Usability: June 2006 Archive Page

This class is unique in many ways, the most prominent is that students learn how to create new media resources for education. As Gee noted, "When people learn to play video games, they are learning a new literacy" (2003, p. 16). In this course students must develop an instructional game where all game elements are integrated with stated learning objectives. This theory of "alignment" is both a design requirement and guideline for the design and development of the game. We will use a design experiment approach to study how students follow this theory, how it manifests itself in the IF game, and the process of how instructional designers build an educational game around specific theory. --Teaching with Technology: Using Interactive Fiction to Teach English Students (Creative Learning Environments Lab @ Utah State University)

Sounds like an awesome project.

Vaporizing VR Hardware (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Last year, my brother-in-law asked me what I would do with a bunch of virtual reality gear his employer had packed in crates in a warehouse.

VR headsets, sensors, software to get them working together, and computers to run them all -- enough to fill "a big closet."

I started seriously thinking about all kinds of things, from working with a facutly member who teaches a mind-and-body class, to perhaps seeing whether the athletics department was interested in using such equipment to get athletes to study their form, or perhaps working with dance students on some kind of VR-ehanced interactive new media project. Thinking about what I might do with this equipment led me to put more effort into Half-Life 2 modding (and I've been pleased with the results).

The long and short of it all is that, unfortunately, that company was recently burned for releasing comptuers that contained sensitive client data. They were only willing to release the equipment if the computers were wiped clean. Andy couldn't find any CDs that contain the required software, and the VR company itself has gone out of business.

I'm sure the right techncial team wouldn't have any problem hacking something together. But because I don't have any contact with the CS majors at Seton Hill, and Seton Hill doesn't have an engineering program, I don't think the situation looks very hopeful -- not with the resources that are available to me, as a generalist (journalism, new media, literature, freshman comp) working at a small liberal arts college.

So I thanked Andy for his time. I know he jumped through a lot of hoops before getting that final answer.

As it happened, when Inform 7 came out last month, pretty much all of the spare time I'd been putting into Half-Life 2 modding got sucked into familairizing myself with Inform.

It's just a cruel shard of reality working its way into the soft tissues of my dreams.

I've already got more enticing leads than I can juggle right now, so in a way maybe I'm like the kid in the candy shop who's been waiting in a long line at the soda machine only to find that it isn't working. Yes, there's momentary disappointment, but then the kid notices that the lines for all sorts of other goodies are actually moving faster.

Onward!

--The Song Tapper

Tap out the rhythm of the lyrics on your space bar, and this website will try to guess the song. It will serve up a set of pre-loaded links to where you can buy the song.

I was unsuccessful in getting it to recognize "Lola," but I had more luck with "Happy Birthday" and "The Theme from Star Trek" (yes, it does have lyrics, and yes, I know them by heart).

A nifty little tool-toy, but the design is hardly visually stunning.

The way I see it, there are three basic tasks that journalists do:

1. Gathering information. This involves talking to sources, examining documents, taking photographs, etc. It's reporting.

2. Distilling information. This involves applying editorial judgment to decide what parts of the gathered information are important and relevant.

3. Presenting information. This involves shaping the distilled information into a format that is accessible to the readership. Some examples: writing style (inverted pyramid, etc.), photo color-correction, newspaper page design.

"Doing journalism through computer programming" is just a different way of accomplishing these goals. Namely, the technique favors automation wherever possible. --Adrian Holovaty, in an interview by Robert Niles --The programmer as journalist (Online Journalism Review)

The robot in the classroom, which displays a live picture of Achim, provides what its inventors call "telepresence": It gives the boy an actual presence in the classroom, recognized by teachers and classmates. It can move from class to class on its four-wheel base and even stop at the lockers for a between-periods chat.

"The robot literally is embraced by students in the classroom as though that is the medically fragile student," said Andrew Summa, national director of the robot project, which is in use at six other hospitals around the country. Achim's teacher, Bob Langerfield, said his other students had become used to the robot -- and were treating it as if it were Achim -- after just a few days. --Robot Rep Goes to School (Wired | AP)

This article combines geekery and empathy, painting a very positive (one-sided) picture of technology. It's a natural for a reprint in Wired. If I had a child who could benefit from this technology, I wouldn't spend much time fretting about whether this is the best way to spend educational dollars.

Summa said one student used a robot so fully that it joined the boy's classmates to sing a song at a school show. He said a child in the audience asked, "What's that thing up on stage?" to which a friend of the student replied, "That's no thing. That's Jimmy."

The codes, called captchas, are also showing up more often amid a boom in new Web services, ranging from blogging tools to social-networking sites. The trickiest ones "make you not want to go to those sites anymore," says Scott Reynolds, a 29-year-old software architect in Ocala, Fla., who lambasted the devices on his blog last year. --David Kesmodel --Codes on Sites 'Captcha' (Wall Street Journal)

I've been considering adding a catpcha to the blogs.setonhill.edu website. The anti-spam protection there is pretty good, but the site is hit with so many spam attempts that the spam-filtering software sometimes crashes the server. (My ISP has been understanding and creative about it, though.)