Part 2: John
PREFACE
- Context: How I got here
- The Traditional Dissertation Model
- This ‘Practical Papers’ Dissertation Model
- Where to Find the Traditional Pieces
- The Chapters
4.1. Chapter 1: Introduction
4.2. Chapter 2: Research Summary
4.3. Chapter 3: Cultural Models of Flying Moose Lodge
4.4. Chapter 4: AR Games and Motivation
4.5 Chapter 5: AR Games and Identity in Community
4.6. Chapter 6: AR Games and Cultural Models
1. Context: How I got here
In 1977, at age eleven, I attended my first camp. It was a two-day 4-H camp on a lake where we did arts and crafts, learned to bandage wounds, and…um… that’s all I remember, other than that the bunk I slept in smelled funny.
In 1986, at age 20, I worked at residential camp in Northern Minnesota. It was a seven-week camp for underperforming elementary students and focused on math and reading, buttressed by swimming, canoeing, nature hikes, arts & crafts, and typical camp fare. It was on a weekend expedition with other counselors that I fell in love with expeditionary learning. Over the next six years I organized and led trips to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area for college students, and learned to improvise.
In 1992, at age 26, while working at a Residential Treatment center for abused youth, a co-worker told me of a camp in Seattle that changed his life. I got a job there that summer as a Trip Leader for the Expedition branch of the camp. I got to plan and lead hiking and whitewater rafting trips. It was a bureaucratic nightmare to do anything outside of what had been explicitly laid out in the lawyer-approved schedule. I met a girl there who is still one of my closest friends, and she insisted I check out a camp in Maine. A friend at her co-op at Oberlin College worked there and told her stories about it. She thought I’d like it too. I emailed him, and he told the director about me. I called the director to apply for a counselor position, but after five minutes of talking, he said he wanted me as an assistant director.
In 1993, at age 27, I worked at Flying Moose Lodge (FML) in Maine. It was weird. I did all sorts of stuff. I fixed roofs, unclogged toilets, drove vans, organized games, emcee’d skits, wrote newspaper articles, ran the camp store, made a chair out of cedar limbs with no nails (that was still the most desired chair in the lodge in 2008!), broke up fights, learned to play an extreme version of tetherball, learned that my seven years of leading trips in the BWCA didn’t mean that I knew how to canoe, and probably did a hundred other things that I’d never done before. In short, I learned more in that summer than I had in a long time.
The story of this dissertation starts at that camp, in 2005. In the time between I had missed a summer at FML in order to work for industry to pay off my student loans; I went back to school and earned a Masters, taught technology courses to pre-service teachers at UW-Eau Claire, got another Masters, got accepted into the PhD program in education at UW-Madison and was looking for a topic for my dissertation. Someone told me to pick a topic that I hate, because after I get done with a dissertation on it, they assured me that I will hate whatever topic I chose. Instead, I decided to study the culture of the camp that changed my life.
2. The Traditional Dissertation Model
The traditional five-chapter dissertation is written as a book with a beginning, middle, and end. It is written as a sort of magnum opus of the author—a great work that demonstrates that the doctoral student can and should be considered a full-fledged academic. It is written to be read from start to finish, and in fact, depending on the work, a few people, or a few hundred people will actually read it.
Upon approval by the student’s committee, the dissertation gets printed and filed in the Library, on the student’s bookshelf, and possibly on the student’s advisor’s shelf. The student then gets hired, or works furiously to deconstruct and reassemble the dissertation into a series of articles and papers, which the student may submit for presentation to conferences, or for publication in journals.
3. This ‘Practical Papers’ Dissertation Model
This dissertation was not written to follow that model. Instead, I obtained approval from my dissertation proposal committee to write a series of practical papers, that is, journal papers that are prepared for review by peers in the field. As such, the key papers in this dissertation have already been presented or published. Venues include: the America Educational Research Association (AERA) annual meetings of 2008 and 2009, the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI) in 2008, the International Conference for the Learning Sciences (ICLS) in 2008, the College and University Faculty Assembly (CUFA) in 2008, and as a chapter in Hybrid Reality Games: Reconfiguring social and urban networks via locative media (in press).
3.1 Where to Find the Traditional Pieces
The traditional dissertation model includes the following five parts: Introduction (the why), Theoretical Framework, Methods (the how), Findings (the what), and Discussion (the so what). Since each paper was designed to stand alone, I had written each of these parts into each of the papers, to some extent, anyway. As a collective assemblage however, this proved to be ultimately unsatisfying, so I wrote up and Introduction (Chapter 1) to house the (very important and necessary) details and minutiae I found least interesting. I apologize if it’s not very exciting to some readers, and expect that those who do like it might not be as enthused about the content and style of some of the other chapters. As a whole piece, I am confident that I have assembled a dissertation worth assembling at this level, and hope some may find it of use in their research.
4. The Chapters
Short synapses of the chapters.
4.1. Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 1, based on my dissertation proposal, is written to introduce the goals, theory and methodologies of the overall study, as well as present some of its limitations and constraints.
4.2. Chapter 2: Research Summary
Chapter 2 is a large grain-size summary of the overall findings, broadly stated. It provides an overview of the study and context, and presents some of the initial findings that led to the more substantial investigations in later chapters, such as: 1) the role of narrative in the AR-enhanced Mystery Trip, 2) how the storyline promoted a certain level of risk taking, 3) that the GPS technology supported, and 4) how that experience in turn made possible a deep connection to the land, self, and community. The chapter also
4.3. Chapter 3: Cultural Models of Flying Moose Lodge
In order to understand how a Place-Based Inquiry activity, such as an AR-enhanced Mystery Trip, remediates cultural models, existing cultural models need to be mapped out. Chapter 3 is a foundational study of the cultural models in play at Flying Moose Lodge as revealed through historical artifacts, observations, and interviews. It uncovers primary values that are held and maintained, such as: a focus on community, ruggedness, improvisation, and a recent turn to Luddism.
4.4. Chapter 4: AR Games and Motivation
Chapter 4 is an investigation of how the AR-enhanced Mystery Trip increased participants’ motivation to hike, collaborate, and to endure the various discomforts involved in a camping trip through the introduction of an unfolding narrative and just-in-time prompts. This resulted in more intense interactions with the physical traits of geographical space, which in turn led to deeper personalized kinesthetic understandings of place.
4.5 Chapter 5: AR Games and Identity in Community
Chapter 5 considers the various and shifting roles and perspectives that participants in the AR-enhanced Mystery Trip undertook, and how taking these different perspectives framed their understanding of self in accordance to their involvement in meaningful activities that contribute to the camp community.
4.6. Chapter 6: AR Games and Cultural Models
To bring everything to a close, Chapter 6 explores the roots of the culturalt critiques voiced of some participants, including the notion that games are for kids, and the idea the introduction of this sort of technology was antithetical to values that the camp promoted such as ruggedness, agency, community, and low impact behavior. The chapter revisits the cultural models revealed in Chapter 3, and examines the impact that AR-games may be having on these models.
