‘The Production of Space’, in: Frans Jacobi, Imagine, Space Poetry, Copenhagen, 1996, unpaginated.

The Production of Space

Symposium Review: 25th Anniversary of Moral Boundaries by Joan Tronto

Postmodern geographies: The reassertion of space in critical social theory

aimed to attract a more diverse audience of gamers and non-gamers – and to bring video games off the screen and into the living room. While not all games are well suited for multiplayer play – ‘It’s hard to avoid getting in each other’s way and impeding rather than advancing game progress’ (p. 133) – most games are intended to be played while in the room with other people. ‘The Wii is just the latest attempt by Nintendo to bring a version of this kind of social gaming into the living room, closer to arcade parties and karaoke than to, say, bouts of online multiplayer military simulations’ (p. 142). Jones and Thiruvathukal’s book is as much a user’s manual for the potential of the Nintendo Wii as it is an academic and technical deconstruction of the console as a computing platform. Their joint approach to considering the topic works well, but it isn’t until the very end of the book that Jones’ cultural contextual approach really shines. In the final six pages of the sixth chapter (pp. 143–148), the authors consider the paratext of the Wii, as well as the diegetic and nondiegetic elements of video games – and the various layers of the platform and the games, interactions and activities it supports. ‘This social layer of a video game platform is an essential part of what the system means, because it’s the environment in which the platform gets used’ (p. 148). Much of the existing literature on Nintendo – such as Osamu Inoue’s (2010) Nintendo Magic: Winning the Videogame Wars and Jeff Ryan’s (2011) Super Mario: How Nintendo Conquered America – concentrates on the company’s success as a business. The more technical literature to date focuses on the use of the Wii Balance Board, another controller for the platform, in healthcare and therapeutic settings. This text sits comfortably in the middle, Wiimote and Nunchuk controllers in hand, making a valuable contribution to the study of the Nintendo Wii and how technology and culture work together.

It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens

Edward W. Soja, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2010, xviii+256 pp., indices, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8166-6668-3 (paperback) The main argument of this book is that the spatial dimension has...

Seeking Spatial Justice

There are many approaches that support studies of learning in relation to the physical environment, people’s interaction with one another, or people’s movement. However, what these approaches achieve in granularity of description, they tend to lose in synthesis and integration, and to date, there are not effective methods and concepts to study learning in relation to all of these dimensions simultaneously. This paper outlines our development and use of a new approach to describing, representing, and interpreting people’s interaction as they move within and across physical environments. We call this approach interaction geography. It provides a more integrative and multi-scalar way to characterize people’s interaction and movement in relation to the physical environment and is particularly relevant to learning research and professional design practice in informal learning settings. The first part of this paper illustrates our development and use of interaction geography to study visitor engagement in a cultural heritage museum. In particular, we illustrate Mondrian Transcription, a method to map people’s movement and conversation over space and time, and the Interaction Geography Slicer (IGS), a dynamic visualization tool that supports new forms of interaction and multi-modal analysis. The second part of the paper describes one team of museum educators, curators, archivists, and exhibit designers using a computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) environment based on interaction geography. We show how this environment used interaction geography to disrupt the conventional views of visitor engagement and learning that museum professionals hold and then reframe these disruptions to enable museum professionals to perceive visitor engagement and learning in innovative ways that potentially support their future design decisions. We conclude the paper by discussing how this work may serve as a blueprint to guide future efforts to expand interaction geography in ways that explore new collaborations across the fields of education, information visualization, architecture, and the arts.

Developing & using interaction geography in a museum

Data has become central to the technologies and services that human-computer interaction (HCI) designers make, and the ethical use of data in and through these technologies should be given critical attention throughout the design process. However, there is little research on ethics education in computer science that explicitly addresses data ethics. We present and analyze Re-Shape, a method to teach students about the ethical implications of data collection and use. Re-Shape, as part of an educational environment, builds upon the idea of cultivating care and allows students to collect, process, and visualize their physical movement data in ways that support critical reflection and coordinated classroom activities about data, data privacy, and human-centered systems for data science. We also use a case study of Re-Shape in an undergraduate computer science course to explore prospects and limitations of instructional designs and educational technology such as Re-Shape that leverage personal data to teach data ethics.

Re-Shape: A Method to Teach Data Ethics for Data Science Education

Mobility provides the fabric of everyday life but is rarely considered part of learning and is almost never used as relevant, experiential content in teaching. This special issue integrates ideas a...

Why Learning on the Move: Intersecting Research Pathways for Mobility, Learning and Teaching

Gestures, or spontaneous hand movements produced when talking, are an untapped resource for understanding student knowledge in computing education. This paper develops a conceptual framework to support future studies of learning and teaching that incorporate gesture studies in programming contexts. In particular, this paper introduces how gesture has been used to study teaching and learning in another discipline, mathematics; critically reviews and interprets what concepts and methods may be most relevant to programming contexts; and also discusses what unique challenges programming contexts present to studies of gesture (e.g. differences in abstract versus concrete). We ground our understandings of gesture by using an observational study where we observed novice students learning to program. This paper concludes by suggesting potential avenues for future research in computing education that incorporate analyses of gesture in studies of teaching and learning.

Applying a Gesture Taxonomy to Introductory Computing Concepts

This paper outlines our use of space-time visualization as part of an emerging approach to studying human interaction and mobility in interior spaces that we call "interaction geography". We describe how we have used this approach in a museum setting. Findings and discussion show how interaction geography draws from space-time visualization research to advance professional design practice in a museum. We conclude by discussing limitations and the need for future research to further develop this early work.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3027063.3053146

Ben Rydal Shapiro

Papers

Developing & using interaction geography in a museum

Re-Shape: A Method to Teach Data Ethics for Data Science Education

Why Learning on the Move: Intersecting Research Pathways for Mobility, Learning and Teaching

Applying a Gesture Taxonomy to Introductory Computing Concepts

Interaction Geography in a Museum