One of our students Joel Clemens gave a demonstration of his impressive fourth year project, Virtual Wiiality Redux. He used common consumer components like the Sony SIXAXIS controller, which has motion sensing, to create an virtual reality system. In the picture above you see me with the helmet (with the SIXAXIS velcroed above) experiencing the 3D space (a version of our lab with a gaping chasm below my feet.) The strange broom thing was Joel’s solution to tracking where I am in the space. It has a small bowling ball with rollers to capture movement. The broom “floor mouse” didn’t work as well as the head tracking set, which was very responsive. With hackers like Joel and cheap motion tracking controllers, DIY VR may be a real “wiiality”. Check out his extensive web site.
Two of my students have been getting attention for an original senior thesis they did for Multimedia. Calen Henry and Jacob Karsmeyer created a mod for Half-Life 2 to explore game physics. You can get the mod and read their essay on the history of game physics on the web site the created, Half-Life: Havoc. As of today, Sunday, April 13th they are ranked 5th on Mod DB. Kotaku has also blogged their project which seemed to have started a long thread about whether one can trust downloads not to have viruses (and some comments about the writing.)
The Global Voices Online site has a story on Part-time Lecturers and Suicide that matters. A number of humanities lecturers have committed suicide after spending years in part-time sessional work with no promise of a professorship. Would we know if we had a similar situation here in Canada? Increasingly we are dependent on sessional teaching to cover courses as we handle budget cuts by not hiring tenure-track or even just contract faculty. My guess is that a few departments may get to 50% of their teaching being done by part-timers. Why is this? Sessionals, hired one course at a time, are a cheap way to get quality teaching, especially if the sessionals are led to believe they might eventually get the coveted positions. Full time faculty benefit because we can keep our research positions while letting help for a fraction of our salary. At what point should we be honest with ourselves and admit that a university cannot afford tenure track faculty for teaching and deal with the effects by creating teaching positions that have some stability instead of stringing on recent graduates. Is Korea ahead of us in confronting the desperation of part-time faculty? Will it take a suicide for anyone to notice here?
It won’t come as a surprise that libraries are getting into gaming, whether to support game studies by making games available as they do books, or using games to teach information literacy. I came across na nice conference video report by Tom Peters of the American Libraries Association (ALA) TechSource Gaming, Learning, and Libraries Symposium in 2007. I like how the video report is edited. It is a bit short of content, but it shows the atmosphere and people.
I’m less convinced by games to teach library and information skills. Here are some I’ve found:
Quarantined: Axl Wise and the Information Outbreak is from Arizona State and lets you play a student, Axl, who works for the student newspaper and who has to figure out why the university is quarantined. It seems rather a lot of irrelevant puzzles for a little bit of simulating searching for information, but could be fun enough.
I’ll Get It and Within Range are two games from Carnegie Mellon, neither of which are much fun, but that may not be the point.
I’ve been talking with Kevin Kee at Brock about the logic of serious games or educational games. I’m tempted to say that games can’t by definition be both playful and serious. I gave a paper to that effect at Playing the Gallery, but Kevin is convincing me that games are sophisticated enough a phenomenon that there can be all sorts of planned learning. I think the National Film Board The Cyber-Terrorism Crisis site (which Kevin was involved in) might be a good example of a playful web site for learning, though parts of it are no longer working. I’m certainly convinced that designing games can be serious work through which learning happens. I also accept that there are things one learns through playing like “problem solving”. I just find games created to teach certain skills, like how to file books, are neither games nor particularly good at teaching.
Stay tuned, Kevin and I are writing a dialogue where I will get to be a curmudgeon on this issue.
Compare the announcement of KAUST (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology) KAUST’s Unique Vision to John Maeda’s vision for the Rhode Island School of Design, risd’s next president. KAUST will be a new university with a large endowment that is for graduate students only. RISD is a design school that has just hired one of the leaders in design and technology away from MIT’s Media Lab. They are both exciting developments, but different in so many ways. Here is part of the vision of the new president of KAUST:
to conduct high impact research unconstrained by disciplinary boundaries, to create a new ecosystem for research unfettered by organizational strictures, and to build meaningful partnerships across communities, cultures and continents. (President’s Acceptance Message)
Thanks to Alex for the KAUST link and to Shawn for the RISD link.
Carnegie Mellon is going global with their Masters in Entertainment Technology program. They have a campus in Adelaide, Australia and are adding new ones in Japan and Singapore. The High Concept is project based learning where people from an arts or technology background learn to work together and deepen their understanding of entertainment technology. It has the virtue of weaving arts and computing students together rather than segregating them.
The “high concept†behind both the Entertainment Technology Center and the Masters in Entertainment Technology degree is that we are based on the principle of having technologists and non-technologists work together on projects that produce artifacts that are intended to entertain, inform, inspire, or otherwise affect an audience/guest/player/participant. The masters degree is focused on extensive semester-long project courses. This focus allows us to tackle the much larger challenge of effectively bringing together students and researchers from different disciplines.
We do not intend to take artists and turn them into engineers, or vice-versa. While some students will be able to achieve mastery in both areas, it is not our intention to have our students master “the other side.†Instead, we intend for a typical student in this program to enter with mastery/training in a specific area and spend his or her two years at Carnegie Mellon learning the vocabulary, values, and working patterns of the other culture.
Is global programs simultaneously offered in different regions an answer to distance education? After all it is cheaper for instructors to move than students. Could faculty find they are part of multi-university programs instead of affiliated with one university?
The site also has a good list of similar programs elsewhere, which I think is generous. More programs should be honest about the alternatives.
So I’m teaching a course on digital games and I’ve asked students to create a sculpture of an historic character from videogame history in Second Life. In the picture above you can see the Sculpture garden that Dave Marhal has created on the McMaster Library island where students will place their sculptures. When its done, I hope you will visit.
The idea of a departmental knowledge base is also a good one. I assume the idea is that this can be an informal place for public knowledge faculty, staff and students gather.
YouTube – A Vision of Students Today is another video from the Digital Ethnography folks at Kansas State. (Remember Your Moment of Inspiration?) This one has students holding up pages or laptops with messages about students, the web and learning. The script is on the Mediated Cultures site. I love the creativity of how they are using video in class and for class. It feels participatory – by students, for students, and about students. Digital Ethnography indeed.
Carnegie Mellon is going global with their 