John Kirriemuir visited us today and presented interesting lecture on how libraries and information studies are starting to tangle up together with games and game studies — really interesting stuff for us in University of Tampere who are currently looking into more collaboration between these two fields. The full presentation should be available in here: http://www.slideshare.net/silversprite/digital-games-in-libraries-and-information-science
Tomorrow I will start a new lecture course series, ‘Theories and Interpretation of Interactive Media (P2)’ in WordPress.com: http://newmediatheory.wordpress.com/ . I will be making use of Slideshare service in publishing my PPT lecture notes, further media still under consideration.
This autumn has been full of news about the Finnish labour market turmoils — particularly nurses have protested that they were promised a lot during the parliamentary election campaigns, and then let down in the actual salary solutions. This morning there was this piece of news that also university professionals and other government/civil servants have now the results from the salary negotiations: 11,5 % by the end of 2010. I suppose the solution is pretty much in line with what has been going on in the other negotiations, but the entire salary negotiations roulette leaves bad taste in your mouth. The economists and lawyers disagree with the fundamentals on what the current and future Finnish economy can handle in terms of salary rise, politicians change their views on what they have promised and what not — and the “competitive”, “innovation based” knowledge society refuses to fix the unmotivating and deep gap in the basic funding of Finnish universities. See: YLE uutiset / Kotimaa.
Summer is already here, but before galloping off to the freedom, there is still much to do. And my schedule for next autumn is already full. Here is a quick rundown of upcoming seminar and conference engagements:
These are subject to change, of course, but not much, or so I hope at this point. Working in this field certainly keeps you busy, but it is also exiting to be constantly faced with new and surprising challenges, create new connections and innovations, so you end up being tired in the evening, but also feeling to have achieved something meaningful. Only in a truly rewarding field it would make sense to keep on traveling around and working in this way.
Graveyard walk
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.
The Kalevankangas Cemetery is a beautiful and peaceful place in Tampere, but it is also filled with sad and tragic memories of war. Timo Malmi (an author and expert of local history) talks here at the grave of Lauri Viita, one of the most famous Finnish modernists, whose work was also rooted in worker-class culture and folk traditions. A quiet moment was also spent in front of the mass graves from the 1918 civil war. The walk was organised by the local professors’ association.
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.
This should have gone out some time ago already, but there have been some delays. But: the Mobile Content Communities (MC2) project has finally got its final report book published. This is probably not yet announced anywhere officially, but I got my copies directly from Marko Turpeinen in the FENIX results seminar, so I know these books exists. Thus, I heartily recommend getting your hands on Mobile Content Communities (Eds. Marko Turpeinen and Kai Kuikkaniemi), HIIT Publications 2007-1 (ISBN 978-951-22-8757-4). It contains some key article publications from our games research lab as well, including:
And there are many more interesting articles in there as well that deal with community-centric design issues, user-created augmented reality games, mobile communications and such case studies as Habbo Hotel users, Neverwinter Nights, live action role-playing (larp) and geocaching. This publication is a summary of several years worth of work, build by an international team of 21 people working together — hope it gets its readers even if it is part of an academic publication series rather than product of some major commercial publisher.
Update: this is now available also as a PDF for download: http://pong.hiit.fi/dcc/papers/mc2_final_report.pdf
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
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:
The Inauguration Day, March 9th, 2007
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.
Friday was when the inauguration lecture to the new professorship took place, followed by a great party in the Hypermedia Laboratory. Million thanks for everyone involved, this was a really memorable day. Photo shows some of the gifts (the other one is an axe, something every professor needs, but who recognizes the other, round object? 😉
More photos in: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fransmayra/tags/inauguration/
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