Paging Dr. Gina
Congratulations to Gina Svarovsky, who officially became the first Dr. of Epistemic Games yesterday! Gina’s dissertation will be available on the website here soon, and she will be going on to work at the Science Museum of Minnesota in the spring.
Gina’s dissertation is one of the first studies to use Epistemic Network Analysis to look at the impact of specific parts of a game on the development of professional thinking. Her study of Digital Zoo found that interactions with clients and reflections in an engineering notebook play a key role in making the values and epistemology of engineering explicit for players.
As the first graduate student in the Epistemic Games Group, Gina was instrumental in helping to establish the research directions and practices of the group. We will miss her very much, wish her well in in future ventures, and hope that from time to time she will drop in with a post on news epistemic!
Learning from Urban Science without playing it
In working with the design team of Urban Science, I have developed a personal interest in urban regional planning. Although I have no role in designing the epistemic game Urban Science, the team members have demonstrated enough of the values in the game, so that I see the importance in the task of urban planning. The time I spend as the videographer, conducting interviews, editing and creating a demo for the game has given me a window of knowledge into the realm of urban planning. Also, as an anthropology major, I am exposed to the infinite amount of issues surrounding the human species, and it just so happens that city planning is one of them. The topics I have observed from working with the design team, combined with the topics I discuss in class have inspired me to consider pursuing graduate studies in the field of urban and regional planning. I would be particularly interested in working on the cultural aspects of city planning, such as interacting with interest groups to understand their wants and needs. Thanks to the Urban Science development team, I have discovered a new interest which could potentially be a fascinating career. That urban planning is a potentially more lucrative career than anthropology doesn’t hurt either.
André Rupp visits Madison
Last month André Rupp, professor at the University of Maryland, visited the Epistemic Games Group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Rupp, the Co-PI on the EAGER grant, participated in several discussions regarding the ideas and issues underlying Epistemic Network Analysis, while he was here. One meeting, with David Shaffer and Mike Gleicher, centered on a proposed method for converting adjacency matrices into coordinates in n-dimensional space and comparing them by calculating the distance between them. In effect, this method controls for the number of speech act occurrences by comparing frame shapes, rather than frame sizes. Another benefit of this method is the afforded ability to visualize learning trajectories.
Andre also experienced the joys of several of Wisconsin’s customs and culinary treasures during his stay, including–but not limited to–cheese curds and Old Fashioneds.
