Esther kindly asked me to do a workshop for the 2nd year Game Studies students on answering call for papers (CFPs) – and since I’ve seen a few other people in academic groups ask about it I thought I’d post it up here. I’m only really sad my amazing collection of gifs don’t work on SlideShare
When I first got made a Tef I was asked by someone how I was planning to track my contribution – which made me think about mapping my contribution and I’m so glad I did. What I’ve been doing since then is plotting conferences, workshops, projects etc on a google map. I’ve found it a really easy way to keep a track of the different strands of things I do (Social Media workshops, Hidden Object Games, Board games etc) and adding a new pin somewhere is a great way of showing the wide ranging impact of my research.
[googlemaps https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/embed?mid=131eMhpXY4XO5v29dkTYdXTCdb2s&w=640&h=480]
One of the many hats I hold is current secretary of the British Digra Which usually doesn’t involve a lot. We did recently hold our annual conference, at Staffs Uni and one of the things that came out of our AGM was the request for a more up to date space to carry on the conversations and grow the community of British Game Studies conference (and anyone else)
So, dutifully I asked the community on twitter, facebook and in the room if people wanted a discord, a slack or something else and a discord won overwhelmingly – so I’ve spent the last 48hrs learning all about the ins and outs of setting one up (our student have one so it can’t be that hard) and so far, so good and it’s delightful to see conversations appearing, and new faces in the crowd amoungst familiar names.
It will be interesting to see how it’s used, and it develops (and what issues it throws up) but I’m slowly coming around to ways we can engage with students in what might be a post facebook world.
I was looking at maybe using Slack with some of my teaching in the future – so I’ve also put my hat in as a possible moderator for the UK Games Industry Slack but I haven’t heard anything about that yet – but the engagement I’ve seen on both of these platforms has been heartening.
