At Playing with History I met Jeremiah McCall, an innovative teacher at the Cincinnati Country Day School who uses games extensively in his teaching. I was struck by how creative and low tech he was in adapting anything at hand to teaching through play. He has just launched a new web site, Historical Simulations in the Classroom.
Jerome McGann and Rice have published the Proceedings of The Shape of Things to Come — Rice University Press in record time. The conference took place in March and the essays are now up on line and coming out in print. (See my blog entry and conference report on the original conference.)
“Certain questions,” Jerome McGann writes in his introduction, “are especially insistent: How do we sustain the life of these digitally-organized projects; how do we effectively address their institutional obstacles and financial demands; how do we involve the greater community of students and scholars in online research and publication; how do we integrate these resources with our inherited material and paper-based depositories; how do we promote institutional collaborations to support innovative scholarship; how do we integrate online resources, which are now largely dispersed and isolated, into a connected network?”
My paper is titled As Transparent As Infrastructure. I argued that there has been a turn to infrastructure as a way to get sustained funding for things, but that don’t really know what infrastructure is and we are tempted to turn into infrastructure things that are still being negotiated.
Susan pointed me to a hilarious YouTube video about Brontë sisters action figures. The authors of it write,
This was a fake commercial we made in 1998 for a series of educational shorts about action figures based on historical figures. Its educational value was somewhat suspect. It was never aired.
This week I’m at the Mind the Gap: A Multidisciplinary Workshop Bridging The Gap Between High Performance Computing And The Humanities. My conference report is going up at philosophi.ca : Mind The Gap. The twitter feed will be at #mindgap.
For those interested, there is a fair amount of information about Facebook and privacy. See, for example the EFFs timeline of Facebook’s privacy policies. They also have a video (and instructions) on how to opt out of Instant Personalization. That’s if you can’t bear to quit entirely.
Matt McKeon has an animated visualization of the change in privacy from 2005 to now.
Jeff Jarvis has a nice long blog post on Buzz Machine on Confusing *a* public with *the* public. He makes the point that what we liked about Facebook was that we could control who our public was (who our circle of friends is.) He argues that Facebook confused our willingness to share information with a small public with a willingness to share with a large and corporate public. That is the promise of a social presence site – that it lets you control who you want to see what. Ning gets it, though the site is slow. I’ve used Ning to create family private networks.
From Twitter I discovered Facebook’s Gone Rogue; It’s Time for an Open Alternative on Wired.com by Ryan Singel.
Facebook has gone rogue, drunk on founder Mark Zuckerberg’s dreams of world domination. It’s time the rest of the web ecosystem recognizes this and works to replace it with something open and distributed.
Ryan Singel is right. It is time to replace Facebook. They have decided that privacy is overrated and that their audience doesn’t care. They may be right, but those of us who do care need to vote with our feet (or fingers.) The first step is deactivating Facebook.
I’ve stayed on Facebook, despite the fact that I rarely check it, because old friends have found me on it (and it sends me an email when they befriend me.) It seems that my generation all started joining Facebook a couple of years ago and through it I got in touch with old school friends. That’s the power of social sites like Facebook – their value to us grows as more and more people join. When it was just youth on Facebook it was more of a curiousity, but now that it has become popular across generations, it is harder to quit. After all my long lost California cousins now stay in touch with me on Facebook. Thus Facebook has us where we are afraid to lose our online social presence if we close our account, which is why they can start monetizing our privacy. Singel has convinced me that they have deliberately made that choice.
For this reason I think we have to start deliberately deactivating our accounts, despite the social outcomes (which, to be fair, are not that great when you really think about it.) Deactivating is a message itself about privacy and the social that you send to others on Facebook. If enough people deactivate, the value of Facebook drops for others, which would probably panic Facebook into changing their policy. Imagine if word got out that people were dropping off Facebook – just the perception that it was no longer “the place to be” would threaten its business model. Social media depend on the perception of growth, for which reason they should fear a movement to drop out.
Now I have to figure out how to gracefully quit Facebook.
Next week we are running a workshop at the University of Alberta on the subject of bridging the digital humanities and high-performance computing (HPC). This workshop will bring together teams that will prototype ideas for HPC digital humanities projects. We will have Stephen Ramsay and Patrick Juola as guest speakers. It should be an excellent mix of formal and informal meetings. Above all, Megan Meredith-Lobary developed a neat graphic for the event. See Mind the Gap: Bridging HPC and the Humanities.
I’m at a conference organized by Kevin Kee called Playing with Technology in History. I am writing my conference notes at, philosophi.ca: Playing With History. The theme of the conference is gaming to teach history.
The first day is an unconference where we first decided what we wanted to do. Bill Turkel brought all sorts of fabrication stuff. We had sessions about different types of games.
Brain training games don’t train your brain according to a study by Adrian Owen of the Cambridge Medical Research Council.
The participants were subjected to a barrage of cognitive test before and after the experiment but the study found that they showed no improvement when compared to a control group which just buggered about on the Internet.
The story come via BBC.
Sean pointed me to a video (abvoe) explaining the working of a real Turing Machine built by Mike Davey in Wisconsin. It is worth noting that Turing didn’t (to my knowledge) every try to make the machine he described for theoretical purposes. Also worth noting (as is clear in the video) is that there are actually 3 settings for each position: nothing, 0 or 1.