Build Your Game Design Skills
DESIGN For Cayuga students who share
DEVELOP a common interest and curiosity in
DEPLOY videogame design and development
D3 Interactive invites students to undertake five secret missions in Spring 2012. Agents, who choose to accept these challenges, will participate collaboratively to level up their design skills. No coding or design experience required.
Missions include…
- (Feb 6)—Working Your Game Core
- (Feb 20)—Taming War without Frontiers
- (Mar 5)—Uncovering Passwords to Lost Enigmas
- (Mar 19)—Melting Digital Metal into Physical Gold
- (Apr 2)—Raising the Dead
Drop by L-218 and talk with Professor Bower to receive your missions.
www.cayugagames.wikispaces.com
Angel Training Off the (2.0) Map
Cayuga provided Angel training today for our online, hybrid, and web-enhanced courses. Two bits of information that struck me as useful. The first was not a surprise.
- Angel will be replaced within the next couple of years with another LMS. Since Blackboard purchased Angel and is likely to replace it with one of its products, more discussion needs to happen. And I’d encourage everyone with experience in online learning to take part.
- The second was an excellent reminder for those “writing” with new media or looking to add select widgets to your webtext. To find the perfect app, the Map of the World 2.0 can be browsed using the Mosaic or searched more strategically using the application reviews.
Moodle is in.
Kairosnews posted the following music video yesterday. It’s a student project by Chandler Birch, Josh Stephens, and David Perkins out of Taylor University published to YouTube on November 26, 2010.
After playing the video a few times, I find it persuasive through two means: 1) it taps into the irritation people feel for Blackboard Inc because of their LMS’s complexity and confusion, and 2) the music isn’t half bad. As one comment said, “My kids don’t even know what [Moodle] is but they won’t stop singing your song.” The creators can’t hide that this is a student project, but using the most of their resources, they still clinch some of the moving features for this music genre.
Do you find it persuasive? Do you find it persuasive if you’ve never used online course tech?
I’ve written elsewhere that if one looks, there are lots of open source options for online learning.
Digital Distraction Debate (& Possible Evidence)
We know attention is as important to writing as it is to most any practice, and a lot competes for our attention these days. But are we more distracted than in the past? The discussion has gone something like If you are distracted constantly, you become dependent on the stimuli in your environment–digital life and multitasking have “shallowed” our ability to attend to the world and our very bodies.
Or There’s no such thing as distraction–being distracted means we pay attention elsewhere. We’ve always multitasked, and we’re smarter for the engagement it provides.
Debate can help frame our concerns, and we can pick sides in this. But without getting out of our skin or applying multiple tools, we can’t know the accuracy of our perceptions. A Feburary 2, 2010 Front Line found MIT students thought they were more productive when juggling tasks, but their reaction times slowed. Thus, we’re beginning to test how multitasking is or isn’t impacting us.
This Sunday’s N
ew York Times Article, Your Brain on Computers: Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price, focuses on a forty-something multi-tasker, not simply the youth as is usually done. Care to check yourself for distraction? There’s a test provided.
Admittedly, I found the test exceptionally easy. But instead of congratulating myself on my abilities or doubting the test’s validity, I couldn’t help think the test was easy because it was a stripped down skill set I’ve acquired by playing video games.
Care to weigh in on this? It’s an ongoing question: what does digital life mean for writing? I’d be most interested in hearing what you think are the best tools to test our arguments.
New Media Vids
Here are a couple of new media videos to consider. The first explains what Google sees as the next step from email, but they’re really talking file-sharing and e-committees.
The second is similar to what we’ve seen before, making the case for social networking as legitimate communication.
Social Media Revolution
Considering Academia 2.0, Writing, & the Community College
Filed under: History, invention, New Media, postprocess, rhetoric
“It’s not about timing. It’s not about keeping it short. It’s about relevance.” –Mike Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Kansas State University
Wesch is right. Information is not scarce. But even in an information age, knowledge making can be. Writing is more than a container for knowledge; it can help processing, development and production of new knowledge. For this reason, writing to learn and examining expression might present an attractive study for college students. Students crave forums for expression; they want to be heard. Learning information alongside learning to persuade is powerful and rewarding. Personal purpose and goals make information relevant, but understanding that we have to talk to one another within different social structures is some of what rhetoric and writing provides in its educational long-term.
If we accept the Academic 2.0 argument about the importance of teaching the “how” and not merely the “what” of information, we embrace the importance of writing and rhetorical studies. We can then work to implement communication activities beyond the lecture and can accept communication’s interdisciplinary habits in addition to its residing within the domain of the English department.
That said, community college students often face a wider digital divide than assumed under Web 2.0 arguments. It’s incorrect to assume all students have been naturalized to blogs, wikis, mashups, or mobile networks. This is not to say community colleges give up. The opportunities to write and research with these technologies are likely to accelerate, and ignoring the latest developments because not everyone knows them will only widen the technological divide. However, it is important to acknowledge what many (considering that the majority of students in the country are community college students perhaps I should say “the majority of”) freshmen are not digital natives. And if their professors must immigrate to the digital too, there is a tendency to go with what is most comfortable: chalk and talk, lecture and note take, and read/discuss.
While I see nothing wrong with these classroom approaches in general, academia needs to consider seriously Wesch’s earlier observation that The Machine is Us/ing Us, for our media platforms rewrite how we compose and make language (and therefore knowledge).
Or as one of the comments under the Academia 2.0 video says,
Academia is dead! learning can be done faster and better outside of universities, renting an office space and committing yourself to learning a subject has far less distractions...
Community colleges’ missions center on learning and job training, so I say, Why not put the media machine into the curriculum? It’s influencing how people gather information and make personal, civic, and business decisions. Academica can become more relevant if entry points to the network are practiced in and outside the classroom.
So blog on…
2009 Cayuga Forum–Blog & Wiki Workshop
Rationale for using Web 2.0–In the humanities, Classical Greece gets a lot of attention. Western civilization leapt forward democratically and culturally in part because writing interacted with speaking to produce new ideas and fuel debates. Plato favored speaking and doubted writing much like some people treasure books and paper but doubt webtexts today. But just as writing interacting with oral language produced some of Western culture’s greatest thinking, web-network communication like Blogs and Wikis may be pushing us toward a new explosion of knowledge. Since many students are not digital natives to technology, they need opportunities to immigrate that we can provide as they learn course content.
2009 Full-time Faculty Survey (excludes English) on Writing Expected at Cayuga
How much do multimedia, mobile texting, blogs, and wikis matter for today's students? How will their use prepare them?
Class Management (one-to-many)–The most familiar way to use a blog is similar to a classroom lecture or a syllabus where the teacher communicates unidirectionally with his or her students.
- Have your students forgotten the titles of the required books or lost the course syllabus?
- Share media and encourage tangential learning–Don’s Psych blog as an example.
Engage Web 2.0 & Many-to-Many Communication Networks–here, we may not be able to compete with the interactivity of social networking, but we can…
- Encourage interactivity and student expression beyond the classroom.
- Collaborate in groups.
- Use student material for discussions.
Audience Questions? (Ask yourself, what would you like to do with Web 2.0 tech?)
Cayuga Links
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Admininstration
Blogs
D3 Interactive, Game Writing Club (Currently Inactive)
Ink Lines