Educational Gaming

The reading that interested me most out of this set was Gee's "Is playing video games a waste of time," which explored what people actually learn when they game. As Gee describes his son's experience learning new strategies and approaches to the game Pikmin, he says, "What we are dealing with here is talk and thinking about the (internal) design of the game, about the game as a complex system of interrelated parts meant to engage and even manipulate the player in certain ways. This is metalevel thinking, thinking about the game as a system and a designed space, and not just playing within the game moment by moment" (42).

I had this afternoon free thanks to a canceled class, and I convinced a friend to let me try out his Playstation 3. He suggested I try playing Madagascar, which is based on the Dreamworks children's movie of the same name, so I did. I immediately got sucked in by the learning design built into the game; it gives you an opportunity to play each character before you really get into the "story" behind the game. It reminded me very much of software workshops I've done in the past for software; it's useless to tell people which button does what if they have no frame of reference for it. I always come up with some exercise for them to do, using real data and producing real documents.

When I think about the potential for gaming as an educational tool, I'm primarily thinking in terms of teaching critical thinking about technology, especially software. I've been trying to hammer it into my students' heads all semester to use the Help function and Google to figure out how to do what they want to do in Word and Excel, but not many of them do.

Gaming has the potential to teach people to use trial and error, to look things up and to get help from other people using the same technology for whatever purpose (pleasure or work, or both). It's one of those learning-how-to-learn things, focused on a particular view of (and comfort with) technology.

Topic for the Final Paper

As many of you might have guessed, my plan for the final project is to discuss wikis. More specifically, I would like to investigate how this technology might be used in the technical communication classroom. Drawing from research in TC pedagogy as well as multimedia theory, I plan to explore why wikis might be considered effective tools, as well as the experiences of myself and others as we attempted to teach with them. So far, I've located relevant articles for all these areas; in case our proposal gets accepted to Computers and Writing, I'll have a lot more to say about this subject after completing my proposed research.

Web 2.0 Project Topics

I'm most interested in focusing on wikis for my Web 2.0 project. I'm currently teaching a collaborative research project in my English 218 class in which students deliver an informative and persuasive wiki site on a particular topic, which I've proposed to present on at Computers and Writing next year (haven't heard whether it's been accepted or not, but whatev). I think they're a really fascinating phenomenon and have the potential to allow the "general public" more control over information, so I'd like to do more research on wikis as an educational tool.

Any takers?

Topics, topics

I have a ton of ideas for the upcoming podcast assignment, but my "best three" are as follows:

1. A genuine moment of personal enlightenment occurred at the tailgate on Saturday; it led me to the idea of collecting a ton of people's best pterodactyl impressions, including one grad assistant's description of how to make them, and working them into a piece that explores how creature sounds are synthesized in films like Jurassic Park. (Yeah...I know).


2. I think just about everyone has a weird voice they do when they're talking to pets, making fun of a family member, or just trying to be goofy or creepy. I often wonder what the stories are behind these voices and how they have changed over time, and it's something that I could really only explore through an audio text. Also silly.


3. As Meg mentioned in her post, she and I have been talking about doing something related to scar stories. I think this would provide a good opportunity to exploit and explore Ira Glass' argument that everybody has a story, but not everybody has a story that will work in radio. I think this is the one I'd most like to go with.

Modal elements of This American Life

"#1: New Beginnings," 11/25/05
Added 9/28/08

Strangely, I didn't find it terribly evident that this was a "first shot" at This American Life, largely because it seems the show had a distinctive identity from the start. One thing I like about this program (though I've had limited experience listening to it) is that it's not really about the emcee; Ira Glass acts like a navigator, behaving the way an editor of an anthology behaves in introducing the featured stories and offering a small bit of commentary on them.

The use of music in the Kevin Kelly story represents what I like about this program; it's sometimes hard to tell whether it's supposed to be funny or melancholy. If it were just Kelly's voice, the story might seem more depressing; while I expected a kind of carpe diem story about skydiving and whatnot, Kelly's narrative struck a different chord. By anonymously giving away money, setting up a will, and so on, he really does act as if he were going to die in six months. The piece could have easily used a lot of strings and piano to underscore the story as a more emotionally driven piece, but the subtle blues riffs make it harder to react to the story in a particular way. The orchestral music that punctuates some segments of the piece lend a darker sense to the narrative, but it usually occurs at points when there is tension, not necessarily that contemplative sadness Kelly conveys in much of the story. The ending, though, hits that inspirational note by allowing stark silence to dominate as the author struggles to continue reading, repeating the same statement. Then, the music takes over again, putting us back into a more comfortable place.

I absolutely loved how the Lawrence Steger story made use of the whole recording process as the show itself; we hear Steger commenting, "Um, this isn't the right section of Blade Runner...can we just kill the Blade Runner?" and "The music is Strauss' four last songs...okay, can you take it under me? Hold...okay, can you take it out? Can you take out the Janet Baker?...Can we nix that Strauss music? It's kind of too mournful." (This particular commentary starts at around 39:00 if you want to find it in the podcast; it persists throughout the story, though.)


"20 Acts in 60 Minutes," 10/14/05
Added 9/28/08

The opening by Ira Glass gives a sense of speed and rushedness by combining fast-paced music with the rhythm of a typewriter in the background. In general, changes in music and in the voices you hear let you know that there is some kind of transition, either within a story or between two stories.

In the Tate Donovan piece, I first noted that the laughter of the interviewer in background lets us know she's there before she asks any questions; it also gives us a sense of where the story is going. We can't see his face, so we can't be entirely sure what it's indicating about his narrative. When he gets to the part with the kid with the camera, the music gives a sense of wacky foreboding and Tate's voice lowers to almost a whisper, becoming more monotonous. When he's "playing" himself, though, his tone varies wildly, giving a sense of enthusiasm and further wackiness. When he gets to the end of the story, the producer's "Ohhhh..." lets us know how we should react to that awkward moment Donovan describes; the background music also disappears at that moment.

The Susan Drury piece about the radio station in Tennessee gives a sense of nostalgia by using big band music in the background. The accents you hear in the excerpts from the Swap and Shop program give a better sense of location; the difference between these voices and the accent-free voice of the narrator lends distance between them and further permits us to view the radio show as being from another time and place.

What struck me about the piece from the inmates in the juvenile prison was how the head of the kitchen crew reacted to the questioning of the inmates. He seemed to get really angry at them for no reason, which upset me at first until I realized that he might have also been reacting to something nonverbal. There was also a lack of context for the man's reaction; the woman the inmates speak to reveals that the incident had resulted in a riot in the dining hall, which probably explains the man's anger.

The use of printer sounds and melancholy music was especially effective in the story about That Guy in the Office. The printer is very much the same in this story as it is in Matt's life and as Matt is in the lives of the people he works with: a constant presence that you'd never notice unless you were really looking for it.

Aurality and Multimodality

Websites are changeable, which means that when I wrote down the instructions for this assignment on Thursday, it was a 1-pg. response. Now, it's supposed to be short. So, I'll leave it as is, but here's a summary:

• The Selfe article helped me understand what we mean by "multimodality" a little better than the other readings we've done. You?


• Still digesting Tagg. Not sure I buy the whole music-as-conquest thing, though it does make some sense. There are loud people in Milton that have earned some aural conquest, which I deliver with headphones.


• The Mississauga sound map was pretty cool because it made ambient sound the focus, which makes it stop being "ambient"; it's kind of like the effect of listening to rain.


• Interspecies made me happy in entirely geeky ways. I think that paragraph's worth reading, so scroll on down.

As I read the Selfe article, the term multimodality suddenly started to make a lot more sense to me. Granted, it was reading the endnotes with the text that helped this along, but I’m starting to gain a better understanding of how to explain it and treat it in my writings. It also made me decide to modify my definition of New Media so I could make a distinction between it and multimedia. (I caved in and decided it has to be digital.)

I also appreciated Selfe’s historical approach. I think we often forget just how recently writing has become important to us and how quickly our field (meaning composition, communication, whatever) has developed. Why do we resist using video and audio in freshman composition when aurality is what Aristotle was talking about when he came up with ethos, logos, and pathos? However, we probably wouldn’t know what Aristotle said in the first place had no one privileged writing enough to commit it to print. Selfe seems to be somewhat critical of the fact that it requires writing to discuss aurality as a topic in composition, but the lack of hyperlinks to the audio content to which she refers in the text doesn’t really help any arguments for the alternative. Access!

I’m still digesting the Tagg piece; in terms of my experience, I guess his notion that we use music as a conquest of ambient noises makes sense. I know I wear my headphones in Milton a lot so I can drown out the distractions of other people talking. The terms he uses are pretty strong, though, and I’m not sure I entirely jive with this article.

For the listening exercise, I first chose the Mississauga Sound Map. What immediately struck me about the samples in this piece was that, for the first few samples, everything sounded like rain to me. Even when the sounds were those of a lot of people talking and shuffling around, the fact that I couldn’t make out what any one voice was saying made it easier for me to hear it as something else. Without a visual context for the sounds—which I tried to create by closing my eyes—it was harder to associate the sounds with what might have actually been happening when the sound was recorded.

I was also surprised by my tendency to get startled by sudden loud noises in the Missauga recording. Often, not knowing the origin of sounds I recognize as potentially dangerous made me nervous, such as the repeated knocking noise from the Lakeview Generating Station recording. The recordings with audible words had a much different feel to them; I paid far less attention to the background noise than to the person talking.

My second choice was the site Interspecies, which was incredibly cool (in a “Holy crap, talking whales!” way). The audio on the site was created by humans and whales interacting through sound, which sounds bogus, but is pretty fascinating. For example, in one recording, an orca responds to the sounds of a reggae guitarist, while keeping the beat of the music. Very strange. It’s especially interesting if you think about its relationship with the Tagg piece; is getting an orca to respond to an electric guitar a gesture of conquest?

Blogging and Civic Discourse

The Barton piece was actually the first blog-related reading of an “academic” type I’ve been able to get into this semester. I’ve been critical of pieces that treat potential as what’s going on; this seemed to have a more tentative tone about it and was more practically oriented toward what users can actually do with technology.

Barton’s treatment of access appealed to me in this reading; I flagged his statement that “the Internet’s ‘means of production,’ that is, the ability to create and manage web sites, is becoming ever more separated from the average user as powerful corporations find more ways to distinguish their web sites with expensive, high-end, proprietary technology like Macromedia Flash” (178-9). Aha! But blogs, wikis, and discussion boards are free to anyone with Internet access (which is a small portion of the world’s population) and the know-how to create or contribute to one (which is an even smaller portion). But within these small populations, how many could actually afford a program like Flash? At least these solutions offer some more options for participation. (As long as the blog doesn’t get shut down, which is what happened to the students using zblogger in the Wiltse article.)

As I read this piece, I asked myself whether we could really consider these tools to be “democratic.” After all, even Blogger has rules to maintain a certain level of civility in the content that appears in blogs, as well as terms that dictate the use of a blog. But I feel that these rules, much like rational-critical debate itself, are designed to protect Blogger’s readers and users, not to limit the perspectives that can be offered there—keep it legal, keep it just. I’m okay with having these rules in place; in order for rational-critical debate to take place, we have to be able to bracket beliefs that directly interfere with the rights of others.

But, just when you thought blogging was democratic, here comes Michael Barbaro with news of Wal-Mart feeding bloggers info to vouch for their interests. Wait a second, didn’t Blogger tell us not to do that in the terms of service? Not really. But they did tell us to acknowledge sources, which Pickrell did not do, which begs the question of whether we should consider bloggers to be journalists; if they are, they don’t have to reveal sources of information. (Are you confused yet? I know I am.)

The issue at hand is the one Jonas focuses on: transparency. But this issue goes beyond just being honest about information sources and whatnot. It also has to do with potential consequences related to disclosing information in a public forum. I’m inclined to agree with the author on this one; if you face personal risk by disclosing your identity along with sensitive information, why disclose it in a public medium like a blog? The problem with that, as the commenter “Tony” pointed out, is that “anonymity increases freedom.” Then again, does freedom that has to be anonymous really count as freedom?

…I’m not sure where I’m going from here. Thoughts?