Tag Archives: collaboration

Tying it all up

Posted on March 22, 2013 | 1 comment

We have covered a range of topics since January. From affordance, participate, collaborate, to create, aggregate, and finally to immerse. It’s hard to believe we are winding down. Despite my last post, I am optimistic about the future of social media for information professionals. I recently watched a 2010 TED Talk by game designer Jane McGonigal about how gaming can make the world a better place. I felt that her talk touched on a lot of ideas we have covered in LIBR 559m and helped me draw more connections between them.

So how do immersive worlds facilitate collaboration for information professionals? I think this question can be answered with four points McGonigal highlighted in her talk:

  1. Urgent optimism (gamers develop extreme self motivation, they have a need to act immediately)
  2. Social fabric (gamers are virtuoso’s at weaving a tight social fabric. We like people better after playing a game with them, because we build trust. Through game-play we build strong social ties)
  3. Blissful productivity (we are happier working hard if given the right work, which is why some World of Warcraft gamers dedicate an average of 22 hours a week to games)
  4. Epic meaning (gamers love being attached to awe-inspiring missions. The World of Warcraft wiki is the second largest wiki in the world. “They are bulding and epic knowledge resource about the World of Warcraft”.)

McGonigal suggests gamers can achieve more in virtual worlds than in real life because they receive better feed back in games than they do in real life. To access these skills we need to start making the real world more like a game. Sound familiar? It should: gamification.

For me this video ties it all (most of it) together: as gamers we are participating, collaborating, creating, all the while immersed in a virtual world. We can take the skills and lessons learnt through these experiences and translate them to our real world environment.

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Critical Making

Posted on February 6, 2013 | 1 comment

I am currently taking INF 1240H Research Methods at the University of Toronto iSchool. One of the components of the course is a group research (b)log. In our groups we discuss the weekly readings and topics as well as hash out our individual research projects. Emphasis is also put on engaging with each other through comments or new blog posts. It is a similar approach to the Facebook group as a collaborative research log we saw in Module III: Collaboration.

While this is collaboration 2.0 in action, I actually wanted to talk about something else from INF 1240: critical making. Last week we were introduced to the idea of critical making. Ratto (2011) describes critical making as “a mode of materially productive engagement that is intended to fill the gap between creative physical and conceptual exploration” (p. 252).

There are three stages to critical making. The first involves reviewing relevant literature and compiling useful concepts and theories. The second stage involves groups of scholars, students, stakeholders jointly designing/creating an artifact. And the third stage is an iterative process that involves reconfiguring the artifact, conversation, and reflection (Ratto, 2011). The emphasis of critical making is not on the artifact created, but rather the process—the value lies in shared construction, joint conversation, and reflection (Ratto, 2011).

Through collaboration in this form, individuals from the social sciences and computer sciences can reduce problematic disciplinary divides. The process—construction, conversation, and reflection—can highlight disciplinary differences and as well as ways to overcome these differences. If you listen to the interview with Ratto below, he suggests that critical making can create an understanding and allow participants to see beyond the norms we as society associate with technology. It’s about transforming the personal and collective imagination.

While critical making may not fall into the category of collaboration 2.0, I do think it is worth discussing in relation to this module. The idea of the shared making experience and the importance of this process is very interesting. I think in many ways that is what makes collaboration in general useful. It is the process of collaborating—what we learn from each other through making, conversing, and reflecting—that has such great value. Of course, in situations outside of critical making the final product is important in and of itself.

Listen to Matt Ratto talk to Nora Young on the CBC’s Spark about critical making. Note: this interview was originally embedded on this blog, but it was a victim of autoplay.

Watch a short video of critical making as it happens:

Thing Tank: Workshop 13 – Energy Monitoring and Data Visualization from Ryan Varga on Vimeo.

Ratto, M. (2011). Critical Making: Conceptual and Material Studies in Technology and Social Life. The Information Society: An International Journal. 27(4), 252-260.

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