Navigating life as an avatar The shiftin

Navigating life as an avatar: The shifting identities-in-practice of a girl player in a tween virtual world Fields, Deborah A., and Yasmin B. Kafai. 2012. Navigating life as an avatar: The shift- ing identities-in-practice of a girl player in a tween virtual world. In Constructing Identity in a Digital World, ed. Cynthia Carter Ching and Brian J. Foley, 222–250. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Cited in Connected Play: We used the findings from these player profiles to construct qualitative case studies of individual players.15 For instance, in choosing Zoe/bluwave, one of the club members, we selected someone who we knew had a fairly high participation rate in Whyville based on her placement in the profile analysis described above as well as her interactions in the club. We first cre- ated minute-by-minute summaries by isolating her logfiles and going click by click through the data. Then we condensed these into short daily narra- tives that noted patterns and innovations in participation. Each line of her logfiles contained her username, a time stamp, her location in Whyville, and, if applicable, chat or whisper text. In all there were over 54,000 lines of text in bluwave’s logfiles. To create the minute-by-minute summaries, we sampled the days she was on Whyville, selecting the first seven days and then alternating every five or six days to ensure breadth of days of the week in our sample. In all, we analyzed thirty-five days during her first two months on Whyville from January to June 2005. In our final interpretation of Zoe/bluwave’s activities, we also took into account video, field notes, and interview data from the club while looking for consensus or discrepancies between her activities and “ways of being."

We used similar techniques for tracing particular practices, such as tele- porting, giving a secret command, or throwing projectiles such as mudballs, a popular practice in Whyville among club members. Once we identified teleporting as a practice to study (a process that involved significant immer- sion in the data), we conducted three kinds of analyses. First, we searched the logfiles for the first time that club members teleported and identified their physical locations based on time stamps and knowledge of attendance and schedules at the club and in the classrooms. Second, using these time stamps as starting points, we pieced together information across all of our data (logfiles, field notes, videos, and interviews) to determine the process and contexts in which each club member learned to teleport. Inevitably there was more information about some individuals than others, but in every case we determined social, spatial contexts of knowledge sharing and diffusion. Finally, we inductively and thematically coded incidents of peer-to-peer teaching of teleporting across the data. For the logfiles, this involved identifying times when teleporting was discussed rather than used for transportation (e.g., “how do u teleport” versus “teleport moon”) and assembling conversations in the logfiles between school members before coding them. We used a similar approach for projectile throwing, identify- ing times, spaces, and social contexts of learning and tracing key events backward and forward in the data to establish histories that led up to and followed learning how to throw projectiles.” (152)

This reminds me of the work done by Chris _____ at Lytics Lab at Stanford, creating clustered narratives of MOOC users.