The Wake

Believe it or not, some of the esteemed professors at the University of Minnesota spend a lot of time on Facebook. And Myspace. And Twitter. And Second Life. In spite of the obvious reasons why these professors are wasting their time on social networking sites, they aren’t griping about how silly their students are. In fact, they’re studying how their students and other people interact with each other online, and analyzing how we use various communication functions like forums, instant messaging, video and audio clips, posts, blogs and other common tools associated with today’s cutting edge technology. Yet social media studies is only one aspect of a broad range of interdisciplinary research going on in tandem with the Institute for New Media Studies, the U of M’s off-the-wall research tank that studies useful and beneficial components of society, like videogames, in order to understand how we communicate with one another.

The INMS, headed by Professor Nora Paul, is part of the New Media Initiative within the School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Although funding for the institute was approved by the State Legislature in 1998, it was not until Paul was hired as INMS Director in 2000 that the institute began its work. Since its inception it has helped create and support a multitude of projects designed to examine new media and content, connecting researchers with vastly different backgrounds in the process. Nowhere was this more apparent than the recent New Media Research conference held at the U of M on Friday, September 18. About a dozen experts in fields ranging from graphic design to computer programming gave presentations on their compelling research.

“I got more and more intrigued about how technology was impacting the packaging and delivery end of the [media] process,” Paul says of how she ended up at the U of M. “So coming up here was a chance to really focus more on how technology is changing the ways that information and storytelling is being created.” Take Facebook for example. Dr. Christine Greenhow, a Learning Technologies researcher at the U of M, knows Facebook. She just finished one of several studies on how Facebook can be used as an educational tool for younger users. With funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Greenhow created the HotDish application with the creative team behind NewsCloud, a social media software provider and Grist, an online environmental magazine. HotDish is an environmentally-themed community app designed “to see if we could get young people coalescing around an issue…get them engaged in an issue,” Greenhow told the audience during her presentation. HotDish, which was built in about two months, allows users to post environmental stories, create application profiles, vote on stories posted, play games and organize environmental activities.

“It’s not just about content,” Greenhow says. “Social media is about the people.” Greenhow’s research focused specifically on how information flows through social networks, and whether a social network could engage younger users, increase users’ knowledge about an issue, build community and generate real world impact while promoting reading and writing practices.

Although about 2,000 people signed up for the application during the time the study was conducted (March 4-April 10), only 346 users fit the 16-to-24 year old qualification for the study. The site mined these users’ data, including how much time users spent on the application, how many stories they wrote, posted and read, the various environmental activities done and how often, and how many outside activities they planned or participated in. Despite the mass amounts of data, Greenhow found users had contributed about two-thirds of the content available on HotDish, and while a statistical increase of environmental knowledge couldn’t be measured among users, anecdotal evidence increased. To be fair, the users who joined HotDish already knew more about environmental studies than what could be measured nationally, according to Greenhow. Best of all, users claimed the site helped stir up activism, with less frequent users increasing interest in a variety of topics over a short period of time than more active users.

Of course, new media raises a variety of concerns over data privacy. How much information is too much? Jennie Lijewski, an information technology manager from University Relations shed light on the U of M’s continuing struggle to define the boundaries of data protection and privacy in social mediums. Comparing the impact of social networking to a dog yard, she challenged conference attendees to define the boundaries of how much presence the University could have online. Raising intriguing questions like whether a third-party social networking site can claim ownership over University-related logos and content, Lijewski did not elaborate on the U of M’s specific policies over social networking but rather focused on the decision-making process behind University policy, describing it as a series of never ending questions whose answers give way to more questions, from the definition of social networking on.

“It really becomes very, very clear this is not a cut and dried issue,” Lijewski says. Of course, the U of M isn’t the only public university struggling with this issue. According to Lijewski, Big Ten schools are still coming to terms with the same questions: Should university administration, staff and faculty have two separate accounts on social network sites, one for work and one for personal use? What constitutes appropriate behavior on these sites? What’s safe to disclose and what’s not? Should multiple units within a University department use multiple social sites, or should they all use one? What are the legal ramifications of using third-party sites? What protection do they offer? Who is held accountable? With all the questions, it appears the U of M must continuously play catch-up with making policy as new social networking opportunities surface, as the rules and boundaries of social networking constantly and consistently evolve.

INMS doesn’t focus entirely on social networking, however. Paul likes computer games, too. Not Street Fighter or Halo, per se, but the applicability of computer games and other virtual environments to education. In other words, how games can be used to teach people. Starting with the well-publicized “Harperville Gazette” simulation she helped create with SJMC Professor Kathleen Hansen, Paul’s work in simulation may reap great rewards for the U of M in the near future. The original idea for the so-called Journalism Game came from a technology and education conference where she heard Kurt Squire, a professor from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, speak about a simulation of the American Revolution he had built using the engine that powers the popular PC role-playing game Neverwinter Nights. From there, Paul and Hansen wrote the scenario and script for a simulation tool using the same Neverwinter Nights engine designed to educate journalism students on basic information gathering techniques by having them cover a train derailment and chemical spill in Harperville, USA.

“We were really excited about the possibilities of it,” Paul says. “The reality of it, the logistics…it was clunky with some of the graphics…so we just couldn’t sustain it as a learning object. But we remained really interested in that kind of simulation space as a possible way to engage students, let them try it out and see what it feels like.” Paul also said the server space needed for the game would have presented problems in the Digital Media Lab as well. Paul may have found a solution in having the Neverwinter Nights model ported into online software called Thinking Worlds. Thinking Worlds is a flexible game engine, game build and tool kit that appears to be a higher graphic, better mapped version of Second Life. What’s more, it can be more easily controlled and scripted, allowing instructors to fine tune a student’s educational experience. Once the Thinking Worlds build is complete, the real research begins.

“There’ll be very rich opportunities for doing some comparative effects research,” says Paul. Of course, enjoyment and immersion will also be researched in order to see how effective a simulation can be in teaching students journalism skills.

Another component of Paul’s game research studies involves a Knight Foundation-funded project that allowed Paul and Hansen to explore the effects of making a general tool kit for an interactive web game that media outlets could post with current issues, hopefully engaging viewers of the web site.

“A lot of journalism-type games have been created, but they’re one-off,” Paul says. “The trouble with those was they were only good for that [particular subject].” Therefore, Paul and Hansen set out to make a “game template” that administrators could update with information on current issues. Out of five proposals submitted to the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the proposal they found funding for involved making two separate games. One, which allowed players to assume the role of a staff assistant to a Senator in researching ethanol, was more of an interactive dialogue with different non-playable characters instead of a real game. The other game, “Explore a Topic” was more of a board and card game where players found the answers to different informational questions.

After designing a web site and online survey, Paul and Hansen found participants to view five ways information on ethanol could be obtained, including the two games, a traditional news story, a shortened news story, and a topic-organized page. Unfortunately, respondents found the topic-organized page the best of the information methods. According to Paul, although the board game was preferred over the interactive dialogue game, respondents basically said they didn’t want to work so hard to get the information they wanted. Despite the setback, Paul says she and Hansen are currently working with a company to make application software for mobile devices based on the board game which media administrators could update at their leisure. “You can do it about ethanol this week, you could do it about the state legislature next week, you could do it about fun places to go downtown the following week,” Paul says.

The next research project Paul wants to tackle may be the most ambitious yet. If nothing else, planning a virtual reality tour of the U of M would require much interdisciplinary cooperation from other University departments. Among the various topics of discussion, the Virtual Worlds and Video Games discussion panel bore discussion on mixed reality teaching tools. Greg Daigle, a teaching specialist from the College of Design, suggested an augmented reality tour for the U of M where prospective students could download a program onto their cell phones or other mobile devices and walk around campus finding markers that would send 3D models to a cell phone along with whatever other information University officials would want to appear. To demonstrate the technology, Paul had downloaded a similar program from Toyota that worked with pictures of Toyota-related images she had printed out. Once she held it up to a basic computer camera, the image then became a 3D model of a driving Toyota sedan. The model, textured and shiny, could also be broken down into parts which were also in shiny 3D bitmapping.

“That’s augmented reality,” Paul says. “If you could imagine, with a cell phone…if you were walking around and you see a symbol…it would take in the symbol” and create a 3D model of University maps, or perhaps an avatar of a University official. What happens next lies with innovative researchers like Paul and Daigle.

Although the New Media Research conference happened earlier this semester, another half-day conference will occur some time in February, in order to accommodate more University researchers and visiting scholars. That most likely won’t slow down progress on any of the research projects the INMS supports and creates. Innovation, like progress, won’t slow down so easily.