"creating computer games, rather than just playing them, could boost students' critical and creative thinking skills"

Nikunj Dalal, Parth Dalal, Subhash Kak, Pavlo Antonenko, and Susan Stansberry of Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, outline a case for using rapid computer game creation as an innovative teaching method that could ultimately help bridge the digital divide between those people lacking computer skills and access and those with them. "Worldwide, there is increasing recognition of a digital divide, a troubling gap between groups that use information and communication technologies widely and those that do not," the team explains. "The digital divide refers not only to unequal access to computing resources between groups of people but also to inequalities in their ability to use information technology fully."

There are many causes and proposed solutions to bridging this divide, but applying them at the educational and computer literacy level in an entertaining and productive way might be one of the more successful.

"The Imagined Space of the Web 2.0 Classroom"

Accommodating technology, that is, making it usable in a room, does require many changes: Rooms should be square or rounded instead of rectangular since sight-lines and visual display of information is now as important as the sound of voices; moving furniture for different ways to work with technology should not cause a sudden roar of noise, chair and table legs scraping on tile, but instead the soft rolling of table and chair on a soft surface. In other words, new classroom design is not based on unquestioned tradition but is based on new practices developed within the field of media architecture.

College-level coursework in composing music for videogames (take note, @myronmanns)

Berklee is offering five classes this semester in video game audio or game scoring. Sweet says his typical student is not only knowledgeable about state-of-the-art video games like Modern Warfare and BioShock but also has classroom experience in disciplines like sound production, voice acting, music technology, and film scoring.

Versatility and familiarity are important. In writing for games, composers must anticipate and create cues for the various layers and levels a player passes through. Story lines and scenes change rapidly and unpredictably. As technology improves and memory space expands, moreover, these games have grown more sophisticated, visually and sonically. Players’ expectations rise accordingly, creating a demand for such elements as a full orchestral score.

1/4 of variability in achievement seen in those trained on a new video game predicted by measuring volume of 3 brain structures

Research has shown that expert video gamers outperform novices on many basic measures of attention and perception, but other studies have found that training novices on video games for 20 or more hours often yields no measurable cognitive benefits.

These contradictory findings suggest that pre-existing individual differences in the brain might predict variability in learning rates

Are students lazy, industrious or both? #eng111 #345tw

The academy at-large is also divided over this generation’s profile. We tend to classify today’s students as either lazy (putting our country’s future in peril) or industrious and creative (offering national hope). It appears that we have a “Janus Generation;” researchers continually picture its students with contrasting faces, like the two-headed Roman god, Janus.

I have no words

The Justice Department also faces questions about its larger role in creating the circumstances that lead to the use of so-called enhanced interrogation and restraint techniques at Guantánamo and elsewhere. In 2006, the use of a gagging restraint had already been connected to the death on January 9, 2004, of an Iraqi prisoner, Lieutenant Colonel Abdul Jameel, in the custody of the Army Special Forces. And the bodies of the three men who died at Guantánamo showed signs of torture, including hemorrhages, needle marks, and significant bruising. The removal of their throats made it difficult to determine whether they were already dead when their bodies were suspended by a noose. The Justice Department itself had been deeply involved in the process of approving and setting the conditions for the use of torture techniques, issuing a long series of memoranda that CIA agents and others could use to defend themselves against any subsequent criminal prosecution.

"Humans turned from hunting & gathering to agriculture [because] of...simple urge for alcoholic beverages."

The pottery sherds in China, along with a pattern of ancient brews found in other regions of the world such as Africa and Mexico, have led McGovern to theorize that alcohol had a pivotal role for the development of early man.

Even as our ancestors had no understanding of chemistry at the time, they likely would have discovered how to create alcohol by accident. McGovern said perhaps a sprouted grain that had fermented by falling in a pool of water was picked up and eaten. Once consumed, those drops of alcohol juices would have hit the taster’s brain, causing them to wonder where they could get more.

“A main motivation for settling down and domesticating crops was probably to make an alcoholic beverage of some kind,” McGovern concluded. “People wanted to be closer to their plants so this leads to settlement.”

"Can historical fiction – in the form of novels, plays, films or even video games – pass as education when it comes to teaching history?"

Technology is being used more and more both inside and outside of the classroom. Schools are increasingly keen to employ computer games and web-based resources as part of their arsenal of teaching tools, and several museums including the Brooklyn Museum in New York, and Glasgow's Hunterian, are going mobile with iPhone apps.

Virtual reconstuctions can offer an immersive educational experience, and are a great way to discover ancient history whilst actually having fun. Projects like Virtual Sambor Prei Kuk, King Tut Virtual, Digital Karnak and Virtual Roman Leicester offer a high level of detail and historical accuracy. Virtual reality is a tool also used by archaeologists and museums to actively teach - and learn - about historical sites and artefacts.

Answering a CFP: 900 words proposing analysis of techne & videogames in relation to composition pedagogy

Rhetoric/Composition/Play is further evidence of an increasing advocacy toward teaching approaches that allow and encourage students to greater exploration and more “play” in college-level writing courses. Such pedagogy often comes coupled with an acknowledgement of technology as an increasing influence in the lives of students entering composition classrooms. Not only a call to engage students where they are and where they want to be, scholarship of this kind also tends to stress how American higher education often fails to even adequately participate in this endeavor.  It is here that various questions concerning implementation arise, and paramount among these is a focus on how to make pedagogy more of a competitor. The easy answer is to incorporate said technologies to further learning and literacy, and while many compositionists already teach in computer-assisted classrooms, more remains to be done regarding pedagogical applications.  Integrating such technologies can be done better, though. Without a more thorough understanding of technology and how it is manifest in society, any incorporation is almost certainly doomed to some kind of failure. A perusal of the history of the root of technology, techne, can result in not only applicable understanding for today's post-wired reality but also achievement of a more beneficial balance between pedagogy and technology.

Despite being commonly understood as synonymous with art, craft and/or skill, techne remains a rather ambiguous term. However, it does not work in isolation as it is often inseparable from other old Greek words, like episteme, ethos, phronesis and kairos. Examining the relationships between such terms reveals an operative definition of techne as the acquisition of literacy; such examination also assists in understanding how techne itself is manifest within videogames.  Out of such analysis, we are then able to question the nature of composition pedagogy in relation to technology, applying both techne and videogames to the teaching of academic writing. Through such a two-tiered methodology, we come closer to a peaceful and reciprocal relationship between composition pedagogy and technology, one in which each acknowledges and acts on the influence of the other.

My curiosity lies in the application of videogames to composition pedagogy. As the very idea of what constitutes composition expands beyond traditional definitions, I am all the more interested in what videogames might bring to the theory and practice of teaching writing. Videogames constitute an evolving, popular medium that not only refashions earlier media but also promotes a greater degree of interactivity. Videogames are also representative of a more immersive style of learning and, as mentioned above, this is something I see composition pedagogues aspiring toward.

Therefore, I propose an analysis of videogames as a techno-pedagogical manifestation of techne with an eye toward implications for composition pedagogy. Techne provides a historical foundation and videogames provide a current literacy practice, both of which serve to improve approaches to teaching composition. There is an obvious, reciprocal relationship here: To better understand techne, it is necessary to show how it functions within a current technology.  Furthermore, to better understand video games, it is necessary to explain them in relation to contextualized, historical inquiry of an old Greek word. This is also important work because there is ongoing a process of negotiation inherent to present multimedia which exerts an influence not only on various and sundry technologies but also the ways in which we learn and use them.  By their very nature, videogames reveal such processes in creation and subsequent interactivity.

So, as society and technology advance, it is of great importance that we not only keep up but, in fact, reflect on process and progress.  We need to be more attentive to technological influences, which are also often unmarked in the lives of the students entering composition classrooms, and redesign courses and sequences in accordance with these influences.  As such, there is much to learn from historical understandings of techne and its current manifestations in popular media technologies, like that of videogames.  Such a technology reveals techne as flexible and diverse, requiring rather different forms of interaction in relation to particular principles and the acquisition of means to desirable and fulfilling ends, which can be achieved through tapping into the potential presented within.

It is through various communicative technologies that we are better able to not only understand ourselves and the identities we create but to also comprehend and embody change.  Understanding techne as the acquisition of literacy and seeing the current, popular technological medium of videogames as an example of this idea in turn promotes a rethinking of composition pedagogy, re-imagining approaches and sequences designed to promote active, critical thinking. To be gained from discussion of techne as manifest in videogames is not only a burgeoning appreciation for how the concept operates today but also a greater curiosity for how both connect with current approaches to teaching writing.

This chapter endeavors to be an exercise in reflection, recognizing past and present understandings of the relationship between technology and society and, more specifically, between techne, phronesis, episteme and ethos.  Out of the exploration of such relationships, there arise some new, alternate understandings of various aspects of composition, which are further illustrated by a focus upon the particular technology of videogames as a manifestation of the aforementioned relationships. Doing all of this should help composition perform better in keeping up with and integrating technology, bringing closer together and making more obvious the aesthetic and technical aspects of the various communicative technologies students use to make meaning.