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February 27, 2004
Bar Code Scanning for Consumer Empowerment?
OK, we've been seeing consumer-oriented bar-code scanner technology around for years now. Can I ask you activists something? Why haven't we done something with this yet? Wouldn't it be useful to have a bar-code scanner in your cel phone which you could use which would tell you that the manufacturer of an item pollutes rivers, abuses workers, sends jobs overseas, contributes to antiabortion terrorists, doesn't abide by safety rules for the product, etc? Hell, I can tell you *I* would use it. Seems to me the big costs would be legal and in maintaining a database of information. Please, discuss.
Posted by me at 4:06 PM | Comments (7)
Tapa tai!
The Onion AV Club is running an interview with the creator of Pootie Tang this week. Worth a read if you loved the movie, which I did. Things I hadn't known: 1) Louis CK is white (which, sadly, flips my liberal white guilt switches in bad ways for enjoying the movie); 2) there was a big struggle with Paramount about the way certain nonsensical scenes were approached, which resulted in pulled punches on a lot of the gags; 3) Mr. CK regrets the parts which were unintentionally bad (the way the film was shot in places, for example), which I at one point celebrated for making Pootie Tang one of those rare and delightful movies which is both intentionally and unintentionally bad. Things I had known: Chris Rock pulled to keep the movie from being killed by the studio because he is a good guy who values smart comedy, and I need to check out more of his stuff.
Posted by me at 12:37 AM | Comments (0)
February 26, 2004
Our Princess Is In The Ivory Tower
Former fellow Mod 63-dweller Roger made the Times today because of his upcoming conference on video games! Yay Roger! (Is there a page for that conference, Rog?) A bunch of us from TC will go down for it -- let me know if you want to caravan.
Posted by me at 10:44 PM | Comments (1)
Geometric walky things!
I'm attending a lecture by the founder of MaMaMedia right now. She's of the intellectual lineage (?) of Seymour Papert at MIT, who has written a lot about Logo. In passing, the MaMaMedia founder mentioned a fantastically geeky site called SodaPlay which puts me in mind of the Kinetic Sculpture Race which Evan used to tell me about.
I dig the various philosophies of MaMaMedia (not seeing a good link for that, poke around), and I am impressed that the company was so forward-thinking about their technology. They are currently re-orienting, post-crash, to a nonprofit, open-source model.
Posted by me at 9:07 PM | Comments (0)
February 25, 2004
Not Tonight, Dear, I'm On Fire
Just FYI, my laptop cord caught fire in the middle of my TV class tonight, so my laptop is out of commission. If you need to get in touch, give me a call.
Posted by me at 9:36 PM | Comments (0)
February 23, 2004
Detritus: The Homefront
So the old computer lost its mind and the new computer has a busted disk drive and I just *knew* I'd be getting myself into daily hourlong tech support sessions when I set Fabiola up with a computer that old, it's entirely my fault. The kid is patient, but angry now, and she knows she's been sold a bum steer. When I took the machine over Saturday she swore up and down she'd never turn it on. Today she called me and told me between gritted teeth that she couldn't get the floppy out of the drive, and made no bones about how much I sucked for putting her in this situation. I walked her through a number of steps she had mostly taken care of on her own. I feel guilty and at the same time harassed and then among it all I can see her slowly taking command of the machine and I know in the end she's going to get something out of this. and maybe she won't hate me when it's done.
* * *
Various chickens are coming home to roost at the DSWJ. I was somewhat unnerved the other day when the son of one of the doctors whose handwriting I disparaged found me and commented. I should have checked to see how many hits that guy's name was getting on Google already. I didn't really know how to respond, because I don't know how upset the guy was to find some random nutjob bagging on his dad's handwriting on the Internet...
Also, either the Olsen Twins post is getting a shitload of attention or someone's having a lot of fun with my attempts to make academic meaning out of stray comments on my website... which if it's the case y'all can cut that out now, I ain't bitin'...
I still don't know what to do with the Final Fantasy screenshot analysis, intellectual-wise. I guess you didn't either, because I gots no comments. I'd still love to hear from y'all.
* * *
It becomes clear to me that not much has changed since I was six when I find myself faced with an unravelable set of ideas for homework, and suddenly have the urge to stick my butt in the air. I press my cheek against the bed, tuck my limbs under my stomach, and stick it way way in the air. Like a stinkbug. I don't know why I'm compelled to. I've just always felt like I think better with my butt in the air.
* * *
Lynda Barry is always good.
* * *
I went on a planting spree over the past two weekends and now I have filled about every available container with succulents, spider plants, and peas. It makes me so happy. They're so brilliantly green in the sunlight, and there's so much sunlight in my room.
Charlie's laptop broke somehow when he was away, and he has been despondent, roaming around the house instead of suckling the teat of Mama Hypertext. Then he sat down and drew a picture of what he thought happened (it got kitt0wnd). Jamie made up a batch of purple cabbage juice last night and we spent way too much time using it to test the pH of various household substances -- milk, baking soda, Febreze, and overused cat litter. The latter indicated we were very bad parents. Also in the apartment someone was puking -- it wasn't me! It had cat food in it. And in other news, Jacob came over last night, gave me a really good comic, and did hilarious things I can't repeat here, along with making the usual faces and sight gags about being terrified of me.
Yeah, the domestic life is pretty good.
Posted by me at 11:17 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
February 20, 2004
Boxing Day? No, Valentine's Day!
Jacob sent me a valentine (the one with the Martians) this year as usual but I yelled at him because I was frustrated with him at that point in time. Having cleared things up a little I went back to look at the series with a little less rancor. He thinks they're better than the disaster ones and not as good as the monster ones (you can't really argue with that, unless you don't have the archetypes or the sense of disconnect-as-humor), but frankly I'd rather receive any of his valentines than just about anyone else's. Except when I'm hormonal and feeling ambivalent about the value of popular culture. like I said.
Posted by me at 10:41 PM | Comments (0)
February 19, 2004
Attention cowboy journalists:
The Times says Al Jazeera will soon be hiring reporters for their new English-language channel. Also in the works? Al Jazeera for Kids! Host: "Hey kids, who wants to hear today's taped message allegedly from our old buddy Osama?" Kids: "Yaaaay!" Grainy bin Laden footage: "HEY KIDS! BRUSH YOUR TEETH AND BOMB THE PENTAGON! AND REMEMBER, I LOVE YOU." (cue saccharine theme song)
Posted by me at 3:51 PM | Comments (0)
February 17, 2004
lipstick-red prune
S: Are you eating a prune?G: Yes. A lipstick-red prune. That's the technical term: lipstick red -- not a fire-engine red prune.
S: A fu(k-me-red prune?
G: Yes. A fu(k-me-red prune.
Posted by me at 3:42 PM
February 16, 2004
cheap silk shit
I know if I were having an er0tic conversation with a multimillionare that I'd definitely mention I get my cheap silk sh!t at Kmart... and thus the Internet records yet another fossilized layer of humankind's stupidity -- kbsPosted by me at 11:20 PM
I like coloring books.
Especially coloring books developed by the CIA to teach Nicaraguans how to bring down the Sandinista government. The pitchers are fu-nny. Heh heh heh. And maybe useful for when the Republican National Convention comes to town? Some people seem to think so. (Others of us are somewhat amused that the CIA seems to be borrowing a page or two from labor on how to create a slowdown.)
Posted by me at 8:46 PM | Comments (0)
February 15, 2004
The Bohemian Index
"What can one say about Tottenville, except that it is less bohemian than the Fresh Kills landfill." Dorothy Gambrell's geographic analysis of bohemianism in New York City! Informative and funny.
Posted by me at 10:56 PM | Comments (0)
Cinema Chocobo
I just finished analyzing screenshots from Final Fantasy VIII for a class I'm taking. We were supposed to be analyzing a 20-second TV clip to try to figure out what the director was trying to accomplish with angles and cuts, but since I'm doing some thinking about video games this semester I got the teacher to let me try this instead. I feel like a klutz reading visual elements -- I'm eager for those of y'all with more experience in it (Mack? are you out there?) to suggest alternate readings.
Little observations this excercise brought up: one, camera angle in video games is much more constrained by function than it is in a movie; and two, some visual arrangements in video games would be nonsensical if they appeared in movies, so while film and video game literacies may overlap they probably don't consist of all the same elements (obviously). More here. now I have to go to bed because I feel like death warmed over.
Posted by me at 10:34 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 13, 2004
Photo Finish
Today I got a flat envelope back from one of those mail-order film processing places. This was a little surprising -- I'd sent in three rolls to be processed a month or so ago, but I'd thought I'd asked for processing for web download, not a CD or other flat delivery.
Sadly, as it turned out, the envelope had gotten horribly mangled and the film lost in the mail. The envelope I got back included my check, which somehow did not fall out of the totally torn-open envelope and a regretful note from the company's customer service department suggesting I fill out a "tracer form" to see if any of the loose film they often receive was mine.
Any loss I might have felt is totally lost in a thick fog of early-onset senility. These were rolls I'd found lying around my room when I moved. I have little idea what was on them. They might have been taken in the past year and never developed -- I was unemployed and didn't have the cash. They might have been taken years ago. They could be of protests, candid shots of friends, scenery, my car, any number of things.
The tracer form is actually rather clever -- it lists categories of people, events, sports, scenery, even types of dress which the photos included. It seems to be developed after years of having people write in and say "You've lost my photos, you know, the ones with that guy in them? I think he was wearing blue?"
I imagine any number of people are happily reunited with their photos every year as a result of this smart little form. However, the form was not intended to help people like me. It will not help the kind of people who develop a handful of film without knowing what's on it, and it will not accommodate frustrated artists.
I realized this as I began searching for a category for "plastic toy horses," which seemed a likely subject of my old rolls. I sold a lot on eBay last year, but also I had a moment where I got really amused by the shape of an unwrapped chocolate Easter bunny and took a series of conceptual shots with the naked brown form among My Little Ponies. The closest thing I found was "Animals," so under "Other," I filled out "Toy horses," but that really needed more explanation. What I ended up with was "Toy horses and Easter candy, fantasy scene on toilet (I'm not making that up.)"
Then I realized they could have been pictures from my birthday, and I added "Birthday party with blue cake and human-shaped pinata in Central Park." I did not want to go into the backstory that the pinata was supposed to be Henry Kissinger but the whole thing accidentally ended up looking like an effigy lynching of a dark-skinned man. Explanation doubtless takes the edge off that story (please know that I feel infinitely more remorse now over the horrible scene than I did when I first wrote about it), but the form was only so big and my handwriting is illegible anyway.
Just to cover all bases, I checked the boxes for "Buildings/brick/two story" and "Hill/mountains/desert/backyard" on the off chance they had been pictures of my house in Queens or my dad's place in Altadena, and "Vehicles/Make: Chrysler Sebring/License Plate New York City" in case they were pictures of the car. I filled out the appropriate addresses and dates and realized I couldn't possibly send this form in.
When they processed this form, would the lab staff look for deserts, backyards, toilets, cake, pinatas, a Sebring, plastic horses and a brick building all in the same place? Would they miss it if they only saw the cake or the car? Would they post my tracer form on a "Greatest Hits" list in their copier room? Man, I don't know if I could hold my head up if they didn't post it there. Something's gotta come of the embarassment of having cared enough to look for the weird photos I only vaguely remember taking. What if someone just threw them out?
What if the film never made it to the processing center? Is it rolling around the floor of a New York City mail processing station? Did someone I'll never know make prints? If you found a shot of what looks like a chocolate d!ld0 being admired by a My Little Pony, please drop me a line. I'd kind of like it back. Better it not be floating around in the world out there.
Posted by me at 2:05 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 12, 2004
internet titty
The Internet will show titty to anybody who wants to see it. Skank. --sushiesquePosted by me at 12:12 AM
February 10, 2004
We Are The Crapflood Of The Blogosphere
Argh.
Posted by me at 11:54 PM | Comments (1)
February 9, 2004
Experts See Patterns, That's What Makes Them Experts
All my Hampshire friends hate bu11sh!t academic conventions. Howabout youuuuu?
Posted by me at 9:22 PM | Comments (1)
The Problem Of Skills In Role Playing Games
When I think about effectively using video games to teach, I start thinking about RPGs (role playing games). This framing partially comes from personal bias -- I play RPGs more than anything else these days -- and partially from half-conscious thought about what RPGs have to offer compared to other types of games.
RPGs offer a number of advantages over other game models, for teaching. First, as Jess pointed out to me the other day, they require minimal dexterity with controllers to play. It's not like, say, Super Mario Brothers (to name one even people who don't play video games should know), fighting games like Tekken, or shooters like Doom, in which hand-eye coordination is required to win. RPGs generally offer a long time in which you can consider and prepare for your next move.
Gee notes that in general, good games work on this kind of an "amplification of input principle," "designed so that they adjust to different levels of play and reward each sort of player, if the player is putting in effort, with some appropriate degree of success." (Gee p 64) This encourages rather than discourages beginning players. Gee also suggests that "in the real world, science often operates by the amplification of input principle;" he sees the very visible reward one gets for tinkering in a lab (new strains of fruit fly with weird characteristics, explosions if chemicals are mixed the right way) as motivating in itself. (Gee p 64) I think current RPGs, with their extensive, diverse opportunities for trial-and-error tinkering with equipment and strategies, suggest possibilities for particularly good amplification of input.
RPGs also allow for gameplay within a narrative, which not only can be compelling in and of itself but also makes for more opportunities for putting knowledge in context, which all of the books I'm reading say is important for recalling knowledge and keeping it from becoming inert (look for the topic to come up repeatedly in both Bransford and Gee.)
Of course, game type is increasingly fluid. RPGs in particular tend to offer a range of games-within-a-game these days. The Final Fantasy series, for example, has added animal raising, animal racing, treasure hunts, puzzles, card games and other games of chance, dexterity side-games, and army battle tactics simulations to the small-party battle simulations of a traditional RPG. RPGs could easily be used to frame simulations (let me know if they have already), offering more opportunities for the player to identify with the characters onscreen than a simulation alone would.
This could be an excellent way to develop the identification with academic communities that Gee wants to see among students. (Whether we all agree that encouraging students to identify with academic communities is a good idea, or not practical, or displays a bourgeois bias -- or whether Gee is even correct that a student in an ideal science class takes on the identity of a scientist -- is a question for the flamers in the peanut gallery ;)) Imagine a game, for example, in which you role play as a scientist, studying microbial development in a lab simulation, and then put what you know to practical use in healing a community (or heck, germ warfare if you prefer) in an RPG scenario.
The limitation of RPGs that I keep bumping up against, however, is that in them, "skills" are only metaphors for code. Gee talks briefly about how one's skills contribute to one's identity (p 52-53). The identity a character builds up in an RPG can be comprised of a range of physical skills (lockpicking, swordsmanship, martial arts, the ability to tame animals, knowledge of how to raise particular plants, and so forth), socially relevant skills (charisma, orientation towards "good" and "evil"), and personal attributes (dexterity, ability to heal). I think in general this is a promising model for encouraging kids to think about themselves and their abilities along multiple dimensions and at multiple levels. I've also been messing with the idea that one could, say, create a game in which players would gain the ability to "see" like a historian, an anthropologist, an architect, a physicist, etc, and use those "lenses" to demonstrate how one might notice and interpret things differently as those different kinds of experts. (See Bransford, Brown, and Cocking's How People Learn, Chapter 2 for more on why an understanding of expertise is important to teaching.)
But the problem is, like I said: skills in RPGs are no more than code. If your character gains skill in lockpicking -- to use one of Gee's examples -- in a game, doors simply open for her when she approaches, rather than remaining impassable. There's no manipulation with the controller, even; no presenting of a lock model on the screen. The player doesn't learn anything about the mechanical principles behind a lock, or about categories of locks, which she can apply to locks she encounters in real life. Game-specific strategies and hand-eye coordination are still the only skills that an RPG really develops in the player,, as far as I can tell.
What a player might even develop in a game model like this is a superficial appreciation for the benefits of lockpicking -- or knowledge of plants, or charisma -- without ever trying the skills out herself. Games continuing to work in this model could end up developing attitudes in students which are profoundly unhealthy for future learning, rather than encouraging positive attitudes towards learning, testing hypotheses, and other benefits which Gee suggests games foster. (I should note that Gee generally does not seem to be suggesting ways in which games can be used for educational purposes. Rather, he is talking about the learning that goes on in games, as they stand, to point up the ways in which contemporary schools fail to present good learning opportunities. It's my own interests which are leading me to apply his ideas to the possibility of developing better educational games.)
There have got to be ways around this problem. One of them is probably incorporating simulations into games, as I suggested earlier. I'm pretty much finding it tricky, though, to come up with ways in which a game might reward or even assess academic ways of thinking. Getting students to transfer skills used in games to real life is a whole 'nother can of worms...
Cited in this essay:
Bransford, John, Ann Brown, and Rodney Cocking. How People Learn.
Gee, James Paul. What Video Games Have To Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003.
Posted by me at 12:51 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack
February 8, 2004
When Teachers Try To Be Cool, What's The Worst That Can Happen?
One of the important signs of our Lord Jesus' presence is the development of nuclear bombs that have the capability of annihilating all life upon earth many times over... Such bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in 1945, and were influential in bringing an end to World War II."
Fabiola weaseled me into doing research for her on the "Soviet Bloc of 1953" this weekend, because I feel guilty that I still haven't set up her computer to connect to the Internet at home, and I didn't say "no, do your own damn research, kid" in time.
Apparently her teacher has assigned each student in her class to do a brief essay on a line from the Billy Joel song We Didn't Start The Fire. I'm guessing the line is "communist bloc." No other context for the research was apparently given.
I'm chafing about the whole situation. For crying out loud, how does using a pop song help to make an assignment exciting and accessible if it's by a singer who went out of style twenty years ago?! And how the hell is this content supposed to matter to the kid if she doesn't have any direction on framing it?! Add that to feeling stupid that I got suckered into doing her work for her. stupid stupid liberal white guilt and my own bad teaching skills.
Anyway I sent her off to comb A People's History of the United States for starters before I get there. I just hope she's able to make sense of the stuff about the McCarthy hearings in light of all this. I poked around and found a few interesting tidbits on the CIA's site, and I'm also planning to drag along my own excellent high school American History textbook, which did a great job of covering events by theme rather than chronology, and for laughs a copy of Kiplinger's Looking Ahead given to me by a cousin of mine who co-authored the book. That's basically a compendium of historically-relevant quotes from the Kiplinger Washington Letter, which as far as I can tell is aimed at keeping the ruling elites up on the news in Washington and the markets so that they can continue to profit off eliminating your jobs, running through environment and tax loopholes, benefitting from advance knowledge of global wars and inequity, etc. (Ha-ha, I'm only kidding about the role of the Letter in that crap. Um, at least as far as maintaining serene family relationships is concerned.)
Anyway, a few of the hits on Google for "communist bloc 1953" make me glad I didn't just turn her loose on the Web... I'm sure nobody's bothered to equip the poor child with any skills for positioning Internet documents in context... Actually, I think I will give her that document just to see what she makes of it. All in all this could still be a good lesson on evaluating sources and triangulating between them.
Posted by me at 1:53 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
February 3, 2004
Metacognition Semester: Socio-cognitive Literacy Imbalance!
The view from where I stand is this: The classes I took last semester mostly did not treat the issues I am most interested in studying in depth, or if they did, they basically satisfied my interest in their topic and I won't be heading that way again. Yet I was covering a very healthy range of subjects and using a variety of skills and resources to do so: Internet discussions, printed fiction, Java code examples, kids' software, video lectures, journal articles, philosophy, history (on the reading/input end), and debugging, adding to comment threads, writing case studies, developing concept webs, synthesizing a diverse range of theories (on the production/output end).
All of the classes I am taking this semester, by comparison, including my independent study, have something to do with media literacy, a major interest of mine. All of them, so far, are prescribing remarkably similar literature which spans the narrow range from sociology to cognitive science, covering scant more than psychology and theories of literature between those two areas.
Sadly, I am reading a lot of things which are basically textbooks, and it is very, very hard to get anything useful out of them. I take twenty minutes to reaad a page. I can feel the skimming abilities I developed last semester crumbling. I had been learning to look for important ideas which were new or difficult for me. Textbooks make that nearly impossible. Basically, I'm drinking from a firehose of literature reviews: rather than following the development of one theorist's idea through examples, I'm frogmarched through an overview of all of the ideas of a given field, ancient or recent, useful or discredited, important or peripheral. When someone in a field I don't know well is presenting all of this information to me I find it nearly impossible to think about which of the information is new or useful to me; I end up thinking, "Have to underline this, it is an idea this specialty talks about, all of these ideas are interrelated" As in high school, I end up with pages of underlined text, and feel like a goofus. It doesn't help at all that my cognitive science class is online, so there is no spoken lecture to connect to
You know what I'd rather do? Read the original goddamn literature, and find my own way around through literature reviews. Or talk to professors or grad students in the field, find out what ideas they are working on, relate them to my own ideas, ask what ideas inform theirs, and evaluate whether those informing ideas are worth cannibalizing to support my own ideas. I feel like I've learned a lot just from watching Roger's face when I get him to talk to me about various theorists, and watching for when he curls his lip. Ideas come from people, and how they relate to each other hinges and hangs on a social structure. That is where their power and their meaning comes from. The idea of semiotic domains -- domains of social meaning, as Gee defines them at least -- makes a lot of sense to me.
It seems totally ironic to me that these people who are writing about how people learn are completely unable to put their ideas to practice to effectively communicate the interrelations and importance of those ideas to me in a simple goddamn book.
Whoa. The next thought on my mind is "Where are their hyperlinks? Where is the wiki where I can add my own interpretation to help position an article?" As much as I think about the Internet I have generally not felt like it informs my learning style in such a fundamental way. I mean, there was no Net until I was like 14, and I just had my first Net-enhanced class last semester, in grad school, twelve years later. Chalk one up to the neurocog sorts who note that the brain continues to restructure as we grow...
Anyway. The imbalance of what I'm studying this semester is why it was dumb to not affix my independent to Frank in an official way. Were I working with him, it would be a pressure valve. He's a generalist and has a very holistic take on academic development. Should all of my synapses devoted to ideas about social sciences suddenly melt down (I feel it coming in T minus two weeks), I'd have room to take off in some new direction, maybe think about video game design or something. I mean, he says I can still come talk to him, but argh. Bad strategies, Andrews. Smart to think about new literacies with the professor whose focus is new literacies, but dumb to evade the generalist.
The story behind that is that I tend to spook out about people I don't see often who are very important to me. Same with Jacob. Film at 11. Um, 12. Put your media-critic-news-filter hat on.
* * *
Another observation:
Amazon.com is better for finding books than the library is. It usually has what I want. Plus, if you are looking for the social life of a book, there is much richer information on it than there is in your library. TC's library especially. OMG I can't believe how little stuff they have on technology and TV, it's sick.
Posted by me at 11:57 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack