What started out as a wide-open, unplanned summer is filling up quite quickly.
Turns out I will be working for MSR again this summer, but as a contractor rather than a visiting researcher--which means for the first time in three years I get to spend summer in my own house! I will, however, be taking two trips out to Seattle. The first will be next week, from 6/16-23. While I'm there, I'll also be giving two talks at the annual Special Libraries Association conference--one on trends in social computing, and another on gaming in libraries.
The day after I return from Seattle, I'm headed to the Boston area for a quick two-day trip where I'll be doing training for HR folks at Hanscom AFB.
Then I'll spend a few weeks at home, working on a variety of research projects--some for MSR, some on my own. That includes starting the planning for this year's social computing symposium, doing some analysis of Twitter uses and users, and working with a local organization and a high-profile expert to start development of a very cool ARG project.
On July 10-11 Lane and I will be in Madison for the 4th annual Games, Learning & Society conference. He and I will be doing a "frag 'n' chat" session entitled "Games as Gateway Drugs."
After that I head back to Seattle July 20-30 for the MSR Faculty Summit and week of working with Lili Cheng and Jonathan Grudin at MSR.
So far, that's all I've got (which is plenty). I suspect there will be some travel in August, but so far that month is looking blissfully clear :)
Glad to hear you will be at the Game and Learning Conference. I can finally make it there this year.
It will be great to see you in action in person and to also see Lane in action.
Liz, I have seen quite a number of references to game theory in postings of recent months. Not sure if you remember, but that was an area of interest of mine about twenty years ago when I arrived at UMich and the basis for an ALOT grant Cisler and Ertel awarded me ca. 1989. The idea came up again recently at the University of No Returns (UNR) and I dug up this reference for a colleague there. If you have not already done so, I would highly recommend reading this. It is in the form of a Socratic dialogue and not very long (178 pages in octavo format). You could read it in one day even with distractions, and it is probably suitable for Lane too. The thing I like about it is the non-emphasis on technology in conveying basic principles of game theory (principles I find notably absent in a lot of the online gaming experience such as MOOS, MUDS and the World of Warcraft, &c.) but which were initially present in Confer II and MTS ads communication tools. I just realized where it was originally published (there is a 2003 reprint out of stock at Amazon), so maybe I am preaching to the choir here. (There is a lot of philosophy in it too; however, I'm uncertain if the author is related to David Suits in RIT's Philosophy Department of not.) Interestingly the only Wikipedia reference I can find to the work is at de.wikipedia.org where it falls under the heading ludologie the study of the science of play.
Suits, Bernard. The Grasshopper: games, life, and Utopia. (Toronto / Buffalo : University of Toronto Press, 1978).