Literacy: October 2005 Archive Page

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.)

--Teaching Carnival II is here! (Scribblingwoman)

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

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)

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?