Lisa Galarneau, Ph.D.​
Social Impact Research and Development
BIO
​Dr. Lisa Galarneau is a graduate of the Department of Screen and Media Studies at the University of Waikato in New Zealand. As a cultural/digital/cyborg anthropologist intrigued by contemporary material cultures, kinship, learning, and social dynamics, her doctoral research focused on social learning associated with virtual worlds, and she continues to explore the promise and possibility of digital spaces.

Lisa resides in Seattle, WA and has previously done research at Microsoft Games User Research, Microsoft Surface, Xbox, Amazon.com, and Intel.

She also helps maintain and contributes to Terra Nova, a collaborative blog exploring virtual worlds, and can be seen here and there on other blogs and social media sites.

Currently intrigued by relevance, cyborgs, insight into the human condition, and a good experience.
RESEARCH STATEMENT
My research into the types of social learning associated with digital spaces is inspired by my interest in the nature of learning, my experiences as a gamer, and the research and opinions of a great number of scholars, including John Seely Brown, Etienne Wenger, Jean Lave, Henry Jenkins, T.L. Taylor, James Paul Gee, Constance Steinkuehler, Kurt Squire, and countless others.

I am specifically interested in the phenomenon of self-motivated social learning in virtual worlds: how players self-organize and self-empower to achieve mastery of a game or virtual space. This interest covers various aspects of participation, community, learning, collective intelligence and self-organization:

How players self-organize into temporary and more permanent groupings and assist each other in learning the intricacies of a world.
How players contribute to the world and meta-world environment, and how developers/publishers/fans respond to these contributions.
How socio-cultural literacy develops in the context of a world, and how the worlds develop and regulate unique cultures and values.
How skills developed in virtual worlds might be leveraged into real-life contexts, and might even transform groups and individual lives.
How increasing the intelligence of an individual contributes to an increase in capability for their organizations.
How children’s forays into virtual spaces can be best understood, regulated when necessary, and rewarded.
How we will invent our socio-digital futures, and how the world will change as a result.
My projects take qualitative and quantitative approaches to exploring these questions.