Paper Information
| Title | Computer Visualizations of Social Learning Affinity Spaces in "Sploder" |
| Presenter(s) | Alex Games and Chandan Sarkar |
| Session | Communities & social gaming |
| Time | Friday, October 22, 10:30a-11:30a |
| Location | Parlor A |
| Format | Paper Presentation |
| Description | This talk has two goals. First, we want to demonstrate the ways in which computer visualizations can serve as aides in hypothesis generation about the relationships between social networking and social learning dynamics taking place within online communities centered on game design, as well as aides to explain these relationships based on community data. Second we wish to exemplify these uses in the context of an ongoing study where we use both visualizations, interview data, and discourse analysis, to examine these relationships in Sploder (www.sploder.com) , an informal online computer game design community for children. Using a mixture of public quantitative and qualitative data collected from the Sploder site and through interviews with it's site administrator, we mixed computer visualizations using NodeXL and Discourse Analyses to triangulate preliminary insights about the presence of affinity spaces centered on game design in the Sploder Community. We then show how similar triangulations can be used to gain insights about the forms or social organization that shape learning dynamics within affinity spaces in the Sploder Community. |