Humanities: 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?

--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. --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)

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.)

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.

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.

--2005 IF Comp Results

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

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)

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 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 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