Culture: 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))

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 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.

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?

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.

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 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.”