October 2005 Archive Page

Serious Games Summit DC 2005Ian Bogost: Project Management: Avoiding Mistakes... If I Only Knew Then What I Know Now (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Bogost reminded the group that, despite the fact the room was arranged for a lecture, this is a roundtable.

Why is an academic talking about project management? “After all, uiversities are not exactly known for finishing things.”

About a third of the audience self-identified as game developers, about a third were educators, a smaller group were owners or investors in serious games projects. Dealing with the diverse needs of a heterogeneous group is one of the most challenging situations I face as a teacher.

Bogost’s talking points:

What’s different? Budgeting, Expectations, Stakeholders, Testing, Deployment, Integration, Other Stuff?

Topics called out from the audience: Distributed teams, risk-averse environments, creativity, production pipelines, efficiency.


Some initial tension between the creativity of the designers and the accuracy of the instructional content. An instructional designer noted “There is no such thing as an educational game model,” while there are educational models for other media.

A woman who said she is from a story-basted instructional design company says start with the learning objectives, moves to what she called the “story envelope,” but trying to get away from the opening exposition, a game that has little to do with the story, and then a final story. Bogost noted (without naming) the position of ludologists (who say that games are not fundamentally storylike).

Instructional designers in attendance said they need more game literacy. One member noted, in jest, that “Instructional designers suck all the fun out of the game.”

One speaker spoke of three champions in the mix – the game design champion, the instructional design champion, and the subject matter champion.

Another speaker invoked David Letterman, who says if you ever learn anything on his show, then he’s lost you. Game designers don’t worry about learning outcomes.

Another speaker noted that a serious game is selling a concept that the game will improve learning, and that the outcomes must be evaluated, while the outcome in commercial games is determined through sales. In a conventional design situation, a particular feature might be cut for time, but certain features in serious games simply aren’t optional.

At this point, Bogost asked a very good question. Is a particular instructional component just another constraint, or is it qualitatively different from other constraints?

I noted that, while you might want to evaluate the success of a game based on how many copies you sell, simply spending money is never the intention of a game customer. In a similar way, the creators of a serious game will have a different objective than the players (who may not want to play a game at all).

Budget: One participant mentioned that 3D prototyping must be “evangelized” so that funders can see the value of that particular technique.

Expectations: When speaking of working in risk-averse environments, Bogost noted the importance of going to the top of the organization. One participant warned that, once you educate the stakeholders about the potential of serious games, a problem is that the decision-makers suddenly develop high expectations – but typically that happens after the developer has committed to the project.

I noted that, as a verbal thinker, I was interested in the assumption lurking behind so much of the activity here that better graphics and more polygons equals a more realistic game, which by definition is a better teacher. But I noted that today’s young people are also interested in animation. For example, we need an abstracted version of an atom in order to understand the forces at work inside an atom. I suggested that we shouldn’t forget about the power of abstraction to teach basic concepts. (Bogost gave a thumbs up and said, “Inform text adventures!” The participants seemed to like that.)

On the difference between simulators and games – good simulators depend on outside knowledge, while a good game teaches you how to play the game (through a context that uses rewards and penalties to get the user to modify his or her behavior). Bogost introduced James Gee’s definition of the difference between games and simulation, though Bogost himself holds that there is no fidelity to the outside world in a simulation (and then, after dropping that bomb on the audience, rather comically changed the subject).

A comment from someone sitting next to me -- designers make games too difficult, because they are typically expert gamers themselves, and they tweak a game until it holds their own attention. The gameplay may be too hard for the intended audience to learn.

Developers noted the difficulty of testing their games on their intended audience, but in response to a question that Bogost and I asked at almost the same time, who in the room has funded such research? The crickets chirped in the room, two hands crept up, but when Bogost called on one, the speaker simply asked, “Where’s the money for that kind of research?”

Bogost will run a similar roundtable tomorrow.

Serious Games Summit DC 2005Sharon Sloane: Exploring Game-Based Instructional Methodologies that Reach the Cognitive and Affective Learning Domains (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

The presentation, by Sharon Sloane, president of CEO of Will Interactive, began with a long video clip showing a military leadership training game, focusing not on combat but routine decisions, careerism, inappropriate comaraderie (a superior officer being too friendly in response to a screw-up), slackerism, and even on-the-job horseplay.

Sloane warned that some of the worst principles of brick-and-mortar teaching have moved into distance learning and serious games, and set up shop on CDs and on the internet.

She invoked Bloom's taxonomy, and suggested that behavior won't change unless the affective domain is reached, where emotions and life experiences convince people to apply the phsycho motor skills they've practiced, and the information they've been exposed to through cognitive doman. Affective learning leads to cognitive goals.

Tips to engage the Affective Domain.

• Be learner-centric.
  
• Know your audience
  
• Get real.
  
• Reach out to your learner's world.
  
• One more item I didn't get...

Example of reaching out into the world of the intended audience, from an HIV education program designed to change the attitudes and behaviors of young adults.

Rule #1: Never take medical advice from someone hornier than yourself.

Advised that the learners will have different motives. Simply pass a course? Become a more successful person? Avoid casualties and maintain morale in a war situation?

Introduced "Hate Comes Home," a game about bias and ethics, understanding, stereotyping and prejudice, used in California schools and elsewhere. (I'd call it a modern morality play.. just as doctrinal as Everyman, but filmed with shaky-camera effects and a documentary style - including "artistic" camera effects (slow-mo, etc.) and a voice-over narrative - that one doesn't usually see in a computer game. The military is learning, through the global war on terror, that the old style of teaching military doctrine isn't working. Since lower-level people are now making higher-level decisions in the field, the military needs to develop the critical thinking ability of people in the field, rather than relying on the centralized wisdom and experience of the upper-level officers.

According to a slide, "Generic content no longer works. We cannot rely on the leaner to make the leap to today's realities and unique circumstances. In GWOT [Global War on Terrorism], education and training must depict real events in real environments in order to work."

Today's artillerymen are asked to do peacekeeping tasks and interacting with civilians in towns, rather than "putting steel on target."

Described the characteristics of successful "game-based learning solutions." Based on a comprehensive learning strategy; customizing the game on the fly to meet the needs of the learner; get useful feedback that's not simply a score. Games need in-game reference materials that can be accessed easily during gameplay.

(By the way, that term is a wonderful example of marketese - no real human beings talk about "game-based learning solutions," but I can understand why Sloane wants to use that term in her presentations. Her game philosophy is essentially the same as Gibson's. but where he used Flash cartoons to teach a general point, she used videotape and special effects -- blood, simulated burns -- to create a gritty realistic detail. Having said that, the make-up was not exactly top-notch, and the acting was adequate in the training clip, low-key and documentary-style in the high school diversty game and a hostage-negotiation scenario, and really just adequate in a combat simulation. Sloane says her games are designed to recreate reality, and repeatedly apologized for only being able to show isolated clips out of context. Is it flippant of me to note that the games she showed were only partially successful at emulating the cinematic qualities of film?)

(I just asked her the above quesiton. She responded that her test audiences responded postively to this particular method of instruction. There is a difference, she noted, between educating people in the field to change their short-term behavior in order to achieve results, and teaching a complex concept in the context of a college course. While Sloane is an accomplished and confident speaker, numerous times she ran up against a wall when she realized the information the audience was able to glean from a three-minute clip is completely different from what a player might learn from an extended interaction with the whole training system.)

Serious Games Summit DC 2005Michael Gibson: Creating Life Experience Through Dramatic Simulations (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I picked the wrong presentation to stroll in on a minute before the speaker started. It’s standing room only – three people jumped up and took chairs at the speaker’s table. I’m sitting on the floor, my knee touching the podium where the speaker is presenting.

Gibson promised an inexpensive method, deliverable over the web.

“Failure is the best teacher,” said Gibson, who shared a childhood humiliation – being caught shoplifting candy as a child. The shopkeeper called out “Stop!” and he dutifully emptied his pockets and was exposed before his friends.

The lesson: “If you’re caught stealing candy from a candy store – run!”

That was a life-changing experience (Gibson realized he didn’t want to be a career criminal). The best simulations place the user in the decision-making seat, letting them learn from failures without the career-destroying consequences of failure.

Demonstrated a negotiation game – “The Raise.”

Gibson used the story of the snorkler found dead in a tree ten miles from any body of water – a logic puzzle that leaves out an important detail.

Began with a second-person textual scenario, that leads into a dialogue cutscene, then leads to a multiple-choice sequence. The animation was cheesy, as was the Monty Burns-esque voice for the boss, but the audience clearly enjoyed the presentation. What made the presentation work was Gibson’s articulation of his (not very good) reasons for making choices that lead to amusing failures. I can imagine a student would simply click quickly on the answers – what makes the “game” work is Gibson’s

(Always give a clue in the assessment of the failure. The players who assumed that they were role-playing a competent employee may feel they were cheated by making choices that would have worked in that case.)

[Note – This is very different from the way educational games are presented in K-12 environments, where protecting the student’s self-esteem is an ideological position that limits gameplay options.]

The assumption in The Raise game is that we deserve a raise; the mistake is assuming that the other party has a similar goal.

A good educational game will be built around exploiting a false assumption made by the user.

You don’t win “The Raise” by getting a raise – you win it by convincing your employer that something else you can do is worthwhile to him, and you get another source of income.

When designing an educational game built around this kind of gameplay, start at the end and work backwards.

What are the learning outcomes?

Avoiding and identifying unprofessional conduct
Non-disclosure of conflict of interest
Pushing biased solutions

What assumptions inform the above bad actions?

1. Everyone does it, so it’s OK.
   
2. Speaking out will hurt my prospects.
   
3. I don’t need to disclose the conflict of interest because I can be neutral.
   
4. Silence means consent.
   
5. Pushing one solution locks the other parties out of determining their own results.

What are the failing outcomes?

1. Everyone gets caught.
   
2. All are tarred with the same brush.
   
3. You’re told, by a supervisor or judge, that it is important.
   
4. One of the silent participants is non-compliant in a settlement.
   
5. A better solution exists.

Gibson demonstrated a web-delivered flash game designed to train financial consultants for Canadian farmers.

Early questions sort participants out into groups that are happy-go-lucky and those who are more cautious. The early decisions we make lead to consequences in later chapters. (How you respond to a worker who speaks disrespectfully of clients on one day affects how you should behave in front of the boss when he behaves that way again. Antagonist characters try to drive you towards the outcome of making an unethical choice, which leads to one of six failure outcomes.

One of the design principles was informed by the fact that users who choose an early solution close off the possibility of learning new information that leads to a better solution.

The take-home message: Play to the assumptions of players, by leaving out crucial details that drive the consequences.

Serious Games Summit DC 2005 Dolly Joseph and Mable Kinzie: Boys [sic] and Girls [sic] Game Play Preferences: Survey Results (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I'm hemmed into an awkward back corner, so I hope the presentation's good, since I won't be able to get out easily.

I didn't catch the speaker's name at first, but it was Dolly Joseph speaking alone, about work that she and Mabel Kinzie did at the University of Virginia. She began with the thick theoretical grounding that I find comforting in an academic presentation -- though the use of "Pedagogy" in Tim Holt's presentation as a term of insult used by a bully suggests the tension between academics and designers).

Joseph made multiple references to her dissertation... she invited the audience to interrupt with questions, working her way professionally and methodically through her slides, occasionally referring apologetically to information that she was not covering. That did spark a lot of requests for clarification from the audience. I'd like to see more of this study as it develops.

I found the very small statistical sample to be troubling -- 20 students for the survey, and just four for in-depth profiles. In addition the survey was a proxy -- measuring what students said about games, not actually measuring their reaction to games. For instance, rather than giving the students the chance to play four different games, and then observing how much time they spent on each game, the students were instead asked to answer a question about what kind of hypothetical games they would like.

To her credit, Joseph didn't make any grandiose claims about her findings -- she freely admitted the risks associated with making claims on such a small data set, though she did on several occasions express frustration that the data confirmed multiple stereotypes about children. If the data had challenged rather than confirmed those sterotypes, would she have presented her findings differently? (For more on gender and desing, see Utopian Entrepreneur, in which Brenda Laurel describes the flak she got from some feminists who were horrified that her company designed games for girls, and catered specifically to the friendship-related issues that are so important to girls.

What follows are my lightly-edited liveblogging notes.

She was building on her own research on the use of popular culture in education, and mentioned comic books.

Hm.... the presentation is based on comparisons between the activity of two different game camps in Charlottesville, Va., offered under the title "Got Game".

A survey of the participants of two camps, featuring feedback gathered from a total of 21 participants. While I rather like the idea of having kids give feedback through surveys, journals, and a "video confessional," that's just 21 kids - not even a whole middle school class. That's a pretty small sample to use, and the arbitrary choice of four out of these 21 students leads to problems. As long as a study doesn't use this kind of profiling as evidence to support a statistical conclusion, I'm perfectly happy hearing what we can learn from the analysis.

The researcher chose four children to profile, with different ethnic backgrounds, learning styles, and gaming preferences.

• One student who liked games with clear goals and good positive feedback and strong closure, and thus liked a game called Bioscopia, which the researcher presented as like Myst. "None of us understood why it was fun."
  
• Another student frequently asked "What is the point of this game?" Didn't like educational goals embedded within the gameplay, she wanted to know what she was supposed to learn.
  
• Yet another student preferred collaboration during gameplay, liked controlling social interactions and adaptable goals.
  
• A fourth student gravitated towards complex, realistic problems, with an urban aesthetic, liked action and conflict. Liked to set his own goals.

All four of the profiled campers were proficient in "active play" - under the pressure of time, with rapid character birth and rebirth, starting over from the same point, and dichotomous storylines (good/evil). Educational games that included this kind of play were answered highly. Kids were not fooled by games that inserted quiz questions as barriers.

Explorative play - part of the game world is initially hidden; travel through physical space is important; discovering new areas leads to new challenges. Only one profiled camper liked this.

Problem-solving - Discreet challenges with set goals; hierarchical or parallel, multiple challenges that are generally independent. All of the four students enjoyed these. Clear challenges and readily apparent successes and failures, consequences are apparent. Some educational games are insufficiently challenging for middle-school children. Assembling puzzle-pieces or other simple tasks were not addressing the higher cognitive abilities of the advanced students.

Srategic play - long-term manipulation of resources; multiple pathways; greater complexity 2 of the 4 liked this mode; few educational games employ the open boundaries of this kind of gameplay - the complexity might be too challenging.

Social play - Intra-game, multi-player, and collaborative. Social play was not implicit in any of the games surveyed games.

Said the kids "were wild for" the idea of playing an online social game, but that element wasn't part of any of the games tested.

Results: Design Suggestions (after looking at case studies of 4 children, from a pool of 21)


I asked the speaker to clarify - these are four suggestions for games that the researcher wishes would exist, because they contain elements that she says these fours students would like. [The ideological force behind the suggestions are at least as interesting as the gameplay suggestions themselves.]

1. Cures of the Rainforest: Goal - find plants with potential curative properties within the rainforest. Put together a party with characters who have certain background details. Teaching flora and fauna. [But wouldn't a game that presented the political and economic choices that must be made by the government of a third-world country that possesses rainforests. Issues related to the economic dependence on tourism, poaching, the jobs of people who might be employed by a local logging company, the agenda of a Hollywood celebrity whose presence on the team would increase publicity but displace a scientist... ]
   
2. Vigilante P.I. - "Solve crimes and bring corrupt businessmen to justice." Strategy and problem-solving, using mental powers and a bit of muscle. Forensics, chemistry, health hazards. (You would be able to shoot.) A question from the audience: Did you get backlash from suggesting shooting a person would be an appropriate element of a game?
   
3. Butterfly Babies - "Collect, breed, and 'grow' butterflies." "Create a pretty butterfly, but use science to do it." Biology, genetics, lab procedures.
   
4. Zoo Rescue - "Free a trapped zookeeper by traveling through a maze-like zoo." Teaching biology and ecology, solving puzzles that lead you through passageways. Surprised to find a child who liked that kind of gameplay.
   

In response to a question I asked about the ideological decisions behind the game design choices, the researcher said that students who were worried about their on financial situation were more worried about saving their neighborhood; those students who had the luxury of worrying about the world did.

Analysis of a survey of the 20 children who participated in the study.

Boys more likely to play on consoles, girls more likely to play on computers.

Both genders preferred to play their own genders and ethnicities.

Girls preferred thinner female characters.

Boys preferred games in the street or sports fields, girls prefer games set in a mall to a meadow. (This result sparked a flurry of questions from the audience, that eventually established that participants were given a survey to take home, and for this particular question were asked to say which of the following four choices would be their favorite setting for a game: streets, sports, mall, and meadow.)

I don't know how the following was determined, but boys preferred saving adults and senior citizens, girls would rather save young children. (I'm actually just as curious to know more about this item, but since I was one of the questioners about the previous item, I kept my mouth shut so the presenter could get through the material.)

Serious Games Summit DC 2005Tim Holt:  (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Remediating the classic Atlas body-building cartoon, Holt presented the scenario in which a big burly organization kicks sand in the face of a scrawny game designer. He suggested that modding is a way to create a great-looking game, that can be used to get further funding, without requiring a million bucks for the prototype. In some ways I'm more advanced than the target audience for this talk, but what Holt is doing now is what I'll have to do if my own idea for an educational game is going to go anywhere.
Holt noted that open-source and alternative development options are available, but he got a little FUDdy on the audience. When Holt, who used to work for Valve (the company that makes Half-Life) first suggested that he would talk about several alternatives to the traditional commercial development process, then admitted that would only talk about modding, the audience chuckled. The presentation walked through the process of using Half-Life 2 as a source for mods.

Differentiated modding - resuing somebody else's wheel -- from the traditional development process. The process starts with buying a commercial game such as Half-Life 2, noting that the companies want users to create their own modifications. Modding is a great playground, but you don't have to start from scratch. Half-Life 2 includes lots of grungy bitmaps, which wouldn't be acceptable for a hospital simulation, of course, but are easily expandable. Holt's laptop has 14 GB worth of content that can be reused in original mods. That content includes code that defines the AI properties or the in-game characters.

Holt showed the Half-Life 2 characters, which his collaborators complained they slouched too much, turning the oppressed out-of-work civilians of Half-Life 2 into confident, confidence-inspiring doctors (with white work boots).

Used Half-Life 2 greenery functions for a forestry simulation, expanding a function originally designed for grass and shrubbery, turning it into a system to populate a forest stretched across kilometers.

"It's too hard to explain to a bunch of foresters why they're running around with a crowbar."

Showed a proof-of-concept game for "Pulse!!" - a first-person medical game that featured an in-game EEG monitor synchronized with an in-game patient. The PC, with stethoscope in hand, touches the patient's chest, and we hear the heartbeat and breathing, based on where the hand is touching. (In the background, slouching hospital workers wash their hands or punch buttons.)

Indicated that in order to do mods, you'll need to play the game in order to understand its capabilities. "If your co-workers don't like it, invite them to play too."

Saved me a bit of time by noting that there aren't really any books out there on the subject of modding games.

In response to a question from the audience, briefly mentioned other platforms such as Neverwinter Nights and the new Civilization IV that offer modding capability.

Noted that, in addition to a copy of the game, you'll need a 3D modeling program (he suggested XSI), a programming environment (Visual C++), and an image editor.

Holt's virtual forest needs a system where people can share data, posting persistent notes within the game world. [That really got me thinking? would that be virtual geocaching? Let players leave audio comments for each other? That would let students annotate the same simulated world in different ways, according to different objectives? that really opens up a huge range of ways to reuse the same generic simulated environment. Lots to think about! -DGJ]

Giving students a virtual patient that they have to take care of day and night [That would be an extremely interesting variation on neopets, or the parenting simulations in which adolescents are given dolls that they have to take care of]

Offered the advice to "keep it simple," as applied to "Pulse!!"

Holt mentioned Garry's Mod - a sandbox version of Half-Life, with a scripting language called Lua.

Played "A Few Good G-Men," a wonderful demonstration of what can be possible with simulation. Perhaps only a scene that features a cold, stiff military officer in a courtroom setting would work. While the clip was fascinating, I would rather have seen a demonstration of a game - using a remediated version of a movie to demonstrate what modding can do.

(Holt's use of the buzzword "pedagogy" in his remediaton of the bodybuilding cartoon was hilarious.)

Serious Games Summit DC 2005Perla and Whatley's Keynote Address: What's So Serious about Game Design? The Art or the Science? (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Quick Take:

I thought both speakers did a fair job contextualizing serious games, but as a humanist I am used to attending conferences in which speakers are meticulous about plugging their individual observations in to a larger theoretical framework. I did take practical notes during Whatley’s careful walkthrough of the design process, but I could have learned most of this content directly from the slideshow. I felt that both speakers were concentrating so much on delivering a take-home message that attendees could use to inform and persuade other stakeholders, that as a result, just when the speakers had laid out all the pieces, instead of synthesizing and building on the situation the laid out, they backed up and said “And here’s what this really means,” and delivered a much simpler version of the message. I’m not sure what that accomplished, rhetorically, other than to train audiences not to pay attention during the setup. But I recognize the difficulty of speaking to a diverse audience -- I often struggle with how to meet the expectations of English majors while not alienating or terrifying the non-majors in the same class.

New to me – the “OODA loop.” An acronym for Observation, Orientation, Decision, and Action. In war, when one side has a more efficient OODA loop, the effects can be powerful. But in a game production context, the developer and the client need to have matching OODA loops.


What follow are loosely-edited notes, taken during the presentation.

Perla

Perla’s book The Art of Wargaming was published by the Naval Institute Press, introduced a scientific approach to designing a game system for military purposes. He observed that war is a fitting topic for "serious games" there is no subject more serious than war. A justification for seeking realism in wargames.

On teaching naval officers to use games to teach military strategy: "How can you teach people to create credible games, if they don't have that spark of genius that all working designers have?"

Perla introduced what he called a bad definition of wargaming: "Any type of modeling, including exercises, campaign analysis, computer simulation without players (CSWP)"

Perla offered his own definition, that differentiates between field exercises and computer modeling that are sometimes grouped under the umbrella of "wargaming," but which are fundamentally different from gaming. To Perla, wargaming is "A warfare model or simulation that does not involve the operations of actual forces, in which the flow of events affects and is affected by decisions made during the course of those events by players representing the opposing sides."

The dimensions of wargames: Time, Space, Forces (not just military, but also civilians and physics), Effects, Information, and Command

The military command structure exists in part in order to counter the effects of entropy. Success involves controlling that entropy better than your enemy.

Tips for "gaming your subject matter" (for those who aren’t doing wargaming)

Identify the "true philosophers of your subject matter" and make the postulates of your subject tangible in your game universe. Then – he offered whimsicaly -- "Just do it -- enter the artist."

Whatley

Douglas Whatley, CEO BreakAway, Ltd, offered a quotation from Donald E. Thompson of the National Science Foundation: “Perhaps the most fatal flaw in the education of young people is that we apprentice youngsters into 19th century science rather than letting them play scientist.”

Whatley presented serious games not just a replacement for e-learning, books, or rote teaching, but “fundamentally change the way we train, the way we educate… and hopefully to improve their interactions with the real world.” Much as “the game publishers are the bad guys in the stories we tell,” those game companies know how to protect the creative arc of the process.

Whatley’s definition of serious games: “A product that is not specifically entertainment, but which uses entertainment or the techniques and processes of the entertainment business, to achieve a purpose.”

Offered a chart illustrating the stages in the development and delivery of a game, with time on the horizontal and manpower/resources on the vertical.

Concept
Design
Prototype
Preproduction
Production (top of bell curve; the only time that simply throwing more people at the project can accelerate it -- when “nine women can have a baby in one month”)
Alpha, Beta, Testing, Delivery, Support (difference between “code complete” at alpha, and “content complete” at beta)

Of the government: “They don’t actually like paying for the testing phase.”

Whatley offered a useful set of terms that expand the concept of a “serious game”:

Simulation: “a speculative exercise with rules, goals and containing a disequilibria outcome. Typically it has a mathematical construct that allows one to test an adaptive skill set within a planned context.”

Play: “outcomes are often unknown and unexpected. We attempt to let kids make things explode.”

Toys: “fun objects that allow one to explore the woodness of wood.”

Whatley returned to the list of dimensions of wargaming, and offered some expansion.

Time – granularity (turn-based… how to force people to deal with a problem)
Space – granularity
Entities – the objects in the game
Effects – what can happen in the game (don’t model the physics of the element, but look at the effects as a separate element – thus, use die roll tables instead of simulating physics)
Information
Command

Serious Games Summit DC 2005 Blogging (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Here's my schedule for the first day of the Serious Games Summit, which starts in a few minutes here in Arlington, Va., a suburb of Washington D.C. I do enjoy the mixture of commercial, government, educational and indie content, but the biggest draw is probably the dollars at stake to be extracted from government agencies for military training. I'll check out the booths of course, but the government/military/business angle is not why I'm here.

Signs That I'm Not at a Humanities Conference

1. Demonstrating the seriousness of the situation: Whatley mentioned that one of his EULA (end-user license agreements) includes the warning “death and dismemberment are not our fault.”
   
2. When I asked a question about simulation, Whatley’s response began with, “If I shoot a bullet at you…”
   
3. The word "pedgagogy" appears in one of the presentations, not simply to be dismissed as pedestrian and non-theoretical, but in the speech bubble of the beach bully kicking sand in the face of a scrawny little game designer, in a remix of the classic comic book advertisement for body-building snake oil.
   
4. To be continued??

Last year there was a T-shirt. This year? A plastic bag with a program, a promotional CD from Anark (one of the sponsors) and a few other fliers. (I overheard one of the conference organizers say that nobody offered to sponsor the t-shirts. Shame.)

I certainly hope there are muffins or cookies somewhere around here. [Update: There are.]

Keynote: Peter Perla and Doug Whatley
"What's So Serious about Game Design? The Art or the Science?"

Tim Holt
"Healthcare and Forestry -- Half-Life 2: Meet Serious Games Modding"

I'm conflicted... I'm interested in both of these topics, and may bail out of the first one to visit the second.

Dolly Joseph and Mable Kinzie
"Boys [sic] and Girls [sic] Game Play Preferences: Survey Results"

Lauren Davis
"Inside our Hidden Agenda: Using Contests to Generate New Ideas for Games in Education" (Never got to this. I've actually blogged about the Hidden Agenda effort before, and I would have loved to hear how the project is doing, but Joseph's presentation held my attention.)

Michael Gibson
"Creating Life Experience Through Dramatic Simulations"

Sharon Sloane
"Exploring Game-Based Instructional Methodologies that Reach the Cognitive and Affective Learning Domains"

Ian Bogost
"Project Management: Avoiding Mistakes... If I Only Knew Then What I Know Now"

Well, it looks like the exhibit hall is supposed to be open now.

Update, 01 Nov: See my liveblogging from day 2

People are investing major chunks of disposable income and (astonishingly, in a flat-out work-obsessed society where no one has time) untold hours in modding. It's one of the fastest up-and-coming social trends in the United States.

And modding has already tumbled head-on into a legal snake pit. --Andy Oram --Control Freaks: Modding and the Clash with Law (oreilley.net)

Modding is the practice of making and sharing new content for existing commercial games.

Since we currently cannot make games of sufficient (accessible) complexity to rival the heights of our best storytelling, we perhaps should focus on the other side of the equation. Games produce play and implicit narrative: we can look at ways of making those implicit narrative situations tie into an explicit narrative, thus deepening the sense of involvement (and the mimicry) of a game, and (crucially) of building dynamic explicit narratives which support whichever implicit narrative situations the player chooses to favour. --Chris Bateman --Between Stories and Games (Only a Game)

On Oct. 31, the Serious Games Summit gets underway in Washington D.C. Its sole focus: To bring together the computer gaming industry with other experts from various fields for more than just a good time. --Beyond 'Flinch and Twitch' Games (Cybershake)

Thanks to some (partial) funding from SHU, I'll be going to this event. My students were crushed when I told them I was cancelling most of my classes Monday and Tuesday.

(There's a Monday class that meets for just one hour a week, and I'm going to let the students run that class themselves.)

In God’s atemporal view, the act of creation is simultaneous with the moment of your reading this. God doesn’t look back to creation, nor forward to your clicking on... more» --Arts & Letters Daily

A wonderful little blurb that uses the context of encountering this bit of text in a web browser to draw the reader in.

A complaint was filed against Miner because he used the word "subhuman" when writing about gay people.

The university's Judicial Affairs panel found that those remarks violated the school's university code of conduct.

[...]

As punishment, Duquesne University made Miner take the offending blog off his online profile.

We checked that profile and the blog is gone, but Miner is also supposed to write a 10-page paper on homosexuality in the Catholic Church.

[..]

Arguing that it is a First Amendment issue, Miner is appealing the school's decision. --Student Sanctioned For Comments On Homosexuality (WTAE-TV | The PittsburghChannel.com)

If Duquesne isn't Congress, and I'm pretty sure isn't, then the First Amendment doesn't apply. (The issue is, instead, one of academic freedom.)

And the article mentions that it's a Facebook profile, but refers to "blog" as if it means "a bit of text posted online." That's like calling a business card a "newspaper" because they're both printed on paper.

For the last decade, most game companies have been governed by one obsessive idea: that making games more lifelike?more three-dimensional and hyperreal?will make them more fun. But this hasn't worked. Even the crappiest game today has an elaborate 3-D world you can wander around and marvel at the superb rendering of shadows, the elaborate tattoos on the characters, or the lens flares when you look up at the virtual sun. But after you've finished admiring the scenery, the game itself is often incredibly tedious. You're just running around, solving obtuse puzzles, and listening to wretched pseudoacting by virtual characters.

What's missing? Game-play. What today's game designers have forgotten is that a video game isn't about 3-D rendering. In fact, a video game isn't about "technology" at all. It's a game, and as game theorists such as Eric Zimmerman have argued, a good game is created by crafting a few simple rules that make your goals teasingly difficult to achieve. --Clive Thompson --Blasts From the Past: What today's game designers can learn from Space Invaders. (Slate)

The uncanny valley itself is where dwell monsters, in the classic sense of the word. Frankenstein’s creation, the undead, the ingeniously twisted demons of animé and their inspirations from legend and myth, and indeed all the walking terrors and horrors of man’s imagining belong here. In essence, they tend to be warped funhouse-mirror images of humanity, and many if not most share one or both of a pair of common traits. --Dave Bryant --The Uncanny Valley

Bryant presents the work of Masahiro Mori, who noted that people like dolls and toys that represent humans, but that as these items start to look and behave more human, there is a sudden drop in the graph. [Correcting that last bit, which got cut off.]

Now, I'd have to look into Mori's work more closely to determine exactly what he was measuring, or why he chose to see a connection between these objects:

1. industrial robot (slightly positive)
   
2. android (more positive)
   
3. moving corpse (most negative)
   
4. prosthetic hand (somewhat negative)
   
5. handicapped person (neutral)
   
6. bunraku puppet (most positive so far)
   
7. unhealthy person (higher than the previous one)
   
8. healthy person (even higher)
   

When you list them in that order, you get a positive "emotional response" curve from the industrial robot to the andriod, and then you get the "uncanny valley" -- that is, the huge drop in the graph -- for "moving corpse," followed by an upward sweep towards "healthy person."

But what is it about a moving corpse that necessitates that it should be placed to the right of an android on the above scale? The "valley" disappears if you simply sort the items in a different order, like this:

1. moving corpse (lowest)
   
2. prosthetic hand
   
3. handicapped person (netural)
   
4. industrial robot
   
5. android
   
6. bunraku puppet
   
7. unhealthy person
   
8. healthy person (highest)
   

My point is not that Bryant is somehow being dishonest, or that Mori's work was somehow unscientific. But the choice to arrange objects in order to create a visual "ucanny valley" in the graph of emotional responses is a rhetorical device, designed to draw attention to a particular measurement and to control the context in which that measurement is presented.

This is Denny Hastert and welcome to my blog. This is new to me. I can't say I'm much of a techie. I guess you could say my office is teaching the old guy new tricks. But I'm excited. This is the future. And it is a new way for us to get our message out. --Speaker of the House Denny Hastert --Welcome to my Blog (Speaker's Journal)

Found via Slashdot, where, if you look beyond the knee-jerk political responses, there's some interesting discussion on the tone and style of this blog.

One poster writes, "If we expect our policiticans to start web-logging their daily thoughts, we're going to have to be a lot less hard on them about what they say. Our politicians, like the rest of the human race, are going to have ideas that, when fully thought out, are really bad. In maintaining weblogs some of these bad ideas are going to see international publication."

There's this amusing mock post... not hilarious or stunning, but amusing enough:

OMG!!!! What a day! :-(

Georgie said that he didn't think that I was doing enough to kill the McCain amendment in conference committee. Then I got a call from Dick, and he said that I needed to get the troops in line for the upcoming appropriations bill. They both are so mean sometimes! WTF!!! I just want to do fun speaker stuff like bang my gavel and shout "THERE WILL BE ORDER IN THE HOUSE!" at freshman congressmen, but these guys make me feel really underappreciated. I told Tom about it, and he said that I should just chill out and not worry about them. :-( [sigh]

I was feeling really depressed until I got a call from Condi, who said that she wanted someone to go shopping with her. I had an excellent time with her. We went to The Mall and bought a few odds and ends. She really cheered me up when she did an impression of John Kerry. She spoke in a monotone voice and pulled the sides of her eyes down to look like a basset hound and she said "GLOBAL TEST! GLOBAL TEST!" and "I VOTED FOR IT BEFORE I VOTED AGAINST IT!" ROFLMAO!!!! After we were done laughing, some lady next to us was shopping for flip-flops! Can you believe it! LOLLERSKATES!!!!

But I, for one, do not believe that journalism's future is gloomy. In fact, I think that when we look back on the early years of the 21st century, we will recognize it as a period of exploding opportunity for journalists and the start of an exciting new era for journalism. I also think it's quite possible that we'll look back on these years as a period when a better informed public began to emerge, thanks to new communications channels and technologies.

Am I nuts? Maybe. The signs of decline in traditional forms of journalism are real. But declining audiences and financial returns for newspapers and television news do not necessarily translate into worsening prospects for journalism, nor into a more poorly informed society. --Rich Gordon -- Printer-friendly version Online opportunities make journalism’s future bright, despite gloomy feelings (Online Journalism Review)

Okay, given the source one expects a wee bit of bias, but it's still good to see these arguments made this clearly.

At first glance, it seems like a regular blog. But look closer and you'll see there's something very odd about the blog's content: It's very familiar. Too familiar.

That's because you wrote it, six months ago, on your own blog. The rest of the content doesn't make sense: The same word repeated over and over again. There are ads all over the sidebar for products like Viagra and mortgage loans.

This, you realize, is a splog, and you're the victim. --Nicole Lee --How to Fight Those Surging Splogs (Wired)

It's happened to me.

SHU's blogs are down for the moment.

If the blogs don't get fixed soon, my news writing students can leave comments on this entry in order to prepare for their oral presentations scheduled for Friday.

Update: Blogs are back up. Nevermind.EL 227 Student Blogging

Officials at Proctor Jr.-Sr. High School have banned access from school computers to an Internet site that students have been using to post to weblogs, or blogs.

Principal Chris Sousa said the decision to block the site from school was made because blogging is not an educational use of school computers. --Brendan McKenna --High school bans blogging (Rutland Herald)

I wonder how an English professor would feel spending a week in a physics lab. Not about the scientific work, but about the frequent, ongoing interaction between students and peers, post-docs and faculty. Scientists see each other in the lab, if not daily, then at least weekly. They have frequent lab meetings, colloquia and interaction with scholars at other universities around joint research. --Gina Hiatt --We Need Humanities Labs (Inside Higher Ed)

I agree that academic life in the humanities can be isolating and lonely. While my Ph.D. is in literature, I found myself hanging out in the library's Java programming lab, where I put in most of the hours of a research assistantship, and drinking in the collegiality in what was at the time the school's Engineering Writing Centre.

Those were great experiences. I also had an experience that was, if not actually hellish, like a visit to the world of "Office Space," and a living lab in which I learned how managers can alienate and undercut the work of the managed. Of course I liked the money, and everything worked out for me in the end, but quite frankly, most work in the humanities IS solitary. I realize that hard and serious work is done in group environments, but in the humanities we don't first *do* research and *then* write it up -- typically the writing *is* the research, along with the requisite reading, and most of us need quiet and some control over our schedule in order to get that work done. I can't imagine going to an office 9-5, and punching in, just so I could start reading "Hamlet".

I got through it all just fine, and I welcome the collegiality in play at my current job. I think of all the grad students whose work I know of via the blogosphere, and I imagine how different my own grad experience would have been if I'd had access to the kind of online support groups I see in action everyday online.

At what point did the carving of pumpkins turn into a "cute" event? When did boys stop carving pumpkins and moms start? Where did we lose touch with one of the years coolest events? --ExtremePumpkins.com

Don't miss the story of carving "Carrie".

Via Machina Memorialis.

I couldn't help but make a joke with the title, because it's seemingly right on the money. You see, Google is getting ready to take the wraps off of a new service called Google Base. If it can be posted online, it would appear that they would, in fact, prefer it belong to them. At least, they'll store it for you and make it searchable. -- Ken Fisher --Google Base: All your base are, in fact, belong to us (Ars Technica)

I think a better title would be "All Your Base Are Belong to Google," but that's just me.

For those who don't get the joke, see "All Your Base Are Belong to Us," a meme that hit the internet around 2001.

The very fact that we can use wildcards to search Google for variations of phrases means that we can study this process in popular culture, essentially in real time. New to me: the term "snowclone," one example of which is a variation on Dr. McCoy's famous line, "I'm a doctor, not a ____."

The variation, of course, is "I'm a _____, not a _____."

Rather than looking into my blog to see if I have any new comments and then staying on my own page to read and reply, I go to my blogroll and move out into other people's blogs, to see what they are up to. --Torill Mortenson --Noted difference (thinking with my fingers)

Torill comments on her recent change to a comment-free blog. When I recently wrote a brief definition of blogs, some conversations I'd had with Torill were in the back of my mind when I relegated comments to a subordinate position.

While comments are a big part of a lot of blogs, a blog can still be a blog without comments.

Since the blogging evaluation rubric that I use asks students to comment on each other's posts, I am conscious that the pedagogical value I place on having students read and comment on peer entries is skewing the way my students approach academic blogging.

In an effort to reduce the workload on students who dislike blogging, I started out the year without requiring students to post blog entries that link to peer blog entries. Those students who have blogged before or who early on figured out the value of cross-blog links are doing them, but I haven't required it.

We show the news consumer how the magic trick, as it were, was done: how the lighting was placed, wehere were the mirrors, wires, and sturts, what sleight-of-hand was employed. Yet our purpose in demystifying the news is not cynical dismissal. Rather, we appreciate news as a manufactured, even theatrical, artifact, as much as it is an engagement with reality. Watching research results go through the prism of media and get thereby refracted into multiple colors and shadings is valuable. It doesn't mean that the process is fraudulent or misleading. But it does reveal the action of the prism. --Murray, Schwartz and Lichter --It Ain't Necessarily So: How the Media Make and Unmake the Scientific Picture of Reality (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

In my lit classes, I often have to remind students that Ophelia and Huckleberry Finn are not real people, and that we can talk ourselves blue in the face about what their "true" motives were or what they "would have done" in a literary work with a different ending.

This book is an attempt do something similar in the world of journalism. For understandable reasons, students want to get the "right" answer, especially when they are still getting used to the whole idea of a college education. It's something that professional journalists face all the time.

In order to prepare students for this book, Friday afternoon I read them a series of jumbled facts, and asked them to turn them into a news story. I told them they could take every fact I said as if it had already been verified, I showed them the words as I read them, and I told them that they'd have ten minutes to write, and then I'd read through the whole thing again.


My students know that I can't resist a good Star Trek reference. In Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, the cadet Saavik reacts after a simulated mission results in the destruction of her ship.

Saavik: Permission to speak freely, sir?
Kirk: Granted.
Saavik: I do not believe this was a fair test of my command abilities.
Kirk: And why not?
Saavik: Because... there was no way to win.
Kirk: A no-win situation is a possibility every commander may face. Has that never occurred to you?
Saavik: No sir, it has not.
Kirk: How we deal with death is at least as important as how we deal with life, wouldn't you say?
Saavik: As I indicated, Admiral, that thought had not occurred to me.
Kirk: Well, now you have something new to think about. Carry on.

I think most took Friday's activity for what it was. Like any lab exercise, it was artificial, set up to re-create only one controlled segment of a complex system. Of course it wasn't an ideal situation for them to write. Of course it wasn't fair, if "fair" means "optimized so that students will get the highest possible grade."

Since I'm not actually going to send them out on the street to report on crimes and accidents, I had to do something else to emulate the pressure of deadlines and the importance of filtering out correct but irrelevant facts.


And by the way, the article they submitted was worth a grand total of zero points -- though I did ask them to blog their reaction to the lab. In this case, I'm more interested in their ability to analyze and understand the process, rather than their ability to create product. Today students are submitting pitches for a long feature article, and they'll have over a month to work on it. The evaulation of "product" is part of the course, but after a series of reporting exercises that I think went over pretty well, I hope they'll make the adjustment to "process" smoothly.

I finished a three-hour binge of racing, clicked off my Playstation 2, and ... it was over. My compulsion had vanished. I still enjoyed the game, and had plenty more challenges to complete. But I didn't need to play it any more. For some mysterious reason, Burnout had suddenly released me from its talons.

This is one of the abiding mysteries of games: Why do they let us go so suddenly? --Clive Thompson --The End of the Affair (Wired)

One of the units in this January's "Videogame Culture and Theory" course will ask students to do a "close playing" and analysis of a game they are playing right now. My assumption, and I hope I'm not over-reacting (preacting?) is that students will come into the course with a strong idea of the "canon" of videogames worth studying, and that these games will overlap closely with whatever the students have themselves played recently.

I can't force them to buy a PlayStation in order to do the "readings," and since it's an online game I can't just put all the games on reserve in the library. (Emulators, here I come!)

If I did let students focus only on the games they already know well, I worry that the syndrome applied above will make it difficult for the students to return to and think critically about games they have recently played. So I am going to try to teach the critical process by asking them to play older games, and even "spoof" games like the ones from a recent StrongBad retrospective on videogame designs. (Here's a good example of what I mean.)

It's about time she wrote about something other than cannibalism and blood drinking. Oh. --- Metafilter commenter ColdChef --Meet Anne Rice, Christian Novelist.

These fabulous finger puppets are the perfect medium for children of all ages to relive the story of the "melacholy Dane." Includes Hamlet, Ophelia, Gertrude, and Claudius. --Hamlet Finger Puppets (Shakespeare's Den)

OPHELIA

You are as good as a chorus, my lord.

HAMLET

I could interpret between you and your love, if I
could see the puppets dallying.

Since Hamlet makes this line while he is commenting on the performance of the play-within-the-play, I couldn't help but think of the cinematic interpretations of my favorite dallying puppets.

Games and game technology are poised to transform the way we educate and train students at all levels. Education and information, skill training, even political and religious beliefs can be communicated via video games. But these games and repurposed game technology, collectively called "serious games," have yet to be fully embraced by educators.

It's not enough to declare that "games teach" and leave it at that. Teachers aren't going to hand out a game to a bunch of students and simply trust that the students have learned the material. -- Proof of Learning: Assessment in Serious Games (Gamasutra)

Unlike many articles on serious games, this one presumes the audience knows about games but doesn't know much about education. It educates a gaming readership about education.

--All Time 100 Novels (Time)

I've read thirty of these, which is embarrassing for an English professor, but when I remind myself that my literary specialty is plays, I feel less guilty. Plenty of contemporary ones I've heard of but never got to.

Especially because of the confusing "all time" in the title, I wonder why they chose 1923 as the starting point, Is that because all works from 1922 and before are no longer protected by copyright?

Currently I work a very WIDE room for my freshman composition class. I'd estimate it's about four seats deep and ten seats wide. When I lead a standard class discussion, I have to march the length of the room -- from the door to the window at the far end -- and project my voice rather loudly when I'm on one side or the other. But that doesn't bother me. What's troubling is that it spreads the students far apart from each other. It divides them; and there is a sort of "faction" mentality that seems evident to me when debates get hot: one side argues against the other, from the comfortable distance of the double-wide trailer sized room.

You don't have to be a communications theorist to recognize that students tend to territorialize their space in a learning environment. --Musical Chairs (Pedablogue)

Last fall, whenever a student got up to give an oral presentation, I would sit in their vacated seat. I enjoyed the chance to see the room from so many different perspectives.

This great entry on classroom space got me thinking a little more about how my students' relationships with each other in the blogosphere affects the in-class dynamic.

In the past, when I've offered a free, no-bad-consequences draft review, I'm always disappointed at how few students take me up on it. I did notice that some of the same students who wouldn't submit rough drafts would have at least something prepared for an oral report. Perhaps they don't mind getting a zero on a rough draft when I'm the only one who knows they didn't do the work, but when I call on their name for their oral presentation, they didn't want to have to say "I'm not prepared" in front of their peers.

I thought I'd try to put this phenomenon to use, and started planning informal oral presentations a day or two before a rough draft was due. I eased the freshmen into it by letting them present on a personal topic of their own choice, so they would feel more comfortable presenting. For all my classes, I made it clear I wouldn't mark them down for saying "um" or for fidgeting.

While I saw the oral presentations as a way for students to try out new ideas without necessarily churning out pages and pages of detailed support, and while I thought the student papers improved markedly after we workshopped the thesis statements and supporting ideas the students floated during their informal presentations, too often the students were simply focused on getting through the presentation.

Displaced from the comfortable anonymity of their accustomed seat, students felt too vulnerable to appreciate constructive criticism. I graded the oral presentations very generously, because I wanted to reward and encourage the process rather than evaluate the product, but the anxieties students felt about performing made their way into their evaluations at the end of the course. Students didn't mention how much better their writing was as a result of their oral ordeals. Some even complained that their peers' presentations were so lame and repetitive that they would have preferred me to lecture more. My efforts to create a more student-centered learning environment seemed to invite a backlash. So a little reorganization was clearly in order.

This term, I've drastically reduced my reliance on formal student presentations. I let students know I don't want them to enter the classroom as a blank slate. In my lit classes, I've been distributing the teaching task, diffusing it among the whole student body, making it part of the routine environment of the classroom.

Each student needs to prepare an "agenda item" they have prepared in advance, and that they will be ready to share if called upon. I ask them to post a brief entry on their blog, 24 hours before class, in which they offer a quotation from the assigned reading, and state what their "agenda item" is -- that is, what they plan to talk about, when called on in class. Then, they bring to class a 200-word reflection, that mentions by name a student whose blogged idea has helped them develop their ideas about the assigned text.

Friday morning in "Drama as Literature," we were discussing the first two acts of Hamlet. Because I checked the student blogs before class, I already knew the students were talking about Hamlet's madness, Gertrude’s complicity, and the dramatic effectiveness of the ghost. The first student who spoke mentioned being inspired by a second student's blog entry. The second student then mentioned being inspired by a third student's entry. This went on for a string of six or eight students, for about fifteen minutes, each building on what the previous student had said, before the first pause in the discussion.

During that pause, I called attention to what had just happened, and praised the students for sustaining the conversation on their own.

When the students in this class give informal presentations, I split them up into small groups, and send them out to a courtyard or patio. I float around and try to listen in on the discussion, but my physical absence reminds them to think of their peers as their primary audience. Several students blogged about how much they enjoyed the experience, and the informal reflections they submitted afterwards were overwhelmingly positive.

Once when I was late to class due to a domestic incident (I told the class it involved a shower curtain, a large spider, and a potty-training toddler), I sent word via the division secretary that I'd be a bit late, and the students went around the room and shared their agenda items. When I did show up, they seemed quite pleased with themselves for having been so productive on their own.

I'm a little spoiled, since all the students in that class are English majors. I'm also teaching two sections of a lit seminar and a news writing course that includes students who are less than thrilled to be there. While some students are enthusiastic and dependably well-prepared, it's clear that some students haven't made the class a top priority. That's okay -- I got a C in my college Latin course, and it wasn't because I disliked the subject or the teacher, it was just because I chose to put my time and effort elsewhere.

The news writing class is changing the focus from a series of short exercises to some longer, more in-depth units, so I'm hoping I can use some of blog-enhanced classroom discussion techniques. In the next five or so weeks, we'll work our way chapter-by-chapter through two books, and I plan to have the students sign up for a particular chapter, and let a different student take the class through the "agenda item" sequence each time. At 32 students, that's large by SHU standards, but as a writing class, it's large by any standard. I'm going to let students know I expect them to participate regularly, and I'll start asking them to evaluate and reflect on their own contributions to the online and in-class discussion.

When I switched places with the students who gave oral presentations last year, I was trying to send a message that, for the next 20 minutes, I was just one of the students. But the act of trading places with the students emphasized the difference between us. When I wasn't sitting in a student space, I was The Teacher.

By asking all students to prepare agenda items, I am distributing the authoritarian role of the agenda-setter. It is sometimes stressful for me, since I have to work twice as hard weaving connections between the student agenda items, filling in gaps with 5-minute mini-lectures on catharsis or the role of the raisonneur.

I still haven't worked in "anagnorisis" or "the fourth wall," and earlier in the week, three students in a row asked me a question that stumped me. There were three high school seniors visiting the classroom that day, and I kept having to admit my ignorance. I'm teaching without a net when I let the students set the agenda -- but the 24-hour lead time really helps. I have time to prepare those 5-minute spurts of info, when I notice the students are hungry for background information on the Protestant reformation, or if they're puzzled by a mythological reference, or they're curious about the author's biography.

Rather than letting the students take turns being the "sage on the stage," I'd like them to take turns being the "guide on the side," and shouldering the responsibility. In a typical class, some student has usually checked the Wikipedia entry for an author's biography, or has read the author before, or got inspired and did some outside research.

Musical chairs is a good metaphor, but I'd like to think of removing the empty chairs that separate the students, until every student is connected with his or her peers all the time. If we all swap roles and trade ideas as rapidly and smoothly as my lit students did in Friday morning's Hamlet class, I think we'll all enjoy the result.

• As of October 2005, Technorati is now tracking 19.6 Million weblogs
  
• The total number of weblogs tracked continues to double about every 5 months
  
• The blogosphere is now over 30 times as big as it was 3 years ago, with no signs of letup in growth
  
• About 70,000 new weblogs are created every day
  
• About a new weblog is created each second
  
• 2% - 8% of new weblogs per day are fake or spam weblogs
  
• Between 700,000 and 1.3 Million posts are made each day
  
• About 33,000 posts are created per hour, or 9.2 posts per second
  
• An additional 5.8% of posts (or about 50,000 posts/day) seen each day are from spam or fake blogs, on average

--David Sifry --State of the Blogosphere (Sifry's Alerts)

A. A suburban teenager's online diary, bursting with angst-y Goth poetry and "creative" grammar.

B. An alternative news source that can break stories the mainstream media won't touch.

C. A scholarly notebook, where a professor reviews books, brags about student accomplishments, and posts occasional cat pictures.

D. A list of web addresses, often focusing on a theme (such as data encryption, homeschooling, Latin-American economics, or ferns), recorded and evaluated by a meticulous web-surfer.

E. Any of the above, especially when updated frequently, and where visitors can add their own comments.

(Answer: E)

---

Seton Hill's blog site, blogs.setonhill.edu/nmj, developed by Dr. Jerz, allows any member of the Seton Hill community to keep an on-line journal (or comment on someone else's). Blogs are used both as a formal teaching tool and as an informal forum for students, faculty and administrators.

"Students who read my professional blog can see what I do when I encounter a new concept," says Jerz. "They see me testing my initial reaction against the facts as they emerge. They might see Dr. Arnzen [SHU associate professor of English] politely disagree with me. They might see me change my mind, or post a correction. That's very different from the dynamic you find in the traditional lecture."What is a blog? (A Multiple Choice Quiz) (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

This appeared as a sidebar in Seton Hill's alumni magazine. Becca Baker, from our PR office, asked me to submit 200 words defining "weblog," and I was feeling quirky and unconventional, and the quiz question was the result. For the intended audience, I didn't feel it was necessary to specify the reverse-chronological order of blog posts, but if the definition were a little longer, I wish I could have fitted that in somehow.

The main article was about my colleague John Spurlock's Fulbright-sponsored visit to Montenegro, where he blogged about his encounters with the students and ordinary citizens, in entries that were sometimes touching, sometimes hilarious, and always illuminating.

I'll try to get a PDF of the article online in the near future.

Subject: The expository lecture as the principal means of instruction.

Inciter: The expository lecture is simply a talking textbook that has endured too long since the invention of printing.

Subject: The student-selected curriculum.

Inciter: According to the interest theory of value, the value of academic subjects is not intrinsic. It is bestowed on them by the interest that students bring to them. It follows that students should study only those subjects in which they are already interested.

Subject: The purpose of a college education.

Inciter: "If then a practical end must be assigned to a university course, I say that it is that of training good members of society. ... It aims ... at cultivating the public mind, at supplying true principles to popular enthusiasms and fixed aims to popular aspirations, ... at facilitating the exercise of political power, and refining the intercourse of private life." (John Henry Newman in The Idea of a University) --F. Champion Ward --Filling a Gap in the Doctoral Process (Chronicle)

Now that we're at the midpoint in the semester, I think my literature students have for the most part grasped the idea that a college lit course demands more than the ability to summarize plots, analyze characters, and apply the themes of a literary work to the student's own life. Their high school teachers praised those skills, and for students who haven't taken any lit since high school, getting them to make the shift is a challenge.

I first asked them to turn to close reading, so that they can practice supporting their claims with evidence from the texts, rather than details from their own lives or personal opinions about love, sin, gender, etc.

Yes, a paper on one possible meaning of the titular bird in Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven" makes a good topic, but such a paper isn't an argument unless it considers alternative views.

The students have submitted their rough drafts for their first big paper, and so far the papers have been very rough indeed -- but I expected that. It's a struggle to get students to collect a bunch of academic articles first, and then build an argument based on the sources they've been able to find, rather than having them write out the opinion they held before they conducted any research, then have them looking through the databases to "find quotes to support" the opinions to which they've already committed several pages of nicely-crafted prose.

Given that the rough draft is only worth a few measly percentage points, I've been pleased with the effort most students have put into it. Several students who got the draft "wrong" revised it after I gave them initial feedback, and submitted it along with a note saying they weren't asking for credit, they just wanted to know whether they were now closer to the right track.

I've warned students about the "bottom of page 3" problem, in which students who aren't quite sure what their argument is churn out three pages of general fluff before they hit on a really good idea, which they develop for half a page before tacking on a conclusion that basically says, "Therefore, this paper has [repeat introduction here]."

I wonder if these examples of "inciters" will be of use, as we try to move from a collection of interesting observations to a paper that has been written entirely in order to defend a particular thesis, so that the reader won't discover on page 4 what the paper is really about, but will rather be introduced to that controlling idea in the thesis paragraph, if not in the very title of the paper.

You'll not only be able to watch every film, but also every TV program, news show, documentary, music video, and video blog, and all of it will be playable wherever you go. Great, you think: Thousands of channels, millions of choices, and still nothing worth watching. Nevertheless, "nonlinear TV"—watching the tube on our schedule, not the broadcasters'—is our destiny. The revolution will not be televised, however, until the companies that funnel the content into our homes figure out how to control it. The best advice for now: Study the music industry and do the exact opposite. --Adam L. Penenberg --The Death of Television (Slate)

"But I do know that it's true," said the author of The Book of Virtues, "that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky."

Not the smoothest thought experiment ever ad-libbed by a lapsed academic opposed to utilitarian ethics. The firestorm ensued. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, declared himself "appalled." The Rev. Al Sharpton denounced Bennett's comments as "blatantly racist." The White House labeled them "not appropriate." NAACP President Bruce Gordon felt "personally offended." Rep. Rahm Emanuel, an Illinois Democrat, detected "a spirit of hate and division." Bennett, while not apologizing, had to resign under pressure from the educational company he co-founded.

It's hardly the first time a hypothetical upended a national political figure -- mere proximity to one sometimes does the job. --Carlin Romano --The Trouble With Hypotheticals (Chronicle)

An excellent analysis of a moment that really frustrated me.

Regardless of what you think of Bennett, to willfully ignore the entire context in which the quotation ensued in the desire to score points against the speaker requires either industrial-strength blinders, or deliberate malice.

I like the two-tiered set of goals described by my colleague Cynthia, a professor of psychology. "I approached my sabbatical with two sets of expectations: the must-do project and the wish-I-could-do projects," she said. "I accomplished the former, but didn't get to the latter, unfortunately."

I happen to know that, if I set low goals, that's all I will achieve. So I'm aiming high, but trying to find balance between my work and my personal life in a couple of ways. --Lee Tobin McClain --Going on Sabbatical (Chronicle)

Lee is my colleague down the hall. Since she's not been coming to English faculty meetings this year, we're giving her all the tasks nobody else will volunteer for. (Just kidding!)

I've been planning to ask for a temporary teaching load reduction to invest time in an open-source educational videogame concept I've been kicking around for a year. It's time to get cracking on that proposal -- once I've turned in next midterm grades.

For the rest of the week, it's marking, marking, marking.

Some weblogs are really just private diaries intended only for a handful of family members and close friends. Usability guidelines generally don't apply to such sites, because the readers' prior knowledge and motivation are incomparably greater than those of third-party users. When you want to reach new readers who aren't your mother, however, usability becomes important. --Jakob Nielsen --Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes (Alertbox)

I would only add that, while Nielsen's points about uninformative link titles are sensible, sometimes it's a rhetorical choice to link to an off-site source with a single word, or even a single letter, rather than always writing out a whole sentence or using the whole title of the off-site page. But the general point about writing for an audience that's new to the conversation is a good one.

Blogs can be too chummy if you consistently refer to other bloggers with their first name, but I figure if I don't recognize the name, I can always mouse over the link and check out the URL that appears in the lower left corner of the window. Since I'm more familiar with the names of some blogs than the names of the bloggers, that's usually enough to help me place the name.

Links are now devalued. Page-rank is under attack and the attackers are winning. It won't be long before Google itself is infested. Tim Bray is right, below, it's time for Google to get on top of this. They're both the victimizer and the victim. The spammers found a huge hole in Page-rank. You could drive a truck through it. I was the early warning system on this, the canary in the coal mine. --Dave Winer --[Google and Splogs] (Scripting News)

Winer is talking about how spammers have started creating their own fake blogs ("splogs"), which they populate with links drawn from Google, and which they create on Google's free blog service. While Google doesn't really notice the traffic on its huge servers, the holy PageRank is being defiled.

Let's hope Google does something about it. Maybe every so often asking a blogger to do one of those wiggly word puzzles, and if the blogger declines or fails more than a reasonable number of times, blocking the whole blog from Google's pagerank.

So for instance, shows like Law and Order, CSI, and all their different versions can fetch more than 1mm dollars per episode. Most other shows fall in mid six figure price ranges and can go as low as 50k to 75k for hit reality shows like Survivor. The reality shows go for far less because everyone knows the winner already.

But what if CBS sold Survivor episodes the day after it aired like ABC is with Lost -- What if they sold them not just on ITunes Store, but through CinemaNow, MovieLink, Netflix, Walmart Online, wherever.

Think some people would buy them to keep up with the action -- Possibly to sample the show -- Think they might sell more than 75k downloads at $1.99 each ?

Could this move have created a new market that could be comparable in size for some shows and more money for others than the current syndication market -- --Mark Cuban --How Bob Iger Saved Network TV (Blogmaverick)

This column discusses Apple's move to sell TV show downloads. This might be another "Information Purity Directive"-smashing moment for Apple, and represents a second chance for Hollywood.

For the past few years, the TV that I've most enjoyed has been on DVDs. Not all of it old stuff, like 1970s Wonder Woman, but more recent stuff, too, like Farscape.

The new commercial model is clearly for those who are young and have time to fill their days with a lot of media. I don't have time to find out whether I would like the TV that's currently on, much less time to re-watch copies that I purchased.

When I was in my 20s, before I morphed into Daddyman, would I have paid $1.99 per episode of Star Trek the Next Generation or Babylon 5, if I could get a clean, commercial-free copy, and also know that I was supporting a show that I loved? When my part-time work schedule was flexible enough that, if I had wanted extra spending cash, I would have just worked more hours?

Yes, I probably would have.

One of the key characters in this film is Toby (played by Toby Froud). Froud is a midget who has been given a Muppet head to wear. And although the head is a good special-effects construction, I kept wanting to see real eyes and real expressions. The effects didn't add anything. --Roger Ebert --Labyrinth (rogerebert.com)

Er, no. I just saw this last night, for the first time in almost 20 years. Toby is the name of the baby taken off to the goblin world by David Bowie. Ebert was thinking of Hoggle, who is played by a midget wearing a costume that features an articulated muppet mask.

I was more struck by Ebert's comments about nightmare movies, however.

I have a problem with almost all nightmare movies: They aren't as suspenseful as they should be because they don't have to follow any logic. Anything can happen, nothing needs to happen, nothing is as it seems and the rules keep changing. Consider, for example, the scene in "Labyrinth" where Sarah thinks she is waking up from her horrible dream and opens the door of her bedroom. Anything could be outside that door.

Therefore, we're wasting out psychic energy by caring. In a completely arbitrary world, what difference does anything make?

I thought The Lord of the Rings (the books, that is) does a good job of setting up the rules of the world and running with them. The reasons why Frodo kept showing mercy to Gollum escaped me when I was younger, but now I realize that Frodo saw in Gollum what he himself would become. As a youngster reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe for the first time, I was annoyed with the sudden appearance of the "old magic" that brings Aslan back to life. Looking back, I can see that I was reacting to what I felt was an unsatisfactory "deus ex machina" plot device. While Lewis went on to paint a grand and sweeping depiction of a mythological world, I thought this detail was clumsy and awkward, since (unless I am mistaken) this "old magic" isn't mentioned before this point.

But it's because Lewis's mythological world was otherwise so consistent and coherent that this detail troubled me. When Jareth the Goblin King changes the rules, and speeds up time, or walks on walls in Labyrinth, you just have to accept that all in all he's interested in the affect he has on Sarah, and that's enough to sit back and enjoy the spectacle.

The pre-expressionistic, dream-influenced drama of Strindbergh used a world of non-sequiturs and infinite possibilities to deny and frustrate the typical expected dramatic resolutions, putting in their place thoughtful and striking juxtapositions.

I was never a David Bowie fan, and can't hum any of the songs from the movie though I just watched it last night, but the idea for a music-video fantasy muppet movie is still a good one. It was interesting seeing Kevin Clash as one of a long list of anonymous muppeteers. Clash is better known for his red, furry, squeaky-voiced alter ego, Elmo.

"It's important to emphasize story and emotion and character. This is one of the things that games don't do," Spielberg said. "Currently, what games do is they give you the entire story in the run-up to the actual game play from level to level. You get to see a movie, and you're supposed to remember what the stakes are for the characters. But there's no reminder, nothing refreshes who these characters are.

[...]

"Is the player in charge of the story, or is the programmer in control of the story?" Spielberg asked. "How do you make those two things reconcile with each other? Audiences often don't want to be in control of a story. They want to be lost in your story. They come to hear you be the storyteller, but in gaming it's going to have to be a little bit of both, a little bit of give and take." --Anthony Breznican --Spielberg, Zemeckis say video games, films could become one  (AP|Sign on San Diego)

A good introduction to one of the core differences between the aesthetic goals of movie directors and those of videogame designers. Perhaps Hollywood will one day "get" the concepts behind videogaming, but I don't think it's productive to think of video games and movies merging. Yes, they'll continue to influence each other, but if they do merge, then what they become won't be either a movie or a video game. It will be something else.

--Teaching Carnival II is here! (Scribblingwoman)

A great collection of teaching links, highlighting what teachers who happen to blog are saying about their work.

The industry and the market are bewitched by the idea of more pixels and polys. Higher visual quality is fair enough, but why is it equated with better stabs at photo-realism? What's the point of aesthetics at all? If they don't matter, how come E3 can sucker-smack a "wow" or two out of so many gamers each year? Why, after gushing over how good stuff looks, do we hypocritically trot out that almost apologetic load of bollocks about gameplay moments later?

I'm guilty of it. I think it's time that particular conversational old dog was taken out back and shot. By no means am I suggesting that aesthetics are the very substance of games, but obviously, "it" is not all about gameplay. I suspect even the most fanatical ludologists have been watching tech demos with the curtains drawn.

We may not know a great deal about what they are or exactly what they do, but aesthetics are clearly important to us. As a phenomenon, aesthetics have manifested in every culture and sub-culture throughout history, and furthermore survived the demise of each. From food through to music and architecture, all of our possessions and many of our experiences are purposely shaped by designers for aesthetic as well as functional purposes. Aesthetics pervade all media, and games are no exception. --David Hayward --Videogame Aesthetics: The Future!

Also check out the discussion on Slashdot.

I say we need photo-realistic text adventures.

The Internet is now teeming with some 15 million blogs. Although the medium first drew mainstream attention with commentary on high-profile events such as the presidential election, many now use it to chronicle intensely personal experiences, venting confessions in front of millions of strangers who can write back.

Nearly half of bloggers consider it a form of therapy, according to a recent survey sponsored by America Online Inc. And although some psychologists question the use of the Internet for therapy, one hospital in High Point, N.C., started devoting space to patients' blogs on its Web site, a practice Inova Fairfax Hospital is also considering.

[...]

"With my blog, I've learned how to share things with people that are close to me," including her sister and her 14-year-old daughter and 20-year-old son, she said. But of the 6,271 comments she has received over the years, most are from complete strangers who found her online. "Sometimes it's easier to write about it to 1,000 strangers than to sit face to face with someone you know well." --Yuki Noguchi --Cyber-Catharsis: Bloggers Use Web Sites as Therapy (Washinigton Post (will expire))

I was happy to find a brief reference to Matt Kirschenbaum in this article.

Audience members, mostly senior-level editors and writers for women's magazines, joined the panelists in voicing many familiar complaints about the industry: too many skinny models, even more emaciated feature stories, and too much advertiser influence on editorial content. Laurie Abraham, executive editor of Elle magazine, however, had something else on her mind. The worst thing about women's magazines, she asserted during the panel discussion, is how much "we lie about sex."

Under normal circumstances, a roomful of experienced journalists might rise up in outrage at being called liars. But Abraham's statement was met with nods of guilty agreement and mildly embarrassed "tell me something I don't know" shrugs. No one denied the charge.

This is not Watergate, of course, or even Monica-gate. Yet these ubiquitous stories about sex are presented as journalism, chock full of analysis and quotes, and they are surely believed by many of their readers. They are a formidable cultural force, shaping and reinforcing our attitudes about men and women, orgasms and relationships. Women's magazines run scrupulously reported and fact-checked articles on such subjects as breast cancer and women under the Taliban. Do they have a problem with sex?

Well, yes, it turns out, they do. Many writers, editors, and fact-checkers involved with these sex articles (most of whom asked that their identities be protected with the top-secrecy accorded Seymour Hersh's CIA sources) agreed that the editorial standards for them are abysmal. --Liza Featherstone --Sex, Lies, and Women's Magazines (Columbia Journalism Review)

I've blogged this before, but the CJR reorganized its archives, breaking the link. So here it is again.

Jack: So .... [pause]
Jack: So he won then. [pause]
Jill: Yes.
Jack: Yes. [longer pause]
Jack: He waited long enough.
Jill: Yes.
Jack: Yes ... he did. [pause]
Jill: Yes, he certainly waited long enough.
Jack: Words. [pause]
Jill: What?
Jack: Words, in conversion, he was good at that. [pause]
Jill: Yes ... he waited long enough.
Jack: I think... [pause]
Jill: ...and pauses, he was good at that too.
Jack: Yes.
Jill: Yes. [pause]
Jack: Yes. [pause] I think his word/time ratio was the smallest ever heard.
Jill: Yes.
Jack: Yes. [pause]
Jill: Yes, he waited long enough...
Jack: Well done, that's what they say...
Jill: Yes, they do say that...
Jack: Well done, like the toast... [long pause]... How's your cornflakes, then?
... and so on..
John Grady, Wokingham, Berks,UK --Pinter wins Nobel literary prize (BBC)

From a comment appended to the article.

Fuzzmail records the act of writing and lets you send it as an email. Dynamic changes, typoes, pauses and writeovers are captured and communicated. We created fuzzmail because we wanted a more emotionally expressive alternative to email, so that an emailed love letter does not have to look the same as a business letter. --Fuzzmail (fuzzmail.org)

Intersting concept. Found via KairosNews.

I am also not claiming that IF should self-evidently be assimilated under the umbrella of “games,” but instead is being cruelly excluded. There is plenty of ambivalence about whether or not IF belongs in games on all sides, both from within the IF community and from without. As “fiction” that is experience by playing a “game file,” IF has ridden the “ludology v. narratology” line for decades. But still, IF might count as an indie game culture. It might. You could take that point of view on a vibrant and productive community of interactive artists toiling in relative obscurity. Or not. --Jeremy Douglass --IF and Indie Aesthetics in Games (WRT: Writer Response Theory)

While I see many flaws with the strategy of applying too much narrative/textual critical terminology to the study of computer games, just as there are problems with similarly applying the taxonomies of cinematography, I'm glad to find the occasional recognition that IF is a particular subgenre of games that invites (even requires) a narratological/textual approach.

Part of me flinches every time I hear the term "videogame." It seems so unnecessarily exclusionary.

If it's a videogame, then it's almost always to some degree an audiogame, isn't it? And a coordinationgame, and a spacial-perceptiongame, and a socialgame, and at least to some degree a kinetic-tactilegame, too.

Google is dumb: it places so much trust on its relevance ranking in its presentation of search results as a simple list of Web sites. Users don't have access to suggestions of alternate concepts or terms or all the tools that other search engines provide. Our clients are placing too much reliance on the first ten results they get from what they consider to be the best search engine out there. It reminds me of what happened when we Baby Boomers, raised on Chef Boy-Ar-Dee Beefaroni and Jell-O corned beef salad loaf, finally encountered- you know-real food. "Wow, you mean we can fix food that has real taste and texture?"

What this means for us info pros is that, when we introduce our clients to all the sophistication of a high-end online service or enterprise search tool, we have to remember that they often do not have any context within which to evaluate it. They are accustomed to looking at search results that were cutting edge three years ago. The new search tools that are available do require more work for the user. Rather than just rely on the first page of search results, you are encouraged to look at some of the suggested modifications. --Mary Ellen Bates --You Still Google? That is So Last Week (Red Nova)

Settle thy studies (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I've written before about using circle games in my teaching. Since students are wrestling with midterm projects and other major assignments, and since I'm teaching a large number of freshmen in 200-level courses this year, I'm seeing lots of worn-down students.

In my Drama as Lit course, up to now I've given the students modern plays, or I've given them modernized versions of older plays. The online and in-class discussions of Everyman and the York Corpus Christi plays went well, even though I filled in with more lecture material than I typically like to provide. Today, however, they were to read the first two acts of Marlowe's Faustus, and I didn't give them a modernized translation.

I figured some of them would need a bit of help getting into the play, so I did the first monologue of Faustus in his study.

These metaphysics of magicians,
And necromantic books are heavenly;
Lines, circles, letters, characters.
Ay, these are those that Faustus most desires.
O what a world of profit and delight,
Of power, of honour, and omnipotence,
Is promised to the studious artisan?
All things that move between the quiet poles
Shall be at my command. Emperors and Kings,
Are but obeyed in their several provinces,
But his dominion that exceeds in this,
Stretcheth as far as doth the mind of man:
A sound magician is a demi-god.
Here, tire my brains to get a Deity.

I wish some of my students had a bit more motivation this time of year, but this play is a good one to remind me that the thirst for knowledge is not necessarily good.

I started with an interpretation of Faustus as a pompous professor -- which may not be that much of a stretch for my acting ability. At any rate, I imagined how Dr. Frasier Crane would do it. Before I went too far, I backed up and started over, this time entering the front of the classroom paging through a book of magic, which I then put down on one side of the table, as Faustus tried to distract himself with logic, medicine, law, and religion. (Before class started, I hid a book under the table, so that when Faustus sets aside his law book and looks for the bible, I pretended I had to hunt for it, and then when I pulled it out of its hiding place I pretended to blow dust off it. Sometimes that gets a laugh, but not this time. Oh, well.) When Faustus gives up on religion, I sort of caressed the prop bible, with the line "Divinity, adieu!" A little later, while gesticulating wildly, I knocked the bible off the table, and started after it as if by instinct, but then I left it there on the floor, and went on, like the evil overlord that Faustus thinks he can be.

Then when I finished the scene, I went back to the bible scene, and this time stood up and threw the bible across the room. (It was actually Faulkner, not the bible, that I threw. See this older blog entry about a teacher who tore a bible in class to make a point.)

I can never keep a straight face when I do the fourth version, so I apologized to the students and warned that it would be short. When Faustus goes for his magic books, I whipped out my PDA and grinned madly. The light from the PDA shone off my glasses, and the students said I reminded them of Gollum with his precious. (I'm sure my wife would say they're not far off with that comparison.)

In News Writing, we're starting a shift from a writing-intensive unit to a reading-intensive unit. For the next class, the journalism students will be looking at the editorials in the local paper. But I want them to have something to look for when they turn to that section of the paper.

The three main purposes of an editorial are to inform, to persuade, and to entertain. I am asking that they choose two of the three for an upcoming assignment. I do want the students to feel they can unleash the creativity and opinions they've had to suppress in order to "do news" in the traditional style, but of course there are limits.

To introduce that assignment, I pointed to a student who has shown a willingness to role-play in the past, and I said, "Okay, class. He is going to give me a political opinion, and I am going to respond to it. You tell me whether I am being persuasive."

The student responded with a statement about the Iraq war. I barely let him finish his sentence when I barked out, "What, are you stupid!??"

I stepped out of the role, in order to note how my voice cracked in just the right way to suggest outrage and madness. "Am I being persuasive yet?" I asked.

When the student went on with another sentence, I blurted, "I *hate* people who say things like that!" The class laughed, so I hissed a little. "Hate!!!"

I didn't quite have the courage to flounce around the front of the classroom like Morgan Spurlock did when he disparaged the McDonald's spokesperson's references to yogurt, apples, and salads. But once the students know me well enough, and when I'm sure I've picked a student who doesn't mind playing along, I loosen up a bit. The ham in me rejoices.

Blogs are all the rage, and I encourage their use as part of the external - and internal - communications process. Unlike press releases, which tend to read as if they'd been composed by the mating of a computer and lawyer, good blogs have a distinctly human voice. They are conversational almost by definition.

But the key word here is "conversation" - and the first rule is that you have to listen. That's why companies should encourage comments from those various constituencies, publicly and privately, as part of the conversation, even when they make insiders cringe. The people at the edges of the communications and social networks can be harsh and effective critics. But they can also be fervent, valuable allies, offering ideas to each other and to the newsmaker. --Dan Gillmor --PR: It's a New World (Bayosphere)

Jacobs decided to craft an article about Wikipedia, complete with a series of intentional mistakes and typos, and post it on the site. The hope was that the community itself would be able to fix the errors and create a clean version that would be ready for publication in Esquire's December issue. The original version was preserved for posterity.

"The idea I had--which Jimmy (Wales, Wikipedia's founder) loved--is that I'd write a rough draft of the article and then Jimmy would put it on a site for the Wikipedia community to rewrite and edit," Jacobs wrote on the page introducing the experiment. Esquire "would print the 'before' and 'after' versions of the articles. So here's your chance to make this article a real one. All improvements welcome." --Daniel Terdiman --Esquire wikis article on Wikipedia (C|Net)

Great concept. "Every factual error was corrected within minutes, and the focus moved on to refinement, clarification and making the article more readable," according to a source quoted in the article.

Of course, if the article had not been about Wikipedia itself, chances are the responses would not have been as rapid or as informed.

How many cardiologists would be willing to correct a crappy draft of an article about heart bypass surgery, for instance?

The way I read a letter 's this:
'T is first I lock the door,
And push it with my fingers next,
For transport it be sure.

And then I go the furthest off
To counteract a knock;
Then draw my little letter forth
And softly pick its lock.

Then, glancing narrow at the wall,
And narrow at the floor,
For firm conviction of a mouse
Not exorcised before,

Peruse how infinite I am
To -- no one that you know!
And sigh for lack of heaven, -- but not
The heaven the creeds bestow.

Emily DickinsonThe way I read a letter 's this (Emily Dickinson's Poetry)

As my literature students have been discussing the two years Thoreau spent living in the woods, I've reflected on what it might have meant to be part of a society where people didn't expect to be able to contact each other immediately and get instant responses.

When will I *ever* get an e-mail that makes me withdraw this far, in order to prepare myself for the emotions I expect the e-mail will bring?

Update:

The way I read an e-mail 's this:
'T is first I maximize
The Outlook window that reveals
The message to my eyes.

In my Picassa files I find
A slideshow sure to please
As I make use of reading-time
To download MP3s.

I'll quickly check my voice-mail box
And scan my server log.
I'll sync up next my PDA
And weed my spam-marred blog.

A multi-tasking mambo man --
Digitally alive --
I read "Dear Sir" and stop, for then
Two more e-mails arrive.

The ?word daemon?, Leonard ventures, ?however spelled, uncovers a provocative and useful dualism. An intermediary with another world doesn't have to be beneficient. Yet neither is it compelled to be nefarious. It can be both, flip-flopping between positive and negative states?depending on context or perception, on the vagaries of polities, or the whims of the fickle masses. --Bots, Demons & Dolls (WRT: Writer Response Theory)

A great post on the history of simulations of conversation, sparked by Andrew Leonard's book Bots: The Origin of New Species.

Morgan 'Super Size Me' Spurlock at Seton Hill (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Morgan Spurlock, whose movie Super Size Me documents what happened to his body when he ate nothing but McDonald's food for 30 days, spoke at Seton Hill earlier this evening. I asked him to autograph this burger. My journalism students were required to attend the class, and have a short article due tomorrow. I asked them to do advance research, which they were supposed to submit in class yesterday. Many of them are really getting into the assignment. More than one has asked, "Are you sure we can only write 400 words?" One showed about six pages of densely-packed notes, lamenting, "I've got about twelve sources!" There's a healthy competition among the students to get good outside sources, so that the article is more than a record of what Spurlock said tonight, but a wider article that uses Spurlock as one of several sources. The news hook is the fact that Spurlock spoke here tonight, but the article itself can be much wider in scope. I'm looking forward to seeing what the students will do with their 400 words. I hope at least some of them will blog their work. Update: Added top photo, taken by Mary Cox. Update: A few students have posted on their blog. Ashley Welker. Michael Diezmos. Leslie Rodriquez. Erin Waite.

I see students calling me over to their desks to ask about a word problem, and half the time me reading the word problem aloud to them is enough to answer their question. I see students skimming over paragraphs of text (not that I blame them) and then asking me what they really needed to read in order to solve the problem. I seldom see any indication that students are reading their textbooks beyond skimming over the examples so that they can match them to the homework questions. I’ve lost track of the number of students I’ve tutored, or fielded during office hours, who did not avail themselves of the indices of their textbooks. The reason they couldn’t show that two events were mutually exclusive was because they didn’t know what “mutually exclusive” meant, nor did they think to look it up. --This is why my little college-math-ed blog has so many readers (Tall, Dark and Mysterious)

Because I typically teach writing and literature courses, the class in which I teach the most "content" is currently News Writing. I've ejected the huge $80 textbook in favor of several smaller books, each of which I can reasonably expect the students will read cover-to-cover. I carefully scoured key chapters of those readings and populated my opening lecture with references to them, so that when students encounter that key lesson just before it becomes important, sometimes they get an "aha" moment when they realize they've already learned (in class) the information that's being delivered in more depth in text. But because I chose just the right books, and knew them well, I can tailor my in-class presentations to deliver what the books leave out.

I confess, making all that material fit together was very hard to do. I can imagine, if I didn't have the luxury of picking the textbooks I wanted to use, and if I were mandated to deliver content X so that students will pass test Y, I can see how I might lean more on delivering short in-class explanations of what students "really" need to learn, while still virtuously assigning chapters that cover the material I'd like to teach, but don't have time to emphasize in class. This might lead students to depend on skimming, and might train them to respond quickly and vivaciously to points I brought up in class, while not helping them develop the ability to respond to material that they themselves read.

So... reading how a math professor parses the "students aren't prepared" problem has helped me see how I might respond. I'm still not sure what the solution is, but I can't simply blame the high schools of America, since, like it or not, it's my job to help the students pick up the pieces.

While things have settled down a bit, this time of year is very stressful for freshmen. I've got a high proportion of freshmen in two of my 200-level classes, and while I pause every so often to deliver a particular message to the freshmen, I'm not teaching them as freshmen courses, so we are together confronting the challenges of collegiate work.

While blogging has real intellectual payoffs, it is not conventional academic writing and shouldn't be an academic's main focus if he or she wants to get tenure.

But to dismiss blogging as a bad idea altogether is to make an enormous mistake. Academic bloggers differ in their goals. Some are blogging to get personal or professional grievances off their chests or, like Black, to pursue nonacademic interests. Others, perhaps the majority, see blogging as an extension of their academic personas. Their blogs allow them not only to express personal views but also to debate ideas, swap views about their disciplines, and connect to a wider public. For these academics, blogging isn't a hobby; it's an integral part of their scholarly identity. They may very well be the wave of the future.

[...]

Academic blogs offer the kind of intellectual excitement and engagement that attracted many scholars to the academic life in the first place, but which often get lost in the hustle to secure positions, grants, and disciplinary recognition. Properly considered, the blogosphere represents the closest equivalent to the Republic of Letters that we have today. Academic blogs, like their 18th-century equivalent, are rife with feuds, displays of spleen, crotchets, fads, and nonsenses. As in the blogosphere more generally, there is a lot of dross. However, academic blogs also provide a carnival of ideas, a lively and exciting interchange of argument and debate that makes many scholarly conversations seem drab and desiccated in comparison. Over the next 10 years, blogs and bloglike forms of exchange are likely to transform how we think of ourselves as scholars. While blogging won't replace academic publishing, it builds a space for serious conversation around and between the more considered articles and monographs that we write.--Henry Farrell --The Blogosphere as a Carnival of Ideas (Chronicle)

A welcome antidote to the Chronicle's recent Tribble twaddle.

We expect them to be able to follow us around the house, picking up after us, chattering with us like C-3PO, reading our emotions with the accuracy, if not the intent, of HAL. While robots have proved indispensable in narrow kinds of work, like assembly lines, when it comes to interactions with unpredictable, flesh-and-blood humans, they have yet to deliver on the promise of more lifelike responses. --Larry Gallagher --R Is for Robot  (Wired)

The average American is a ravenous media junkie, consuming up to nine hours a day of television, web time or cellphone minutes, according to new research which raises fresh questions about how technology is revolutionising society.

From iPods filling commuters' ears, the screens scrolling headlines in the elevator at work to proliferating on-the-move tools like cellphones and Blackberry handhelds, media is everywhere in the United States, like much of the rest of the developed world. --Media, media everywhere, and no time left to think? (Breitbart | AFP)

We're reading selections from Thoreau's Walden in my American Literature class. Thoreau's desire to shed his ties to material possessions and live simply in the woods appealed to several of the students in my morning class.

Astronomers at the Palo Alto Observatory are citing "lunar error" as the cause of the three-moon pileup that totalled Ganymede and severely dented Callisto and Europa Monday, causing an estimated $700 quadrillion in damage. --Ganymede Totalled In Three-Moon Pileup (The Onion (Satire))

An oldie.

There’s no question that certain things are lost when documents are prepared and transmitted in electronic formats. The texture, heft, even smell of the paper, the coffee cup’s stain, the crinkled edges and dog-eared pages, the physical abrasions of marks and erasures. Let’s think for a moment about what’s gained though. By opening my word processor’s Properties window I can ascertain, to the date- and millisecond, when the file was first created and when it was last edited. I can count the number of words and characters, but more interestingly the number of minutes spent editing the document. This is the kind of information scholars and editors of the literary classics would weep to have. How long was Coleridge really at work on “Kubla Kahn” before he was interrupted by the man from Porlock? The point here is that electronic objects are self-documenting to a remarkable degree, and this is a phenomenon that can and should be exploited as new social and technological practices evolve to preserve them. --Matthew Kirschenbaum --Lost and Found in Cyberspace (MGK)

This man is insightful and rigorous in his observations about a technology that far too many people either take for granted or treat as "the enemy".

There are some things that become so ubiquitous and familiar to us - so seemingly obvious - that we forget that they actually had to be invented. Here's a case in point - the weblog post's permalink. I mean - let's think about it. The problem was that a weblog's front page is by far its most visited page. This is the page where everyone actually sees your content (or at least it was until the creation of RSS feeds). But it's not possible for someone to effectively bookmark or link to that particular entry on that page, because shortly it will scroll off the bottom. Added to that, bookmarks operate at the level of pages, not posts. So how do you handle that? --Tom Coates --On Permalinks and Paradigms... (Plasticbag.org)

I'm saving this for the next time I teach "Writing for the Internet," but also for the next time I introduce blogging to a class. Some students get the whole package right away, but others need to be brought along in stages.

This year, I asked students to get used to blogging their reactions to texts by having them post brief comments on the course website, then bring 200-word reflection papers to class. I then asked students to move their initial brief comment to their own blog, asked them to read and comment on peer blogs, and invited them to post the 200-word reflection on their own blog, if they wished.

I lost some students along the way, by which I mean that some students stopped posting regularly, which means that their first blogging portfolio was a frustrating exercise in writing furiously in order to catch up.

But I added an extra blog portfolio, and moved the first due date up, so that students would quickly get the chance to see just why it is more valuable to blog a little bit each day, rather than wait until the night before the portfolio. We'll see how it turns out.

Coates credits Matt Haughey with the term "permalink" and Paul Barusch with the concept "permanent link".

Basically, I remember being afraid a lot of the time. I felt incredibly unsafe. I remember a couple of trips to the hospital after being in freezing water for long periods of time, losing quite a bit of my hearing for days at a time due to explosives, having my heart monitored when one went off relatively close to me, etc. I remember running through this long sort of corridor where explosives went off every few feet, things were on fire, etc. I cried hysterically in my dad's lap and begged him to make sure I wouldn't have to do it again, but I did. I think I did it quite a few more times. I remember the terrifying scene where we were in the boat and the horse jumped out and ended up surfacing a plastic explosive that went off right under my face. I remember being half trampled by a mob of extras and then repeating the scene several times. I remember working very long hours.

I know I had some fun as well, but it's pretty much obliterated by the sense of fear, and exhaustion, and of not being protected by the adults around me. And again, the adults who should have been there to protect me were my parents, not you. This, of course, took some time to arrive at. I admit I was pretty furious at you for a lot of years. --Sarah Polley --Polley recalls trauma of Gilliam set (Toronto Star)

The little girl who starred in The Adventures of Baron Munchausen writes director Terry Gilliam about the trauma she remembers. Gilliam gently points out that she may be constructing memories from having seen the finished film, but Polley responds that that's part of the point -- he had no idea how the film would impact her, overall.

Welcome to IFComp 2005, the competition for short text adventures. --Interactive Fiction Competition 2005 (ifcomp.org)

Free text-adventure games, written specifically for this annual competition. Anyone can be a judge.