#i could do one of those 'give a 20min presentation with no prep time' things re: Thriller Bark Moment

[glassedplanets]

truly one of those zs top hits moments

[bentuhoekenobi]

In Transit

My mind is relocating. From the 7 years of being and educator and gamedev community volunteer in Auckland to something else.

This transition will take between 2 to 12 months. Likely around 8.

Because of this I am  going to migrate my few posts on my staff blog to here with some post reflection on them.

I’ve also removed mention of my PhD from this blog. Although I am still planning to do the project that was the core of my PhD, it will be different due to the loss of an academic context and the gaining of a commercial one. It is highly unlikely I will ever do PhD. Or re-enter academia.

SOMEHOW I COPE

Published by Ben Kenobi on August 29, 2018

In the interest of documenting my process and outcomes:

for my professional profile,

to promote my events and attract collaborators for research projects,

to slow myself down and do less,

to reflect critically on the outcomes of my efforts and potentially drop responsibilities,

to act as a way to collect all of my efforts in to a single place,

I'll start by identifying value in what I produce to help me select what remains - or becomes - a part of my workload and what doesn't.

As it affects the documentation process itself I'll also be developing workflows to COPE (create once publish everywhere) (Fox, 2017) and identify - and potentially create - value across all metrics: learning, research and leadership.

RISE

Published by Ben Kenobi on August 30, 2018

What a busy couple of days...

SEP AKLGAMEDEV MEETUP - GUARDIAN

I've organized the content and set up the event page for the next AKLgamedev Meetup.

This month coming is the first time since the idea first surfaced a couple of years ago, that the AKLgamedev Meetup is going to provide an 'Indie' Launch Party service. The idea is that the meetup trades a themed catered celebration for a developer presentation and, depending on the size of the studio, some sponsorship contributions.

See the announcement in Yammer event page for more details.

I'm having troubles with the room booking because I'm dead keen to use the WZ building in some new and interesting way.

PHD SUPERVISORS

I have two potential supervisors meetings early next week.

Ultimately I just want someone who can guide me through the PhD process. It doesn't really matter too much what they do. I prefer someone with a qualitative background.

I've been set a deadline of "the end of September" to have my PGR2 accepted.

I also met Boris Bacic who takes the COMP819 Ubiquitous Computing paper. I have asked if I could go along to a class to see what they do there and connect.

OFFICE 365

I've been quite thoroughly testing the new features of 365 - especially those available off-campus.

STRENGTHS + OPPORTUNITIES

We are now using a platform and front end that Microsoft are still willing to support and update. This means obviously good and potentiually easy-to-implement features are now available to us...

Some features seem to work well off campus now (like the scheduling assistant) and I'm hoping to identify interesting work habit opportunities that can make for better work/home habits and more productive off campus working.

Ultimately I am focusing on identifying how this new platform can help us breaking the culture silos at AUT. The financial silos are harder to break, so it's more a matter of either ignoring them or just "playing them" - making them work in ad-hoc ways with 'back-room deals'.

One of the more technical advantages is that it's easy to invite AUT staff and students to the platforms. This is a big deal as the first 'wall' is often enough to turn new adopters away.

Delve has helped me understand a bit more about how the university works and exactly who everyone is. It's still not as good as it could be and I suspect that a lot of the HR information is out of date (e.g. who reports to who).

CHALLENGES

Behaviour change. Even for the willing it's hard to adopt new skills, approaches and workflow cultures.

I've already noticed some features lacking from the suite. For example Trello is still far more advanced in many ways than Planner (although Planner does have some nice things that Trello doesn't). So far I haven't seen enough of a feature 'dip' to warrant not giving it a good test. I'll be testing Planner out, for example, on the Creative Tech Showcase + Awards (staff and students) and some Bachelor of Creative Tech Planning tasks (staff only).

LEGO SKETCHES (DISCONTINUED)

I've also started up my "Lego Sketches" exercise again as part of my PhD. The image above is an example and I'll explain more as I go.

TRANSMEDIA NARRATIVES PRESENTATION PREP

I've started working on a 20min presentation I'm giving at Pete Rive's CTEC704 Transmedia Narratives paper on Sep 19th. It's split in to two halves:

A brief intro to some of the more famous ARG's that have been born out of the commercial video game industry focusing mostly on Fletcher Dunn's presentation on Valve's Potato Sack ARG at Digital NatioNZ 2014.

A quick look at the Suburban Quilt: A street-game about bees. Although not a transmedia project, it was planned to be and it has some parallels with some of design tools and the fact that it needs to be facilitated.I'll then be working my way through the teams talking to them about their projects.

FOREST FOR THE TREES

Published by Ben Kenobi on September 04, 2018

I have two days of solid meetings lined up. So I doubt I'll get much work done.

I'm reminded of the race on Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy that realises that the only way to mask their telepathy was to talk more because beings that talk more usually think less.

...

PHD PROGRESS

I met with my first potential PhD supervisor. We both feel we'll be a good fit.

Next step is to meet with my first potential secondary (Wednesday) and then start on my PGR2 to help clarify to all involved parties what our expectations are. I'll blog my update but I need to narrow down some theoretical frameworks and methodology.

I've asked for some good PhD examples in my area.

SENIOR STUDIO HALF-TIME REFLECTION

During our Senior Studio meeting today we reflected on the crit format.

The students receive a slideshow template that has instructions for what kind of information is expected in what week.

This is a shared doc so all students and staff can see each others progress. I've never had a problem with students deleting or interfering with other team's presentations in the 4 years I've been doing it this way.

This is a formative assignment and feedback is written by all staff present in to the notes of the first slide of each group's presentation. This means that we need a minute or two between each group to clean up the feedback but at the end of the session the assessment task is done.

A roughly clustered continuous timeline is be made. Students are expected to engage with 1-2 before and 1-2 after their own. The idea is to increase engagement:

teams are clustered with projects relevant to their own,

there is often a lot of repetition in the verbal feedback so we only say the repeated stuff once every 3 presentations and constantly remind groups to engage during other crits to hear their feedback,

engaging with a crit is exhausting - the fewer that each student has to see the more they will engage themselves...

What was interesting to me was when one of the 'commercial-video-game' teams had made the terrible mistake of focusing on all the things in their game that didn't matter. Assets and animations and no mechanics. They have a fairly clear final visual aesthetic but were under the unjustified impression that they could design their mechanics in complete abstract. Maybe I wasn't as explicit about that at our last meeting.

The interesting part was that the team they were clustered with had done a pretty rigorous prototyping process making several 'grey-box' (Winters & Zhu, 2018) and they jumped in before I could comment and 'laid in to them'. It was good advice - so I let them go and endorsed them.

The first group, who were mostly younger (half were year two) got to see that the techniques were 'not magic', 'obvious' and something they would be expected to do in a year's time.

O365 REFLECTION - ATTRACTOR LANDSCAPES + BOUNDARIES

A staff member asked if they should consider using Planner in their team.

I'm an avid and relatively expert Trello user. I prefer Favro over Trello but it costs more. I have used both in other organizations and they save a tonne of time. No more agendas - just agenda tags. Minutes are much shorter as the action item info is translated straight to the task during the meeting. Although things like conflicts of interest still need to be reported.

The hardest thing about trying to use all of the good tools that the industry use at the university is that academics don't want to learn them. I'm hoping that the lack of a registration wall, and the fact that if managers start using OneDrive, staff will hopefully gradually start to use the associated apps. I'm not holding my breath. But I'm optimistic.

I've started using Planner with some of my more willing tutors, technicians and professional staff and it's working well:

meeting action items go straight to the buckets on the fly

static info is stored in the associated Sharepoint,

and chatting[1] is done through the associated Teams team.

Although Planner it's definitely a 'Trello-lite' I think the fact that it integrates with the other 365 platforms that have no "registration-wall" - and is part of a infrastructure eco-system that the staff can't really avoid - is why I'm optimistic the culture may gradually shift towards realising these tools may help us not just save time and work more effectively as individuals, but reject some of the silo-culture tendancies we all have.

The hard part is how attractor landscapes (Case, 2018) can be used to show that these tools can help us work across faculties.

Before the coalition of the willing can tackle that we must first prove that they can help us work across faculties.

I've been documenting the pros and cons through this blog. This weeks lists of downsides:

Planner

Teams

Shortcuts. Especially for searching/filtering. Which I do often.

Removing a deadline seems to be impossible and you have to delete the task and start again.

Feature request: Add students from a class to a Teams team (and subsequently a Planner plan, OneDrive folder and Outlook group).

[1] The 'chatting' I'm referring are things like: clarification and exploratory conversation. Not 'off-topic' banter.

MECHATRONICS LAB

We've made positive steps towards streamlining the Mechatronics Lab and equipment loan processes using Office 365 apps.

MONKEY SEE MONKEY DO

My almost 4yr old started kindy today. It was definitely cute. But what was interesting was seeing her observe what we'd all done - introduce ourselves - and then do her most confident and best interpretation. "Hello my name is Amelie. I live in Ruakaka. I go to the beach. And I have so many toys at my house to play with." None of that was scripted. It was all from her watching the adults introduce themselves. She deconstructed our introductions as far as:

Hello my names is [name].

I live in Ruakaka.

A few other things.

DEFENSE

Published by Ben Kenobi on May 30, 2019

I live in a culture that encourages overworking. You need to set your boundaries. Doing everything accomplishes nothing.

RESEARCH

Potential advisor.

Regular meetings. Some structure is necessary. Primary good of regular meetings is spitballing.

Potential Masters supervision with some overlaps.

Project Shadowmeld.

Post Secondary School Play

Macarthur foundation 2010

Gee 2007

identity, conversations, sharing, presence, relationships, reputation, and groups

PHD EXAMPLES

Attending an ethics approved playtest.

LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

Tasks workflow is finally ​almost there. One feature that Planner has that Trello doesn't. A sortable personal task list - removes the need for a separate app to handle you own personal tasks. You just need to create a separate "Personal To Do Planner Plan" for any tasks that you don't want to show up on another team's Plan.

OnePlaceMail looks like it might have some good uses. It's not a big priority for me right now (until more of the team start using Teams). What I'm really looking for is something that can convert an email in to a Planner task. I've Tried using Flow but it's very limited. It's hard, for example, to bring in links (like what happens in the example on that OnePlaceMail site) from a webmail. This guy got it working so the email body is trawled for links that get turned in to link attachments on the card. But it's a lengthy hack. The main thing is that I don't want to lose the initial information from the email. Judging by my forums search, there's not even an easy way to add the email as an attachment to the Planner task.

Case, N. (2018, May). An Interactive Introduction to Attractor Landscapes. Retrieved September 3, 2018, from https://ncase.me/attractors/

Fox, V. (2017, December 5). Five Benefits of Using the Create Once, Publish Everywhere (COPE) Method - Blackboard Blog. Retrieved August 30, 2018, from https://blog.blackboard.com/five-benefits-of-using-the-create-once-publish-everywhere-cope-method/​

Winters, G. J., & Zhu, J. (2018). Guiding Players through Structural Composition Patterns in 3D Adventure Games, 8.