Global and Civil Learning

Here is an interview by a McMaster student with my new colleague Henry Giroux that puts well the challenge we face in teaching civic and moral responsibility. (DV) Rahmani: Interview with Henry Giroux.

McMaster is capable of attaining the highest quality of excellence in the traditional sense, but I think it is also providing a new model of excellence, one that measures a university in terms of how it addresses the needs of civic society on both a national and global level. There is a certain worldliness about McMaster, a sense of being in the world, being attentive to the civic quality of a larger global public sphere. This means, in part, taking seriously what it means to educate students to be critically engaged, civic citizens of the world.

JFK Reloaded Game

Glasgow based company Traffic launches JFK assassination game according to this story from USA Today. (“Company launches JFK assassination game”, 11/23/2004)
The game JFK Reloaded sounds like a mini-game where you are Oswald trying to shoot JFK three times. Traffic claims this is to interest people in history, Ted Kennedy’s spokesman calls it “despicable”. Would there be such a fuss if it was a book being released? It is the first-person character of games that bothers us – the idea of kids practicing doing despicable acts – which is what Plato was bothered about in the Republic when he banned the poets.

CANARIE and Video Conferencing

I’m at the CANARIE Advanced Networks Workshop 2004 today after wrapping up at The Face of Text. I gave a talk about TAPoR – the token humanist at this conference. Most of the talks in my session are about video conferencing over the net and telepresence.
My sense is that “access grids” for shared network meetings are close to being usable. The ViDe Videoconferencing Cookbook was suggested a good starting point if you want to try a virtual meeting.

Video Games and Instructional Revolution

Video Game Studies and the Emerging Instructional Revolution by Joel Foreman in a new online education publication Innovate is a short survey of some of the issues around games studies becoming an academic and taught field. He makes these interesting points:

  • To study games will take significant funding. Game engines are expensive to make as are effective games.
  • He makes the case that serious simulations (games that are serious?) will come when we get a critical mass of students trained and these might be effective instructionally.
  • Modding will be important and may the form that game studies happens.
  • His main point – about revolution – is that game studies may not be just another program – it could lead to games/simulations becoming a serious form of instruction. Game studies could trigger a revolution thoughout the academy.

Some quotes

The emergence of video game studies would be no more or less significant than any other curricular expansion unless, as many believe, it is the precondition of something far greater: an instructional revolution.
…
Since the Gutenberg era, students have been trained in the productive skill (writing) that is responsible for growing and maintaining the dominant media. Likewise, current and future generations of students trained in video game technologies will advance a computerized, pictorial culture

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Google Scholar

Google Scholar is a beta service that is aimed at academics. In their words,

Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.

Continue reading Google Scholar

Zoomify an Image off the Web

Zoomify is a cool utility for providing interactive zooming and panning of high-resolution images. It is a specialized visualization tool useful to any with high-rez images that they want to serve.
I heard about this from a paper by Pamela Asquith and Peter Ryan on Kinji Imanishi Archive where they use it. This paper was one of the many excellent papers at The Face of Text – a conference here at McMaster.

Bill’s spam is 4 million a day!

The Guardian reports that Bill Gates gets 4 million emails a day (David Teather, Friday Nov. 19, 2004). I’m glad someone gets more spam than I do.

The next time you’re sifting through the mortgage offers, cheap Rolex watches or dubious business proposals from Nigeria, spare a thought for Bill Gates. The Microsoft founder is the most spammed man in the world, with 4m emails arriving in his inbox each day.

Brian Cantwell-Smith was discussing the development of e-mail and made an interesting claim that some of its flaws can be traced to the way e-mail in the 70s was designed for people like the engineers who were developing it. As a result it doesn’t work well for someone who needs to have a secretary filter e-mail as the engineers were not managers and did their correspondence themselves. One could respond that it was exactly such a design that made the net feel democratic – even if you had staff there was no way to get around answering your own.