Using the iPad requires more than just a change in mindset; it involves a cultural change, one that can be painful. One of the drawbacks I found this semester was that students used and discussed the iPad only in my class. That made my class unique, but it also meant that students defaulted to familiar…
In the FIRST Robotics competition, individual teams of kids have six weeks to assemble a robot from a collection of loose parts. Here is our kit, just before we started inspecting the inventory. In March, FIRST team members around the country and in other parts of the world will play a game (the exact details…
“The hardest fun you’ll ever have.” — FIRST Robotics slogan At Carnegie Mellon, waiting for the FIRST Robotics Competition 2012 Kickoff to start. I’m one of the mentors of our new club, the JCP 4H Gears. Today we will get a box of parts, and we’ll be told the rules of the game that will…
To be sure, such optimism must be tempered in today’s bleak economy, where hardly any form of education is a sure ticket to a job and where many in the private sector may still look with indifference or even disdain on a humanities degree. But as David Brooks himself went on to point out in…
Class. All the way. The Times’ rule is, we correct anything that is wrong, no matter how small or seemingly silly. And I don’t know any of my colleagues who would want to do differently. I hate to get any detail wrong, and when I do, I often have a moment of fantasizing about just…
To date, few studies have been undertaken to make explicit how microblogging technologies are used by and can benefit scholars. This paper investigates the use of Twitter by an academic community in various conference settings, and poses the following questions: does the use of a Twitter enabled backchannel enhance the conference experience, collaboration and the…
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Kairos uses a three-stage review process. First, editors decide if a submission makes sense for a review. Then, the entire editorial board discusses the submission (online) for two weeks, and reaches a consensus that is communicated to the author with detailed letters from the board. (Board members’ identities are public, so there is no secrecy…
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Yes, editors and publishers perform a professional service, and will be able to do it more efficiently than the government, but the cost is passed along to libraries who have to buy the databases instead of the monographs that are still required for academe. What if all PhD students had to take a class where…
On page 9 of a 13-page ruling, Judge Hernandez last month set out these requirements to qualify as a journalist: Education in journalism. Credentials or proof of affiliation with a recognized news entity Proof of adherence to journalistic standards such as editing, fact-checking, or disclosures of conflicts of interest Keeping notes of conversations and interviews…
This three-week working group aims to develop readings and methodologies of Critical Code Studies, which examines the extra-functional significance of computer source code. This forum-based online working group is the follow-up to the highly successful CCSWG (2010), which brought together a community of researchers in ways leading to later scholarly presentations, papers, and book projects.…
Lego, I understand that girls have been telling you they want more stuff for girls. I have been looking for more good stuff for girls myself. But I have not been looking for yet another arena where boys and girls are shown that their interests and activities can never mix. The beauty of Lego was…
Video Game Culture and Theory In the last decade, scholars have noticed the growing importance of video games among some areas of the population, as a form of storytelling, as a form of teaching, as a form of social commentary, and as a unique cultural practice. Their observations lead to the development of “Game Studies,”…
It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly…
As Christmas Break wanes and my spare time dwindles, I’m going to have to say goodbye to my nightly Blender 3D design sessions. But I’m hoping to keep my creative juices flowing, by reserving at least 20 minutes a day for an interactive fiction work-in-progress. I’m at a point in my development where I’ve implemented…
Blogging with an eye towards finding background info for my “Media and Culture” class next term. Once a writer’s archive consisted of letters, badly-typed first drafts and corrected manuscripts. But now they write on computers and communicate by email, what clues to their creative process remain? Archaeologist Christine Finn sets out to explore how the…
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Pay no attention to the neatly formatted and deceptively typo-free surfaces of the average Microsoft Word file, Mr. Kirschenbaum declared at a recent lunchtime lecture at the New York Public Library titled “Stephen Kings Wang,” a cheeky reference to that best-selling novelists first computer, bought in the early 1980s.”The story of writing in the digital…
You don’t have to get into the curvature of space-time, but you can tell your kids that Santa uses deep scientific knowledge to see a different map of the universe, one that contains roads most people don’t know about. The Jolly Old Elf may have found a way to jump or drop from one house…