betajames

Some things I did not expect that turned out to be true: 1) An awful lot of people read blogs. Spontaneously conceived essays (if they deserve that elevated name) that are not particularly well-thought-through can instantly go viral on you without warning. After a few of these experiences I came to realize that there were significant numbers of readers who believed that Think Tank was all I did for a living, and was perhaps all I had ever done, and who seemed pretty well content with this assumption. That was a sobering discovery. 2) Goofy experiments that would not work in any other format, such as deciding to read the entire 2009 stimulus legislation and blog about it will be forgiven by many readers on the grounds that we’re all in this experiment together; it’s like going to a rock festival and hearing terrible music but feeling really good about being there. 3) Aggregation and calling attention to other people’s good work without much effort on your own part is enough justification for blogging in the first place.

CCP's space-faring MMORPG EVE Online is known for what some may term mildly as "accessibility issues." But while many game developers are clamoring to attract a wide base of users through better accessibility, CCP is focused more on nurturing an existing hardcore fanbase.

By doing this, Reykjavik, Iceland-based CCP has been able to maintain an EVE subscriber base of around 300,000. MMORPG released in 2003 and has had several expansions to give players a reason to keep subscribing month after month.

The company has taken steps to make the game a bit more appealing to new players, but at its heart, EVE Online is an unabashed hardcore MMORPG in a world where the buzz word is "accessibility."

Having established the premise of game design as an analog for course and curriculum design, we must consider what it means to design a game and discuss just how it is done. There is no shortage of literature on the design of games, ranging from practical guides on professional game development to theoretical analyses of the components of games. What can be gleaned from a review of this literature is that defining what a “game” is and how to go about designing one remain topics of great debate. That is healthy of course, particularly as the exposure of video games increases and the discourse surrounding games continues to expand. The goal of this paper is not to resolve either of these debates. That being said, in order to draw direct comparisons there must be a stable framework from which to work, and a crucial part of that framework is a specific definition of a game.

This is a strange way for an animal to spend its days. Surely we would be better off pursuing more adaptive activities—eating and drinking and fornicating, establishing relationships, building shelter, and teaching our children. Instead, 2-year-olds pretend to be lions, graduate students stay up all night playing video games, young parents hide from their offspring to read novels, and many men spend more time viewing Internet pornography than interacting with real women. One psychologist gets the puzzle exactly right when she states on her Web site: "I am interested in when and why individuals might choose to watch the television show Friends rather than spending time with actual friends."

One solution to this puzzle is that the pleasures of the imagination exist because they hijack mental systems that have evolved for real-world pleasure. We enjoy imaginative experiences because at some level we don't distinguish them from real ones.

Competing for the top spot on Twitter is a zero-sum game. The rise of one hashtag leads to the fall of another as Tweeters vie for public attention, and this fickle fame-game had dire consequences for the Iranian democratic movement in late June 2009, when Michael Jackson's death eliminated its Twitter presence at a critical moment.

The concern about technology (in its entirety, rather than one tool or another) was summed up in a series of statistics reviewed by both professors showing that increasing numbers of college students are not prepared for work at the college level. At that point, the presenters asked: If technology is helping us teach better, why are we seeing so much evidence that students aren’t learning as well as we would like? Current college students have had more exposure to technology in high school and college than previous generations did, but are they better off for it?

RateMyProfessors.com has its own vocabulary, its own values and its own idiosyncrasies. Success on the site is a badge of something. It’s just not immediately clear what. As a result, Rate My Professors is best consulted “for novelty purposes only,” as the tag on bad fake-ID cards used to read.

Students should not base decisions about their education on it, believing (mistakenly) that they always know how to filter information on wiki sites. And professors should not get ideas from it, believing (mistakenly) that it represents the wisdom of crowds. The top professors on Rate My Professors, after all, are not the top professors in the nation. Rather, they’re the top professors on RateMyProfessors.com.

Games could also be a powerful means of differentiating instruction (by, say, adapting the quest to the learner's abilities) and personalizing -- putting the learner directly into the content they're studying. Richard Wainess of UCLA explained that something as simple as using the words "I" and "you" in a lesson -- saying "You look up and see clouds" vs. "There are clouds in the sky" -- yields significantly better learning outcomes. Learning through games is, almost by definition, learning by doing.

There's even some evidence that games, if designed right, can encourage kids to use more positive social behavior

technology is changing so fast, privacy protection rules, laws and guidelines can't keep up. Kraglund-Gauthier and Young say there's no magic bullet when it comes to privacy protection. But they do say students and educators - and indeed everyone using the Internet - should become aware of the pitfalls, and work to minimize them.

One major pitfall relates to the international character of the Internet. If a Canadian institution stores data on a server in another country - something that's increasingly common because it can be a way to save money - then it becomes difficult to enforce Canadian privacy laws.

The notion that “having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity” is the sentiment of someone who’s never had to code-switch, someone who’s never had to be in the closet for fear of getting kicked out of the house, someone who’s familiar with the world of white-collar “networking” in which bosses are expected to have semi-social bonds with their employees rather than the world of enforced hierarchy in which bosses are on the lookout for off-the-job indiscretions to punish or exploit. For many, many people, having more than one identity isn’t a sign of “lack of integrity” because it’s not even really a personal choice. It’s the only way to survive in a world that isn’t always perfectly willing to accept and respect them for who they are.