There is a really interesting two days conference on fan studies in our university, taking place today and tomorrow. It is an open event, so please be welcome. Matt Hills from Gardiff just presented the opening keynote, giving a comprehensive overview on the various narratives that have been offered about fan studies and about its role and development. See: the programme in Finnish.
Category: moblog
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Hermanni
Hermanni
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.
This is Hermanni, a living cake that has been in our care for the last 10 days. My version was in the end spiced with banana chunks, hazelnuts and hazelnut chocolate pieces. Tasty! But I must admit that the principles behind this kind of chain letter cakes escape me — the dough is distributed from friend to friend, fed with sugars and then divided and fed again. And eventually you can put it in the oven and bake it. And eat. Supposedly it gets its yeast directly from the air or something?
Stiga Collector
Stiga Collector
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.
One practical thing to consider in gardens is the lawn. Our aim is to have less grass and more “woodlands” or natural look in our yard, but still there will be more than enough grass. This morning was spent setting up Stiga Collector 46 S Combi, which we got after a lengthy comparison process. This is a compromise, of course. The professional, solid-body lawnmowers can cost 1000 euros or more. This one is not as sturdy in its construction and materials, but it has the right feature set: 3-in-1 cutting, collecting and bio-slicing functionalities. And since Stiga is coming from Sweden, you can trust Finnish stores providing spare parts and service for it also in the future.
Pinsiön taimisto
Pinsiön taimisto
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.Another extremely busy week behind, and time to relax by doing something physical. This weekend we traveled to Pinsiön Taimisto, a nice plant and garden sale c. 12 km from Tampere. They have rather good collections of trees, bushes, various flowers and also garden path stones, gravel and sand. This is important as we move towards the next stage in the garden project (albeit planting all these trees requires some serious shovel-work, and we have much to do in the house project, too). Keeps you busy, and also better fit, I hope. Gardening is a nice counterpart to the digital life.
Winter Assembly & DiGRA Finland meeting
Winter Assembly & DiGRA Finland meeting
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.
Aki Järvinen, Elina Koivisto, Tony Manninen and Olli Sotamaa are here explaining how they became games researchers. This is part of Winter Assembly, a 1000+ gamer event in Tampere taking place this weekend; Neogames centre and DiGRA Finland co-organise a games researcher meeting with kind support by Assembly organisers. Lots of interesting talks, huge numbers of games sessions and a good example of fruitful cooperation among all sorts of parties.
Plant paradise
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.
New owners of a garden, we are eagerly visiting greenhouses — this week in Honkasen Puutarha in Kangasala, which proved to be a real plant paradise.
Transit
Transit
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.
Location: Stockholm airport. I have written earlier about airports as particular kind of transitional spaces, comparing them to Limbo from Dante’s Inferno, among other things. This has been a busy day, starting with short talk about games and virtual worlds as “mafufactured realities” in a professional seminar in technical documentation (wonder how much the audience really got out of my talk, though?) Then I was commenting on Olli Sotamaa’s PhD thesis chapter in a graduate seminar in Media Culture. After that, busily to the airport, and happy to find that the SAS strike had not affected my connections, I am now on the road to Malmö in Sweden. We are having the kick-off meeting with some Nordic partners about a new games research project, titled Mobile Learning Environments (MLE). The use of games in learning is an interesting field, of course, even if I wonder how long it will take to really have the constructivistic spirit and emphasis on creative problem-solving that games excel in to take over a typical institution of formal learning — not to speak about things like using games to learn about games cultures, games literacy and games design, that they would be most immediatelly suitable for. My main concern currently is that structurally MLE is a typical contemporary response to the demands that this much-touted increased competition and international collaboration is bringing us: a large international and interdisciplinary consortium with a very moderate research grant and ambitious goals that quickly turn into the reality of tiny fragmented resources that are not enough to hire a full-time person (or not even a half-time one, in this case!) — and then there is the real threat that organising inter-partner communication and the administration will end up eating all resources the funding body (NICe) has granted us. Sad. Lets hope we can find ways to join this kind of interesting research extensions of our pervasive gaming work with some other initiatives to pool resources
FENIX seminar on Interactive Computing
FENIX seminar on Interactive Computing
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.
This is Wanha Satama, a seaside conference centre in Helsinki where the results seminar of FEXIX takes place today. FENIX was a four-year technology research programme that funded also some important research projects of ours that looked into games and gameplay experiences, among other things. Some of its results are available now; more about those later.
The Future of Finnish Universities
The Future of Finnish Universities
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.
Today the researchers and professors are gathering to annual seminar and meetings in m/s Viking Mariella (soon sailing to Stockholm — these boat seminars are a local tradition). Sakari Karjalainen (a high official from the Ministry of Education) is in this picture talking about the next 10 years developments in the Finnish universities. There are many challenges, related to globalization, international competition, national demographics (population getting old really quickly now, and immigration staying low) and internal challenges in universities (the part that resists all change, and the lack of shared vision about the direction of change). Also Esko Aho from Sitra spoke about the similar challenges but rather than calling for focus into one huge “national Top University” that would compete with the MIT and Harvard in their own game, he pointed out that even those “tops” are rather small in size. And that the attitude is the most important key factor — and Aho claimed that having more competition is the key towards that “right spirit” of enthusiasm and energy. But I’d rather point out that you need to have something to compete for, and that we need the essential basic resources so that we can actually remain enthusiastic and energetic about our research (working on five research plans and jumping in six project meetings a day, without any time to dedicate to your actual research can really wear you down). Competition can mean many things, and currently the basic financial and organisational structure of academic research and education is going the wrong way! Chancellor Kari Raivio from the University of Helsinki was touting the “top” quality of his own university, but also pointed out that competition needs to be based on quality (read: national comparative evaluations of universities with meters like citation index and number of publications) and that the universities need to specialize into different areas, having more professors in lesser number of fields. Something like this will probably happen in the future, but there needs also be some strategic vision guiding the focusing of resources, taking into consideration also future developments and emerging fields.
Gamers in Society seminar
Gamers in Society seminar
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.
Olli Sotamaa and T.L. Taylor here at the front row of Gamers in Society — Play in Culture seminar which takes place in Tampere today and tomorrow. Really interesting papers and discussions — one could almost hear the ideas clicking together as the dialog continued. — Edit: another photo, from T.Wright, taken in Café Europe in the post-seminar get-together:
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