Why journals can either kill or refine research.

In popular culture, cutting edge research often makes its way into social discourse the same way as Justin Bieber’s latest gaffe or a delusional conspiracy theory might. News media continues to reduce story details to 7-second sound bites, and 90 second reports. Twitter reduces a thought to 140 characters. Today, I go to revise a research journal article to manuscript guidelines, and am limited to 3000 words.

striatic / Foter.com / CC BY

3000 words to convey science has its ups and downs. I must think carefully about what to cut out. I must consider carefully whether to use a table or a chart. APA format takes me only so far, before I begin to question whether I am giving a complete picture of what I am trying to do. If you read my results without the implications, I’m heaping negativity on the video game industry. What will the news cycle do to my research? Journals can either kill or refine research.

The brief length of your average journal article, and the academic systems that seem to support journal publications over book writing and other research dissemination practices, seem to indicate an academic sector still doomed to the reductionism we’ve been decrying for decades.

On the other hand, a limited amount of space corresponds to the ability of people in the field to digest information in a useful way. It forces me to think about how I can represent something graphically instead. It forces me to prioritize what is most important. It causes me to think carefully about what I want people to take from the research. What will this look like when someone tries to reduce it to a 140 character tweet?

I hope it will look refined. Research is like a child that I want to raise with all the right values, but when I send it out into the world, it will reflect on me- I hope it behaves itself and gives birth to more good research!

Stripping professor at Columbia U: With the credibility of higher education under attack, this happened.

So, this happened. Columbia University faculty member Emlyn Hughes stripped amongst other academic freedoms which he put to the test, in what may appear to be the most arbitrary introduction to Quantum Physics ever.

<p><a href=”http://vimeo.com/59932634″>FroSci Gone Wild</a> from <a href=”http://vimeo.com/user4615152″>Bwog</a&gt; on <a href=”http://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a&gt;.</p>

I have mixed feelings about this. If academic expression comes under fire, no matter how heinous, a precedent will be in place for control by overbearing market forces, and government control from left and right wings. On the other hand, academia’s outcomes are in question right now. Students who climb the entire ladder to a PhD are not likely to find a something at the top to justify the climb, at least in the form of an academic job. Alternative careers, alternative means of education, and alternative delivery systems are clamoring for center stage. And this guy strips.

A few weeks ago, students caught cheating at Harvard were “forced to withdraw” for “between two and four terms”, in a course taught by a professor who allegedly “gave out 120 A’s last year and [will] give out 120 more.” Academic websites are abuzz with grade inflation scandals and stories of students who expect to purchase perfect marks by virtue of tuition paid.

And this guy strips.

I make a lot of mistakes when I teach. I enjoy discovering my blind-spots and learning from my mistakes. I hope I never add to a growing body of evidence that higher education is making itself irrelevant. So I will keep my clothes on- while this guy strips.

When the state tells you what field to go into

Senate Bill 14 and why I care professionally

The North Carolina legislative process recently pinched out a frighteningly brief bill (law) that appears to bypass that whole pesky notion of vocational and career theory, and instead herds large groups of students into career and technical education. I think skilled labor has high value, both as an economic resource and for personal development. It’s also such a broad career category that spans multiple domains for aptitude and interest. However, the data surrounding this law’s reasoning has me feeling intellectually nervous.

Jonathan Pobre / Foter.com / CC BY-NC

A huge part of my profession as a rehabilitation counselor, is vocation. One of the more typecast roles for rehab professionals is to assist persons with disabilities in choosing, obtaining, and retaining suitable employment. These disabilities can be physical, mental health, developmental, or relate to substance abuse. They must be chronic enough to pose a barrier to employment in a significant manner. I specialize in addictions, but my passion for teaching as a ‘newbie’ in academia has made me a horizontal generalist, meaning I branch out into a lot of areas of interest instead of becoming a greater expert in one. That will hopefully change when (if?) I can land in a tenure-track research spot. Most Ph.D.s don’t make it into academia, and some of those don’t last- but it’s something I want to try, because I believe I have a lot to offer in terms of innovation. I believe technology is already changing the landscape, drastically, for people with varying abilities in work and leisure- for the better. Anyway, I teach a bit about career theory, as well as counseling theory, and also about job placement and occupational analysis.

Anyway, I live in the state of North Carolina. I become engaged in politics when I see its pertinence toward people with disabilities, or education, in particular. Right now, there’s a lot of buzz about labor and social services. The latest bill, “Increase Access to Career & Technical Education” includes provisions to lessen standards for career and technical teachers seeking licensure. It doesn’t exactly explain how, it just mandates it. It goes on to designate high school diplomas with specifics on what types of work a high school graduate is prepared to do. That scared me a little bit, because of all the data that shows career exploration goes on well into our 20s and 30s. Donald Super would say it’s lifelong, in fact, with mini cycles changing our vocational directions as we proceed. Another aspect of the bill, and probably my least favorite, directs our education system to direct students away from college and into career and technical fields. I want to highlight these latter two areas, diploma branding and guiding students into education sectors based on the supposed current job market, from my standpoint.

Diploma Branding

The language of the bill with regard to diploma branding is as follows:

The State Board of Education shall make high school diploma endorsements, as provided under this section, available to students graduating high school beginning with the 2014-2015 school year. [...] The State Board of Education shall submit the report on the impact of awarding the high school endorsements on high school graduation, college acceptance and remediation, and post-high school employment rates by September 1, 2016, and annually thereafter.

Governor McCrory recently admonished his citizenry against liberal arts degrees, many of which actually have some of the highest bachelor level employment rates- even when stacked up against some of the science, technology, engineering, and math degrees. This bill goes one step further, urging high schools to remind colleges that students may require “remediation”, and its success is thereby measured through students’ alternative post secondary education choices: career and technical schools. What are some examples of remediation in college? Well this is where my profession comes into the picture. Disabilities often result in college remediation.

Extra Ketchup / Foter.com / CC BY-SA

• A specific learning disability (e.g.: math, reading, or written language) means, broadly put, that a student’s intellectual range of functioning is average or higher, while there is impairment in one category. This phenomenon often means you’ll have someone who excels in “everything but math”, or “anything except writing”. Similar categorical skill deficits sometimes result from an autism spectrum, or dyslexia, or even a time-limited developmental delay when basic skills were first being learned. I know a number of engineers and scientists who had dyslexia. They “mathed” me under the table, but they would require writing remediation in college. This law would seek to dissuade them from trying. Imagine the difference in quality of life between a full time software engineer and a full time computer network installer- the difference being that one of them got remediation in college to help with written content.
• Other hiccups from our schools often result in the need to remediate for bad teaching or guidance, an acute situation for health, or a curriculum continuum mismatch  after a move or school change. Sometimes a student doesn’t receive appropriate services based on a disability, which results in missing material that is pertinent to college prerequisites. An example of this may be a student who misses a great deal of classroom content due to a sickness or physical condition, but has the aptitudes for college. Such a student may conceivably have aced a GED, maybe collects the credits to graduate from high school- but could not complete the foreign language requirements many colleges have. When such a student is admitted to college, he or she receives remediation in foreign language. This law seems to dissuade colleges from accepting such students based on a prescriptive diploma endorsement.

I believe that we need a clever workforce, and that any notion “career and technical trades are for the less bright” is absolutely wrong. Completely, ridiculously wrong. The last thing I would want to do is to make the presumption that intellect should be the determinant for college. Unfortunately, this law may do that too- by narrowing the gates to [generally] higher income, and employment. This is done in part by using such a narrow, uniform measure as a designation on a diploma. Career aptitude measurement is a multifaceted process- it cannot be done with a diploma brand. But let me repeat that college grads have higher income and lower unemployment.

Guiding Students into Career Sectors

WHAT?! Did I just say that college grads have higher income and lower unemployment? Yes, but there is a lot of variance in the data. For that reason, everyone has an anecdote about so-and-so who lives in his or her parent’s basement with a degree in Anthropology. There is this almost derogatory notion that the workforce is saturated with liberal arts folks who aren’t prepared for specific jobs. However, I have two reasons to take issue with this line of thinking. First, Liberal Arts is a valuable degree for a wider variety of jobs; and second, the data says going to college [generally] makes sense, if you possibly can.

• Liberal Arts is a valuable degree.  The beauty of career theory is that it looks, depending on the theory itself, to match a person with the appropriate calling. I hear government officials talking about “jobs“, but I would argue that if you prepare someone for a job that is dependent upon a free market (especially a turbulent market like today), when the job is gone, the education has been wasted. On the other hand, if you prepare someone with the abstract skills to apply one’s self to a myriad of different workplaces, that person will thrive in various environments. The idea of a person / environment match is much different from traditional ideas of workforce. If we simply assigned people to jobs based on the jobs’ needs, we’d have unhappy people expelling very little discretionary effort and they’d turn out complete crap results. They won’t enjoy their work and they’ll use sick days. People with disabilities are no different when it comes to “work that sucks” – it’s not that some of these are lower jobs. It’s that they may not be in the right career, when you limit their options. We shouldn’t be planning the education of a generation based on employer workforce whims. They’ll waste a lot of money in the end, and they’ll leave as quickly as they arrive. It’s a nightmare. I’ll spare the Godwin’s law material about fascism and assigning jobs based on the needs of the state, because it’s ideology. Instead, I’ll use some data.
• The Data shows benefits for going to college. Here’s a raw version for unemployment and earning potential. A simple read of Senate Bill 14 would appear to mean that the state is directing that a greater proportion of the workforce be coerced into a job sector with lower earning potential and higher rates of unemployment:

The State Board of Education, in collaboration with the State Board of Community Colleges, shall develop strategies to increase the number of high school students engaging in career and technical education, especially in the areas of engineering and industrial technologies, and in other occupations with high numbers of employment opportunities.

This is being done for the needs of the state, which are being emphasized over and above individual career development and vocational choice. This is every bit as important (and maybe even moreso) for someone with a disability, where increasing a person’s specific vocational preparation levels can reduce or remove barriers to entire professions and millions in potential lifetime income.

Concluding My Thoughts

Can you imagine having your diploma stamped a certain way, by your state government, because that’s what private employers want it to say? I think that’s wrong. But let’s say we’re just looking at this from a state government  supply-and-demand point of view. Here are some summary reasons why I think mandating young high school graduates to undertake a specific job sector is wrong for the state:

• We’re pushing a new generation into an over-saturated job market. In another legislative action, North Carolina has ceremoniously and cheerfully cut unemployment benefits in their scope, as well as in their length. This means in July of 2013, 170,000 unemployed people in North Carolina will be, according to the logic of the bill, looking harder for work than they were before. They’ll be more interested in “doing whatever possible” to meet basic needs with low wage jobs. This will apparently bring employers to our state, knowing that this labor is cheap and desperate- but will 170,000 new jobs arrive in North Carolina over 6 months? The other presumption is that there are current jobs which the chronically unemployed just should have settled for, but their benefits were too high. Keep in mind that graduating seniors will enter that very same job market. There are simply more jobs available to educated people than to lesser educated people, as illustrated here.

Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the BPL / Foter.com / CC BY

• We are solving an over-saturated job market by lowering our citizens’ education, when we could instead attract higher educated jobs and employers. Education level is associated in the developed world with industrial advances, higher standards of living, and reduced crime and criminal recidivism. Be sure to click on those links.

Finally, because there is a culture in this state and nation to engage in testimony-based political discourse, I add the following: My bachelor’s degree is a liberal arts degree, and I have never been unemployed. I have always chosen my career and professional moves, and always will. I cannot imagine where I’d be if my high school guidance counselor had coerced me into something technical- or mandated it as such by stamping it on my diploma.

Broken Hearts and Examples of Hope in “Azeroth” and Beyond

One of the many aspects of gaming is community- and with that comes social despair and also social redemption. I pretty much always hold to a principle of “good-karma gaming”, or “enlightened gaming” whereby players recognize their roles as not only competitors, but as human beings who intentionally play among other human beings as opposed to on a console with no connection. Enlightened gaming, from the way my compatriots and I have always understood it, has been exemplified through an openness to fairness, kindness, and helpfulness. This means that competition isn’t rooted in making someone feel bad, but rather in skill and chance. Do I enjoy “pwning”? Yeah. That is skill and competition.

It doesn’t mean someone has to feel bad, get called names, get ostracized.

I’ve been part of communities in counter-strike (1.5 and on), Diablo II and III, and World of Warcraft, which held such a principle in common. In some of these games, it took a while for me to find like-minded people. I feel there are a number of continuums through which we can understand gamers’ levels of positive and negative regard.

Reasons to like you

I am cognizant, appreciative, and in awe of the work of Nick Yee with regard to gamer behavior and motivations, which I don’t want to reproduce here, nor conceptually replace. He is ridiculously thorough, an absolute genius, and a mentoring presence as I grow into the researcher I want to be. Rather, I am reflecting on my experience of a selected social order within massively multiplayer online gaming and how it relates to player-to-player relations, positive and negative.

The first is how players relate to one another in relation to competition. The simplest way to look at this is through the lens of “newb vs. pro” and to see those two extremes as treated synonymous with “dis likable vs. likable”. Quite simply,

if you suck, we hate… but we’ll love, if you dominate.

I’ve experienced a number of guilds, clans, groups, communities, and anecdotal situations in which this simple formula dictated players’ regards for one another. A friend of mine pointed out a fascinating and all-too-common story of a misfit gamer whose ostracism seems to have resulted only from a lack of skill and diminished capacity to take minimal helpful cues. In this case, his entire realm (one of hundreds of servers each of which house thousands of players) has blackballed him from raiding and guild membership. That takes place on a South Korean server, where apparently the spirit of hardcore play appears significantly more rigorous than the spread of hardcore through casual through “just for laughs” guilds that cover the landscape of western servers in Europe and North America. But I’ve seen similar dispositions toward players on a guild and community level, who simply weren’t so skilled. It’s easy to feel empathy here, isn’t it? Not necessarily- it depends on who you’re talking to in these games. My World of Warcraft Guild has a policy- we won’t kick anyone from a raid (not guildie, not pug) unless their conduct is rude. We’ll wipe all night while we teach and learn with one another. So we don’t like to measure a person as far as his or her skill. … but what about trolls?

Troll me once, shame on you. Troll me twice, shame on you also?

A few years ago, I encountered my first friendship with a repentant “trade chat troll”. For non-WOW players, trade chat is a chat channel with perhaps the most access to communicate across an entire realm (server)- accessible to the gamers in major cities in-game. The latest game expansion has, to be sure, dispersed the player population into the new world a bit, but trade chat still has its role as a main drag for communication. A troll is best understood as someone who draws negative emotion and reactions from the masses through what he or she says in chat. This isn’t simply someone getting a laugh- rather the goal is a negative attention goal. I like to make this distinction because there are many positive forces in gaming who rally the troops, cheer people up, or counter the trolls’ negativity with positivity. Those aren’t trolls- they’re anti-trolls! Anyway, I met a troll who wanted to change his ways, one day. This was a super-troll, someone who could simply say “hello” in trade chat and his preceding reputation would extract negative reactions based on past history.

This guy could not get into a raid, and only the loosest (and, unfortunately, disorganized, unfriendly, boring, dead) guilds would accept him. The guild of which I was (and still am) a member, decided to take a chance on him, as a few of us had interacted in player-vs-environment and player-vs-player content with him before, and found him to be skilled and friendly. We offered to help him reform. It was difficult, but he reformed. He also grew annoyed with having to reign himself in, and eventually found our guild to be a bad match and moved on. What he didn’t do was wreck us, or bring drama. We don’t do drama. Since that time, we’ve taken in at least one other troll who wanted to reform, with positive results. It feels good to be a community for people who want to participate in community. We had expectations, however- that he not misrepresent us by going back to his old habits while wearing our tag. We’ve asked people to leave our guild if they were abusive to others, communicated in homophobic or racist ways, or if they felt like their competitive edge required them to be rude or condescending to others- either inside or outside the guild. We enjoy being a community whose purpose is not only in-game friendship and gaming content, but also in helping to form the greater gaming community by example. We’re a casual guild, but we’re hardcore about community.

What’s it all mean?

I’m one of those people who believes that gaming has a great deal to teach us. My most high profile research thus far has been to collect what is apparently the largest sample thus far, of MMORPG gamers (players of WOW) for the purpose of addiction screening; but it’s far from my quest to add more hasty presumptive science to the literature against technology, internet and gaming… far from it. I can’t really go into it right now, but the thing we need to do is to harness the power that people, addicted or not, experience from gaming. Here are the assumptions and

• There’s a soul behind every monitor. MMOs are a training ground for empathy. (among other things)
• Mistakes are par for the course. MMOs are an opportunity to learn how to learn.
• Organizations are everywhere. MMOs are a place where community experiences can inform organizational behavior.

With this blog post, I’ve been purposefully vague with regard to some of my favorite (and more defined) areas for gaming discourse, like gamification, addiction (I think it exists, but it’s with the person, not the game), and public policy. It’s my intention to explore experiences and not to write journal articles here, because I’m writing journal articles to hopefully submit elsewhere, as part of my career. However, I’d appreciate getting to know folks with similar scholarly interests, as I try to take part in conversations on a more academic level as well. Thank you so much for reading, and please share with others. If you don’t like what I have to say, well- that’s ok too. GG!

Necessity is the mother of invention. Optimism is its father.

The sheer optimism that I feel when I view videos like this one, from Open Source Ecology renews my faith when I’m feeling owned by huge industries like media, pharmaceuticals, petroleum, and biochemical dynasties. I believe that industries’ choke-hold on the economy and on my freedom to choose (by controlling what choices are placed before me) can be stifling at times. Imagine a world where you have to choose between just a handful of brands, and they are all owned by the same four corporations? (In some cases, that’s actually totally true right now.) Anyway, back to optimism. Innovations like the open source ecology ideas from this video are simply spectacular to me. You start to hear words like “communal” and “we already have the resources” and maybe you start worrying (or hoping, depending on your mindset) that we’re talking about communism, or socialism, but the video explains we’re talking about localism. How beautiful is this?! … I wonder what a left-wing reaction vs a right-wing reaction to this would be. I wonder what the hippy-types, who work the grocery coop where I buy the greatest milk in the world, think of such things. Seeing things like this makes me want to change careers nightly. 

<p><a href=”http://vimeo.com/58165438″>Open Source Philosophy.</a> from <a href=”http://vimeo.com/opensourceecology”>Open Source Ecology</a> on <a href=”http://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a&gt;.</p>

Virtual Currency Goes Mainstream (.. like it wasn’t already?!)

Amazon has introduced its own virtual currency system. Gamers have long felt at least some sort of dopa-mine charge when coming into pixelated money, but virtual money’s traits has its roots in mainstream marketing, games and motivation systems decades old. Let’s consider what virtual currency is: 

• It’s got value. Billions, in fact, in virtual currency circulates our series of tubes (aka the internet) annually.  
• It’s motivational. It’s one of the tools used in marketing- like gamification. 
• It’s a construct. Because there is no standard but opportunity cost to back it up, virtual currency is a social construct of sorts. 

The details behind Amazon’s coin system are interesting- developers will earn commissions (as they do now) for offering apps that will be purchasable through the use of these Amazon coins, which will kick off with a free handful (because the first dose is always free!) and I have no doubt that users are trying to decide if this will more resemble frequent flyer miles or that point when you’re playing Farmville and you run out of seeds and suddenly you’re hit with the invitation to give real actual money. Some argue that real money is also virtual, since it is based on a social construct also. 

Developers will see a windfall with the premiere of this service, Users will experience motivation to purchase apps, adding to the transactional enmeshment of devices and apps: Do apps make the device, or do devices dictate the apps? I like to see positives come from technology and motivation, so I will be watching for the bright side. I believe the bright side will be found in another step in our respective capacities to interface with information- but who’s to say the digital divide isn’t found with the late adopters, or at least the choosy adopters, who see every other virtual currency move as .. well .. a currency move? Only time will tell. 

Applebee’s employee exemplifies growing pains for informational renaissance

One of the latest scrapes between humanity and social media (I am assuming Reddit is social media) is the instance in which an employee at Applebee’s is stiffed by a christian clergy-person, who notes on her check that she apparently receives better service from her deity, and that she will leave no tip, based on the party of 8 or more: “I give god 10% why do you get 18,” reads the now infamous receipt, which is signed with the clergy’s name- but then it looks as if she added “Pastor”- because who can resist the opportunity to advertise one’s ministry?

An Applebee’s employee learns of this (not the server, but another employee) and posts a photo of the receipt on Reddit. If you enjoy reading christian vs. atheist comment battles, head on over there. If not, don’t- that’s all that’s there now.

So people do some detective work and identify the clergy and the church, so it gets back to this clergy person that her 0% tip idea is not popular on the internet. Outraged, she declares to Applebee’s that she wants everyone fired. The server who posts the receipt is indeed fired. 

The controversy points are many. Should clergy have acted like that toward a restaurant server? What if it were a customer without a ministry rank? When someone wrongs you, is social media the equivalent to the water cooler? Where does discretionary privacy begin and end? What are the implied bounds of confidentiality in a world that is more on-camera and data-searchable than ever before? 

One thing is clear- as irrational as social media openness may seem to bystanders, the volume of sensitive material that goes up on social media daily is astounding- and it threatens those who like to bully people in the dark. Their expectations for privacy involve the ability to be mean to others without being held accountable. On the other hand, previous generations’ “among friends” discussions, where three or four people used unspoken, unregulated discretion in what they spread or did not spread, are today amplified by the internet. 

One familiar theme is obvious to me: the message that social media holds today is this: “if you mess with me, everyone’s going to know.” You can be arrested for videotaping the police- they know their decisions can be reviewed on the internet by the court of public opinion. The question we need to ask is whether the specter of high-information sharing will lead to systemic change in how people behave toward one another, or conversely, will it redefine rude behavior as trivial?

There are two take-aways from this: first, keeping one’s job and career involves upholding the protocols expected of the profession and the workplace. If that is a priority, vigilance and discretion in social networking is recommended. Second, simply being nice and acting toward others with integrity is typically the best policy in life- nothing embarrassing about that, when it shows up online. It’s as if the digital age exemplifies a karmic system, where ugly behavior begets ugly responses. I want to be on the good side of karma.