Notable moments at C&W

1. Jenn Fishman gets elevated to goddess status for pulling a french press and coffee out of her bag on Sunday when there was no coffee to be had at the conference. I was really in need of some caffeine.

2. Beer with Barbara Schneider at Circa Saloon, complete with the horrible sticky tables and surly, but sweet waitresses (much like sweet and sour chicken) that I have been nostalgic for.

3. Ethiopian food and crepes with Michelle, Pat, Will, and Lisa.

4. Monster ass irradiated baked potatoes at the Potato Place on campus.

We've been in Detroit since Thursday and I have seen some good sessions and some not so good sessions. But that's about par for the course, right? What I have been disappointed in is the attendance. There are a lot of folks who just didn't show even though they were accepted and some who never even thought about coming. I'm pretty sure that attendance is so low because it's in Detroit. Folks are afraid of Detroit. I don't know if they are afraid of the rumors or frightened by the thought of a true chocolate city. Afraid of being outnumbered the way us Black academic folk are at all of our professional meetings, in our departments, and many times in our own towns. To those folks I just say get over yourselves, your closed mindedness caused you to miss one of the greatest cities in the United States.

We are already hearing rumors of folks being "concerned" for their safety in New Orleans at Cs next year. To those folks I say again Get. The. Fuck. Over. It. Don't let your ignorance make you miss out on another of the great cities in the U.S. (ironically another chocolate city). NOLA (and Detroit) are no more dangerous that any large city in the U.S. They may be a little darker (and you know what I mean) than you are used to, but they are no more dangerous.

Ok, enough of my ranting. I'm going to bed. I'll put my notes up soon.

Edited to add: I just finished my last session so here are all of the notes that I took.

If you haven't seen this commercial for Super Princess Peach you need to see it!

Edited to add: See previous rants about Peach here.

Oh well, back to my C&W presentation!

Nothing professional like to blog about until I get my C&W paper done, but I have been knitting itty bitty hats from a book with the same name. They are too damned cute!

Purdue University will put alerts on Facebook | IndyStar.com

How stupid is this? Using this as a plan to notify students would assume many absolutely ridiculous things.

1. That students have access to a computer at all times.

2. That students are constantly logged into facebook, even when they are supposed to be paying attention in class.

3. That Facebook won't become obsolete ten minutes after being mainstreamed like every other social networking technology known to man.

What the hell are these people thinking?

Here's an idea for university administrators (here and elsewhere). We have 36K students and God knows how many faculty and staff members. Contact three major cell phone carriers. Tell them that we want to special Purdue package that offers all students 100 minutes a month with free nights and weekends with a basic phone (with the ability to upgrade phones and packages) for $10 a month. Wait for the companies to try to underbid each other. Here we are also making note of the fact that a good number of our students already have cell phones permanently attached to their heads.

At this moment what parent wouldn't work an extra hour or so, in the most extreme situations, to insure that their children were alerted in case of emergency? Maybe you can even agree to have some kind of parental block put on the phone so that the students can't run up ridiculous phone bills. Either way, it seems that the promise of upwards of 40K new customers would get most cell phone carriers excited.

Let's get it done folks!

Tengrrl sent me this link today because she wanted to make sure that I wasted valuable time playing games. Oh wait....I like playing games and it's part of my research, Nevermind. Thanks tengrrl! ‘Speare: The Literacy Arcade Game by the Canadian Apollo Games is basically a space shooter (much like space invaders except you don't get to hide behind barriers) where you destroy enemy ships in order to retrieve orbs that bear key words of a Shakespearian phrase that you are supposed to complete for that round. During each round you also receive a series of "transmissions" that give you Shakespeare themed trivia facts. Once you successfully complete each round you can then answer a series of trivia questions for additional points. Accumulated points can be used for ship and weapons upgrades.

I played the demo through and it kept my attention for a few minutes. The trivia facts were more interesting than the Space Invaders knockoff interface, but they definitely pulled you out of the narrative of the game in the attempt to build a Shakespearian meta-narrative. I'm not sure of what the proposed age range is supposed to be, but the ringing endorsements from a 13 year old student and a 6th grade teacher makes me think that the intended audience is middle school aged children. As a former elementary school teacher I am a bit skeptical of edutainment type games (even if the developers don't want to call it that) because children generally see through the thin level of entertainment very quickly. Oddly enough I think that 'Speare might actually grab the attention of a gamer for a few moments. The question is how do you draw in a non-gamer? One of the things that I noticed about the game really quickly was that there were a lot of transmissions coming through, but no faces to put with the voices. I wonder if adding a more "personal"/human touch to the game might be more friendly.

I also wonder about what happens if you die. Do you have to start all over again? You have a limited number of ships and you can earn more, but to be perfectly honest I am too damned competitive to actually keep dying so that I can see what happens when/if I run out of ships/lives. Someone else want to try out the demo and tell me what happens?

via TheStar.com -'Wherefore art thou (zap) Romeo?' by way of tengrrl

IN case you haven't figured it out yet, I am not your average girl gamer. I have never been a big Nintendo gamer. Lisa was always the Nintendo buff. We have always had the systems (consoles and handhelds) in the house. I would pull these games out at undisclosed times and play. Then I got the DS and all bets were off. There were great sims and classic RPGs. (Have I told you lately how addicted I am to FFIII for the DS?) I was hooked, but the console still not so much. I have just never been able to get into side to side platformers. I bought a Wii because I was fascinated with the interface. There have been some good party games for it. Things to draw non-gamers into the madness. And then there was Zelda a great RPG that allows you to wander around.

Yesterday I bought Super Paper Mario for the heck of it. Ok, I was trying to balance my grown up/child universe after having to purchase a washing machine (the most un-fun grownup appliance one can buy). Last night I popped SPM into the Wii at about 11:30 p.m. or so for a little recreational gaming (something that I haven't had much of a chance to do lately) and 5 hours later I dragged my dead ass to bed only after falling asleep with the Wii-mote in my hands. Can I just say that I love this game? It does still have elements of wakawakawaka side scrolling, but you can "flip" from 2D SPM platforming to 3D SPM RPGing. If you have a Wii you need this game. Be prepared though, the RPG-ness of the game makes it take a while. I spent a LOT of time pushing 2 to get through the dialog sections of the game. While it took me about 3 hours to get through the first full chapter with all of text it only took me a few minutes when I used the escape pipe to make it through beginning to end in just a few minutes when I didn't have to stop and talk to folks are re-trigger traps and doors. Now that the fun is over I am seeing how this game might be useful for my C&W and GLS presentations this year.

On to the controversial post. Not a post here, but a post over on joystick101 by Nathan Mckenzie on the macabre lack of transfer of violence and strategy in video games. Mckenzie wonders why IF video games teach gamers how to be offensively violent wouldn't it also make sense that they also learned defensive moves. So the question was in light of last week's VT tragedy “Why didn’t they just Zerg rush?” Macabre to say the least, but an interesting question for nutbags like Jack Thompson and Newt Gingrich, who blames video games and "liberalism" for the VT shootings. Yes folks this specific nutbag does want to be your president.

I didn't take very many pictures at the 4Cs SnB, but I did finally take them off of the memory stick. Here they are! I never cease to be impressed by the creativity of a bunch of Rhet Comp folks.

Pictures are below the jump. Click the title of the post to get the pictures.

Remember the bread that I was making on Sunday/Monday? Well I forgot to post pictures. It came out well. I am going to tweak the wheat recipe a bit and play around with add-ins for the white. Maybe I'll work with some whole grain white flour so it's at least a little healthy!

Here's the wheat:

Sliced:

Now for the white:

Sliced. The crumb and interior was much better for this one.

Now that I am posting pictures I am really wanting to make some more bread!

In case you haven't heard tomorrow is Orange and Maroon Effect Day.

On the next episode of Extreme Makeover Home Edition Insomniac Games makes a playable character of a young boy paralyzed in car accident for release in the new version of Ratchet and Klank for the PS3. How awesome is that? Video games and philanthropy...COOL!

Insomniac digitizes paralyzed boy into Ratchet and Clank Future :: via DESTRUCTOID :: Hardcore video game blog

With the aging of the Baby Boomers there is more and more of a demand for tools for maintaining or mental agility. My own mother was searching out a copy of the game. She didn't get it because she was chasing down the sale price...and no I didn't buy it for because I was offering up my old DS fat to the cause.

While Nintendo bills the game as neuroscience in their advertisements they back off and say that "it's just a game" when called to task for it.

A new article in Seed Magazine on games and the elderly brain brings Brain Age into question as a tool and concludes that while Brain Age is not what it claims to be there are software tools, like PostitScience available that do improve brain function for the elderly and schizophrenics. The problem is that the software is pricey and requires a PC. I would love to see more research done on games like Brain Age or see software developed for handheld devices like the DS and financially accessible to the elderly and poor.

Image from the Nintendo Brain Age site

via Seed: Mind Games

Luckily it seems that all of our colleagues in English are physically safe. My thoughts and prayers are with everyone in Blacksburg. We are going to ignore the madness of Fox News putting Jack Thompson on the air as a "school shooting expert" only to have him blame today's tragedy on video games. *sigh* God help us all.

This could be fun!

Edited to add: University wireless died half way through so I couldn't keep updating. I'm attaching a pdf of my notes.

Digital Game Based Learning (2001)
Don’t Bother Me Mom I’m Learning

MA Teaching
Taught HS Math
Ran a School
Games2train.com (serious training in a games environment)
Goal is to do a reading teacher game

Engaging Today’s Digital Learner

Education and Learning in the 20th

AFTRB- another fucking three ring binder

Training is top down. We decide what students will get and how they will get it

What’s different about the 21st century?
Change (world, students, and engagement, change, education)
Are you changing to meet these challenges.

Do you see education happening in the classroom or in the world?

Students are changing. Who are they? They are not little us’s anymore. Today’s younger learners are not the ones that systems and teachers were trained to teach.
Why?
5-10K hours of games
250K emails and IMs
less than 5000 hours of book reading (but not reading in general)
They taught themselves to live in this world.

Today’s students have tools and they have taught themselves to live in the digital world. They are hands on.

Today’s students want things to be fun.

(He does slip up and say that gamers create weapons in WoW)

Here’s what students tell us:
We don’t listen to them
Don’t engage, respect, prepare them for the future.
But we do bore them in classrooms.

2006 Pew 1/3 of college students admit to playing games during class.

The emerging online life of the digital native.
Things are headed toward a digital life. It behooves us as educators to learn all of these things even though they change as fast as we can study them. Students want community.

Non-gamers are usually shocked by the number of military recruitment ads found in video game magazines and on games websites. With the increasing popularity of online games mags and podcasts it would seem that recruitment ads in print mags would less effective.

The U.S. Army has signed a $2 million deal with the Global Gaming League website. GGL which runs competitive ladders for mostly military/strategy games seems to be the perfect venue for the Army, 18-24 year old males who are already interested in military strategy. The site brings in over 9 million gamers a month, 80% of whom are in the Army's target demographic. While most of the games that I see listed on the ladders are also games that are most appealing to my middle aged friends with the relaxing of age restrictions for enlistment in the last couple of years I suppose that works too.

Under this new deal the Army will open a new area of the site that hosts 15 new games and gives players a chance to participate in a monthly tournament for its game. According to Army marketing specialist, Rueben Hendell, gamers will be given the opportunity to "opt-in" for recruitment information during the registration process and only then will they be contacted by Arny recruiters. The Army sees this as an opportunity “to tell the Army story. It’s not all about combat. Being in the Army is about driving trucks, welding, nurses and computers. If we have an opportunity to tell the Army story, we may have better influence.” Maybe that's why there's no blood when you get shot in America's Army.

Discuss.

(via Serious Games Source)

soon to be cross posted over at j101

So I wimped out a bit on the bread. I made a 2nd batch with all white flour just in case the first loaf didn't turn out right. Better safe than sorry, right?

I've been thinking a lot about language acquisition lately. Lisa and I have been talking about learning Spanish. Not the academic classroom Spanish so much as conversational Spanish. Taking a conversational class somewhere in town would make good sense. At the same time I've been thinking about how to do this in other ways. Language acquisition through video games has always been an interesting idea to me. MIT grad Ravi Purushotma (06) and graduate student Dan Roy (07) have done work on using COTS game Grim Fandango (a personal favorite of mine from Lucas Arts) and The Sims 2 (EA) to teach Spanish and German respectively. It has long been my thought that COTS games are definitely the way to go when thinking about games in the classroom. Many games now allow for extensive modding and have the benefit of multi-million dollar development budgets. This is something that educational/ edutainment games don't have the benefit of.

as my granny would say. Yep, snow in April. The world is coming to an end. The driving rain of the morning turned to snow by the afternoon and the dog wouldn't go for my suggestion that he just stay inside and hold it until the weather changed. *sigh* The odd wintry mix has inspired me to do some cold weather cooking. I checked the deep freezer and found both chili and beef stew. Did some thinking and decided to mix up a batch of No Knead bread to serve up with some kind of soup/stew for dinner tomorrow. I used half whole wheat flour so we'll see how that turns out. Since this process takes about 24 hours total there will be no whipping up a new loaf if this one fails miserably. I'll have to run out and find bread at the store.

On a more scholarly note, as I start prepping for my C&W presentation I am struggling with the ethics of using game ROMS and emulators for research purposes. My talk is going to cover some hand held games and I can't think of any easy way to record game play that would make decent video. The only thing that I can think of is using emulators and recording the game play from my computer. So the question is...is it still wrong if I already own the game? If a ROM runs in the forest and no one is around to catch me doing it is it still illegal? :-)

First Don Imus started by calling the Rutgers girls "nappy headed hoes" and then folks all over the place jumped to his defense claiming freedom of speech and trying to divert attention by bringing up Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson's checkered pasts with racial slurs. Some idiots are even trying to blame rap music for Imus's comments. Yesterday NBC canceled Imus's show and today CBS fired his ass.

Now some idiot DJ in PA got fired because he made "nappy headed hoes" the phrase that pays and getting idiot callers to call in and repeat the phrase over and over again. Yes, of course he's sorry and claims that it was a stupid thing to do. Yeah, right. This has been a banner week for idiot DJs across the US.

What was most shocking about the whole thing is the fact that it took a day or so before anyone realized that "hoe" was also problematic. They got the racist thing, but not the sexist thing. When you put all of the words together it becomes more and more problematic. It's not racism and sexism independently, but it is racism wrapped up in sexism. It recalls images of enslaved Black women who are forced into lives of chattel and sexual slavery and finding the descendants for hundreds of years marked are "hoes". Oh shit, don't get me started!

Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday (April 11, 2007) at the age of 84.