Media: July 2006 Archive Page

"It would have been a major oversight to ignore this portentous anniversary," said Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, whose site now boasts over 4,300,000 articles in multiple languages, over one-quarter of which are in English, including 11,000 concerning popular toys of the 1980s alone. --Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence: Founding Fathers, Patriots, Mr. T. Honored (The Onion (Satire))

Capitalizing on youthful passion for video games, school leaders hope to keep more kids in school by offering the chance to conceive, design, build -- and sell -- their own video game.

"That's what they love," said David White, the school's chief academic officer. "That's the hook." --Scott Elliott --Reading, writing and video games (Dayton Daily News)

Sounds pretty good to me.

--Blender Basics, 2nd Ed (pdf) (Central Dauphin High School)

Where was this book during the last 3 weeks when I was struggling with random half-finished tutorials?

Thank you, James Chronister!

The Facebook is truly a killer app for incoming freshmen - as they prepare to start a new life in a new place, surrounded by a new social network, the Facebook presents a highly interactive way to explore this new space. For those of us who sent snail-mail letters to our freshman year roommates, Facebook is everything we could have dreamed of and then some - not only can students know everything about their new roommates, but they can learn everything about their suite, their floor, and their dorm. This is information students need to know, and it helps them get situated in their new social networks. --Fred Stutzman --Adopting the Facebook: A Comparative Analysis (Unit Structures)

And yes, Liz's face registers the shift between thinking Jon is sweet and deeply weird, but the sudden retraction of her hand from Garfield's back seals the deal: she wants so little to do with Jon that even touching his cat feels wrong. --''Uh...'' (Garfield: Permanent Monday)

The world needs more daily critical analyses of Garfield cartoons. No, really.

Today's peer-production machine runs in a mostly nonmonetary economy. The currency is reputation, expression, karma, "wuffie," or simply whim.

This can all sound a little like, well, '60s-style utopianism. After all, Marx himself believed that the industrial proletariat would revolt against the bourgeoisie, creating a state where the workers own the means of industrial production. It's easy to see an echo of that in blogosphere triumphalism. --Chris Anderson --People Power  (Wired)

As citizens of a highly technological culture, our students see (and often use) technologies as a daily experience. Because of their proliferation, these technologies become are often taken for granted and unexplored. This lesson plan asks students to pay attention to these technologies explicitly. In this activity, students brainstorm lists of their interactions with technology, map these interactions graphically, and then compose narratives of their most significant interactions with technology. By writing these technology autobiographies, students explore what their stories reveal about why we use the technologies we do when we do. --Paying Attention to Technology: Writing Technology Autobiographies  (Read Write Think)

I've got an early in-class assignment in my "Writing for the Internet" class in which I ask students to estimate the date when various technological innovations were invented (such as the CD-ROM, the mouse, the ball-point pen, etc.).

I might modify that assignment to include some elements of this one.

Via Doctor Daisy .

In an online advertising market increasingly dependent on the Net's ability to precision- target ads, MySpace offers no sure way to hit the bull's-eye. Google decides which ads to show based on search terms and page content. By contrast, a typical MySpace pageview doesn't offer much of a clue about anything. What conclusions can you draw when kid A bounces onto kid B's profile and leaves the message "Wazzup"? That's why a top-priced Google ad -- say, one that appears with search results for the word "refinance" -- is valued in dollars per click, while a MySpace ad clocks in around a hundredth of a cent per view. In theory, all those millions of lovingly, often exhaustively detailed personal profiles ought to make it possible to deduce a user's interests. But no one knows how to do it, certainly not on an industrial scale. --Spencer Reiss --His Space (Wired)

Rupert Murdoch, who purchased MySpace for $580 million dollars, is an old media mogul whose head is not in the sand. Should peer-to-peer idealists worry about the commercialization of "their" internet?

Dunn, now 40, grew up in suburban New Jersey where most of her friends dreamed of marrying their high-school sweethearts and settling down. She, however, was obsessed with music, and one day in 1989 walked into the offices of Rolling Stone. Despite a bad perm and a lack of street cred, her detailed knowledge of new and old bands got her a job as an editorial assistant.

Dunn says her job has evoked "equal parts self-loathing and excitement" and in her book writes with bravado about her experiences: "On rare occasions, celebs will veer from their carefully bland, publicist-approved sound bites and make a blundering comment that exposes them as vapid or foolish. If this happens, do not examine your conscience. Print their transgression..." --Melissa Whitworth --Barry, Brad, Beluga, and me (Telegraph)

--Troy Sterling and the Active and Passive Verbs (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I created this with Impress, the Open Office slideshow presenter, and exported it as a Shockwave file. I'm amazed at how tiny the resulting file is. It looks like a few effects didn't make the transition, but they were just eye candy.

I designed this as a simple linear slide show, for me to present in the front of the room. In this online version, all you can do is click to advance to the next page. It should at least have multiple-choice questions, in order to ensure that a bored reader isn't just clicking through on autopilot. (At any rate, it's more entertaining than my more traditional online guide to Active and Passive Verbs.)

This is just a bit of practice, as I continue to experiment with various media production tools.

I've also downloaded Jahshaka, an open-source video editing tool, but it crashed on my little wimpy laptop. I'll try it again when I get some time at the office.

Looking at the last two semesters taught by the author before the text adventure game and the most recent two semesters, every measure of student satisfaction is better. The only measure that might be troubling is perceived student workload.

This project is very large. Even with high-level architectural design and many useful snippets of code presented in class lectures, students work very hard in this course. The amount of work and new material requires a considerable time commitment from the instructor for office hours and other outside-class contact time. It also requires the selection of a good teaching assistant to provide additional time for questions to be answered. We are examining using a Wiki or similar shared editing space to assist students in asking, answering, and finding previous answers of questions; the efficacy of such a system is pure speculation at this point.

The integration of writing, oral presentation, program design, and coding makes this course a fantastic introduction to software engineering. This helps to overcome students? tendency to compartmentalize, thinking writing is for English class, coding is for computer science, and never the twain shall meet. --Brian C. Ladd --The Curse of Monkey Island: Holding the Attention of Students Weaned on Computer Games (Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges)

Fascinating article on a computer science course that uses a text-adventure project as a way of meeting liberal arts curriculum demands.

The interactive fiction concept might be spreading. Next year, HarperCollins plans to release Pretty Little Mistakes, a 600-page Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-type novel for adults by Heather McElhatton. Depending on the decisions made by the reader, the main character's options include becoming an actress, an art thief, a cult member, or a murderer. --Aman Batheja --Choose-your-own-adventure novels making a comeback (Star-Telegram)

Well, that's not how I use the term "interactive fiction," but I still enjoyed this author's take on the series.

I was a huge fan of Lucasarts' adventure games (Loom, The Monkey Islands and so on), and the fact that they were primarily word driven. There were graphics - and what graphics! - but for the most part they presented the player with an interesting dichotomy - nothing ever really happened, but you were responsible for it all. You would chat to somebody who would tell you that they wanted a compass, for example, and it was up to you to get that compass. Only, they would never just say "Get me the compass". Instead, it would be a conversation that could take up to twenty minutes, where you found out about the character's history, family, likes and dislikes, and, above all, the reason for them wanting the compass in the first place. --The Encyclopedia Frobozzica (Progression: Following Myself)

A well-done personal reflection on the graphical adventure genre.

Nowadays, when I sit down to read a book it is so hard to like it. I have forced myself to stare at a page for as long as it takes before I could grasp what I was reading. My attention span for slow paced readings and a teacher standing at the front of the room lecturing is lessening by the minute and I am determined to get it back.

I love technology and what it has done in my lifetime but I have suffered the consequences of constant stimulation. (Whenever I do Homework, the TV is on, my cell phones going off; I'm looking up movie times and the radio's blasting.)

Back then, my mom says she was happy and proud to put herself through college..."not everyone was as privileged as I was," she said...and receive such a reputable degree...I hope I feel that same way when I end this chapter of my life and in the meantime I will respect my professors as if they were doing me favor and spread the word. --Juli --College Etiquette (from a college student's perspective) (Juli's Views)

Even if Juli hadn't ended with a Valentine to the teaching profession, I'd have been very interested in the content of this essay. I've been thinking a lot about attention spans lately.

Both my children are lively and energetic, which means it's hard for them to sit still. All through the month of June, I've been going to the office just one or two days a week, and the rest of the time I've been doing the family thing.

Peter is well into that magical age of childhood when he finds almost endless amusement in a diverse range of activities such as burping, farting, and making up songs (about burping and farting). While I used to worry about his short attention span, now I find he gets fixated on something. ("Can I have a root beer now? I really want a root beer. Daddy, I really want a root beer. Can I ask mommy for a root beer? Did you forget about my root beer? Okay, while I wait, I'll pretend I'm drinking a root beer.")

He has picked up my interest in "god games" (like Sim City, Civilization, and lately, Black and White), and will sit for hours with a book on animals, chess, or robotics (he's eight, by the way). He's also becoming quite an expert on his scooter. He is very quick to lecture his sister when she's not being cooperative, and that can be a problem (since we have to keep reminding him that the best way he can help Carolyn learn to behave properly is to behave properly himself, so that she has a good example to follow).

For the last few days, I've been spending time playing board games and card games with my four-year-old, in part in order to increase her attention span.

She can't quite sit through a full game of The Magnificent Race, but that's okay, because Peter and I just alternate taking her turn for her when she has to wander off to do other things. But a hand of go fish or concentration is much more her speed. (I'm also teaching my daughter to read, which is a pleasure. I've been spending about a half hour a day with her, usually in two chunks. It's a challenge to get her to sit still, it's great to see her progress, and my wife looks on me with love whenever she sees me working so diligently with Carolyn.)

We were all sitting on front of the TV, ready to watch the space shuttle launch. Leigh had space books spread out in the living room, and we had freeze-dried ice cream ready for an afternoon snack. After Peter read her a book about space travel, Carolyn announced, "I don't want to be grow up to be a painter any more. I want to be -- an astronaut painter!" Or maybe she meant "astronaut-painter."

At any rate, we have been working hard to give them experiences that are richly linked, so that instead of flitting from subject to subject, they develop the ability to make connections that are both broad and deep.

Last week, I was participating in a faculty training session, and I was really interested in the material being covered, so I opened up a blank word processor page, and started typing notes. The facilitator, hearing the typing keys, politely asked for "us all" (meaning me) to pay attention. I switched to my PDA, where I tapped away more frantically in order to keep up. I'll keep this in mind the next time I presume that a student who is clicking keys or pushing a button is not paying attention.

Nevertheless, my favorite classroom at Seton Hill (Admin 405) has about 25 computers around the outside of the room, and tables in the middle. That means there's a physical break between lecture/discussion and online work.