Here is the pdf version of my Analog Games Paper, “Who Has Access? Making Accessible Play Spaces in Minecraft for Children with Autism”. Enjoy!
Tag: writing (Page 2 of 3)
Earlier I posted a blog summarizing my findings from my ASSETS 2016 paper. I’m happy to report the slides from my talk can be found in pdf form, as well as here as a slide show. I hope to have a more accessible YouTube version of my talk soon.
Would You Be Mine: Appropriating Minecraft as an Assistive Technology for Youth with Autism from Kate Ringland
ACM is allowing free downloads of the official version of the paper for a year. So go ahead and download that now!
Kathryn E. Ringland, Christine T. Wolf, LouAnne E. Boyd, Mark Baldwin, and Gillian R. Hayes. 2016. Would You Be Mine: Appropriating Minecraft as an Assistive Technology for Youth with Autism. In ASSETS 2016. [PDF]
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Preview: Those with disabilities have long adopted, adapted, and appropriated collaborative systems to serve as assistive devices. In a Minecraft virtual world for children with autism, community members use do-it-yourself (DIY) making activities to transform Minecraft into a variety of assistive technologies. Our results demonstrate how players and administrators “mod” the Minecraft system to support self-regulation and community engagement.
A calming, quiet garden in Minecraft.
“Need a place to calm down? Quiet? Peaceful? Choose a Calm Room to visit here. In these rooms [t]here is no chat. It’s a place to relax. Visit any time.”
If a child finds face-to-face conversations challenging and feels isolated from their peers at school, where can they go to make friends? How can people use currently existing systems to help those with disabilities, including children with autism? We studied how one online community, Autcraft, through a variety of social media platforms, augments and extends current platforms and transforms them into assistive technology for children with autism.
Autcraft is a Minecraft community for children with autism and their allies run by parent volunteers. The goal of the Autcraft community is to have a safe space for children with autism to play Minecraft free from harassment and bullying (for more information visit the Autcraft website). As part of our study, I have been conducting an on-going ethnography within the community (see our paper for details). This study included analysis of activity within the Minecraft server, forums, website, Twitter, Facebook group, YouTube, and Twitch.
Our analysis demonstrates how players and administrators “mod” the Minecraft system to support self-regulation and community engagement. This work highlights the ways in which we, as researchers concerned with accessible and equitable computing spaces, might reevaluate the scope of our inquiry, and how designers might encourage and support appropriation, enhancing users’ experience and long-term adoption.
Autcraft community members have modified Minecraft to do the following to help players internally regulate themselves and externally manage their engagement with others:
- Self-Regulation. Community members use Minecraft in a variety of ways to self-regulate, including both sensory regulation and mood regulation. Dealing with sensory overload can be a difficult experience for anyone with autism, particularly for children and adolescents who are still learning coping skills. Members of the Autcraft community have created spaces within the virtual world and the other platforms to help even the youngest members learn to deal with these sensory needs. Additionally, to help regulate mood, members are able to put into words their emotional experiences, safely share and vent their feelings with others, on the forums and through in-game chat. They can do this in Autcraft without the fear of reprisal from bullies or trolls—which is something they may fear in other online spaces. While this type of behavior may not be unique to Autcraft, the ability to vent in this safe space is possibly unique for the community members personally. They may have communication challenges in their physical environments that limit their abilities to express their feelings fully.
- Interacting with Others. Members of the Autcraft community have appropriated the entire ecosystem of technologies surrounding Autcraft to support interfacing and engaging with others. These efforts support engagement with both the internal community and across community boundaries by supporting sociality explicitly. One mod, teleportation, enables players to jump from one place to another in the Autcraft virtual world nearly instantly. This mod, which can be found on a variety of Minecraft servers, creates a “safer” virtual world experience and to support socialization among community members. Teleportation is available through various waypoints within the Autcraft Spawn area as well as through the text chat window. This teleportation functionality not only enables these quick avatar interactions, but also gives community members an ability that they do not have in the physical world. This helps support empowering these young community members to engage in socialization with their friends, when and where they choose.
Individual players appropriate the Autcraft virtual world to suit their own needs, shaping their virtual environment, embodied experience, and, in time, influencing the overall experience for everyone in Autcraft. As the children worked within the confines of the virtual world to make their environment more usable by appropriating with what was available, administrators are able to then iterate on these appropriated instances to re-appropriate the software itself. Thus, administrators, following the cues of the children within the virtual world, are able to instantiate these appropriations and make them available to everyone on Autcraft.
As a group, children with autism are doubly disempowered: both as children and as people living with disabilities. Here, however, we see how this kind of technological openness allows them to customize and create their own play spaces, a type of autonomy that is inherently empowering. This work explores how designers and researchers can learn by observing how even the youngest of users augment and appropriate mainstream technology to become assistive in their daily lives. This work highlights the ways in which researchers concerned with accessible and equitable computing spaces might reevaluate their scope of inquiry and how designers might encourage and support appropriation, enhancing the individualized experience and long-term adoption of assistive devices and systems. The appropriations we observed in Autcraft point to a future model where child-initiated modifications can guide research and design, providing greater access for disempowered communities.
For more details about our methods and findings, please see our full paper that has been accepted to ASSETS 2016 (to appear in October 2016). Full citation and link to the pdf below:
Kathryn E. Ringland, Christine T. Wolf, LouAnne E. Boyd, Mark Baldwin, and Gillian R. Hayes. 2016. Would You Be Mine: Appropriating Minecraft as an Assistive Technology for Youth with Autism. In ASSETS 2016. [PDF]
Acknowledgements: We thank the members of Autcraft for the warm welcome into their community. We also thank members of LUCI and the anonymous reviewers for their feedback on this paper, and Robert and Barbara Kleist for their support. This work is covered by human subjects protocol #2014-1079 at the University of California, Irvine.
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For Slide Notes: Writing Beyond Your Undergrad Experience: Going Somewhere New from Kate Ringland
For slide notes: Collaborative Writing and Critique from Kate Ringland
I’ve been wandering the net looking for useful information for grad students (particularly those who are working on their dissertation and looking forward to the job market.) So here I will start compiling the useful information and links I have found and update as needed.
If you have your own materials or have links to ones you like, feel free to share in the comments!
- Destination Dissertation by Sonja K. Foss and William Waters, excellent book–read it early and often!!
- Even a Geek Can Speak by Joey Asher, this is a great resource for learning how to communicate complicated ideas to all sorts of audiences, also it’s got great humor
- How to write a professional bio
- Lots of really good advice for grad school and beyond (Matt Might, CS-oriented)
- Job market materials (Benjamin Mako Hill)
- More job market materials (Philip Guo)
- Scholarly Pursuits by Cynthia Verba
I’m happy to report I successfully passed my advancement to become a PhD Candidate!
My talk was titled “Technology Mediated Socialization for Children with Autism.”
Committee: Gillian Hayes (Chair), Rebecca Black, Mimi Ito, Josh Tanenbaum, and Tom Boellstorff
Technology Mediated Socialization for Children with Autism, Advancement to PhD Candidacy Talk from Kate Ringland
Abstract: Traditional face-to-face social interactions can be challenging for individuals with autism, leading some to perceive and categorize these individuals as less social than their peers. For example, autism can be accompanied by difficulty making eye contact, interpreting some nonverbal cues, and performing coherent verbal utterances. While these challenges can be interpreted as an inability or lack of desire for social interactions, researchers have begun to explore how to expand the definition of sociality for those with autism. My research explores how technology can support alternative means of sociality, particularly for children with autism engaged in social play. In this advancement talk, I will present two research studies: SensoryPaint and Autcraft. SensoryPaint is a multimodal sensory environment built to enable whole-body interaction with the Kinect. Evaluation of SensoryPaint was conducted in two stages: a lab-based study and a deployment study. Results from this study show how these systems can promote socialization. My second research project explores Autcraft, a Minecraft community for children with autism and their allies. I will present results from on-going ethnographic work exploring the community’s Minecraft server and other community affiliated social media. Results from this study highlight ways in which community members use technology to create a safe environment for children with autism to explore alternative forms of social expression. Findings suggest an expansion of how sociality has traditionally been conceptualized for individuals with autism and how technology plays a key role in facilitating this new sociality.
This spring has been rough in terms of my time management. Deadlines have crept up and the big ones seem to be converging. The past two weekends I have found myself trying to cram in finishing everything on my to do list that somehow didn’t get done during the week (including reading a couple of books, writing drafts of papers, and coding a prototype of our DanceCraft software).
After reading Time Tracking – Getting it Right, I was inspired to start keeping track of my time. Starting tomorrow, I’ll be keeping a log of activities, estimated time to complete, and time spent for the next week. Hopefully by next weekend I’ll have a little better idea where all the time goes.
Do you know where your time goes?
I will be continuing on in my series about my workflow as a graduate student (overview in Part 1). Last week, in Part 5, I talked about free writing. This week I will discuss the next step in the writing process for me: memos.
Memos
For me, memos look a lot like my free writing. They are mostly unformatted text (I will throw in an occasional header for sanity reasons). The big difference is memos are focused. They usually start with a question or idea that I want to expand upon. Maybe I am working through collected data or some literature I have just read. Perhaps I am asking the 10 questions about my research (https://depts.washington.edu/csclab/2009/11/the-10-questions/). Memos are a great way to start thinking through without worrying about the consequences (no grammar check, no worry about formatting, or if there’s a point).
Another difference between free writing and memos is the likelihood someone else might read a memo. My free writing I don’t share with anyone. However, my memos might get shared with co-authors or my advisor – especially memos that I have iterated on and are in a little better shape after a couple of drafts.
Really rough memos I do in Evernote. One nice thing about Evernote is you can link notes to each other. So as I am writing I can paste in links to other relevant notes (which would include other notes I’ve written, pdfs I’ve saved, or media I’ve clipped from the web).
If my memos make it to the stage where I am doing multiple iterations or drafts, I switch to Word. This is mostly so I can save versions as needed to Dropbox and so I can share easily with co-authors and my advisor.
Memoing is an important step in between free writing and starting drafts of academic papers. This is where the big thinking happens. Granted, you are thinking your way through the whole writing process, but this stage is where the questions get asked, the connections get made, and the literature starts to make sense. I have found it makes the next step, which I will talk about next week, much, much easier.
This week I will be writing about free writing. This is the fifth part of my series about my workflow as a graduate student (you can find Part 1 here). Last week, in Part 4, I gave an overview of my various steps in my writing process. Now I will break the first step down for you.
Free Writing
This is something I strive to do every (work) day. I carve out 35-45 minutes and sit down and write. My goal is 1500 (any kind of) words. Some days I don’t quite make it to my 1500 goal because I am tired or things get too hectic for my full writing session, but I do the best I can.
I do my free writes in OmmWriter and then transfer the text over to Evernote for safe keeping.
The great thing about this program is it is simple and quiet. I can plug in my headphones and hear ocean waves and the happy click-clack of keystrokes.
With a quick swipe of the mouse, I can check in on my word count if I’m feeling particularly anxious. For the most part, however, I just write.
When I’m done with my 1500 words, a quick copy and paste from OmmWriter to Evernote (filed under my notebook title “Free Writes”) saves my writing. I do this quick switch for one primary reason – searchability. My goal at the end of the day is to have all my research notes, memos, writing, etc. all in one place that is easily parsed and searchable. That way, when I get to later steps in my writing (“Now where did I put that one idea about a conference paper…..”) I can throw some keywords into my Evernote and find what I need. Work done now, upfront, is work saved later when energy levels may be low, cognitive function may be impaired, and deadlines are getting anxiously near.
I find this free write process to be very freeing (haha). First, it gets rid of one reason for writer’s block – the blank page. My later writings can now have snippets of free write pasted in to get them started – no more blank page! I also find this process really helps jumpstart and solidify my thought process. I am thinking through my writing. As I go through my day, do my readings, maybe work on various projects, my brain is making all sorts of connections I might not be aware of. These free writes are one place where I find myself actually articulating for the first time and iterating on these connections.
Up next, I will talk about memos in Part 6.
