Inside PBS Blog

This post is part of a series we kicked off last week, in which we introduce the incredible members of the Engage Advisory Board. Read our interviews with blogger Mark Glaser and online community guru Howard Rheingold.

Some of my friends joke about making a career out of playing video games; but for Engage Advisory Board Member Alice Robison, video games are serious business.

Alice studies how video games can be used as meaningful social interactions and learning tools.  She teaches in the English department at Arizona State University and helps Engage with our efforts to build PBS' interactive community.
Alice answered a few questions about the future of the web and using social media on PBS.org.

What excites you the most about what you're seeing online these days, and why? What concerns you the most?
What excites and concerns me about what I'm seeing online these days is the way people make decisions about how they want to use digital social media tools and applications. I see a lot of people making the mistake of assuming that there are right ways and wrong ways, when in fact it's much more complicated than that.

Those of us who use Twitter regularly know that while there are certainly "uncool" ways to use Twitter, we each end up having to find our own way of making it work for us. For example, new Twitter users should immediately post a pic in place of the default "O_o" symbol, and they should definitely include some specific identity clues in their profiles. Otherwise, folks might not follow them back if they don't know who they are.

But you don't necessarily know that until someone from the Twitter community tells it to you. You need a sponsor to apprentice you in to the community, just as you would need in any offline space, too. No one expects you to figure it out on your own, which is why these are called "social media." After a while you learn that although each of us uses Twitter differently, there are still a few common rules of Twitter culture that you need to learn. But you can't know what those rules are until you start exploring and asking for help, which is scary for a lot of people. So it's interesting how all of that gets sorted out.

What interests you most about being a member of the Engage Advisory Board?
What interests me most about being a member of the Advisory Board is the potential to design a vision for the project with other members of the team. I'd like to see board members do things like mentor members of the team, for example. Or perhaps we can start a Tumblr account for all of us to share, or maybe we can spend a bit more time learning what each person's strengths are so that we can use them more effectively as a part of the team.

Finish this sentence: "It would be amazing to see PBS _______________" (do what?)
I think there a few directions that social media are going in and it might be interesting to start gathering examples of them. For example, we might start collecting interesting visualizations and digital storytelling models for programming folks to think about. See this, for example.

I think mobile tools and projects are becoming more and more important by the day. I work in games research, and I'm seeing many developers leaving large studios and starting their own smaller companies in order to develop games for the iPhone. I'm seeing people like Dennis Crowley create games that are low-tech (can be played with SMS) but are *about* being mobile. Things like space and place are becoming more and more important, too, especially when we start looking at the world as a designed system.

In other words, there are a lot of amazing projects out there that I think the advisory board can teach the team about, helping them see how these concepts and ways of looking at what's next in social media might translate to day-to-day decisions about the project.

Check back soon to meet more of Engage's Advisory Board. (And if you're interested in video games, check out The Video Game Revolution, a site from the PBS archives).

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