betajames

"Online instruction may be more economical to deliver than live instruction, but there is no free lunch," said David Figlio, Orrington Lunt Professor of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University and primary author of the NBER working paper released this month. "Simply putting traditional courses online could have negative consequences, especially for lower-performing and language minority students."

The academic and the e-community have this in common: both necessarily go beyond the classroom and beyond direct, physical interactions. So Facebook, for instance, is necessarily part of our honors community. It's not just "out there," it’s also "in here" – whether we invite it in or not. If we truly believe in technology as integral to teaching and learning (as we do), we must remain open to these tools – even when they’re misused.

While we seemingly get lots of choices in a game about how we get from place to place, how to kill enemies (and with what weapon), and even how we make moral decisions, when the game prompts us we usually get down to doing what it tells us to do.  Even if we don’t, if we really want to play the game, ultimately we will have to.

If the player blows the right moves or says the wrong thing or chooses the wrong place to eat, intimacy is a no go.  “Intimacy” becomes an activity in which a potential lover is acted upon, not a complex system of mutual interaction.  It is also seemingly antagonistic.  The paramour is competing with him- or herself or the desires of their intended lover in order to engage with them intimately.  Failure means that the lover is displeased, transforming them into something more of a threat or obstacle to be overcome than a potential partner.

we want the fruits of our labor to exist between hard or even soft covers in our own time and after us (and accept that the pages containing our being will turn brown and become brittle), it means something to us to see and speak of a book as a weighty tome or a slender volume, we like to be able to locate a passage we've already read spatially on a page, we are interested, even as we are dismayed, to discover that we are the first person in 61 years, eight months, and three days (according to the "due date" slip) to check a book out of the library, it pleases us to think of Whitman's leaves of grass as pages of a book

For me, reading is a physical experience, one that vanishes, evaporates completely, the minute you read something on a screen. Books also have an architectural dimension. Rooms full of books are meaningful places where people assemble. And yet, one of the things that defines reading is its very intimacy—which is what I love about it.

So real books and e-books will coexist. That has happened time and again with other new technologies that were prophesied to kill off old ones. Autos didn't wipe out horses. Movies didn't finish theater. TV didn't destroy movies. E-books won't destroy paper and ink. The Internet and e-books may set back print media for a while, and they may claim a larger audience in the end. But a lot of people who care about reading will want the feel, the smell, the warmth, the deeper intellectual, emotional, and spiritual involvement of print.

Our coming ability to conduct engaged and very personal academic discussion across great distances – or in cyberspace – should be of keen interest to institutions of liberal education. Rather than unbundle liberal education, these new technologies and networks will allow liberal education institutions to "rebundle" themselves: to recombine academic assets into new arrangements across distance and institutional boundaries. In a world where space has been collapsed to allow for intimate engaged dialogue over distance, the physical campus will become less the locus of learning than a point within a web of learning environments.

Douglas Knox (@knoxdw) shared this same article in a mention to Dan Cohen (@dancohen) and Rob Townsend (@rbthisted). He also posed an interesting question: "What's the Craigslist of liberal education?"

Public historians conduct history research and promote history in museums, parks, schools, nonprofit groups and elsewhere -- designing exhibits, overseeing archives and developing educational programs, all based on scholarship, but for a broader audience than scholars. As more history departments have created public history programs (in part because it is considered a growth area in which historians may find jobs), they have hired more public historians -- often creating tension over how to evaluate them.

To what degree are such public approaches available to academics in other fields and, perhaps more importantly, supported?

We're living through a radical transformation of our communications environment. Since we don't have the benefit of hindsight, we don't really know where it's taking us. And one thing we've learned from the history of communications technology is that people tend to overestimate the short-term impact of new technologies — and to underestimate their long-term implications.

We see this all around us at the moment, as would-be savants, commentators, writers, consultants and visionaries tout their personal interpretations of what the internet means for business, publishing, retailing, education, politics and the future of civilisation as we know it. Often, these interpretations are compressed into vivid slogans, memes or aphorisms: information "wants to be free"; the "long tail" is the future of retailing; "Facebook just seized control of the internet", and so on. These kinds of slogans are really just short-term extrapolations from yesterday's or today's experience.

While a definite qualifier for "tl;dr," it's worth a read for the clarifying perspective and reflection on what the internet is, does and could/will be.

Ars: Why do librarians and archivists want to preserve games?

JM: The really simple, one-sentence answer is because games are important. In the United States we're looking at about 80,000 people who are directly employed by the gaming industry and maybe another 240,000 people involved in related, tangential industries that rely on gaming companies for their existence. So just as a monetary phenomenon, games are important. You probably saw the sales for Modern Warfare? We're talking a single game that realized over a billion dollars in sales. Sort of shows on a monetary level the importance that games have taken within our economy.

This has certainly made librarians take note of games, but also they've become important culturally. There's a long history of wanting to say "popular culture is lower culture and therefore we should not be preserving it." For all of us in our project, we're rejecting that point of view. Popular culture is the most important culture we need to preserve. It shows what people were actually interested in and what they were doing.

Further ammunition for those arguing for the validity of videogame studies as well as their preservation.

Also: on this here laptop, I have Fallout, World of Goo and two emulators, one for DOS and one for NES.

In spite of their name, desktop PCs often have several users. Laptops, netbooks, and tablets are usually single-user machines—that is, they really are personal. Modern mobile operating systems are built with room enough for one—Apple's iOS and Google's Android are both tied in to a single user's e-mail, calendar, and app-purchasing accounts. Forrester's numbers also suggest that in the future we'll have many such machines around the house. Your "main" computer will be a laptop—and you'll probably have several smaller, tablet-type machines that you use regularly as well.

My laptop is my "main" computer, my only computer, at least until my current wireless carrier contract ends and I'm able to land a Google Android. Then I'll have two single-user machines, four and five if the PS3 and Xbox 360 qualify, six if I dare include my Moleskine journal.