betajames

to move toward "original content" is to move in exactly the wrong direction. People are hungry, they are positively salivating, for sites that intelligently dissect the plethora of sites that in turn deal with sites, books, music, and sites on sites. In every other medium critics write from secondary, tertiary, even quaternary degrees of removal. The critics analyse the original content, sure; but then the critics are themselves analysed; and then that analysis is analysed by someone else; and then the real genius wakes up, carbonates his own cola product, turns on his computer, and analyses the shit out of everything that preceded him. And that's what students write awesome, timeless papers about.

In April 2010, Twitter had approximately 106M registered users. The volume of data that flows through the Twitter pipe dwarfs any other publicly available linguistic corpus in existence (except the web itself), and unlike fixed corpora, it still flows. Such a huge dataset has proven itself to be a fertile resource for a number of natural language processing tasks (such as trend detection and sentiment analysis), but its value as a collection of colloquial language begs to be used for lexicography as well: if the purpose of a dictionary is to record actual usage, then Twitter data allows us to broaden the scope of our corpus beyond newswire, literary works and other forms of privileged publication and include the unedited language of everyday folks as well.

Practomime leverages the advantages of role-playing games for immersive learning. Role-playing games (including popular MMORPGs such as World of Warcraft or The Lord of the Rings Online) rely on a player's investment in a created character or avatar and require the player to complete difficult tasks (quests) and problem-solve to overcome obstacles, in order to progress through the "levels" of the game.

As has been pointed out, role-playing games are the perfect assessment machines: you can't get to the next level without mastering the previous one, and you get constant feedback.

Roger Travis, U of Connecticut

Travis suggests that this type of "assessment machine" can be easily translated into a learning game. "The first step is to realize it is possible to make course objectives and game objectives the same." Then:

• Create a storyline for an "alternate reality" in which students are tasked for some urgent narrative reason with learning the information and developing the skills required by the course
• Insert course activities into that narrative framework
• Have students create characters within that virtual reality, characters who have a stake in solving the problems/assignments given and achieving the objectives of the game and the course
• Assign credit for assignments in the form of "levels" or "experience points" within the game

You're not allowed to play the game for yourself, so interaction with the developers or PR person gives you an artificial idea of how easy, or hard, the game is to play. "The worst is PR flacks who are kibitzing as you're playing, telling you exactly which buttons to press at which times. Half the fun for me is figuring out a game's mechanics, which is impossible if you're standing over my shoulder and telling me which buttons to press at which moments," McElroy says. "Stop it. Also, stop telling me that you're shocked at how well I'm doing or that I'm the best player that day. I know what you're doing."

Games are the only creative form - the only art form perhaps - where creators are banned from making works specifically for adults or dealing with exclusively adult themes. Given the average computer game player is about my age it should be no surprise that the government is being lobbied hard by gamers advocating a change of law.

But do I think games are art? Frankly I'm not sure it's the right question.

Like all Star Wars games, Republic Commando has a much easier time telling its story because it doesn’t have to explain itself to anyone. We already know what the Trade Federation is and why these droids are attacking us. The game barely even has a main villain, you just see General Grievous once before having to fend off his rave-party bots. Even if you did manage to shield your eyes from the prequels, it’s not like you have to infuse an FPS with an intense personal motivation for the player. A bunch of people are shooting at you, people understand that it’s best to fire back. The dialogue instead mostly consists of you and your squadmates talking. Rather than getting sucked into the usual video game banter of personal motivation or why we have to kill the evil wizard, the Commandos just talk about what’s going on around them. The game doesn’t have to waste time explaining a lot of intricate details that aren’t really relevant anyways.

The goal is to reverse the consumer-advertiser relationship. Traditional marketing pushes a message over and over. If people instead pull bits of information into their lives through a game, they are more likely to feel a sense of ownership.

“That makes them talk about it, share it, evangelize it,” said Elan Lee, a co-founder of Fourth Wall Studios, a pioneer in the games-as-marketing field that has worked with Paramount Pictures.

These speculative excursions where we are relieved from our modern state of information overload and forgetfulness allow us a glimpse, a taste of what sophisticated cognitive
BCI might enable. From our current vantage point, such spectacular developments are not on the immediate horizon. Indeed, some eminent neuroscientists have suggested we’ll need to understand far more about higher brain functions, and perhaps consciousness itself, to even consider tackling cognitive BCI. But there are sound, compelling reasons to believe the task may not be quite so daunting.

just as Winston Churchill described democracy as "the worst form of government" except for all the others, so too with grading.

Let me put it more directly. I think avoiding grading (or some comparable form of rigorous evaluation by the instructor) shirks necessary responsibility, avoids necessary comparison, and puts the humanities at even greater risk of bring branded "soft" than they already face.

Rather than designing and dictating the everyday workflow of educators and students, the self-organizing school identifies a small set of simple rules. These rules, in combination with multiple feedback loops, drive and iterate the work of teachers, students, administrators and others involved in teaching and learning. As with the emergent behaviors of ant hills and flocks of birds, the simple rules drive elegant, complex system-level behaviors that adapt to changing circumstances.

This model of education reform depends on real-time, effective feedback loops of information at a scale that is possible only with the support of technology. But the technology platforms to support a self-organizing school haven't been developed -- as with most educational use of technology they are likely to be pulled together on an ad-hoc basis with minimal support, making them clunky to use and difficult to modify. As a result, rather than enabling and supporting adaptation, they are just as likely to carve existing processes into digital concrete and become a force resisting change.