Academia: October 2008 Archive Page

A researcher who studies World of Warcraft likens leading in-game raiding parties to teaching a class.

Raiding has taught me that being a good teacher requires laying down strict guidelines while simultaneously demonstrating real care for your students. The stronger the ties of trust and respect between teacher and student, the more weight they will bear. In the past I've cringed when my raid leaders cheerfully announced that we would spend the next four hours dying over, and over, and over again to a boss who seemed impossible to defeat. But I've trusted them, done my job, and ultimately we have triumphed because they insisted on perseverance. The visiting raid leader who took us through the Kael raid lacked that history with us -- he was too much of a stranger to ask us to dig deep and give big.

A willingness to take risks can also be shored up by commitment and drive. Our guest leader drove my guildies nuts, but impressed me with his professionalism. Does this mean that after graduate school even generous doses of sadism seem unremarkable? Perhaps. But it also indicates that I was willing to work hard to see Kael dead, even if it meant catching some flack. For them, it was a game, and when it stopped being fun they lost interest.

What I learned that night was that I believe in the power of fear and humiliation as teaching methods. Obviously, I don't think they are teaching methods that should be used often, or be at the heart of our pedagogy. But I do think that there are occasions when it is appropriate to let people know that there is no safety net. There are times -- not all the time, or most of the time, but occasionally and inevitably -- when you have to tell people to shut up and do their job. I'm not happy to discover that I believe this, and in some ways I wish I didn't. But Warcraft has taught me that I there is a place for "sink or swim" methods in teaching. (Alex Golub, Inside Higher Ed)

The headline immediately caught my attention.  I went to Catholic high school, and while most of my teachers were laypeople (that is, not nuns or priests), my freshman year I had an octogenarian Latin teacher who would threaten to throw erasers at us -- but always with a twinkle in his eye.  He was actually very patient and charming, but he used the eraser threat as if he were parodying the stereotype of a strict teacher. 

My Algebra II / Trigonometry teacher was not a parody, she was serious. Usually, the only praise she ever gave was moving on to the next student after you'd survived your grilling. After a quiz, she would say "Everyone who got an A, bring your paper up.  Now everyone who got a B, bring your paper up.  Now, all the rest of you."  That was a sort of reverse humiliation, since the rest of us saw that someone was able to earn an A. She called us "Sir Jerz" or "Lady Ryan," which I suppose was vaguely appropriate, since our mascot was a knight, but I'm sure her goal was to take us down a peg or two and remind us who was really in charge.  If we answered her question with a "yes," she'd say "Yes, what?" And we'd say, "Yes, sister." 

I've had plenty of other teachers who were more personable, and made me feel happier while I was in the classroom, but she really stands out in my memory. But boy, she really made me want to study.

Contrary to popular belief, electronic data has proven to be much more ephemeral than books, journals or pieces of plastic art. After all, when was the last time you opened a WordPerfect file or tried to read an 8-inch floppy disk?

"Even over the course of 10 years, you can have a rapid enough evolution in the ways people store digital information and the programs they use to access it that file formats can fall out of date," McDonough said.

Magnetic tape, which stores most of the world's computer backups, can degrade within a decade. According to the National Archives Web site by the mid-1970s, only two machines could read the data from the 1960 U.S. Census: One was in Japan, the other in the Smithsonian Institution. Some of the data collected from NASA's 1976 Viking landing on Mars is unreadable and lost forever.

From a cultural perspective, McDonough said there's a "huge amount" of content that's only being developed or is available in a digital-only format.  -- Physorg.com

I play a small part of the digital preservation project mentioned in this piece. One of the digital artifacts the project is using as a case study is Adventure, which has been the subject of my recent scholarship, so I've been pitching in where I can.

My colleague David Stanley links to this article.

Many people, especially academic experts, have argued that Wikipedia's articles can't be trusted, because they are written and edited by volunteers who have never been vetted. Nevertheless, studies have found that the articles are remarkably accurate. The reason is that Wikipedia's community of more than seven million registered users has organically evolved a set of policies and procedures for removing untruths. This also explains Wikipedia's explosive growth: if the stuff in Wikipedia didn't seem "true enough" to most readers, they wouldn't keep coming back to the website.

These policies have become the social contract for Wikipedia's army of apparently insomniac volunteers. Thanks to them, incorrect information generally disappears quite quickly.

So how do the Wikipedians decide what's true and what's not? On what is their epistemology based?

Unlike the laws of mathematics or science, wikitruth isn't based on principles such as consistency or observa­bility. It's not even based on common sense or firsthand experience. Wikipedia has evolved a radically different set of epistemological standards--standards that aren't especially surprising given that the site is rooted in a Web-based community, but that should concern those of us who are interested in traditional notions of truth and accuracy. On Wikipedia, objective truth isn't all that important, actually. What makes a fact or statement fit for inclusion is that it appeared in some other publication--ideally, one that is in English and is available free online. "The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth," states Wikipedia's official policy on the subject. --Simon L. Garfinkle, Technology Review

Blogging this to assign for my students to read when the current unit is over.

Not surprisingly, the Web serves the first function of a local paper exceptionally well. They deliver information instantly, and articles can be updated and corrected in real time. What is surprising, though, is the unfortunate and neglected condition of most student papers' Web sites. The average site has a clunky layout, sloppy design and little-to-no attention to color schemes or aesthetics. Many sites are a muddled array of hyperlinks, with uncategorized articles strewn every which way. Graphics are poorly sized. Fonts are dull. Multimedia is ignored.

All of these flaws are shocking when one realizes that Generation Y, the most tech-savvy ever born, maintains and codes these sites. Yet their designs are, excuse my snarkiness, very 1990s. But worse than my aesthetic objections is my philosophical gripe: Most student papers' online content essentially mirrors the print content. They are updated daily or weekly, only in conjunction with the print paper. Such an organization suggests a clear prioritizing of the physical newspaper -- a mistake that the professional news media, by and large, began to correct a decade ago. -- Brian Farkas, Inside Higher Ed

My provost just sent this link to me and some faculty from computer science and theater, all of whom I've already spoken with, very informally, about some kind of collaboration.

Game design has helped rekindle interest in computer science and become a hot new major at more than 200 schools across the country, according to the Entertainment Software Assn., a trade group. Because making games crosses several disciplines, the diversity of programs that offer such courses is staggering: Fine arts colleges, engineering schools, film schools, music schools and even drama programs are sending graduates into the fast-growing industry.

"Some programs throw a drama guy together with a programming guy to see what they come up with," said Bing Gordon, a venture capitalist and former chief creative officer for industry powerhouse Electronic Arts Inc. "Games is the ultimate interdisciplinary art." (Alex Pham, LA Times)

Teaching: Midterm Grades (w00t!)

• LA100 (14 Oct)
  
• EL200 (16 Oct)
• EL236 (16 Oct)
• EL405 (16 Oct)

Administration/Advising

• Submit two recommendations (Oct 15)
• Program Review Executive Summary (Draft Oct 17; awaiting reviews)
  
• Advising Grids
• Internal proposal for a summer outreach project
  

Research

• Submit co-authored article (been sitting on it for months)
• Finish article for anthology (probably missed the deadline by now)
• Comment on architecture-in-games dissertation
• Comment on proposed Inform 7 manual chapter
• Request funds for spring/summer travel
  

Life

• Leave work in time not to be in the doghouse when I get home
  
• Success:
• Oct 14
• Oct 15
• Wife-approved Late Night
• Oct 16
• In the Doghouse for Being Late
  
• Oct 17
• Avoid getting depressed by this list

Seton Hill recently won a multimillion dollar instruction technology grant, part of which includes funding for a new technology specialist (which will become a permanent job when the grant ends). 

In helping to write the job notice, I drafted the "you-attitude" paragraphs, with the references to Bioshock and lolcats.

Our grant will fund the creation of a new instructional technology center, and we're motivated to put our resources to good use. Which is where you come in.

You love talking to people about technology. You have experience encouraging interactive exchanges between students and professor, students and their peers, and students and technology. You can help us eliminate the "sage on the stage" instructional model, and implement the "guide on the side" via multiple teaching points established around the room. You have the technical skills to maintain the latest in PCs/Macs, projection equipment, cameras, video iPods, text-to-speech scanning pens, and assistive technology of many kinds. You have the creativity and the people skills necessary to help us put our resources to good use, as Seton Hill continues to expand its learning environment as part of a globally networked virtual classroom.

You are also sufficiently well-versed in digital culture to maintain and promote the site as a collaborative learning center and recreational gaming lounge, when not needed for classes. (It's a tough job, but hey, someone's got to make sure Bioshock runs on the huge projection screen; u can has lolz!)

The search is currently open and will continue until the successful candidate is identified. (See the full job notice.)

My student Dani Choynowski, a double-major in new media journalism and theatre, is a very busy woman.  She's getting top-notch grades in two challenging majors, her hand is usually the first one up during workshops or discussions, and she's always ready with some connection to the world of theater or Harry Potter.

Last semester, as a sophomore, she took a very demanding 300-level course, "Media Aesthetcis," the theme of which was the history and future of the book.  As part of her work in this term's "Writing for the Internet," she blogged about a major revelation that she had a few hours ago.  This is exactly what I needed to read on a drizzly gray day when I had been feeling a little grumpy and overwhelmed with various projects and responsibilities. This is the sort of thing that reminds me why I love my job so much.

Now I finally see what the point of that class was. El 336 was theory, and EL 236 is the practical application. Wow, what an epiphany. I'm a little in shock because when I say I loathed EL 336, I wasn't kidding. There was a 4 page paper due every week (think a super- ultra synthesized essay pertaining to all the readings you blogged about), not to mention forum presentations, an 8-10 page midterm paper and a final 12-15 page paper. I haven't had Digital imaging, Topics in media aesthetics, or Publications Workshop yet, so I can't speak for the rest of my time here, but EL 336 has been the most difficult (sans General Chemistry 1) class I have taken at Seton Hill so far.

Since the subject changes every time the class is offered, I don't know if you will have the same reaction as I did. But if you do find yourself cursing you papers to hell (especially when your hard drive crashes in the middle of your mid-term paper and you didn't save a backup because you were in the zone too deep to pay attention and then have to re-write it while wondering if the $1300 machine is ever going to run again !!@#$!@$), I will offer you these words of wisdom:

you will be so glad you took the class (and will also feel an immense weight lift off you on the glorious day the class ended). You will be a much better writer by the end of those  3 1/2 months.

It's strange how one little reading can cause you to have an epiphany. I haven't gone past the second link in Is Hypertext Fiction Possible?. --Daniella Choynowski

Ideally, the practical "EL236: Writing for the Internet" is a prerequisite for "EL336: Media Aesthetics," but I let her take the 300-level class first because it fit better with her plans for her double-major. 

It's possible that, had she taken the classes in the intended order, the theory class would have been a little less stressful, but then she wouldn't have had the "aha" moment that brought the material into such clarity for her.

A journalism student at NYU published a Generation Y-ney piece on PBS's MediaShift.

The first thing I notice when I walk into the class is that there are 14 girls and two boys. Already NYU is dominated by females, but the journalism department is exceptionally estrogen-infested. Professor Quigley begins by explaining how blogs are becoming more imprtant and asks if any of us have a blog.

One hand slowly rises. It's mine. (Alana Taylor)

It's certainly... interesting to have a student publicly evaluate a class in this manner, after the class has been in session for a few weeks.   While she is careful to distance her essay from a personal attack on her professor, she complains about the old-media stance of the course, and the program as a whole. Based on the scarcity of student bloggers in this particular classroom, it seems to me that the professor is pitching the class at the right level -- though the generic term "blog" is far less familiar to today's teens than branded bloglike entities "Facebook" or "MySpace." 

My former student, Amanda Cochran, now a grad student at NYU, reacts to Taylor's piece.

Like Taylor, I am one of the only bloggers in my graduate school class, and I'm looked upon as a novelty. As many of my readers know, blogging was an important part of my undergrad experience. We were on the cutting edge of journalism (and still are) at Seton Hill -- as it would seem in light of this report. I know about blogging. I know what I need to do to write a good blog. This ability has enhanced my resume and, more importantly, my understanding of online media and its direction. However, it is true that few other students do know about blogging and its ramifications on their future careers.

Okay, so Taylor made a point. So what? She has done much more harm than good to her career by this stunt. Taylor, looking oh-so-Facebookish in the picture posted with the piece, did invade her classroom, as cited by NYU professor Quigley. However, more importantly, no matter if she isn't a traditional journalist or not, she violated a journalistic tenet of disclosure to her subjects for a completely unworthy assignment. If I were an employer, I would think twice before hiring her -- and that's enough in this competitive business to stay unemployed. (Amanda Cochran)

Taylor had planned to write a follow-up for MediaShift, but editor Mark Glaser did so instead.

'Hi YouTube, it's me, Kiki,'' the teenager said to the camera as she swiveled in her chair to jazzy background music. ''And today I'm going to show you how to cheat on a test - the effective way.''

She demonstrates her technique, slipping a small piece of paper with the answers in a clear-tubed pen as she rationalizes her reasons for cheating. (Chicago Sun-Times)

Kiki's video includes a link to her blog, where we learn she is a community college student who wrote a few weeks ago, "I think I want to start being in the media right now. You know, being seen in movies and television."  Well, you've got part of your wish, Kiki.

It's hard for me to imagine what's going through the head of someone who posts a video like this, but at the same time, I can't help but feel amused. First of all, there's a lot of stuff on YouTube, so it's not surprising to find someone has posted a video about cheating.

Second, how many words can you put inside a clear plastic pen tube?  We're talking about filling up the inside diameter, not the outside diameter.  Even if you have really good eyes, and can discern two lines of text, we're talking about 20 words.  In the time it takes to watch Kiki's video, you could say those 20 words to yourself 20 times over, or spend a minute making up an acronym to help you memorize key terms. (The YouTube article on how to cheat on a test with a fake Coke bottle label actually describes something that requires some forethought and talent, and users have rated it much higher than Kiki's method.)

Since I teach small classes where each student is expected to contribute during class, and because most of my classes are writing classes, I can de-emphasize the "memorize facts and spit them back" activities, and instead focus on process. 

When I gave a vocabulary quiz last semester, I let my students bring in a one-page cheat sheet.  I figured that the benefit the student would gain from having to filter the material and decide what was important enough to go onto the cheat sheet would be more beneficial to their learning than cramming. But in that case, I wasn't intersted in getting them to memorize any particular vocabulary words. Rather, I was calling attention to the process of deducing the meanings of unfamiliar words by having them break a word down into its components (prefix, root, suffix).  I also had them invent new words. (Examples I included were "post-cardiofractal" and "circumvore".)

Along the same lines, I let students in Writing for the Internet consult their textbooks and even look on their classmates' computers while they were doing an in-class HTML exercise. (My only stipulation was I didn't want them to ask each other for answers.)  Again, I wasn't asking student to memorize HTML, but rather asking them to internalize the technical steps that go into creating and uploading a web site, so that we can move on to the much more important issues of content and audience.

For my second time teaching "New Media Projects," I have replaced routine "prove you can use this tool" quizzes with peer-focused screencasts.  Rather than have students prove to me that they can perform certain design and programming skills in class, I am asking them to use Cam Studio to record a video of them talking a novice through some steps that demonstrate their skills.  So far we have screencasts on Blender 3D (a modeling and animation tool), Inform 7 (a programming environment for text-based games, which I don't think had been covered on YouTube before), and an open topic that's simply supposed to be interesting to Seton Hill University students.  This phase of the course is designed to get students familiar with various unfamiliar tools. Of course there's only so much they can learn in the two or three weeks we spend on each tool, but when each time they watch and comment on a peer's screencasts, they'll get a slightly different approach to using the tool.

(BTW, also quoted in the Sun-Times article is Liz Losh, whose path I cross on the blogosphere from time to time.)