Now with a slightly Square look

If you're viewing this post from the actual blog, you've probably already noticed that the page has a new look. I've moved over to Squarespace which has been fantastic in terms of set up. However, I've been a little slow to post because it doesn't have the awesome drafting system that WordPress does. That said, the format and content control here is great.

At any rate, this blog post is actually rather delinquent since among other things I haven't actually blogged about my dissertation since that one post with the Wordle. Past the jump you'll find a little about the diss including the figure for the model of raid leadership tasks I've developed, and some other odds and ends.

Having updated the appropriate information on most of my social network profiles it's probably not necessary to mention that I filed my dissertation at the beginning of this month. After adding some content requested by my totally awesome committee, the whole thing weighed in at 413 pages including appendices. For that reason alone I won't be posting it here, but if you're interested in reading it you can contact me be email and I can give you a link for the super secret location I have it hidden on the interwebz.

Meanwhile, here's the figure depicting leadership tasks.

I wound up spending over a hundred pages talking about this figure in two different chapters, so it might be a lot to take in at once. If you want a closer look, the image is linked. In truth I still want to tinker with this thing some more. The division based on presence or absence of synchronous interaction is a problematic construct. It served as a useful analytic tool in sorting the different tasks of guild leadership, but increasingly I've come to see a gradient of interaction around leadership. Like McLuhan's description of interactions with and through media, guild leadership consists of hotter and colder interaction. If you ignore the horizontal division, I did try to account for this to some degree in layout on this image with colder tasks on the bottom and hotter ones up top.

At any rate, apart from filing the diss I've also started working for the Academic ADL Co-Lab as Associate Director of Research. Again, having updated almost all of the social network sites it feels slightly redundant mentioning it here, but I bring it up because invariably there will be a little more online learning research content on the blog in the next while, including a healthy dose of some thinking about interaction design.

That doesn't mean I won't be posting about games though. After all, I just got a shiny new Xbox 360 S and in addition to more research on games, that's invariably going to lead to some exposition on the topic of gaming more generally. After all, this article by Scott Steinberg over at CNN (with its conspicuous use of a screen shot from Limbo) just gives me another excuse for writing about powerful gaming experiences, and I've got a dissertation that badly needs to be chopped up into some chapters and articles, and probably a few more blog posts as well.

The bottom line is I've got a lost more to say (a backlog in fact). Consequently I'm cutting this post off here, but I'll leave you with this picture I took of Christo & Jeanne-Claude's gates when I was living in New York in 2005. Whole lot of transition going on, whole lot.