Liz will be starting as an assistant professor in IU’s Department of Communication and Culture, and I’ll be starting as an assistant professor in the Learning Sciences program, within IU’s Department of Counseling and Educational Psychology. We’re thrilled to be joining IU, an institution with world-class research, wonderful new colleagues, excellent students, and located in a charming college town we both fell in love with immediately. Two tenure track faculty positions at the same institution is pretty rare, not to mention at a University with the reputation and the opportunities of an IU. The stars really did align for us, and we’re very thankful for these exciting new career opportunities.

I am quite humbled to be joining such an amazing collection of scholars in Learning Sciences. The ongoing research in the program is quite exciting, and I look forward to working with them in the years to come. As someone who straddles multiple academic fields — Learning Sciences and Game Studies, specifically — it looks to be an environment where I can pursue my research agenda of understanding the intersections of game fandom and learning cultures, developing rigorous theories of informal learning with media. The culture of research at IU, from the faculty to the doctoral students, is exactly what both Liz and I were looking for, and we’re looking forward to future collaborations at IU.

I’d like to thank everyone at Miami University who has been supportive of my work in the two years I’ve been in Oxford. Both Miami’s School of Education, Health, and Society as well as the Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies have invested wisely in games and learning, and I sincerely hope they continue to grow and develop the undergraduate Game Studies program further. Miami is an institution with a serious commitment to undergraduate education, and I’m very thankful for the opportunities I’ve had to build games and learning into the undergraduate experience here.

Again, we couldn’t be more thrilled about starting this new stage in our lives. We’ve already started prepping for living in south-central Indiana by recently rewatching Breaking Away and catching up on Parks and Recreation — those are pretty accurate, right? Right? Seriously, though, Bloomington seems to be a great town, and reminds us quite a bit of Madison, Wisconsin, where we met in graduate school. It’s perfect for us.

If anyone has any questions, feel free to ask in the comments, or just catch us on Twitter (I’m @scd and Liz is @trilliz)!

Two weeks ago, I started my position as the C. Michael Armstrong Professor in Interactive Media Studies, as an Assistant Professor in Miami University‘s School of Education, Health, and Society and Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies. A bit of a mouthful, but a fun one! I’m still wondering how all of that will fit on my business card, to be honest, but thrilled to be here and starting a new chapter in my career. The folks at Miami have been supportive and excellent colleagues so far, and I’m looking forward to working with my fellow faculty in the Armstrong Institute for Interactive Media Studies.

That means, yes, I finished the dissertation, defended successfully on December 7th, followed shortly afterwards by my graduation. The defense meeting went swimmingly; the comments of my committee were greatly appreciated and helped to shape the final document that I deposited in the University of Wisconsin’s grad college the following week. I feel honored to have worked with all of them (Constance Steinkuehler, Kurt Squire, Dawnene Hassett, Erica Halverson, and James Paul Gee). Their guidance has profoundly shaped what I hope will be a productive academic career.

On top of that, Betty Hayes (at Arizona State University) and I recently signed a book contract with Peter Lang for a book we’re editing entitled Videogames, Affinity Spaces, and New Media Literacies, to appear in Peter Lang’s excellent New Literacies and Digital Epistemologies series. The book will focus on the productive learning and literacy practices that occur in the spaces around games (if you’ve browsed the rest of this site, you’ll see this has been an emphasis of mine for the last few years). We’ve got a great line-up of cutting edge education research to present in the book, and are very excited! More on this as it develops.

In my online life, I’m still around. I remind readers that I’m on Twitter much more often than I’m posting to this blog. I just started as a contributing writer for a great new media and culture blog based out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, called Antenna. And, like many online, I’ve recently started a photo-a-day photoblog. Check any and all out whenever you’d like to see what I’m up to!

And, oh yeah, one more thing: Liz and I are now engaged. I proposed on New Year’s Day morning, and she said yes! We’re planning on nuptuals in summer of 2011. I’m a lucky, lucky guy.

In the next few months, expect a redesign of this site — a new job and a new state deserves at least a visual update — plus, hopefully, a more regular posting schedule. I’ve promised that in the past, I know, but I mean it this time!

So, a major thrust of my work is investigating just this: How do these communities work? How can they support and challenge our assumptions of what learning is and what learning could be? How do we better understand the new digital media literacies that are arising with these technologies? As Armstrong Professor, I hope to have conversations on these topics with Miami faculty, students, and community members, and further understand how interactive media, design thinking, and online communities are intertwined in 21st century media spaces. Expect posts from me on this blog covering topics such as learning with “new media,” games and literacy, and the productive nature of online communities.

I’ll be posting there every few weeks on many of the same topics I post about here, albeit probably a little less informally. Feel free to add the AIMS blog to your Google Reader (or whatever you happen to use)!

As many of you know, I’ve had significant previous experiences at Miami, first as an undergrad in Miami’s (late) Interdisciplinary Studies program, then as a visiting faculty member there for several years, and subsequently as a staff member of Miami’s Project Dragonfly. When I heard about the position, I was initially reticent — would going back to Miami truly be the best fit for me? At the time, it felt a little early for me to be applying for jobs, but I gave it my best shot anyway, as I was very curious to find out how Miami was changing in recent years.

In the subsequent weeks and months, I learned a great deal about Miami’s new vision under President Hodge and Provost Herbst, and it began to sink in how exciting and innovative this position was for Miami (not to mention how amazingly good of a fit it was for what I wanted from a faculty position). I became more and more intrigued, and when I interviewed in February, I was completely blown away by the commitment that both the EHS (under Dean Carine Feyten) and AIMS (under Glenn Platt and Peg Faimon) had for novel staffing models and promoting productive interdisciplinary work. The Armstrong Professors (my position and one in the School of Fine Arts) do not sit within departments, the resources of both EHS and the AIMS program are top-notch (McGuffey Hall’s renovation was phenomenal!), and all of the faculty I met seemed committed to supporting my goal of figuring out how exactly new media and games should guide learning for future generations.

I just got back from a brief curricular retreat with the AIMS faculty and am looking forward to working with everyone. Sitting on the faculty with engaged researchers who do everything from investigating high-end virtual reality spaces through developing models of how the humanities might be reshaped for the digital era made it clear that Miami is exactly where I should be. I know from my earlier experiences that Miami’s undergrads are also superb, and I’m looking forward to building an undergraduate research group on new media, games, and learning once I get settled in Oxford. With all of this in mind, choosing Miami was just, well, a no-brainer, I guess?

In a year in which the academic job market has withered, I’m humbled that I was able to get a job that’s so perfect for the kinds of work I want to do. I have high hopes that this position will serve as a good model for how novel interdisciplinary research can be fostered at the University level, and it’s going to be incumbent upon me to now do good work in the spaces I think need most addressing in understanding learning — bridging traditional educational disciplines and the fantastic new stuff going on with interactive, digital media. It’s a big task, but right now I just feel like I’m a very, very lucky dude.

Anyway, I’m excited and happy! In the next few months, as I finish the dissertation, I’m sure I’ll have more to say about the position and my move to Miami. But, for now, expect a few tweaks to the site in the coming weeks, and even some more regular blog posting (I’ll need to do something else other than write my diss, right?).

Hope you like it, and please let me know if anything in particular isn’t working like it should — as I get more time to tweak it over the holidays, I’ll address a few known issues, such as the block of text atop the front page being replicated on all the archive pages, as well as all the category pages (it shouldn’t really do that). Additionally, I’ll be on the lookout for some more interesting WordPress widgets — I’ve resisted using them in the past, but it seems like many WordPress blogs are relying on them more and more, so I’ll dip my foot into the pool and see what I think.

Any other suggestions/comments are welcome!

I’m rolling into the mode in which I’ll be wanting to, more and more, highlight the research findings and new work I’m doing more than the informal stuff I’ve done on the blog to date, but that’s not meaning that the blog’s going anywhere. Rather, I hope to actually spend a little more time posting about some research content — in the last few months, it’s been hard to find the time, to be honest, but that’s no excuse. Blogging’s not that hard, and I’ll try to keep up better.

I have tons of other exciting news, but those will have to wait for later blog posts. If you’re reading this via Google Reader or something similar, please click over to the site and let me know what you think!

(Or, um, if you find anything’s broken, too… I’m currently working on fixing all the broken categories which got zapped when I upgraded WordPress to 2.6ish, and the favicon is acting oddly. Please let me know if you come across anything else that doesn’t work correctly!)

• I presented two talks and a poster at the Games+Learning+Society 4.0 conference this summer, and ended up winning one of the poster prizes (for best theoretical poster)
• We went to two weddings: Matt & Jill’s (in Ohio), and Ben & Amanda’s (in Virginia)
• I hung out in DC for a few days with Liz, got to see Georgetown and meet her friends
• Now, I’m heading to LA tomorrow to give a talk at the Sandbox Symposium, then Boston next week to give a talk (for my advisor, Constance) at the American Psychological Association meeting.

So, yeah, I’m rather busy. In the midst of that, I did physical therapy for my perpetually bad back, submitted a paper to a journal, started writing another two manuscripts, and have my prelim questions coming into shape. Progress.

A few other things to note…

• I upgraded WordPress, but the upgrade broke all the categories. I dunno what to do about that, and I’m too lazy to fix them right now — expect that to be busted for a while until I overhaul the whole site
• I’ve been Twittering much more often than blog posting lately, and the Twitter feed is on the front page of this blog now. Go there if you want to see what I’m up to in a more timely fashion
• I’ve recently added WPTouch, a new plug-in for WordPress which makes se4n.org look readable and pretty via the iPhone/iPod Touch
• However, I’ve been spending more of my time reading blogs using Google Reader lately — so much that I’ve now started a new, miniblog type thing with my shared items from Google Reader. Eventually, this will be incorporated into this weird mish-mash of a blog I have, but for now, check out the link
• Though this has nothing to do with The Cake Saga (see previous posts), I found the first panel of the latest xkcd to be a little disconcerting:
  
  [Click for a larger image]

Okay, enough for now. Gotta go to a meeting, write Keynote slides, then pack for LA!

Anyway, I’ll be tweaking the blog styles at the very least and possibly reorganizing the content on the entire site within the next few days. If you’re a regular reader (yeah, I know, that’s probably three people at this point), let me apologize ahead of time for any inconvenience. Hopefully the site will be prettier, more usable, and more informative after I’m done.

The name “pop cosmo” might be a little opaque at first glance, but it’s short for “Pop Cosmopolitanism,” a term that Constance has been using lately to summarize the goals of our work. By focusing on the ways that popular media (in the form of persistent online virtual worlds) encourage various learning and literacy practices, we’re arguing that they’re preparing kids for the demands of 21st century workplaces, and the responsibilities of being global citizens (hence “cosmopolitanism”). Here’s Constance’s introductory post, which better explains what we’re doing.

I made a post last week about our research into science literacy and the World of Warcraft official forums. It’s been an interesting project so far, and now we’re in the process of writing up some of our results, as well as determining what to do next. Here’s the introductory paragraph of my post:

Following up on Constance’s post from the other day, I’d like to talk a little more about our ongoing research into science literacy practices in the World of Warcraft forums. Based on the results Constance posted, we found a staggering amount of “social knowledge construction” occurring in our sample of posts to the official WoW forums. Constance gave us a taste of what the typical post to these forums looks like, but what about exemplary posts, and what might those tell us about science literacy in these online contexts?

This coming Saturday, we’re going to start our first afterschool groups, introducing adolescent boys to World of Warcraft. It’s been pretty nutty trying to get everything prepared and ready for them, but I think we’re almost there, and we’re excited to get the kids playing. More on that as it develops.

If you’re interested in any of this, by all means, go check out popcosmo.org, and let me know what you think.

In terms of online writing, I’ve spent a fair amount of my time finding interesting things to post about over at Joystick101, a community blog that I have been a contributing writer for since its relaunch last month. The site is clearly still finding its legs, but check it out if you’re interested in games, gaming culture, and learning. I see myself as mainly just providing links to what other people are talking about on gaming and media blogs rather than being the kind of guy who writes a lot of long features. So, if you’re looking for shorter posts by me specifically on the topic of games and learning, you’ll find them there in my post archive. Anyone is welcome to register and submit a post — though it’s a WordPress blog, the site is transitioning into being more of a community site, and soon it should break out into having a larger reader and writer base. Look for good things here in the future.

Also, since I haven’t written voluminously on my own site yet, I’ll use this post to publically force myself to pin down what my next few blog posts will be about. My former students know that similar promises of mine in the classroom rarely worked out (e.g. “I swear, I’ll get those papers back to you next week, and, oh yeah, those other papers to you the week after that”). But, hope springs eternal, I suppose.

With that said, here are a few topics I’ve been mulling over for some longer posts:

• Will Wright! If you poke into my Joystick101 archive, you’ll see that I posted about Will Wright’s SXSW talk last week. There are a number of provocative ideas in Wright’s talk that need discussing, so I plan on taking a stab at a few of his ideas on narrative and science in games.
• Harry Potter! I just finished The Half-Blood Prince last weekend, and am finally caught up. I have a lot to say (and theorize) about how this series of books works, and will try to devote a post this week to the topic.
• Newspaper Blackout Poems! My friend (and former student) Austin Kleon is doing some amazing, awesome work which reminds me a lot of Oulipo and Oubapo experiments in constructing literature and comics.
• Fantasy baseball! It’s springtime (thankfully!), and I’m commissioner in our local Games+Learning+Society group’s fantasy baseball league. We start up next weekend with a draft, and then it’s several months of me staring at statistics to figure out how to better predict which middle relievers will be a surprisingly dominant closer when shifted into that role mid-season. Also, I’m going to be a participant for a colleague’s new study on fantasy baseball and competition, so that should provide me a few posts of baseball geekery.
• PMOG! That’s “Passively Multiplayer Online Game,” a new Justin Hall creation that a lot of people I know are playing with. It’s really buggy, superfluous, and occasionally embarassing — but, um, it’s fun. I think? I’m not sure yet, and I’ll hopefully work out my thoughts about this with a post to my weblog.
• lolcats! I am reading I Can Has Cheezburger pretty much every day, and I don’t understand why. This is another one of those “I sense something signficant is going on in a context that is ridiculous,” but I’m as yet not sure what I want to say about it.

So, hopefully some of these topics are interesting to you. If not, delete your bookmark now! Before it’s too late!

For now, though, you should be able to see either: A Wii controller, the desktop icon for World of Warcraft, a Dharma Initiative logo from Lost, the symbol from Heroes, a miniature starship Enterprise (the original, naturally), the “P” from the Harry Potter logo, and that cute little Guitar Hero controller that was up there originally. Yeah, I’m letting all my obsessions hang out, people.

I plan to add more as time and insight allows. Please let me know if this doesn’t render properly on your web browser for some reason, as I am never quite sure that I’m using PHP properly whenever I try to do something like this.

Additionally, you should now see a series of links at the bottom of each entry. These are shortcuts to allow you to forward a page on to Digg, del.icio.us, Furl, Reddit, Slashdot, and Technorati. I have no idea if anyone will actually do this with any of my posts, but just in case, there you are.

Finally, I’m in the process of changing around some of the stuff you see in that “About” box on the front page. I’ve added my Twitter account (I’ll be posting more about Twitter soon, once I really get a chance to try this thing out), my Wii friend code (send me yours if you haven’t already!), and a few other things. I’ve given up Myspace for Virb, and I’ll always accept any gracious present you choose to buy me off my Amazon wishlist.

I enjoy this theme (based off of the Hemingway theme), but I am a bit annoyed that it’s hard to incorporate a blogroll or other stuff. So, I’m soon going to be redoing the “about this site” link, creating separate pages for blogrolls and my del.icio.us links, as well as all the other personal junk that I used to have on my old site (my Netflix queue, my last.fm music, etc.) I enjoy putting that stuff up, and will find a way to do it on some sub-page of the current site.

More minor tweaks to the site will be on the way. Please watch for falling bricks.

It’s a whole new year and a whole new weblog.

If you’ve been to this site before, you probably noticed some changes recently. First off, the old weblog is gone — I deleted it and all its posts, gone forevermore. It was time to put the old dog to rest and head to the pound for a fresh, squealing puppy. With this post, I’m hopefully starting something cleaner, fresher, more professional, and (paradoxically?) more fun in its place. That’s what you’re reading now. Are you having fun yet?

If you’ve never been to this site before, I suppose I should introduce myself. My name is Sean Duncan, and I’m currently a doctoral student in the Games+Learning+Society group at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, studying games, learning, and my specific spin on “society” — participatory cultures around digital media. I’m a former University instructor (in Interdisciplinary Studies), briefly worked for Microsoft doing usability, and was formerly a doctoral student in cognitive psychology before finally admitting my heart wasn’t in it. I’ve shifted my academic career to combine all of these things — working in an interdisciplinary field, studying the ways that cognition and learning manifest themselves with digital tools. This is, of course, just a fancy way of saying “popular media’s important, and I want to know why.”

My weblog will be a place for me to discuss academic interests and entertain ideas having to do with games, film, TV, comics, and the Internet. In the past, I’ve tried having a “personal blog” in which I discussed everything from my recipe for borscht to rage over American politics — that is, self-indulgent, more revealing than revelatory, and pretty stupid. Been there, done that, and now it’s time to move on to better uses of the medium.

So, I’m unabashed in admitting that I have professional ambitions and this weblog will now serve as a professional tool, first and foremost. There are burning questions I want to explore in public which include: How do existing commercial games allow us to learn things about the world that we might not expect? How do fan communities around media work as informal learning groups? Can we understand the communities around games in the same ways we understand communities around other media? If this weblog can help start discussions on these topics, or continue them from other venues, I’ll be ecstatic.

Of course, it’ll be hard for me to write solely on lofty, academic topics without boring myself (and you, reader) to death, so I’m sure I’ll take plenty of diversions to discuss the details of last night’s episode of Heroes, where I’m stuck trying to level my blood elf paladin, or what I think about Marjane Satrapi’s most recent book. My interests in diverse forms of media, the communities that form around them, and what this all of this means are tied up like one of those balls of rubber bands. Figuring out how to tease the rubber bands apart — and not put my eye out — is the trick, and that’s what I aim to do here.

Thanks for reading, and I hope you’ll read further in the coming months. Please send along any and all suggestions, invectives, and proposals for marriage. I’ll entertain all of them, I swear.

[Photo by Joshua Whiting, and is covered by a Creative Commons license.]