop-out rate is much higher.

Today I read about the failure rate in MOOC - Massive Online Open Courses - in California, or more precisely, San José. Now, comparing regular teaching with MOOCs is unfair. Any teacher with a tad of experience knows the difference between seeing the students face to face and writing them. However, a sentence in the article caught my attention:

Gov. Jerry Brown had lauded the goals of the program to allow students to graduate faster and reduce their debt loads at a time when only 16 percent of California State students graduate in four years.

 16%

Almost all Norwegian students are state students. The education is free. How many graduate in four years? From SSB, the state-owned statistics bureau (which, by the way, has been noted as being more critical of the educational system than the private agency paid to assess it.):

Av de om lag 30 600 studentene som startet på bachelorutdanning for første gang i 2006, fullførte 45 prosent innen tre år. Etter ytterligere to år hadde 62 prosent fullført. Sammenlignet med studentene som startet i 2005, har andelen som fullførte innen fem år økt med 4 prosentpoeng. I løpet av denne femårsperioden var det 23 prosent som avbrøt studiet. 9 prosent av disse avbrøt etter første året. Bachelorutdanningen i økonomiske og administrative fag hadde høyest andel av studenter som avbrøt i løpet av fem år, hele 33 prosent.

45% have finished in three years. In five years, 62% have finished. 23% have quit, and didn't finish over five years. We don't know if they resumed/will resume their education later. Now, discussing which universities and colleges we should compare our universities with is a bit useless. Norway doesn't have the private Ivy-league schools, but we have a pretty solid state-run educational system. We can't really compare either way, but we do tend to compare our system with the Ivy-league schools, as these are the goal for many of our students who go abroad. But who are the Ivy-league students? They are the children of the educated and well-off, and what does statistics tell us about academic success and social background?

If we look at the figure in the article from SSB, it's pretty clear. Children of parents with higher education finish more higher education. Children of parents with no education finish less. (Considering that none of my parents finished high-school, I am an anomaly according to this statistic: a person from my background should not have a doctorate. Yes, I thank the Norwegian welfare state and the miracle of our educational system regularly.) We compare a system which encompasses students from all backgrounds, with a system which exclusively caters to those with the best chances. We expect our students to compete with the very top of the heap of an extremely competitive system, where failure and dropping out is more common than completing an education.

There's no real conclusion to this. I am not saying which of these two systems is the better (although, see above, I know where my loyalty lies.) What I am saying is: They can't really be compared. The Norwegian educational system needs some serious tweaking, I agree. But I don't feel bad about giving a low grade to a student who doesn't perform well. They are still miles ahead of the large numbers of US students who do not get a grade at all. If we are to compare our students with the American ones, we need to compare both ends. And when it comes to making sure the population is educated, we perform very well indeed.

Teacher evaluations - can we learn from them?

A quick Facebook comment from a fellow professor made a very good point in a permanently ongoing discussion among teachers: can we learn from student evaluations? His point was that he could very easily create a course that would make the students happy and ensure good evaluations, but he didn't feel it would be an ethical act. Why? Because he would not act according to his standards of good teaching, but according to the format for the evaluations used at his University.

One of the discussants in that thread pointed out that high scores in evaluations depend on managing expectations. If my friend had made a standard course, according to the expectations of the students, the score would quite likely have been very high. A standard course makes students feel safe, it helps them deal with the insecurity of being in a learning process. For good reasons students abhor insecurity. They know they will be graded according to their performance, so they need to minimize the risk for bad grades. And so they have learned strategies for this, by learning how to score well on certain standard tests, how to learn well in certain environments, and how to study by using certain tools. When they are asked to use new tools, they react very negatively, and try to control the situation by managing our expectations. And their main tool for managing our expectations is the evaluation: if we are bad teachers, them failing will be our fault, not theirs.

I find that students who are stressed and afraid give much worse evaluations than students who feel reasonably secure. Also, students who have a wide range of experiences, and know that they can learn in very different environments, give much better evaluations when they have to relate to something new, than students who have only experienced a narrow range of teaching/learning styles. Whether or not the students are used to doing well, if they can expect to do well, or if they eventually do well doesn't matter, it's their experience of stress at the moment which influences the evaluation they give the teacher.

One term I taught the same course in three different classes. That gave me three different evaluations to read. One class was extremely negative in their evaluation, and several of the comments were pure character assassination of me and the other teachers (there were three of us). One class was critical, but not personal, and while they didn't all love the course, they didn't set out to trash the professors either. One class loved the course, loved the topics, and loved the teachers. All three classes had received the exact same lectures by the exact same teachers. The difference between them was in the dynamic in the room, how the students related to each other.

In the negative class, when we discussed something there would be two responses: The loud, main one was a demand to change things, mainly the teaching, in a way that they liked better. My experience from several years of trying out what would work didn't matter, their experience with what made them feel comfortable was more important. In the same class, several people who never spoke in class would later come up to us and say: "I love the way this is done. You are all great teachers. Don't change things just because of this. It works for us." The group obviously had an internal dynamic that was killing the openly spoken diversity. Some strong voices made the others feel afraid of speaking up, and when I did not submit to their pressure, it made them increasingly aggressive. Now I made a few errors with them - rather than saying "no" to the changes they wanted, I should have let them know that if I did what they wanted, I'd have to stop doing something else, which I knew they also wanted. I didn't have the resources to do both. Instead I just said "no, not going to happen." That was bad management of their demands, from my hand. After that, they didn't see the changes they wanted that we did make: they were all convinced I would never listen. Interestingly, the same group decided among themselves that a letter did not contain what to them was vital information, and afterwards they were not able to read that information when they read the letter. I had several students make the claim that they had not been told A, and then, when we read the letter together, I could show them where the letter said A. This kind of selective perception is interesting, and quite daunting when such a large group suffers from it. It does say something of the power of self-deception inherent in group dynamics, and the power of the negative thinking I was unable to break up.

In the fairly neutral class, the students were outspoken, vigorous and active, they took charge of the tasks they were given and approached them with a positive attitude, and worked hard at making things work. They tested out new things, asked questions, participated in discussions. When they came up after class, it was to talk about examples, ask questions, be to-the-point. They didn't think we were god's gift to teaching, but it didn't matter, they managed, they responded and they helped each other figure things out. The main characterestic of that class was that they were not afraid. They were not afraid of laughing, being laughed at, being sanctioned by each other. Their group dynamic was positive and generous, and they also addressed each other while in class, and not just us.

In the extremely positive class, they were all very quiet, but it was a contemplative silence. This group took it all in. Their questions were reasonable. They read not just the readings, but also the emails and the material describing the course. They smiled when they talked to us, and they approached us with questions about what they felt was unclear, rather than with demands to change things the way they wanted it.

So, how can I get a better evaluation, based on this experience? Obviously, the main errors were made with the negative class. I should have managed their demands better, given them a feeling of influence rather than saying "no". But both cases of "no" were based on my previous experience. The first was due to several years of positive feedback to how I presented the readings. If I was to do it the way this class wanted it, I'd have to give up the way I was doing it, a way I knew worked from several previous evaluations and conversations. The second was due to experience with student results. When I had previously done things the way these students wanted it, certain errors were a lot more prevalent than they ended up being. Sticking to my experience helped the class as a whole to maintain their focus on the correct task at the time, rather than mixing up the tasks, as bad timing had caused earlier.

I was in a situation where I knew that not giving in would make the students annoyed, but giving in would cause their results to deteriorate. At that point I chose to get a lower score on their evaluation of me, in order to ensure that they performed better in the long run.

And this is the reason why my friend on Facebook doesn't want to design the "perfect score" course. While the students are experts on what makes them feel they control their individual learning process, we, the teachers, know a thing or two about how to manage courses. Sadly, some, like me, also have a temper, and will in a stressed situation answer directly and honestly, rather than pause and consider how to make students feel good about what I am about to tell them. And this is actually a bad thing for a teacher, because students are genuinely nervous, with good reason. They are in a tense situation, and I need to address that fear as much as I address my own truth. I need to make them feel that I am on their side, and my choices are made to help them, not to make their lives more difficult.

Sadly, that doesn't always work. But all I can do is to try again. Redesigning the course to get a good score on the evaluation of me is not going to happen. Everything I do is intended to make sure the students get a good grade, and that, in my experience, they do. If it means they have to be angry with me to do it, well, so be it.

Piracy and academic publishing

We all need to publish. It's part of the job description: The knowledge we, the scholars, are gathering, needs to be distributed. We do quite a bit of that through teaching, but it's not enough. Society not just expects us to publish, it demands it.

This demand is institutionalised through several different structures. The different roads to degrees, jobs, titles and opportunities are all paved with journal articles, the stepping stones are monographies and the embellishments all come in edited anthologies. The Universities are rewarded by the publishing of their scholars, and so they reward us, and the publications are used for public relations and for media attention, which again covers another part of our job: that responsibility to participate in the public debate. Research and learning is ok, but we have to demonstrate that we have done so.

There are of course rules to publishing. This blog doesn't give me any points. I have had (and still have) great pleasure from it. It has brought me in touch with some incredible people over the years, and in a few cases have been immediately useful. But it circumvents the structures that puts value to academic publishing. It's not peer-reviewed, it has no editor, no isbn-number and no rejection rate. It is, in short, not an academic journal. Academic journals is where it all happens, where publishing becomes elitist and important, and, for everybody but the scholars, where the money is. Some of them get paid both coming and going: Universities pay to have the articles of their scholars published, and then they pay to display the same journals (and articles) in the libraries, physical and digital. For a small university the price of journals is through the roof: there's no way we can afford it all.

And so we end up pirating.

When I am in a library with full access, I download like crazy. You can spot the experienced scholars in a big research library or inside a flush university network by the suddenly intense look of a treasure hunter about to download two or three or five years of journal volumes, and on the backchannel of conferences there will be a quiet whisper among friends about who grabs what, while we're still connected. Now, this is a pretty legitimate "piracy" - after all, we are supposed to exchange knowledge. The piracy university libraries targets is the stealing of journals by stealing student emails and passwords, and then grabbing volumes of journals for resale. Considering how extremely expensive it can be to buy one article - Jstore often asks for 25$ or more for 10-12 pages - this quickly becomes very profitable.

I am mostly a law-abiding person, and I couldn't hack Jstor even if I really tried, but I do get a little bit annoyed with the practice of making us pay both coming and going. As it is, scholars and their universities handle all the costs of the initial production. We are talking about years of work in many cases, and decades of education and study. The scholars write the material up, often presenting it at a few conferences on the way, to get feedback. This means it's already been through one or two peer-review processes before a version reaches a journal. This means at least 5 people have been directly involved in creating and editing the materials, before it's even sent to the journal.

Scholarly journal editors often work for free, and the peer-reviewers certainly do. We read and give feedback because we know we are in a loop of favours returned. I read for you, you read for me, and in the end we all get peer-reviewed. The double-blind process stops the most immediate exchange of favours, but there are still levels at which we are mutually dependent. Anyway, the journal itself does more or less decent copy-editing (often lacking, something that skews academic publishing heavily in favour of native English speakers), some design, some legal work as to registering the materials with the relevant libraries or central archives, printing and online publishing, and a minimal amount of advertising. And the sales, of course, where the largest revenues come from libraries, libraries at the universities where the same scholars who wrote the articles have to buy their own material back.

In other discussions about piracy, content producers point to the poor creative souls who try to make a living by writing their souls out, only to be ripped off by the pirates. In academia, pirates just can't steal anything more from us. We already pay, often twice, for content we have produced and the universities and research institutions have financed. And yes, we get something back, but not from the publishers. Hence, I don't hesitate to mail an article to a colleague or a student. I dip into the stored secrets of my hard-disk, and hand articles out, mine and others.

I do feel guilty though, in a looking-over-my-shoulder kind of way, but not because I think I am doing something bad. More in a slightly paranoid fashion, as if I expect Big Brother to look over my shoulder, not in the reality show version, but the Orwellian Science Fiction of 1984.

And now, back to downloading articles.

Transformed Play

Tomorrow the conference The Transformative Museum starts up in Roskilde, and I will be there together with two colleagues from ITU, Bjarki Valtysson and Nanna Holdgaard. Their contributions can be found, among many other objects, at the conference paper site. Go read them, they have put a lot more effort into their work than I have managed to make time for this spring. My presence there started out of a desire to look at and write about everyday culture, under the working title "Mundane and digital" at the ITU, and I have been cooperating with Bjarki and Nanna, as well as Susana Tosca and Lisbeth Klastrup. The paper for this conference is an attempt to catch still half-formed ideas, and it shows. Still, it feels like a useful direction to go, if I want to combine my very varied fields, those of strategic communication, social media and role-play games. And here it is, for those with special interests: limited time only, the latest edition of Transformed Play, written for The Transformative Museum, Roskilde 2012.

Quiet time to do research

Denmark, like most countries, has an ongoing debate about how Universities are to get as much as possible out of the Universities. Due to very good economic support for students, many young people try to ride out the crisis by taking an education. That is not the worst way to go, and I am all for offering education as an alternative to unemployment.

However: the Universities expected to deliver this education get very little extra funding for it, no new positions and also a change of policy which rewards externally funded research, and takes teaching for granted (link in Danish, it's about the demand for more teaching in the Universities.) Now, professors are not stupid (if we were, that would indeed be a sad state of affairs), even if they sometimes are idealistic. And so, when the government says: get more research funding - well, we get more research funding, putting researchers on the case, while finding ways to keep the teaching rolling at the side.

This leads to teaching which is not research based, because all the professors are busy doing research for external funding, just like the government ordered! In order to fix this, the government insists that students need to have more classes, and these classes have to be with the professors who actually do research: research based teaching.

I am very much in favour of this, so I have no problems with the demand for more research based teaching. It's the one benefit Universities have over private research organisations: I get to meet students. Over the years, students have challenged me, pushed me and rewarded me in ways no other part of my job does. But they challenge me into doing research. Without research, which gives me something new and interesting to share and each, facing the students become a repetitive chore.

At the same time, research appears to be viewed as a time of "quiet", of "peace". "We need to give the staff quiet, calm times to do research," professor Sune Auken from the blog Forskningsfrihed says. The error in this is how it puts teaching, apparently a stressful, draining chore, up against research, a calm, peaceful, contemplative activity. In my experience, this is wrong. Of course, included in research is long hours of reading, days of checking for literature, months of analysing data, sometimes years of organising and writing up theories and findings. It may look peaceful. Still, if you're doing research worth the paper it's printed on, it's stressful, tense, fraught with doubt and built on meticulous, tedious fact-checking and proofing, in all possible ways.

Research isn't a time of calm or quiet, it's a time of immersion, introspection and tension, put up against a time of activity, communication and attention to others. In universities these two positions do not oppose each other, they play together and rejuvenate each other. The teacher needs long stretches of time protected from teaching in order to immerse herself into research. The researchers needs to come out of the immersion and communicate, be challenged and be pushed, in order to have something new to bring into her time of immersion.

Of these activities, teaching is the one that it is possible to hire others for though. Entry-level teaching can easily be done by somewhat more advanced teachers, that's not where researchers really have to engage. And so in order to meet the demands for research, universities look at the teaching hours, and move the researchers from the least demanding classes - which also happen to be the most populated. It's a matter of trying to work more efficient - as the government constantly insist the Universities should do. This way some students will get research-based teaching. Hiring non-teaching researchers to do the research while the professors teach means NO students will get research based teaching, as their professors will always be teaching, and never researching.

In order to create a good policy of teaching and research, the government needs to remember that it's the same people who have to do both. It's impossible to drain the university brains into externally funded research, and expect the same heads to have time to teach. And it's impossible to demand research based teaching, and not give the teachers time and opportunity to do research. There are only two answers to this: Fewer students, or more professors. Barring some groups in different organisations - there are always some groups that have more slack than they really ought to have, I have no idea where, but they exist, it's the law of organisations - that is the only way the government can have both more teaching for each student, and more research for each professor. I am sorry. There are no easy ways to split the professorial heads, and neither research based teaching, research itself happens without effort.

Feeling stupid lately?

I keep getting all these questions, as if people expect me to have been drinking from the fountain of knowledge, or eating the apples of wisdom as a regular diet. Of course, the University tap-water does come directly from mimisbrunnr, but what that has made me good at isn't giving answers, but asking questions. That is what Deep Thought and most scholars and researchers have in common, and it is why feeling stupid isn't always such a curse.

(Of course, being stupid is a curse, but those who are stupid mostly feel like they know everything, so the curse is on the rest of the world.)

When teaching works

One of the things about being a teacher is that it's pretty hard to know when teaching works. I tend to believe that the reason things work out is because I have such brilliant students. I am a pretty privileged teacher, I have a lot of brilliant students, they participate, they share, the listen and they learn. It's a wonderful place to be in.

Sometimes, however, I get this sneaking suspicion that I have influenced them. And I am not talking about the many, many students traumatised to the point of never being able to squeeze another ketchup bottle after advertising lectures with graphic images. No, you see, sometimes I do something with my teaching because I want students to get better at one particular skill, and they get better at it!

I have just come out of a marathon of paper grading, the curse of every professor. When the students go on vacation, we hole up with supplies, good reading light and a red pen, and get to it. This is a strange and exhausting process, as it demands intense focus for hour after hour. Luckily the students I grade these days submit computer written papers - when I also have to decode handwriting, this is headsplittingly hard. Anyway.

Going into a long period of grading is like zoning into a very special slice of life. It's just you, the reading list, the course list, the demands to the papers, and this large stack in front of you. It's easy to feel disconnected from reality and worry that you're being too nice or too harsh, or believe you are hallucinating. Sometimes we are. Grading large stacks takes endurance and practice to do well - at the end of day two, the words blur and you turn pages with only a vague idea of what is on them. Again and again you go back, read over, check the notes, worry you may have been in that empty trance state too long, and can't get it all back, but you have to press forwards to the end of the stack.

Then you call the other assessor. You communicate - carefully - your idea about how the grades are this year. Surprisingly often you and the other assessor agree! This is always a miraculous moment. There is something measurable, and you have both sensed and measured it in a manner that is at least comparable!

This year I got this sneaking feeling early; that this was a generally good stack. (Now, if you are a student, no, I am not giving you your grade until all the formalities are in place, and then you have to call the administration. The papers are in the mail between me, the censor and the student administration. Wait for it.) Not that they were all brilliant, some were brilliant, some bad, some failed. It's how it is. But they were on average much better than I have been used to! I thought this was odd, because it's been a rough semester. I had to bring in several external leturers (thanks folks, you did really good by my students!) and rely on the TAs a lot (and they were amazingly reliable). So I started to pay attention, to try to figure out what had happened.

One thing stood out: They papers were organised! They had a strong and clear structure, they had developed the research questions, they had all elements we ask for from a paper, and they used literature well and correctly. I almost wanted to cry. I have been drilling this into student heads all autumn, repeating the structure of a paper, the reference systems, the reason for both and the logic of scholarly argumentation. I have linked reference systems and written outlines, and then repeated it all one-on-one for those who came for supervision. I worried I had overdone it.

If I overdid it, at least the message got through. Even the weak papers were structured. In several cases this saved them from a total crash and burn, as the adherence to structure helped discipline the progress. And this I know is different from the terms before. This one thing was drilled more, and more systematically. The teaching made a difference.

So, now I have that working for me. Tomorrow I'll be at the library, considering what else I need to spend time on. I am thinking of how to tighten up the reading list and the progress of lectures, and couple it better with the exercizes. I can't promise that it will work as well, but I can guarantee that I will try.

Remember the milk 2

One of the things that my new to-do software does, is ask how much time I need to spend on the tasks I schedule. I try to put in realistic estimates. Until March 21st I already have work planned and booked estimated to take 53,12 working days. This is before teaching, planning, administration and meetings. All of this will take between 18 and 22 working days.  In this period there are 51 working days. Perhaps this is why I feel like I never get things done?

In a recent study of the time-use of faculty at universities and colleges in Norway, it turned out that 8 out of 10 of the active researchers who are also teaching, use their spare time for research. The day simply does not have enough hours to cover the three tasks: administration, teaching and research - sadly often emphasized in that order.

Over the next weeks I will have to use a lot of non-paid hours in order to cover all I have to do, if I want to teach well, maintain a network, publish and participate actively to the running of the University, and this is nothing special.

Thinking in your first language

This was supposed to be a post about cheating, and ghost-writing academic articles. However, Lisbeth connected it to educational language politics, and that started this. Read at your own peril - it's all about language and education from somebody who only knows half of it.


When ever I spend a lot of time away from Norway, my language suffers. Three - four weeks into a long stay in an English language country, and I forget all language. I am unable to formulate thoughts and ideas, numbed by the constant translation that takes place in my head, even if I do think in the language I speak. I am suffering a version of this here in Denmark, not as harsh, but more subtle and exhausting, as the constant translations in my head are concerned with subtle details. The only cure is to immerse myself, for a while, in Norwegian, to soak up the words, the music of the dialects, the structure of the sentences. I need to find the voice of my original thoughts in order to find a voice at all.

When I had this experience the first time, I never connected it to the language conflicts which gave birth to nynorsk - new Norwegian - or the political struggle for first language classes for non-Norwegian-speakers in school. But then I discovered a pattern: How not hearing or speaking my own language exhausts me, numbs me and slows me down. It doesn't replace one language with another, it takes away all languages, and I struggle in my search for words.

I guess you are now not surprised the to learn that no, I don't think there should be a lingua franca which all academics should use, from school-children up to professors. I also don't think we should force all students to write all their work in for instance English, just because it will make it easier for an American scholar to read their papers.

This doesn't mean I think we should stop communicating. I am truely grateful that I can talk to Italians, Portuguese, Koreans, Turkish, French and Finns without me having to learn 6 more languages. I'd love to, but I'd need some serious state grants to support the learning period. What I mean is that in order to be able to use our energy on thinking, language needs to take the back seat. We shouldn't insist that our students constantly struggle with words when what we want them to struggle with to be ideas, concepts, theories, hypothesis and arguments. It is enough, really. After all, if they, like me, were born to a social strata where higher education was a far away dream, not an everyday chore, then learning to be an academic is a whole new language in itself.

I would like to see two directions for language in education. First, I would like to see the language education in general strenghtened, and with it culture and literature. People who speak more than one language fluently are more empathic, think quicker, assimilate knowledge faster and in general appear to have more flexible minds. So that's a resounding yes for more emphasis on languages. However, I'd like education to contain more than two languages. We should learn to speak and regularly be encouraged to practice 3 or four languages. Why? Because if we can listen to how another person speaks in their own language, we will meet them as very different persons.

When we study, we should be allowed to learn in our own language, learn to have discourse within our own culture. With a base in the mother tongue, we should then challenge others, stretching ourselves in order to learn not only mastery of another academic tradition of discourse, but also respect for it, for the difficulties others need to overcome in order to communicate with us. It is hard to be a foreign student. It is hard to be an academic from a small country, forced to publish and cooperate internationally. But we should focus on the benefits to be had by learning not just one or two languages, so we can get by, but several: opening the world to us in a very different way.

If internationalisation is to get anywhere, we need to teach how to communicate. Even today, that means in more than one language - but it also means honouring our own while we do it.

Blogging the blogged Ph D about blogging

I just want to point you all towards Lilia Efimova's wonderful thesis Passion at work: blogging practices of knowledge workers, which was submitted last year. It is, of course, online, so: Enjoy!

Why I really should read CFPs more closely

I just finished an article I am now quite happy with and would love to see published, on player ethics and pleasure in games, and enthusiastically I looked up the CFP of the magazine I was asked to contribute to, in order to see where I should send it.

I have written 7000 words too much.

I can cut 2000, perhaps 3000 if I really go through and remove all redundancy (I probably should do anyway), but reducing the paper by more than half?

BTW: Cutting is going fine. Not even sarcastic about that! I may not make all 7000, but it's really useful to start killing darlings! It's an important part of the process, as well. What comes out at the other end will be the important material. At least I hope so!

Discworld and World of Warcraft

Did you know there was a MUD based on the Discworld, the universe created by Terry Pratchett? I knew, actually, although I had never visited it.

The one who did visit is Faltin Karlsen, a Ph D student, and currently a doctorate candidate, at the University of Oslo. He defends his thesis Emergent perspectives on multiplayer online games: A study of Discworld and World of Warcraft tomorrow. I know, because I am one of the opponents.

As such, I don't really want to say too much about this. I just wanted to say this: The test lecture is at Forskningsparken Friday 16th at 9.15. The defense starts 11.15. I am going to do my best to make it an interesting, worth-while event.

Henry Jenkins on why academics should blog

It only took him 6 years to come to that conclusion.