Still, when asked what art forms speak the most to us, games don’t rank at the top. Ranked 1 to 6, where 1 is the most emotional, the order was: movies, music, books, video/PC games, paintings/artwork, and last cars. (OK, so I have a thing for cars?) Heavy gamers have more of a feeling for…
By studying journalism, you carry with you tools for assessing arguments, and a dogged determination to find the truth in yourself and in others. I love this work, but it is work. Living up to the standards of this difficult, competitive field is taxing. I have a long, long way to go. —Amanda Cochran —A…
A computer-generated reconstruction of the man’s face bears a strong enough resemblance to portraits of Copernicus to convince the scientists. —‘Body of Copernicus’ identified (BBC) See Wikipedia for more about Copernicus , the 16th-century priest whose astronomical hobby provided evidence to support the theory that the sun was at the center of the solar system. This…
Teenagers are ten times more likely to use non-standard English in written exams than in 1980, using colloquial words, informal phrases and text-messaging shorthand — such as m8 for ‘mate’, 2 instead of ‘too’ and u for ‘you’. Despite this, the two-year study found that today’s teenagers are using far more complex sentence structures, a…
Here’s where it gets fun: after students’ small groups put some thoughts up on the board, we read through the Writing Program’s Statement on Plagiarism out loud, and discuss it, making sure everything’s clear about the policy. And then I hold a plagiarism contest. —Mike Vitia —Let’s Plagiarize! (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) I’m home in Greensburg, still…
One sunny day shortly after the start of the fall term, Robert M. Dawley was preparing to spend the afternoon tutoring two students on how to measure the DNA content in the cells of tadpoles. But first he walked briskly out of his building and over to a small lounge with white cinder-block walls, stretched…
Serious Games Summit DC 2005, Day 2A Debate Between Jan Cannon-Bowers and Marc Prensky (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Do we need instructional design in serious games, or is making a good game enough? This debate is part of an ongoing turf battle within the serious games movement. As is generally the case with conference liveblogging, these are…
Serious Games Summit DC 2005, Day 2Paul Marino: Machinima: Using Games to Change Filmmaking and Instructional Video (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Executive Director, Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences Author of The Art of Machinima The presentation was a brief introduction to a demonsration of clips, many of which I’ve seen, so it wasn’t as immediately informative…
Serious Games Summit DC 2005, Day 2Derek Wischusen: Expanding Teachable Moments in Serious Games using AI (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Began with a useful grid that recognizes that realism is not the only way to evaluate a game, and that realistic games are not the only kind of training games out there. Wischusen presented two binary pairs:…
Serious Games Summit DC 2005, Day 2Sande Chen and David Michael: Roundtable — Beyond Q & A: Assessment Methods for the Next Generation of Serious Games (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) These are my very rough notes. Some of the speakers didn’t give their names, sometimes I couldn’t hear their names, and sometimes they gave their names while…
Serious Games Summit DC 2005, Day 2Keynote: David Warner, Riding the Cutting Edge of Distributed Intelligence (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Warner identified himself as “dangerously overeducated.” Characterized his presentation as “confessions of a serial stunt scientist,” and warned that he would jump topics around. The cup of tea I brought to the table went cold untouched —…
Serious Games Summit DC 2005, Day II (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) (See also Serious Games Summit DC 2005, Day 1) Keynote: David Warner Riding the Cutting Edge of Distributed Intelligence Sande Chen and David Michael Beyond Q & A: Assessment Methods for the Next Generation of Serious Games Derek Wischusen Expanding Teachable Moments in Serious Games using…
Serious Games Summit DC 2005 Ian Bogost: Project Management: Avoiding Mistakes… If I Only Knew Then What I Know Now (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Bogost reminded the group that, despite the fact the room was arranged for a lecture, this is a roundtabe. Why is an academic talking about project management? “After all, uiversities are not exactly known…
Serious Games Summit DC 2005Sharon Sloane: Exploring Game-Based Instructional Methodologies that Reach the Cognitive and Affective Learning Domains (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) The presentation, by Sharon Sloane, president of CEO of Will Interactive, began with a long video clip showing a military leadership training game, focusing not on combat but routine decisions, careerism, inappropriate comaraderie (a superior…
Serious Games Summit DC 2005Michael Gibson: Creating Life Experience Through Dramatic Simulations (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) I picked the wrong presentation to stroll in on a minute before the speaker started. It’s standing room only – three people jumped up and took chairs at the speaker’s table. I’m sitting on the floor, my knee touching the podium…
Serious Games Summit DC 2005 Dolly Joseph and Mable Kinzie: Boys [sic] and Girls [sic] Game Play Preferences: Survey Results (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) I’m hemmed into an awkward back corner, so I hope the presentation’s good, since I won’t be able to get out easily. I didn’t catch the speaker’s name at first, but it was…
Serious Games Summit DC 2005Tim Holt: (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Remediating the classic Atlas body-building cartoon, Holt presented the scenario in which a big burly organization kicks sand in the face of a scrawny game designer. He suggested that modding is a way to create a great-looking game, that can be used to get further funding,…
Serious Games Summit DC 2005Perla and Whatley’s Keynote Address: What’s So Serious about Game Design? The Art or the Science? (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Quick Take: I thought both speakers did a fair job contextualizing serious games, but as a humanist I am used to attending conferences in which speakers are meticulous about plugging their individual observations…
Serious Games Summit DC 2005 Blogging (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Here’s my schedule for the first day of the Serious Games Summit, which starts in a few minutes here in Arlington, Va., a suburb of Washington D.C. I do enjoy the mixture of commercial, government, educational and indie content, but the biggest draw is probably the dollars…
People are investing major chunks of disposable income and (astonishingly, in a flat-out work-obsessed society where no one has time) untold hours in modding. It’s one of the fastest up-and-coming social trends in the United States. And modding has already tumbled head-on into a legal snake pit. —Andy Oram —Control Freaks: Modding and the Clash…