betajames

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.

Since honest misunderstanding and malevolent word-theft are both as eternal as roaches, it’s safe to say plagiarism will endure. But I’m on shakier ground in worrying that Twitter’s citation style will spread like a virus; such world-is-going-to-hell ideas are usually silly and false.

What interests me about grammatical and other “mistakes” on Twitter is what they signal about our changing culture—a thread of inquiry entirely absent in the Times article. John Cusack spelled “breakfast” as “breakfasy.” Why this error? Surely not because he cannot spell—no one confuses “t” for “y.” But look at your nearest keyboard: The two letters are next to each other on the keyboard, and Cusack clearly mis-hit the keys. QWERTY keyboards were developed in order to prevent exactly these sorts of mistakes on the typewriter—the letters are spaced so to avoid common letter pairs hitting the carriage at the same time. When we hit the digital age, we kept the typewriter-based keyboard. So now we make new errors.

Even more crucial to our brewing backstory are a handful of entrepreneurial Germans from the Midwest -- Industrial Age go-getters who helped wean much of the U.S. off cider and whiskey. In Milwaukee, Jacob Best and his sons founded the Best and Company brewery in 1844. One son, Phillip, later left the brewery to his son-in-law Frederick Pabst, who preferred his own name be slapped on kegs, bottles and cans.

The student facilitator and recorder roles are chosen at random at the beginning of the discussion, which means that each student is responsible for preparing background material and contributing. In a typical student-leader approach, only one or two students will be prepared to discuss the topic in any detail, while the rest of the students may not feel their viewpoints are legitimate. By removing "expert" status, each student is free to discuss the topic on their own terms.

Instead, the question we should be asking is how could more of us collaborate to develop projects that demonstrate innovative uses of technology in education? If we are going to see real benefits from applying technology in education, we need education to become an open platform for innovation that leverages the work of many people working independently.