November 2005 Archive Page

On the 8:12 a.m. commuter train, everybody just assumes I'm one of them. So does my secretary, my assistant, and every single one of my colleagues at the law firm, where I'm now a partner. I even married this clueless girl from Connecticut?loves shopping and everything?and we have two ironic kids. I swear, they look like something out of a creepy 1950s Dick And Jane reader?I even have these hilarious silver-framed pictures of them in my cheesy corner office. But still, the humor is lost on everybody but me. --Why Can't Anyone Tell I'm Wearing This Business Suit Ironically? (The Onion (Satire))

Blogs are the latest form of electronic information that law enforcement is examining as part of investigations, and experts predict they'll become even more relevant as their popularity grows.

"We have to look at that as a new medium to solve crimes," said Cmdr. Christopher Vicino of the Pasadena, Calif., police department. "We would be able to use them, not so much as evidence, but more for investigative leads." --Catherine Donaldson-Evans --Today's Gumshoes Dust for Fingerprints, Then Read Blogs (Fox News)

Suggested by Megan Ritter.

--Volunteers work smoothly for Operation Santa Clause [sic] (Tribune-Review [Online])

Dear Santa,

For Christmas, what I need most of all is a good copyeditor.

Love,

Pittsburgh Live.com

Okay, okay... To err is human.

I shouldn't be so harsh on whoever typed the headline. It's gloating blog entries like this that annoy professioal professional journalists and make them think of bloggers as "the enemy." But as I deal with the final crush of rough drafts from my students, I've been upbeat and constructive and positive as much as humanly possible, and that takes its toll on a guy.

So I've briefly unleashed the unflinching grammar bastard who dwells within. That felt good.

Now it's time to go back to being Professor Helpful.

All of the professors interviewed agreed that the Civ3 gods created a universe in which war goes a long way. The gods, of course, are the game designers who determine the algorithms by which history, in the game, will progress. So in order for the game to accurately portray the inputs that spit out world history, the game designers had “better create a damn complex algorithm,” says Alexander Galloway, an assistant professor of culture and communication at New York University who used Civ3 in a media studies graduate seminar. “The game doesn’t progress the same way [as human history],” Galloway says, noting that a player controlling Russia would essentially have to pick one form of government and stick with it. “I’m sure there are lower level history textbooks that are reductive too.” --Not Just Child’s Play (Inside Higher Ed)

While it's certainly true that all simulations are reductive, it's not true that a player in Civ3 would have to stick to one form of government. Players start out with "Despotism," but after they have researched such things as "Literacy" and "Code of Laws," they have the option to research -- and switch to -- more advanced forms of government like "Republic," "Monarchy," "Democracy" and "Communism." Each form of government comes with benefits and drawbacks, and just because you're playing Russia doesn't mean you have to move from Monarchy to Communism when the game reaches the 20th century. Each civilization starts out with a slightly different set of resources, and each civilization gets a specific military unit that is superior to the similar class units in other nations.

Don't write the sentence "There has been very little research done on games" in any more papers or articles or theses and essays UNLESS you also have a full bibliography that cites those few existing works. I don't care how many authorities you cite who may have written those words quite recently. Because yes, gamestudies is a new field, and therefore does not have entire library shelves to themselves, like literary studies. However, if the amount of articles and books you have to read to be able to understand the width of the field is so small, it is pretty lazy scholarly work - sloppy craft, simply - not to have read them all. --Torill Mortensen --Please, PLEASE stop (Thinking with my fingers)

Just trying to send a little link love Torill's way.

In Bovine majesty she stands,
Her purple tail she swings,
The amethyst cow,
To my heart somehow,
Perfect joy she brings. --Purple Cow Parodies (Purple Cow)

What if Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allen Poe, John Keats, William Wordsworth, or Rudyard Kipling saw Gelett Burgess's elusive Purple Cow?

Parodies by Susan and David Hollander.

In a matter of minutes Thursday morning, while they were in Herald Square hosting NBC's coverage of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, a balloon crashed in Times Square, injuring an 11-year-old girl and her disabled older sister.

Lauer and Couric didn't mention the mishap.

[...]

Couric and Lauer spent the last 10 minutes of the coverage reading from the sappy script, although they did note viewers at home were seeing last year's footage of the M&M's balloon, which depicts the candies in distress.

"Now, because of today's windy conditions, these characters are on video, and if we told you they were not in a panic, we'd be full of hot air," Couric joked.

Sure, you can make an argument why they shouldn't have mentioned the crash. But the fact that someone was injured in a similar incident in 1997 was enough to make the crash worthy of mention on-air.

If it was possible for NBC's cable network, MSNBC, to report the accident - before NBC's own parade coverage ended - then someone should have gotten a word to Lauer and Couric. --Richard Huff --NBC leaves Matt & Katie to twist in wind (NY Daily News)

How does it taste when your credibility melts in your mouth, not in your hands?

So far, 132 people have voted for the best geek novels written in English since 1932, in spite of Survey Monkey's rubric saying free polls were limited to 100 responses. The top 20 is therefore as follows, with the numbers in brackets showing the number of votes.

1. The HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- Douglas Adams 85% (102)
2. Nineteen Eighty-Four -- George Orwell 79% (92)
3. Brave New World -- Aldous Huxley 69% (77)
4. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? -- Philip Dick 64% (67)
5. Neuromancer -- William Gibson 59% (66)
6. Dune -- Frank Herbert 53% (54)
7. I, Robot -- Isaac Asimov 52% (54)
8. Foundation -- Isaac Asimov 47% (47)
9. The Colour of Magic -- Terry Pratchett 46% (46)
10. Microserfs -- Douglas Coupland 43% (44)
[...] --Best Geek Novels Written in English (Guardian Technology Blog)

That's a very small survey sample, but it's still an interesting list. The only one on the top 10 I don't know is The Colour of Magic. I didn't get very far in either Foundation or I, Robot when I started them as a teenager, but both have been on my "to read" list for a long time.

Turning to a few student samples we can see this concept exemplified even more. Below is a quote from one of Dennis Jerz's students. This is one of the student's first postings, and you can see his/her enthusiasm about designing and creating a blog.

September 08, 2004: LOOK AT ME, I HAVE A BLOG!

I have a blog now. My very own. It's like a baby -- mine to mold, change, and create. Hundreds of people (or in my case, about 5) will be able to see my writings. People from other countries even. Hola! Bonjour! Guten Tag! foreign peoples! I think I may have become addicted though. I just found out how to personalize and change the colors. Now, every free moment I have will be spent changing colors and making the blog uniquely me. Homework? Who needs homework? I have to work on my blog. (Special K)

This student seems to be aware of, probably because Jerz emphasized to his students, the public nature of the weblog: "Hundreds of people... will be able to see my writings. People from other countries even." However, what is even more intriguing is that the student states in parentheses "(or in my case, about 5)," which would seem to indicate that he/she does not think many people will be reading her blog. --Ashley Joyce Holmes --Web Logs in the Post-Secondary Writing Classroom: A Study of Purposes (PDF) (North Carolina State University)

This was a pleasant find -- an NCSU master's thesis that analyzes the use of web logs in higher education. I think I'll throw a few quotes from this into my next annual review.

I'm much better at simply showing people what blogs are all about, so I appreciated Holmes' careful description of precisely how a blog works. I might use a section of this dissertation the next time I teach Writing for the Internet.

My student Vanessa Kolberg is the "Special K" blogger. The paper mentions her name correctly, but the URL given in the Works Cited list is wrong. It should be "http://blogs.setonhill.edu/VanessaKolberg".

Each of the following uses a weblog or content management system to manage the site and/or really breaks traditional conventions in other ways, changing the way that the teacher establishes their professional ethos in comparison to the more traditional forms seen above. --Example Instructor Professional Home Pages (Introductory Composition at Purdue: Technical Mentoring)

Just doing a little egosurfing to remind myself that I do have a professional identity that extends beyond circling punctuation errors. No classes today, but I went into the office anyway and marked papers for seven hours.

Not done yet, so it's back to work. But first, maybe I'll crush Rome in Civilization III.

--MLA citation style: quick guide (PDF) (Cal State University, San Marcos LIbrary)

A handy two-page reference sheet.

I was pleasantly surprised to see what example this guide uses for how to cite a website. Perhaps there's a text-adventure fan on the CSUSM staff.

Comments published in a CNN article yesterday purporting to be from Sony CEO Howard Stringer regarding the planned pricing for PlayStation 3 have been removed after it emerged that he had not said anything on the question.

[...]

So where did the information come from, then? The culprit appears to be a Hollywood Reporter article on another interview with Stringer, which appeared a few weeks ago and also appeared to attribute pricing and availability information to the Sony CEO.

However, on closer inspection, the article was actually citing an anonymous source within Sony - a fine detail which the CNN article apparently missed, setting the whole rumour mill rolling once again. --CNN drops PS3 price story as Stringer comments are confuted  (Games Industry)

Via Bobby Kuchenmeister, a former student of mine, and a regular commenter, who finally got a blog. Hooray!

Comments published in a CNN article yesterday purporting to be from Sony CEO Howard Stringer regarding the planned pricing for PlayStation 3 have been removed after it emerged that he had not said anything on the question.

[...]

So where did the information come from, then? The culprit appears to be a Hollywood Reporter article on another interview with Stringer, which appeared a few weeks ago and also appeared to attribute pricing and availability information to the Sony CEO.

However, on closer inspection, the article was actually citing an anonymous source within Sony - a fine detail which the CNN article apparently missed, setting the whole rumour mill rolling once again. --Bobby Kuchenmeister --CNN drops PS3 price story as Stringer comments are confuted  (Discourse Chronicle)

Bobby is a former studnet of mine, and a regular commenter, who finally got a blog. Horray!

Framing a story is like building a house. Just as you determine how many rooms the house should have, you focus on the main idea of your story and what you want to say. A poorly framed story is vague and pointless, and your writing suffers. Good adjectives cannot make up for a bad story or bad idea.

"This is a tool (not a rule) to get a handle on the story and break it down," Roberts said. "Framing makes the story easier to write. If you lay the foundation, you're free to be a much better writer."

One of the leaders in the training movement across the country, Roberts had conference participants pick a story and find ways to make it better. Focus the story by deciding the main idea and, after reporting, run the information through this checklist: news, context, impact and human dimension.

• News is the event, new information, basic facts; it tells the reader what happened.
• Context is the story's background and history, its relationship to things around the news, the bigger picture; it tells readers what's normal, surprising or how similar things are dealt with elsewhere.
• Impact tells readers what the news affects or changes, now and in the future; it tells readers who benefits, who suffers and what they can do about it.
• Human dimension illustrates or portrays how the story effects the lives of real people; it provides details, textures, emotions, colors to convey experience.

--Michael Roberts --Story Framing: Four Vital Ingredients (Poynter)

Researchers unveiled a prototype of a $100 hand-cranked laptop computer on Wednesday and said they hoped to place them in the hands of millions of schoolchildren around the globe.

About the size of a textbook, the lime-green machines will be able to set up their own wireless networks and operate in areas without a reliable electricity supply, MIT researchers said at a United Nations technology summit.

--$100 laptops aim to bring children the world (Seattle Times)

This story broke during the week my blog was down, so I'm late to this party. One of minute of cranking is supposed to provide 40 minutes of computer power.

Awopbopaloobop, alopbamboom! --Roger Ebert --Just Friends (Roger Ebert.com)

Ebert can't seem to stay on the subject of reviewing the movie Just Friends. Pretty funny. (Via MetaFilter.)

It's become cool to dismiss movies as awful. Wherever I go, teenagers say, with chillingly casual adolescent contempt, that movies suck and cost too much -- the same stance they took about CDs when the music business went into free fall.

[...]

What's really driving the studio folks crazy is that a huge chunk of their core constituency -- young moviegoers -- has evaporated. Poof! They've scattered to the winds. Young males aren't just AWOL from movie theaters, they're also not seeing the studio's TV ads -- either because they've stopped watching TV altogether, or because they've got the TV, iPod and IM all going at the same time -- not exactly a situation in which an ad leaves much of an imprint.

[...]

Even worse, the people who run studios are living in such cocoons that they've become wildly out of touch with reality....The ultimate perk of being a studio chief is having your own screening room, which puts only more distance between you and the rabble -- ahem, your customers -- who spend $75 to take the family to a movie. --Patrick Goldstein --In a losing race with the zeitgeist (LA Times (will expire))

All of which, as it turns out, has led us to make a change for the better. We are re-assuming our identity as Pajamas Media. (Just give us a few days to sort the technical issues out.) In short, the whole experience of being caught with our pajamas down has been a bit embarrassing, but in the end, when we realized we could get our beloved name back, we were overjoyed. So a warm, hearty thanks to all of you who expressed your displeasure with our phony identity. --Charles Johnson & Roger L. Simon --Excuse us while we change back into our pajamas (OSM.org)

I've been watching this one unfold from a distance.

A company called Pajamas Media (a reference to CNN president Jonathan Klein's dismissal of the typical blogger as "a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas") to Open Source Media. Bloggers noted that this name conflicts with the name of Christopher Lyndon's "Open Source" radio show, and began tracking changes to Open Source Media's version of the name-change story.

Johnson and Simon have rightly pointed out the problems with Dan Rather's arrogant response to bloggers who pointed out flaws in the CBS coverage of Memogate, so it was rather surprising to see that it took some time for Open Source Media to admit that the company made a big mistake. (See Lyndon's description of the name problem.)

The Pajamas Media website, however, still contains material dismissing "Pajamas Media" as a temporary name that they will soon shed.

Why We'll Be Changing Our Name

When the bloggers who started this company first came together it was almost natural we would call ourselves Pajamas Media. It was a playful tip of the hat to that moment when bloggers exposed the misreporting of CBS anchor Dan Rather. At that time, an ex-executive for CBS tried to dismiss us as riffraff in "pajamas." But the bloggers were right, CBS was wrong, Rather retired (without apologizing) and the rest is history.

But as we have gone forward putting together this company, it has become clear to us that we do not wish to be defined merely as gadflies in opposition to mainstream media. We owe our readers and our colleagues something bigger, an alternative to the structures we have lived with all our lives. It's not enough to criticize. We also have to build something new. To do that, we needed a name that would allow us to grow. And that name we are in the process of deciding.

What a PR fiasco. It wasn't as if the people involved suddenly decided to change their name and picked one at random. They planned this, but didn't plan well enough.

While they responded slowly in terms of the blogging cycle, they still cleared it all up within a week, which is not so bad, in the grand scheme of things.

The most subtle and cogent analysis by a rhetorician of how The Times or CNN frames its stories has all the pertinence to a reporter or editor that a spectrographic analysis of jalapeno powder would to someone cooking chili.

This is not a function of journalistic anti-intellectualism, though there'scertainly enough of that to go around. No, it comes down to a knowledge gap ?- one in which academic media critics are often at a serious disadvantage. I mean tacit knowledge. There are, for example, things one learns from the experience of interviewing people who are clearly lying to you (or otherwise trying to make you a pawn in whatever game they are playing) that cannot be reduced to either formal propositions or methodological rules.--Scott McLemee

--Meet the Press (Inside Higher Ed)

I enjoy discussing things in EL250 in general just because I feel like I learn a lot about all of you who are in there. I feel like I know you all a little better after having these kinds of discussions in class. That is really important to me because I enjoy learning about people and what experiences they have that are different than my own. It really makes me put my own life in perspective and it humbles me by making me realize how much I don't yet know. So thanks guys! Have a great Thanksgiving! --Lorin Schumacher --Kindertransport Performance Discussion (LorinSchumacher)

Lorin is a freshman English education major, who took the time to post this cheerful and encouraging post after today's EL 250 "Drama as Literature" class, during which we discussed our reactions to seeing the school's production of Kindertransport. We had read the script and discussed it briefly already.

I was surprised that several students said they got more out of reading the play. Of course, students who sign up for a class on "Drama as Literature" are going to bring with them a certain literary bias, but I was still surprised to hear that many students preferred the textual experience to the performance.

It's not that they were criticizing the performance, which I thought was excellent. I'd prefer to think that they have developed their skill in reading a dramatic text, and they've realized when they read a play they have to be the director and each of the actors; when they watch a play, they're taken along on someone else's ride.

On the subject of Seton Hill drama, a student in my News Writing class has posted a series of short articles about what it's like "Behind the Scenes of Seton Hill's Theatre Program."

I'd love to see similar projects for other programs.

Irked by a reporter who told him he seemed to be "off his game" at a Beijing public appearance, President George W. Bush sought to make a hasty exit from a news conference but was thwarted by locked doors. -- Locked doors thwart Bush's bid to duck question (Reuters | MyWay)

In Bush's defense, that was a rather hostile, extremely biased question, along the lines of, "When did you stop beating your wife?"

Because Bush himself supplied the verb "escape," the POTUS has probably supplied humorists with enough material for weeks.

Real life is rarely as good as The Onion (See "Clinton Escapes Through Air Vent"), but this comes close.

From the beginning of any playthrough of the game, the author knows what things happen when, why they happen and what they mean. They even know things that don't appear in the game at all. By contrast, the player knows only what they've seen so far, plus anything they guess or speculate (which may well be totally wrong). The rest of this article talks about some specific problems caused by clashes between these two mindsets, and how, as an author, to create a better game by thinking more like a player. Some of the things I mention overlap with things I've discussed previously in my How to Write a Great Game article; if you're interested in seeing more design discussion from me I suggest reading that. Thanks is also due to Stephen Granade's article The Player Will Get It Wrong, which covers a number of the same issues I discuss here, from the perspective of one specific author and several games. --Dan Shiovitz --Think Like a Player! ( Home Page for Dan Shiovitz)

I have a Strunk and White. I like having it. And it's clarity has helped me. Not because I necessarily followed the advice or even agree with it now, but because at a more formative time in my writing life, it gave me a simple place to depart from. It made me feel like a writer to have it. When I first read White's advice (far more than Strunk's), it cheered me to have a writer I love talk to me about writing. I keep the book for that feeling more than any other. -- Nick Carbone -- Frankenstrunk is Shrunken Strunk (TechNotes: Teaching Writing in an Online World)

Carbone is commenting on the occasion of a new edition of Strunk & White, this one featuring illustrations.

But in another sense, academic blogging represents the fruition, not a betrayal, of the university's ideals. One might argue that blogging is in fact the very embodiment of what the political philosopher Michael Oakshott once called "The Conversation of Mankind"?an endless, thoroughly democratic dialogue about the best ideas and artifacts of our culture. --Robert S. Boynton --Attack of the Career-Killing Blogs (Slate)

--2005 IF Comp Results

Vespers, Beyond, and A New Life are the winners of IF Comp 2005. Woo hoo! Free text games!

I'm back! (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Last Friday afternoon, my site went down. Trying to access the homepage yielded a message that the owner of the site should contact billing@[ISP]. I assumed that there was a mix-up in terms of paying our ISP for the next year of hosting, but our billing people say that we paid the bill on time.

During this time, I was able to access my files via ftp and SSH (geekier ways of accessing files, not involving web browsers), so I knew the site was still there and the data files were safe.

About a half hour ago, I noticed that my site was still accessible under a different URL -- the URL my ISP first gave me, before the domain name servers picked up "jerz.setonhill.edu" and started pointing web surfers to hosting company's computer.

SHU's webmaster Jess Turner did his webmasterful magic, found that our ISP has moved to a new IP address (the sequence of numbers that identifies each individual unique connectio to the internet).

So now I'm back in business. Hurrah for Jess!

Thanks to everyone who e-mailed or called me to let me know the site was down.

My student weblogs were unaffected by this problem, which was a good thing, since this is a stressful time of year and I would hate to give them one more thing to worry about.

As Riya learns who's in your pictures, it begins to auto-tag the snaps itself, quickly scanning the rest of your photos and identifying each person it recognizes. Riya also uses text recognition to read street signs and other text in photos. --Riya Eases Pain of Pile of Pix  (Wired)

Once upon a time, in the Triassic Period, there were four hatchlings in a coelophysis nest, down deep in a stone cave, in the desert (wet season). The four hatchlings were Jonathon, Larry, Joseph, and the youngest one was Martha.

They were coelophyses. They lived with their mother and father. But being a baby coelophysis was dangerous, because coelophysis was a cannibal. --Peter Jerz --Martha the Coelophysis (dictated by Peter Jerz, age 7) (blogs.setonhill.edu/DennisJerz)

Over a span of three bedtimes, my seven-year-old son Peter dicated this story. He had thought it up on his own and told it to me during the day, and I thought it was remarkable, so he dictated it to me (in a slightly expanded form). All the parenthetical insertions are his -- he will say "open parenthesis," then give the detail, and he will say "close parenthesis" when he's done. I added the footnotes. The bit about the velociraptor fur was a nice touch at the beginning, but you won't believe how he brings the fur back into the story towards the end.

The driver of the police van starts to pull out, momentarily blocking your view of Ide and the protestors. The two young men behind you come forward for a closer look.

"Did Tony just give her the finger?" asks the young man in the sweatshirt.

"I don't blame him," says the second young man.

As you move to a new position, you pass near the young man wearing the sweatshirt.

You glance at your watch and notice that court will be in session in a few minutes. You know that you've got a seat reserved, but you know judge Dickerson doesn't like people coming into his courtroom late. Given all the noise out here, the judge might be in a bad mood.

Do you

A) Talk to the young men
B) Talk to the woman with the megaphone
C) Head right into the courtroom

[In class Friday, you will be given the next chunk of the story.] --Lab: Court Reporting (EL 227: News Writing)

I'm in the process of creating a "Choose Your Own Adventure" exercise for a courtroom reporting exercise in my News Writing class.

Tomorrow morning, I'm going to hand students a packet of information based on the choices they make. There will be a few other quick choices, then when the court breaks for lunch, they'll have an hour to write up their notes.

When court reconvenes, I'll shift into role-play mode, and I'll perform for them what happens in the courtroom.

They'll have to take notes on this sequence, and incorporate these events into the story that's due at the end of the lab.

Wish me luck!

From Tammany Hall, robber barons and the sinking of The Maine to Vietnam, Watergate and the Lewinsky scandal, editorial cartoonists have exalted, lambasted, praised and skewered the rich, the powerful and the foolish.

Since the history of newspapers, cartooning has been a rich and vital contribution to American political commentary.

With the advent of news on the web and new design technologies, who will carry on that tradition?

Washingtonpost.com is looking for the next star of cartoon satire - a "Herblock" for the digital age.

We're proud to announce the 2005 Washingtonpost.com "Editorial Shorts" Digital Animation Competition.

Can you use the emerging tools of digital animation to be the new voice of American satire? --Editorial Shorts: Digital Animation Competition (Washington Post)

--David Jump! (David Denninger)

A student of mine posted a clever little video that includes some simple but very cool effects.

Not much in the way of narrative or character development, but the whole thing made me smile.

See David Jump!.

For decades, the debate was very much focused on UFOs, sightings and abduction stories. Alien visitors turned into a modern myth. In an age when our other beliefs and ideologies were fading away, we could at least believe in UFOs.

Most scientists, annoyed as they were, simply chose to ignore it. Then some bright people, like my colleagues in The Planetary Society, realized that instead of just laughing at the matter, you could try to tap this truly huge interest for life in space, by shifting the focus to a related but more scientific theme: SETI. Since then, there are more articles about SETI than UFOs in our newspapers. They manage to shift the center of the debate, and to a small degree, they shifted our entire perception of the universe.

In a similar fashion, we now need to sow the seeds of a new ?myth? for the space program?in fact a whole new perception among people regarding our inherited place, role, and destiny in the cosmos. I am sure we won't influence policymakers and budget planners right away. But we can make this seed grow in society at large: why not start already tonight with our kids? bedtime stories? --Hans L.D.G. Starlife
--Needed: a change of focus (The Space Review)

Needed: a better title. The image is beautiful, but the headline is drab.

P.S. Hans L.D.G. Starlife? Really?

Still, when asked what art forms speak the most to us, games don't rank at the top. Ranked 1 to 6, where 1 is the most emotional, the order was: movies, music, books, video/PC games, paintings/artwork, and last cars. (OK, so I have a thing for cars?)

Heavy gamers have more of a feeling for movies. Lighter and younger gamers are more moved by music.

For genres, I thought MMOs would top the list, but RPGs are the runaway winner -- by far the most emotional genre of videogames. --Hugh Bowen --Can Videogames Make You Cry? (bowenresearch.com)

This is a teaser article, advertising a full-length report. While I'm very interested in the subject, journalists should be careful of how they use this kind of study.

Was the study peer-reviewed? What was the methodology? What is the author's purpose in publishing it (and selling copies on his eponymous website)?

I'll have to look into the death of Aeries from Final Fantasy VII. Interactive fiction fans seem to place the fate of Floyd the robot (from Infocom's 1983 Planetfall) in the same category.

By studying journalism, you carry with you tools for assessing arguments, and a dogged determination to find the truth in yourself and in others.

I love this work, but it is work. Living up to the standards of this difficult, competitive field is taxing. I have a long, long way to go. --Amanda Cochran --A journalist's lessons (Girl Meets World)

Amanda is a junior journalism major here at SHU. I've asked her to speak to my "News Writing" class today.

A computer-generated reconstruction of the man's face bears a strong enough resemblance to portraits of Copernicus to convince the scientists. --'Body of Copernicus' identified (BBC)

See Wikipedia for more about Copernicus , the 16th-century priest whose astronomical hobby provided evidence to support the theory that the sun was at the center of the solar system. This part of the story is not as well known as the church's opposition to Gallileo, whose support of the Copernican system irked church authorities.

Gallileo had enemies among secular professors of philosophy (some of whom reportedly refused to look through a telescope), and allies among Jesuit astronomers. The Wikipedia article on Gallileo does a good job explaining the complexity of the case, though it's not exactly a thrilling read in its present format.

The late Pope John Paul II, who famously built bridges by making humble statements admitting past church wrongs against Jews and fundamentalist Christians, similarly exonerated Gallileo in the 1990s. Around that time, Joseph Ratzinger wrote in defense of the Church's proceedings against Gallileo. Ratzinger is now Pope Benedict XVI. I don't think we need to worry about the church hunting down and excommunicating scientists. In light of the cultural rift created by the doctrine of intelligent design, held by some fundamentalist Christians, the Vatican has recently released a statement asserting that science and religion have their own proper spheres of influence. A cardinal invoked the atomic bomb and human cloning as examples of scientific progress that proceeded without influence from ethical and moral principles.

Teenagers are ten times more likely to use non-standard English in written exams than in 1980, using colloquial words, informal phrases and text-messaging shorthand — such as m8 for ‘mate’, 2 instead of ‘too’ and u for ‘you’.

Despite this, the two-year study found that today’s teenagers are using far more complex sentence structures, a wider vocabulary and a more accurate use of capital letters, punctuation and spelling. --Adam Fresco --Texting teenagers are proving 'more literate than ever before' (Times Online)

gr8 2 c

Here’s where it gets fun: after students’ small groups put some thoughts up on the board, we read through the Writing Program’s Statement on Plagiarism out loud, and discuss it, making sure everything’s clear about the policy.

And then I hold a plagiarism contest. --Mike Vitia --Let’s Plagiarize! (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I'm home in Greensburg, still coming down from my Serious Games Summit high. This post is a useful reminder that simulation and role-playing doesn't require a computer. Even the fanciest teaching tools may be useless unless they are contextualized effectively (and designed with sound pedagogical principles). I doubt that corporate or military trainers would go for a training exercise that asks learners to perform undesirable actions. The simulators are, of course, designed with the understanding that learners will fail, and the design includes feedback to get the trainee to reach the expected performance level. But the trainee isn't expected to understand all the material. In fact, teaching full comprehension is inefficient, since in many cases the decisions are made elsewhere, and the point of training is to get compliance (and thus save lives or protect valuable assets).

On the other hand, if the point of a simulation is to teach comprehension, situational awareness, or leadership, rather than to teach a particular skill to be performed by those with their boots in the sand, then we're back to Admiral Kirk's Kobayashi Maru -- a training simulation designed to test how a commander performs in a no-win situation.

Not sure where I'm going with this... it's way too late, and the caffeine-and-sugar high that fueled my drive home is starting to fade.

One sunny day shortly after the start of the fall term, Robert M. Dawley was preparing to spend the afternoon tutoring two students on how to measure the DNA content in the cells of tadpoles.

But first he walked briskly out of his building and over to a small lounge with white cinder-block walls, stretched out on the carpeted floor, his head propped up on a bent arm, and asked a small class of bright-eyed freshmen sitting along the walls to reflect on Gilgamesh, the world's oldest-known epic poem. --Burton Bollag --Where a Geneticist Can Teach 'Gilgamesh' (Chronicle)

Serious Games Summit DC 2005, Day 2A Debate Between Jan Cannon-Bowers and Marc Prensky (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Do we need instructional design in serious games, or is making a good game enough? This debate is part of an ongoing turf battle within the serious games movement.

As is generally the case with conference liveblogging, these are lightly-edited notes, and shouldn't be taken as a verbatim, authoritative transcript.

Perry McDowell gave the introduction. Developer of "Delta 3D," an open-source games engine.

If games can train and educate without putting pedagogy into it, why waste time/money in it?

If games can't train without instructional design, the results can be scary ("negative training effects").

In the 80s, regarding AI, "Mouths made promises that brains couldn't keep." The result was "the AI winter" -- money for AI research dried up as a result of dissatisfaction with early attempts.

In the 90s, the same thing happened with VR. Serious Games is providing a reprieve for VR researchers. But if we can't show hard evidence that SG doesn't train people better, faster, cheaper, then before long Serious Games will be five guys drinking beer remembering the old days, while, the rest of us will be at the "Hula-hoops for Education Conference."

"We don't want Serious Games to be on the scrapheap of history" along with the pet rock. (Hmmm?. if serious games isn't any good, then why shouldn't it be discarded when the next thing comes along? The argument is predicated on the assumption that serious games do work. He's suggesting the issue is to preserve funding for serious games, not to solve the problems that most of us in this room assume serious games will solve.)

Jan Cannon-Bowers and Marc Prensky; two smart, very well-educated people who have almost diametrically opposing positions on the issue.

Contextualizing the start of the deabate, which started at another conference (sorry, I didn't catch that detail).

Marc -- teachers are basically babysitters, under certain circumstances we can get rid of teachers.

Jan -- "Marc, I could almost defend you until you went off the deep end."

The moderator helpfully contextualized the debate with Jerry Springer and Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots slides, and Dan Ackroyd's famous Saturday Night Live retort, "Jane, you ignorant slut."

So clearly, this debate was staged as entertainment, with the two participants ready to attack each other intellectally.

Jan Cannon-Bowers

Do we need pedagogy in educational games? Of course we do! What moron would think otherwise? Why is "pedagogy" a bad word? Gamers are afraid that pedagogy represents this noose we're going to put around their necks and tighten it to crush out all their creative juice. She suggests that it will be an interesting mix and culture clash. Learning doesn't have to be "fun" in order to be successful. Would you say everything you learned was fun? We can all recall cases in which we were so motivated to learn that we overcame bad instructional environments.

Should we try to make learning fun? Sure! If fun is one way to elevate motivation, then why not? Positive feelings about training -- "I liked it or didn't like it." There's a threshold below which no learning is happening, but does learning have to be "fun" in order to be effective? There's a point at which, once a certain threshold of comfort has been reached, there is little correlation between comfort and learning.

Besides fun, we should also consider that training is interesting, engaging, useful, challenging, fulfilling, and otherwise motivating. If we don't incorporate pedagogy, learning effectiveness is hit or miss (at best).

Jan would prefer that her doctor, mechanic, etc, be trained on a solid system that does its job, and she doesn't care whether they have fun in the process.


Marc Prensky

Had difficulty getting his laptop started. Heckled from the audience -- "Are you having fun?" Marc admitted that he should have tested it, and admitted "There's probably pedagogy involved in testing." The moderator jumped up and joked that the debate was over, Jan cried, "I won!"

To fill time, Jan fielded a question from the audience? what's the difference between enjoyable and fun? She replied that that's splitting hairs, but noted that people may go through an experience where they are sweating bullets, and then look back afterwards and say, "That was fun!"

When the laptop was ready, Marc sarted saying, "Sure sure sure sure." Began with a joke definition of pedagogy -- peda = "foot," gogy = "gouge" -- gagging on your foot in your mouth.

"Whenever you add an instructional designer, the first thing they do is suck the fun out."

Showed a list of 12 activities (trying, deciding, observing. etc.). You need motivation in order to get people to do those 12 things.

Will Wright --If a learner is motivated, there's no stopping him.

Effort for learning can feel like work, but can also feel like play. Learning feels like play when you have the engagement, motivation and passion -- and that should be our number one priority. The main reason you do all these things is to get people to finish the training you've invested your energy in.

A good chart

Curriculum Design v Game Design

Focus: Content vs. Engagement
Mode: Presentations vs. Gameplay
Decisions: Rare vs. Frequent and Important

Negative Training -- the instructional designer's way of instilling fear. "the herpes of training"

("Serious Games" is a subset of games for educational purposes. A term for a subset of education that focuses on enjoyment is "Fun Pedagogy.")

Jan of game designers -- "I don't trust you!" (guffaws). When asked to clarify, she said she didn't trust the instinct of game designers to be able to deliver the content that, for example, helps a pilot to fly a plane, without the help of instructional designers.

(Makes me think of Plato's Ion, the dialogue with a rhapsode who says that he is qualified to act the role of a general because he knows what a general would do or say.)

When asked how a pilot in a "fun" simulation would learn the details, Marc said "RTFM." Someone from the audience asked "Who wrote the FM?"

Marc -- we need good instructional strategies. "If they were good instructional strategies, they wouldn't suck the fun out." We've learned a lot about the world of Norrath, such that if there were a real world of Norrath, it could be validated.

Jan -- design is about making decisions. "I don't think the typical gamer who's not gotten some extensive exposure is going to make the appropriate design decisions."

Marc -- suggested that instead of starting from the beginning that instead you started in the middle, repairing an interesting thing that's broken, rather that creating something from scratch without a sense of how it all works.

Jan notes that moving from simulation to games, you need new, modern models of instruction that can accommodate immersive environments.

Ricardo Rademacher, who was sitting behind me in the audience, pointed to the slide on which Marc had displayed "Whenever you add an instructional designer, the first thing they do is suck the fun out," and noted that you could turn that around. "Whenever you add a game designer, they suck the learning out," and argued that's precisely what happened in the 90s with "edutainment software."

In the last few minutes of the panel, amidst much laughter and zipping-up of laptop cases, when Marc tried to get the crowd to join his rallying cry of "Let's not suck the fun out," Ricardo and I cried, "Let's not suck!"

In a parting shot, the moderator asked the crowd how many of them had changed their minds based on what they had seen. Predictably, nobody raised their hands.

Overall, I thought the whole premise -- do we need pedagogy at all -- gave Jan an uphill battle. Imagine, if you will, in the alternate universe, instead of "Serious Games Summit," a "Fun Pedagogy Summit."

What chance would a game designer have there?

Well, that's it -- time to publish this and head over to the reception. I'm driving back to Pennsylvania tonight.

Serious Games Summit DC 2005, Day 2Paul Marino: Machinima: Using Games to Change Filmmaking and Instructional Video (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Executive Director, Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences
Author of The Art of Machinima

The presentation was a brief introduction to a demonsration of clips, many of which I've seen, so it wasn't as immediately informative as I had initially expected. Still, a useful focal point for many different issues. Marino began by defining machinima as “the intersection of filmmaking, animation and interactive/game technologies,” ended by calling it “the democratization of animated filmmaking/storytelling.”

What follows are my hastily typed notes. I kind of shut my brain off and just watched the clips, so this entry will be a little thin.

Capturing live action, even if it takes place in a virtual world, is a kind of filmmaking.

Cinema + Moore’s Law = Machinima

Quake Movies – The Rangers – created “Diary of a Camper,” a silent film with text-chatting dialogue, created by capturing the actions of players in the multi-player environment. The term “Quake movie” persisted for a while, but since it was being created within different games, a new term was needed.

Term coined in 1998 by Hugh Hancock and Anthony Bailey. (Machine + cinema, with the misspelled ending being part of an e-mail communication.)

Clive Thompson, NYT, noted that machinima is not just about creating an animated movie, but also permits game players “to comment directly on the pop culture they so devotedly consume.”

Machinima Clip Screening

“Apartment Huntin’”
“Warthog Jump”
”My Trip to Liberty City” -- “Almost a travelogue, in a Woody Allen kind of way.”
(Played the clip from the beginning to the joke about not really playing baseball.) (The same author also created a great short film on a text adventure theme.)

Visionary Machinima

“Anna” – lifecycle of a wildflower.
“The Journey” -- abstract, arthouse film, medium of expression.

Dance Videos: Keep of Movin’

“Let’s Get Started”
”Shut up and Dance”

Episodic Machinima
“Popular, and to a certain extent profitable.”
Red vs. Blue – five-person team that supports themselves, a million downloads per episode, over three years.
“Strangerhood Studios,” based on Sims 2.
“Cyborg Altar Boy”

New Building Blocks: Machinima Gets Crafty

In machinima it’s hard to do drama, easy to do comedy (the reverse of Hollywood)
Half-life 2’s Faceposer.

Marino’s clip… Presented the G-man singing in a music video.
“Robes”
“A Few Good G-Men”

(As soon as I get the chance, I’ll add links to sources for all these clips.)

Marino noted that Pixar films take two or three minutes per frame to reander, but today’s machinima creators are taking advantage of the real-time rendering tools that their computers and consoles possess. We’re reaching the point where creating these films don’t take nearly as much time as it used to take. Are we in the “Age of Ubiquitous Creativity”?

The talk really didn't have much to say at all about instructional filmmaking, even though that was part of the title. Overall, I'd say the audience was impressed; a crowd of about 20 people were around the speaker at the end of the presentation -- that's generally a good sign.

Serious Games Summit DC 2005, Day 2Derek Wischusen: Expanding Teachable Moments in Serious Games using AI (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Began with a useful grid that recognizes that realism is not the only way to evaluate a game, and that realistic games are not the only kind of training games out there.

Wischusen presented two binary pairs:

Fun/Training
and
Realistic/Unrealistic

Goal: Fun -> Training

(I like the recognition that realism is one option, but there are many ways to be “unrealistic,” just as there are many ways to be nonwhite or un-American. Expressionism, impressionism, romanticism, abastraction etc. are all artistic alternatives to realism.)

Key messages:

Training isn’t “just in time” or “just in case”
Simulation isn’t training
Networks, virtual environments, games, process measures are not training


Training is “relevant practice with feedback”

Assessment and Feedback

Simulation/game provides the practice environment. Practice alone does not make perfect. Intelligent assessment and feedback is essential for effective training to occur.

Perfect practice makes perfect. To learn how to do it correctly, you need assessment and feedback to tell you when you’re not doing it correctly.

While the good instructor is always the best source of training, there are rarely enough instructors to meet training needs; and never enough to provide one-on-one training.

(Hmm… A embedded assumption is that one-on-one training is best.. but “best” is a value statement. If you factor in ROI, then one-on-one instruction may be inefficient. Are all instructors “good” at one-on-one training? The reference to a “good” instructor is sort of begging the question. )

The system can do pre-testing to identify the knowledge you bring into the system, personalizing the delivery according to the needs of the learner.

“Cognitive fidelity is as important as graphical fidelity for both training quality and end-user acceptance.” (Hmm… that phrasing privileges graphical fidelity, but the speaker noted that not all training simulations requires that kind of fidelity.)

Presentation of Virtual Interactive Pattern Environment and Radiocomms Simulator (VIPERS) – an Air Force Research Laboratory project designed to give student pilots practice performing a labor-intensive landing procedure. Typically simulated with a duct tape pattern on the floor, with the students calling out their status and responding to commands as the routine requires. A technique better practiced on the ground, but students have limited access to fancy simulators.

(Hooray – in an aside the presenter noted that 2D environments can provide just as good results as rich 3D simulations, and cautioned the assumption that realistic graphics are always the best option.)

Synthetic Teammates for Realtime Anywhere Training and Assessment (STRATA)

DARWARS – offers a massively multiplayer online war, that permits different training systems to plug into it. Emphasizes “headwork” (teamwork, not flying skills).

Giving the trainee a situation that contains an error; will the trainee note that the setup information contains an error that makes accomplishing the goal impossible.

AI agents should occasionally make errors, since people do make errors in the field. That’s part of the “realism” in the training environment.

Virtual Environment Cultural Training for Operational Readiness (VECTOR)

Building a 3D environment that teaches soldiers to interact with people in a foreign environment, so that the locals are more interested in helping the soldiers than hurting them. The AI agents respond to trainee actions based on the emotional state of the agent, according to rules determined by cultural subject-matter experts. Within the exercise is a synthetic instructor, who gives objectives, provides feedback on both military and cultural protocols. The training involves interacting with the locals, getting important information while following cultural rules.

VIGILANCE – HazMat training, skilled support personnel (SSP) who assist the first responders. They may operate heavy machinery. The concern is that our SSP haven’t been trained to assist an EMT during a HazMat response.

Serious Games Summit DC 2005, Day 2Sande Chen and David Michael: Roundtable -- Beyond Q & A: Assessment Methods for the Next Generation of Serious Games (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

These are my very rough notes. Some of the speakers didn't give their names, sometimes I couldn't hear their names, and sometimes they gave their names while I was furiously typing something else.

The moderators are authors of Serious Games: Games that Educate, Train, and Inform

Presenters began this roundtable by noting an opposition between “Abigail McGillicuddy,” the traditional teacher, where the buck stops, and “HAL.”

Microsoft employee: emphasized the fuzziness of knowledge as the future, as opposed to a prescriptive system that records a single correct answer. In games, knowledge is treated as binary – right and wrong. Teachers, on the other hand, recognize few absolutes, emphasizing contextualization.

Human has to be there for the time being, but technology will

Richard Carey, Pearson Education. Pre-assessment to level a student into the gameworld; in an educational context you want to place the student right away into the proper level, rather than starting them out too easy. Getting the “picky teacher” to use the software.

Does “test” and “assessment” mean the same thing to everyone here?

John Fairfield, Rosetta Stone. Think of placement rather than assessment.

I noted that testing is just one method of assessing; that assessment can be done without any kind of test.

Eric Lauber, IUP – noted that the simulation “looks more real” but that we don’t have much evidence of transferability of what’s learned in one context to a different context.

Technical consultant – “What I care about is what is this information used to sell these games,” that is, convince people that they want to use it (even if it’s given away for free). A technical consultant needs better data, “more backend.” Won’t be able to convince medical clients to use those games unless he can provide longitudinal study data that shows improvement.

David Gibson – designing simulation that helps teachers deal with kids; wants to be able to represent the intellectual growth of simulated students. Noted that Vermont went to a portfolio method for assessment. Noted Ron Stevens’ work on transference in case-based learning, doing neural network analysis on problem solving, making early predictions of the strategies students are going to use. Also referred to research on the automated SAT, so that you don’t have to keep asking them the same kind of question once you’ve determined what the student knows.

Susan McLister, editor-in-chief of a technology magazine. Noted a major challenge in education is to convince teachers that games are not evil, that there is a direct tie-in between tames and what teachers are expected to do. Embedded in a game should be measurements for higher-order learning skills.

Military speaker – one of the longer histories of using games for training. Wants to know when to use a training game, now that they have games that they believe are training. Wants confirmation that they are doing what they think they are doing, what the ROI is versus traditional methods? Improved skill level, improved long-term retention?

Owen: Referred to the “happy path” and “adaptive thinking,” noted the need to create models around not just models and skills, but also confidence.

Completion assessment vs. process assessment.

Margaret Corbit, Cornell: Games are missing a piece in which students showcase and present what they learned in their own ways. Games don’t include a way for students to express what they learned.

Pat Youngblood, Stanford: [Was distracted… missed her point.]

Kids learning in cyberspace all the time… President of the U of Washington complained that media has not filled its mission of educating the masses. The spirit of games does not involve rigid assessment… (at least not about what educators value)

Designer: Can’t find off-the-shelf products that help him do what he needs to do, and assessment is typically one of the problems. Pressure from teachers who want games tied to state curricular expectations.

Mike Gibson: Beyond the learning within the games, how is it affecting the user’s ability in the real world. (A selling point.)

Another speaker – be sensitive to demographics of the audience. Want to be thinking about what you want to assess – a skill, knowledge, cognitive ability. Simulators typically do very badly in training people. Referred to data that says simulators have negative transfer training.

Microsoft: When it comes to assessment, be careful not to think that what we define as valuable data will be adopted by the education community. Embrace whatever the standars are that the education community accepts – pointed to “No Child Left Behind” (“love it or hate it”). While teachers prefer the qualitative model, there’s a need for quantitative methods. Instead of testing against content, assess the individual user’s strategic abilities – are the individual learners improving over time. Did they use the same strategy over and over in new situations that kept leading to failure, or did they adapt their strategies based on what they learned? Useful information for the teacher to determine where a particular student is falling behind.

Cynthia Phelps, School of Information Science in Houston. Are we missing the difference between assessing our learners, and assessing the learning environment (that is, the game). Instead of just assessing how it applies to the learner, how can the game design itself be iteratively improved.

Kip Carr, Lockheed Marketing. Asked how many in the audience play videogames (plenty of hands) more than three hours a week (about a quarter of the room). Noted that gamers are being assessed all the time without knowing it.

[I then asked how many don’t play – about a quarter raised their hands, but others looked uncomfortable. A quarter is probably a low number.]

Jake Troy, doing foreign language games. Games reach people who wouldn’t ordinarily do the training, when they have the choice of watching TV or doing something else.

Robert -- Health care. About games assessing the player – what kinds of methodologies are game developers using.

Chen referred to a Gamasutra article on how games assess players, and noted that a history of cheat codes and walkthroughs.

Karen from Ideas dismissed the idea that cheating is a problem. Teachers want their students to learn, they aren’t really interested in what they do to learn.

I spoke out in favor of the idea that game that can be “cheated” – such that the learner can get around the learning task and get the goal without having learned -- isn’t a well-designed game. A game that rewards unethical behavior is a simulation to train people how not to get caught, that’s bad, but if the game is designed with reference material, and the game gives the student a motivation to consult the reference material, that harnesses the student desire to “cheat” when bored with gameplay.

Game “cheat books” – the new textbook.

Microsoft noted that learners cheat when bored. [That info could be used to spruce up boring areas of a game, or to collect information on whether the student has really internalized the concept.]

Marine Corps: Game is a tool to be used by an instructor. In a training exercise where the instructor notices a leaner is using a cheat sheet, the instructor can “lovingly tell him” not to cheat during the exercise.

I noted that the whole concept of a game is a kind of cheating, in that you get to save and reload and try again. If the point system is closely aligned with the pedagogical goals, there’s little benefit to be gained from “cheating” (in the sense of bringing a cheat sheet that says what the “right” answer is). But if a student in a game has to keep turning to a particular page, whether on a cheat sheet or in an in-game reference tool, in order to get information that the other students have internalized, then that “cheating” won’t help the leaner complete the game objectives.

A speaker from Finland noted that she designs collaborative games, in which she doesn’t consider working together to be cheating.

I noted that the whole concept of a game is a kind of cheating, in that you get to save and reload and try again. If the point system is closely aligned with the pedagogical goals, there’s little benefit to be gained from “cheating” (in the sense of bringing a cheat sheet that says what the “right” answer is). But if a student in a game has to keep turning to a particular page, whether on a cheat sheet or in an in-game reference tool, in order to get information that the other students have internalized, then that “cheating” won’t help the leaner complete the game objectives.

A series of comments on collecting data from multi-user online games. These games can generate so much data that it can be prohibitive.

Microsoft Howard: Designers should talk to teachers about what precisely they want to measure, munging the data stream and delivering information that is meaningful to teachers.

Owen: Find the “happy path” of the assessor, rather than focusing on what the learner learns. Build the assessor’s needs into the system.

Multiplayer games are good at collecting and storing data. That computer can do pre-analysis.

(Continuing...)

Serious Games Summit DC 2005, Day 2Keynote: David Warner, Riding the Cutting Edge of Distributed Intelligence (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Warner identified himself as “dangerously overeducated.” Characterized his presentation as “confessions of a serial stunt scientist,” and warned that he would jump topics around. The cup of tea I brought to the table went cold untouched -- there simply wasn't time to sit back and take a sip while reflecting; I was leaning forward the whole time, doing my best to keep up.

His main theme was what he called shareable system awareness, which he approached through a concep the called grok-it science (that is, emphasizing the user's ability to grasp and understand information quickly, and to transfer that understanding to their separate areas of operation, and to offer feedback that updates the whole system). He operates in the real world, calling on a network of nerd friends who can draw on the expertise and good will of people in a diverse range of locations, from Afghanistan to Burning Man.

His ability to make connections and move from one subject to another was tremendous. Of course I wanted him to slow down and go into depth now and then, but that wasn’t the point of his presentation.

What follows are my loosely-edited notes, taken during a breathtaking, rollicking presentation. My notes don’t even come close to doing justice to the content he presented.


The body is part of the interface with the mind, and the “rodent interface” (of the mouse) is a bottleneck.

Neuro-Cosmology. “All realities are virtual.”

“Grok-it Science 101”

“Computers are rocks that do math. They don’t complain and they don’t need pizza and beer like my graduate students.”

Showed fractal graphics, increasing perceptual density, accelerating the perceptive cycle.

In medical school, felt like he had “taken the wayback machine.” Gave a list of technological innovations that didn’t quite take on in the medical community, leading to his reputation as “a medical power nerd that can move faster than memos can stop me.”

For example, he used computer imagery to do special 3-D maps of data that was typically presented as a squiggly line on a horizontal scale.

Suggested using a data glove to sense tremors, showed that “the glove was more accurate than the doctors.” Surgery, therapy. Great set of photos of a quadriplegic girl who controlled a 3D game with facial expressions. There was little market for the product, but (here he does a Darth Vader breath) the military entered into the picture.

Warner described a robot-control system of pagers in a belt strapped onto a soldier… the pagers vibrate according to the proximity of a barrier in a particular direction.

Discussed ways to help military operations designed to give relief to refugees. (His reputation of being able to move faster than memos can stop him.)

Described a system where a worker in a refugee camp can send a worker out with a head-mounted camera. A medical worker sitting in a base camp can superimpose his or her own hand over the field of view of the worker on site, so that the worker on site can touch a patient in a certain area or perform some other assessment action.

Ways to get people who don’t like each other to get along: Put them in a harsh environment and yell at them.

A refugee has legal status, but a poor person who is not a refugee is less visible.

If you’re going to do serious games, make sure you understand the “ground truth” of the problem.

“We’re all going to die. The goal is not to be killed by stupid people.”

“If was the enemy, I would design a system just like the one we have and give it to us.”

A huge increase of internationally-exchanged information in medical newsgroups. No human can read all that information and understand it, but in order to get advance warning of pandemics, you need to get a sense of the data. Showed an example of a map with spheres representing individual mosques, and rings representing the number of violence-inciting verses from the Koran recited during daily prayers.

“Do you know how we’re going to stop the terrorists?” “I dunno.. hit ‘em with memos?”

Used Burning Man and the Superbowl to document diversity and link organizations.

Described a system that linked four computer stations to a network, had four users play multiplayer games together, and used biofeedback to determine whether it was possible to identify emergent leadership potential. (“It turns out you can!”)

Praised the initial response of the U.S. military to the recent Asian titan wave, but “then bureaucracy hit.”

“Ignorance is curable. Stupidity is terminal.”

Serious Games Summit DC 2005, Day II (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

(See also Serious Games Summit DC 2005, Day 1)

Keynote: David Warner
Riding the Cutting Edge of Distributed Intelligence

Sande Chen and David Michael
Beyond Q & A: Assessment Methods for the Next Generation of Serious Games

Derek Wischusen
Expanding Teachable Moments in Serious Games using AI

Paul Marinio
Machinima: Using Games to Change Filmmaking and Instructional Video

Jan Cannon-Bowers, Perry McDowell and Mark Prensky
The Role of Pedagogy and Educational Design in Serious Games