Recently in the Modding Category

To describe the world before or after the spread of print was child's play; those dates were safely distanced from upheaval. But what was happening in 1500? The hard question Eisenstein's book asks is "How did we get from the world before the printing press to the world after it? What was the revolution itself like?"

Chaotic, as it turns out. The Bible was translated into local languages; was this an educational boon or the work of the devil? Erotic novels appeared, prompting the same set of questions. Copies of Aristotle and Galen circulated widely, but direct encounter with the relevant texts revealed that the two sources clashed, tarnishing faith in the Ancients. As novelty spread, old institutions seemed exhausted while new ones seemed untrustworthy; as a result, people almost literally didn't know what to think. If you can't trust Aristotle, who can you trust?

During the wrenching transition to print, experiments were only revealed in retrospect to be turning points.--Clay Shirky

While much of the talk covered well-known libraries (SDL, OpenAL), game engines (Ogre, Irrlicht), physics engines (Bullet, Tokamak), and content creation tools (Blender, GIMP), there were a few surprises. One was how many open source game-creation systems I found (4, more than the zero I expected). These are Game Editor (2d with export to some mobile devices), Construct (2d, some 3d), Novashell (2d), and Sandbox (3d). Another surprise was the game Yo Frankie! (pictured above), which has very high quality animation and artwork, and was produced using Blender. --Jim Whitehead

A fascinating twist to the complex story behind the legal battle behind the iconic Obama "HOPE" poster.

New filings to the court, he said, "state for the record that the AP is correct about which photo I used...and that I was mistaken. While I initially believed that the photo I referenced was a different one, I discovered early on in the case that I was wrong. In an attempt to conceal my mistake I submitted false images and deleted other images." 

In February, the AP claimed that Fairey violated copyright laws when he used one of their images as the basis for the poster.  In response, the artist filed a lawsuit against the AP, claiming that he was protected under fair use. Fairey also claimed that he used a different photo as the inspiration for his poster.

After Fairey's admission, a spokesman for the Associated Press issued a statement saying that Fairey "sued the AP under false pretenses by lying about which AP photograph he used."

Fairey said that his lawyers have taken the steps to amend his court pleadings to reflect the fact that "the AP is correct about which photo I used as a reference and that I was mistaken." --Los Angeles Times

Jaw-droppingly cool-- though it probably helps if you've ever worked with Flash.

Animator vs. Animation

I don't use APA style, but this article about nine pages of corrections to the APA style manual caught my eye.

"It's egregious," said John Foubert, an associate professor of education at Oklahoma State University, who bought two copies of the book - one for his office and one for home - when it was released in July. "These are the standards for how we write our manuscripts and how our students write their papers .... The irony is so thick."

The corrections include four pages of "nonsignificant typographical errors" and five pages correcting errors in content and problems with sample papers in the book. The APA also released four corrected sample papers in their entireties. One correction is "Page 88 - Change last line under 'Exception' to read 'Spacing twice after punctuation marks at the end of a sentence aids readers of draft manuscripts.' " Another is "Page 64 - First paragraph, line 2, insert a comma after 'e.g.' " --Inside HIgher Ed

Robin Burkinshaw has finished Alice and Kev, an interesting exercise in computer-assisted storytelling, using screen shots from The Sims 3 to tell the story of a homeless father and daughter.

Originally the story was told serially, with a few posts a week; then there were a few very long gaps, but the story is finished now, and you can read it all at once.

It's not a literary masterpiece, and I would have enjoyed it better if the story had progressed without interruptions. Nevertheless, it's worth a look.

This is Kev and his daughter Alice. They're living on a couple of park benches, surviving on free meals from work and school, and the occasional bucket of ice cream from a neighbour's fridge.

All kinds of awesome metatronics going on here.

Dear MR BAGGINS, Fellow Conspirator,

I am Thorin Oakenshield, descendant of Thrain the Old and grandson of Thror who was King under the Mountain. I am writing you to discuss our plans, our ways, means, policy and devices for rescuing our treasure from the dragon Smaug. -- Stephen Granade riffs on the Nigerian e-mail scam (see 419 Eater).

I believe that the underlying facts about the Wikipedia phenomenon -- that the general public is actually intelligent, interested in sharing knowledge, interested in getting the facts straight -- are so shocking to most old media people that it is literally impossible for them to report on Wikipedia without following a storyline that goes something like this: "Yeah, this was a crazy thing that worked for awhile, but eventually they will see the light and realize that top-down control is the only thing that works."

Will the new, more gentle tool, be more widely used than protection was? I certainly hope so. We are always looking for ways to help responsible people join the Wikipedia movement and contribute constructively, while gently asking those who want to cause trouble to please go somewhere else.

Faced with the choice of preventing you from editing at all, versus allowing you to edit even though you might have bad intentions, we have erred consistently for the latter -- openness. The new tool, by making it a lot easier to keep bad stuff from appearing to the general public, is going to allow for a much more responsible Wikipedia that is, at the same time, a much more open Wikipedia. --Jimmy Wales, Huffington Post

I'm not sure many people really care that today marks the 10th anniversary of the date that the moon was supposed to have blasted out of Earth's orbit in the British sci-fi show Space: 1999, but here's a YouTube clip that presents an alternate opening of Star Trek, redone in the style of Space: 1999.

Yes, this is very, very obscure, but I need a break from marking papers, so here it is.
 

Within five years:

(1) Many online journals and magazines now only publishing traditional text-based fiction and poetry will, as part of their online offerings, publish digital literature on a regular basis;

(2) Most major universities and many colleges (if they don't already) will offer courses in New Media, and those courses will cover/include digital literature;

(3) Accomplished scholars who assess the whole of digital literature by examining exemplary models from early hypertexts will be saying "oops!" and seeking a vocabulary that accepts the continual flux and explosive change of current practices in digital literature;

[...]

--Alan Bigelow, Netpoetic

I tell my kids steampunk bedtime stories about the adventures of Captain Rod Gearhart and the Magnificent Blimpship. Since I also enjoy playing with Blender 3D, it seemed natural to make these clockwork heart decorations. (My wife offered detailed pointers to tweak the one on the right.)

At the recent Computers & Writing conference, I found myself, in the Q & A during several sessions, strongly advocating coding skills as a 21st-century core literacy.   (See Ian Bogost, Procedural Literacy. In the following reflection, I talk mostly about my use of Inform 7, but I also touch on Scratch.)

Here at Seton Hill, all students must fulfill a computer science requirement, but it's really set up as a "how to use Microsoft Office" course.  Students who can already use a spreadsheet or make a slideshow can pay to test out of the course, but I've heard from many students who don't want to pay for the test, preferring instead to take the course and get an easy A by being "taught" how to do stuff they already know.  (One faculty member has a special section of that course in which students learn how to program little table-top robots, but they still have to work in all the Office applications along the way.)

But even after students have taken this course, I regularly see evidence they have no idea what's happening when they click an icon or connect to a network drive.  They regularly lose files, saving their website projects onto thumb drives with pointers like "file://c:/Documents and Settings/My Documents/myphoto.png". They're mystified when I ask them to rename a text file with an ".htm" extension, because most have never even *seen* a file extension.

While it's good that the graphical user interface has brought the power of computing to the masses, at the same time, hiding all the working parts behind a streamlined interface turns coders into a priesthood of the elite, and that's not good for culture at large.

There's no information in the non-subscription IMDB, but there is an entry for a movie based on Rossum's Universal Robots.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1300594/

The original play was a talky social comedy mixed with a melodrama (complete with a "missing papers" plot twist), and the big action sequences happened off-stage (with characters either referring in passing to events that happened years ago, or characters looking through windows and describing what they saw). So I worry what "enhancements" might make their way into a big-budget production. (Sigh.)

If anybody knows more about this movie (faithful art-house reproduction of the original play? CGI-infested revisionary abomination?), I'd welcome the news.

For a period of 2 million years, ending with the last ice age around 10,000 B.C., the Earth experienced a series of convulsive glacial events. This rapid-fire climate change meant that humans couldn't rely on consistent patterns to know which animals to hunt, which plants to gather, or even which predators might be waiting around the corner.

How did we cope? By getting smarter. The neuro­physi­ol­ogist William Calvin argues persuasively that modern human cognition--including sophisticated language and the capacity to plan ahead--evolved in response to the demands of this long age of turbulence. According to Calvin, the reason we survived is that our brains changed to meet the challenge: we transformed the ability to target a moving animal with a thrown rock into a capability for foresight and long-term planning. In the process, we may have developed syntax and formal structure from our simple language. -- Jamais Cascio, The Atlantic

I spent a few hours cleaning up my e-mail archives yesterday. I was amazed of the amount of space that was taken up by 4MB flyers for events I did not attend, 2 MB PDFs of one-page forms that I could have printed out from a 3kb HTML page, and batches of photos (@1MB each) that students sent me to chronicle their participation in group activities.

If someone is sending me a document because they want my feedback on the design, or if I want to add a family photo to an archive, then of course the high bandwidth is justified.

But I can't be the only one who's annoyed when someone sends me a 500kb Microbloat Word file that contains nothing but a 20-word thesis statement, or a list of URLs.

In our everyday routine, disk storage is cheap and plentiful. It's good that we don't have to worry about what to keep and what to toss. I bought a 16 GB memory card for my 30GB tablet PC - it was dirt cheap to add that much extra storage. But there are times when an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

I'll never work with data at the file-compression level, but I learned quite a bit from this very clear explanation from someone who knows about such things.

In physics, we know that matter and energy are interchangeable.  In computer science, we know that time and space are interchangeable.  Usually, we can find a way to make things faster by using more space, or make things smaller by taking more time. -- Eric Sink

The journalism class that I'm preparing to teach this fall is a writing course, but it's also very content-heavy -- lots of specialized vocabulary, lots of unique professional practices to teach.

This fall, I'm not using a big $100 journalism textbook. Instead, I'll be spending more time with several smaller texts.  In place of assigning chapters for students to read passively (out of a sense of obligation that I need to "cover" loads of specialized topics), I'm going to treat it more like a writing course, which means more writing (and pre-writing, and peer editing, and revision).   I already teach my freshman writing courses this way, but I guess I had to teach this journalism course a couple of times before I could make the shift. 

The best way for students to learn how to do journalism is to work on the student paper, so there's only so much I can expect from any course. Nevertheless, in the years when "News Writing" is not offered, the student editors report they have a much harder time developing the newbie staff members, so clearly this course does have an impact on the quality of the student paper.

The last time I taught this course, I came down with pneumonia just a few weeks into the term, so I had to rely -- far more than I had planned to -- on assigning chapters and workbook pages.  After I was physically capable of coming back to the classroom, it was fairly easy of me to fall back on lectures and book chapters, but I could feel my mental energies draining whenever I tried to evaluate a paper at any level beyond marking grammar mistakes, or when I tried to moderate a class discussion at any level between lecturing and replying to specific questions.

This year, I've signed up to particpate in a pilot project using "clickers" -- wireless hand-held response gadgets that students can use, in the middle of a lecture or workshop, to respond to spot quetsions.  I'll go into the classroom with an agenda, and a set of loaded questions that are designed to get the students thinking, "Hey, I noticed that, too... I wonder why it is?"  (Which is preferable to "I'd better write that down in case I have to spit it back for a quiz.")

I'm preparing my syllabus with a list of what clicker questions I'll need to prepare for each day's topic.  I've got a fairly decent, very brief handout on newsworthiness, and a more detailed podcast on newsworthiness, but rather than assign these texts first then quiz students on their ability to spit back cognitive chunks (thus placing myself as the source of knowledge to be memorized, and training the students to expect that I will do all the filtering and heavy lifting for them), I will instead try to introduce the concepts through questions:

Which potential story is more interestiing to you?
A) a power outage that affects 20 families. 
B) a power outage that affects 10,000 families.

Which potential story is more interesting to you:
A) President Obama enjoys tea with the Queen of England
B) An ostentatiously tatooed and pierced children's librarian who married the impeached former mayor of your home town enjoys tea with the Queen of England.

...and follow up with discussions that move towards synthesis and evaluation, with links and page numbers for the students to refer to (for review, or for further examples, or for more depth).  (The idea in this case is not simply to get them to spit back the characteristics of a newsworthy story, but rather to help them recognize that the metrics of "newsworthiness" are derived from human nature, rather than a bunch of arbitrary values.)

I can't say I understand my creation, but it sure was fun making it.

Chair Mikhail Gershovich, Barch College, CUNY

Hacking Spaces: Place as Interface

• Danielle Nicole DeVoss, Michigan State University
• Douglass Walls, Michigan State University

• Scott Schopieray, Michigan State University

Writing-a-go-go: Ubiquitous Computing and the Thirdspace of Workplace Writing
Tina Bacci, University of Rhode Island

The Examined Life--Cyberspace Style: The Construction of Space in the #philosophy IRC Undernet Community
Kennie Rose, University of Louisville

What follows are my rough notes, lightly edited. [My own comments are in square brackets.]

These are my notes, lightly edited, from a panel at Computers & Writing 2009.

I only found a single plug in the meeting room, in the very back row. This is a small conference, so I probably appear fairly antisocial typing way in the back here.  (I'll move up when the panel actually starts in a few minutes, after my laptop has sucked in a bit of juice.) 

I had considered attending a simultaneous panel on blogging, but I'd already heard one of the presenters make a very similar talk, so this panel won out.

Chair. Andrea Murphy, Old Dominion University

• Technologizing Pedagogy: How FY Writing Curriculum is Created by Electrons
  Will Hochman, Southern Connecticut State University
• Computers, Tools, and Instruments: Academic Dependence on Machine Terminology and Its Effect on Student Perceptions of the Computer Classroom
  Sarah Spring, Texas A&M University
• Ubiquitous Computing and The Perils of Early Adoption
  Jim Kalmbach, Illinois State University

Andrew Hussie remixes Dinosaur Comics with a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story. The results hurts my head, and not in a good way. But that's a good thing, because, well, it's a remix of Dinosaur Comics with a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story.

Soon after, Mario entered into the Mushroom Kingdom and proceeded to steal from their banks and museums with his brother Luigi in Super Mario Thieves. Throughout the game he is chased by Bowser, chief of police at the M.K.P.D. (Mushroom Kingdom Police department) and the Goomba's and Koopa Troppers in blue.

[...]

Bowser's chase of Mario eventually led to the successful spin off, Super Mario Getaway Kart, in which you had to drive to the bank job/safe house and make sure you beat the M.K.P.D. police cars there. You could also get numerous items that would help you get through the tracks. What's more, the game had a popular multiplayer mode, where whoever stole from the most banks won.-- GameCareerGuide.com

Thanks for the suggestion, Geoff.

The current summer 100 Days project gathers a group of story writers, poets, visual artists, musicians, and programmers for one hundred days of creative effort.  Each artist's work will be unique yet build on the work of others in the collective.  Here we make, remake, shape and reshape.

• Steve Ersinghaus :: Story
• Carianne Garside :: Painting
• James Revillini :: jQuery
• John Timmons :: Sounds
• Jessica Somers :: Photos
• Neha Bawa :: Poetry
• Mindy Bray :: Photos
• Maggie Ducharme :: Meals
• Susan Ersinghaus :: Suburbs
• Denna Hintze-Yates :: Verbal Image
• Dave Pender :: Drawings

My former student Neha Bawa is among the participants. I have enjoyed learning from the new media pedagogy of Steve Ersinghaus and John Timmons. I'm also particularly interested in James Revillini's scripting experiments.

Clever piece on a games-themed theater performance in Brooklyn next month.

One of the more unusual plays in this year's Antidepressant Festival is Adventure Quest, which mimics old-school computer adventure games, combining live action with vintage graphics and 8-bit music. For those too young to remember these strange, puzzle-intensive artifacts of the Reagan era, the creators of Adventure Quest have been kind enough to provide a brief "walk-through" that captures the genre's peculiar narrative conventions.

You are standing in the market square of the town of Despairington. There are several buildings here, including the potter's shop, the pie factory and the apothecary. Each appears to have been long abandoned. (Their owners were presumably among the many townspeople who joined the Octopus Cult last winter and killed themselves by drinking poisoned ink.) A large boomerang rests on a nearby crate of mangos.

You are currently holding: a portable cauldron, a pair of diamond cufflinks, a unicorn femur, an Octopus Cult pamphlet, a waterskin and a magnifying glass.

The marketing text is a parody, not a tribute. The text on the site reads like a text adventure, but it plays like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure novel with a single choice on each page.  The color scheme is flat enough. (Where does the color cyan exist, except in the 16 color home computer palette?) But the pixels are much too small. The detail on the roof is far too fine. 

Both the words and images are off-base just enough to make me doubt that the play itself will be anything more than a silly pastiche. Still, I found the site amusing. via

High-end journalism can and should bite any hand that tries to feed it, and it should bite a government hand most viciously. Moreover, it is the right of every American to despise his local newspaper - for being too liberal or too conservative, for covering X and not covering Y, for spelling your name wrong when you do something notable and spelling it correctly when you are seen as dishonorable. And it is the birthright of every healthy newspaper to hold itself indifferent to such constant disdain and be nonetheless read by all. Because in the end, despite all flaws, there is no better model for a comprehensive and independent review of society than a modern newspaper. As love-hate relationships go, this is a pretty intricate one. An exchange of public money would pull both sides from their comfort zone and prove unacceptable to all.

But a non-profit model intrigues, especially if that model allows for locally-based ownership and control of news organizations. Anything that government can do in the way of creating non-profit status for newspapers should be seriously pursued.-- David Simon, Hearing on the Future of Journalism, US Senate

[C]ourse-management software has become a new kind of campus building--a virtual one where online classes are held and new kinds of "hybrid" courses take place. The unsettled question is who controls what these classrooms look like and how stable their foundations are.

Colleges don't want to just buy these online classrooms out of a catalog. They want to feel like partners in the design process.

Angel apparently got that part right, offering customers unusual responsiveness and access to much of its source code.

Blackboard, meanwhile, has developed a reputation for doing things its way, gobbling up competitors (this is its third acquisition of a competing course-management system) and suing rivals (it has filed multiple patent-infringement lawsuits against one competitor). That might make good business sense, but it casts the company as a hostile force in higher education. -- Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education

I'm not that happy with the course management system (CMS) product that we currently use, so I'm thrilled that our new IT director is a fan of open-source software. Here's hoping we will be Moodling soon.

The cuteness of a tribble, the temper of a mugatu, and the ham of a Shatner.

Unicorns are much more fun when they move.

It took about two minutes for my daughter to do the drawing, about an hour and a half to make the model (while my daughter played at my feet), and another two hours to make the animation (long after she was in bed).

I generally discourage my students from delivering PowerPoint presentations, in part because they typically grab images from everywhere and anywhere, which is a practice I don't want them to retain if they should start working for the student paper.  I prefer instead for students to post a richly linked blog entry (with links pointing directly to online sources, rather than copying chunks of online material into their own presentations). 

My colleague Josh Sasmor just sent me a link for Tin Eye, an interesting image-based reverse search tool.  Start with an image, and Tin Eye will look for copies online.  The Cool Searches page demonstrates how the site can find parts of an image, which might be of use in identifying faked images.

At the meeting, Charlie Lowe presented Bradley Dilger's suggstion that we disband the SIG, since we can do more good splitting up and talking about open source issues in different groups, rather than getting together and preaching to the choir. Bradley was taking notes (on his cell phone no less... boy do I feel inadequate, with my PDA fold-out keyboard attachment). I'll post a link to his notes when I get them.