Conference season picking up

Now that the typical Spring 'abstract season' is coming down to a simmer, we're headed into the beginnings of Summer 'conference season.'

My first of what I anticipate will be several scholarly meetings this year is the annual meeting of the Innovation Systems Research Network (ISRN), of which I have been a member through my research work with the Centre for Policy Research on Science and Technology (CPROST) here at SFU. That's next week in Montreal, and I'm looking forward to catching up on the latest research with our collaborators on this project from all across Canada, and some international guests as well.
Agendas and paper archives are available on the site>>

At the beginning of May (while I'm still in Montreal) there will be a really interesting looking Community-University Expo (CUExpo 2008) in Victoria.There will be lots of opportunities to see the types of community-engaged scholarship that is paving the way towards more productive partnerships between local community praxis and academic research. A friend is attending, so I hope I can get the low-down from her afterwards!
View the Website>>
From May 13-15, there's the ION08 Game Conference (formerly OGDC) in Seattle, which is oriented towards the g/local games dev community. I attended last year as the face of academia and it was a blast... and if I can make it I might just hop down again this year.
View the Website>>

In June, Vancouver is hosting what we in the Social Sciences and Humanities call "The Learneds" or "Congress." It is the 2008 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, taking place at the University of British Columbia (Point Grey Campus). The congress includes many association-specific meetings, including the Canadian Games Studies Association (CGSA) on May 31st where I'll be chairing the "Contexts of Play" panel and the Canadian Communication Association (June 4-6) meeting at which I'll be presenting a paper.
View the FedCan Website>>
View the CGSA Website and conference links>>
View the CCA and conference links>>
View my abstract>>

That's enough to chew on for now... in the meantime I must tend the proposals and papers that beckon... and some lunch.

Gaming, swearing, and...cooking?

It appears that our favourite foul-mouthed chef Gordon Ramsay, host of the show Hell's Kitchen, will be gracing screens in the form of a ...wait for it... video game.

Montreal-based game maker Ludia announced this week that it will be making Gordon Ramsay's Hell’s Kitchen into an interactive video game. Hell's Kitchen is a reality show which pits up-and-coming chefs against one another in a cooking competition. Chef Gordon presides over the show in his familiar foul-mouthed manner.

Play it, and you too can be called a 'stewpid donkay!'

Read more here>>

I'm in ur RSS, feedin ur habitz

A study coming out of UC Irvine at a CHI conference in Italy talks about the participatory culture that the practice of blogging not only illustrates, but enables for those online who do not necessarily blog themselves.

Here's to enabling the continuance of yer blog readin wayz.

Reading a blog can become as much of a habit as checking e-mail, a new study looking at readers, rather than bloggers, suggests.

Researchers from the University of California-Irvine presented their study, which they said was the first to look in depth at the readers of blogs, on Wednesday at the Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) in Florence, Italy.

In a release, they said that previous studies about blogs have typically focused on the writers, "largely overlooking those who go online to read, comment and participate."

With an estimated 57 million adults in the United States reading blogs in July 2006, doctoral candidate Eric Baumer, undergraduate student Mark Sueyoshi and informatics professor Bill Tomlinson decided to look at the relationship between blogs and their readers.

Read more here>>