Mark Friedman, a Web 2.0 technologies researcher for the Immersive Learning Technologies Team, attended the 5th Annual Games, Learning and Society Conference in Madison, WI in June 2009. At the conference he participated in a special 2-part session called Real Time Research. This session challenged participants to explore the ways that scholars, designers, and educators might collaborate together, as they not only discuss but enact new forms of and questions for research. Real Time Research was accomplished by teams of researchers spending two days collecting data directly from conference attendees.

With only 2 days to conceive, execute, and analyze an experiment, the expectation of Real-Time Research was not to make groundbreaking scholarly advancements, however, Mark’s Real-Time-Research team decided to track, analyze, and report on the Twitter feed (back-channel) taking place at the Conference, and categorize the content for various learning motivations. The presentation was selected by the conference coordinators as the "Most Surprising Finding" - a direct result of the statistical and graphical analysis created and presented during the conference. Though not a requirement, it was an interesting experience and offered the team valuable first-hand gaming research experience.

While research on many aspects of games and learning continues to progress rapidly, many important questions remain unanswered. At the same time, few models exist for the successful collaboration of academics, designers, educators, and others. Real-Time Research is a somewhat improvisational investigation of what it means to do games research. The Real-Time-Research results will be included in a forthcoming publication from ECT Press, authored by the GLS conference steering committee. Participants in the session will be cited as contributors to this publication which will include all of the presentations created by the teams at the conference.

Congratulations to Mark and his Team for their award winning research.