So Far, So Good

Not much new to report. The class is going well. I am actually just trying to be helpful. There are only 3 others in the class and I help w/ multimedia. I should be presenting today. Introducing some cool free and almost free technology. Stuff to use in a classroom, work, and home.

Still struggling with my ed. plan. I want to be efficient and get through a degree as quickly as possible but there are some things I want to learn and do that don’t fit well. I need to talk w/ Dr. R today and see what he thinks.

Started reading my Spanish books again. I’ll spend an hour everyday working on it.

Cohort

I met some of the other students in my cohort group yesterday. The two ladies I met are very nice. There are actually 5 of us in this group but 2 did not show. It looks like everyone is confused about what the cohort is and why they are doing it. It is strange and very sad that there seems to be so little flow of information on how this system works.

I feel that C & I should have provided the group with a short orientation where they meet with someone who can explain the purpose and intent of the cohort system. No one in the group seems all that sure of what it is for. I find that I am the most informed on the subject because I have the benefit of connections to the program.

The first F2F session was interesting. It was the Intro to Multimedia class… wait a minute? I thought you were a multimedia designer, what are you doing taking that class? Simply, the program would not let me out of it. I know… I also find it strange that a program to teach educators how to integrate technology is so inflexible, but I could spend a whole day talking about this again. Anyone who knows me, knows that I cannot bear inflexibility in education.

I shall talk about this another day.

The class was good. The teacher is going to allow me to help with technology introduction and maybe teach a little Flash in place of some assignments. It should be fun.

F2F Starting This Week

I start my 2 week face 2 face sessions this week. I’m not doing the Multicultural Ed class, so I will only be away in the afternoons. I will blog on how it goes later.

What is important… to me and my *edumacation*

Simply and immediately, language acquisition. I am very interested in multicultural education, but for me, it is going to start with language and cultural immersion.

I spoke earlier about the Bafa-Bafa activity. Here are some conclusions:
1. What seems logical, sensible, important and reasonable to a person in one culture may seem irrational, stupid and unimportant to an outsider
2. Feelings of apprehension, loneliness, lack of confidence are common when visiting another culture
3. When people talk about other cultures,they tend to describe the differences and not the similarities
4. Differences between cultures are generally seen as threatening and described in negative terms
5. Personal observations and reports of other cultures should be regarded with a great deal of skepticism
6. One should make up one’s own mind about another culture and not rely on the reports and experience of others
7. It requires experience as well as study to understand the any subtleties of another culture
8. Understanding another culture is a continuous and not a discrete process
9. Stereotping is probably inevitable in the absence of frequent contact or study
10. The feelings which people have for their own language are often not evident until they encounter another language
11. It is probably necessary to know the language of a foreign culture to understand the culture in any depth

This last conclusion is something I believe in strongly. I cannot know every culture deeply but there are two cultures I want to explore for personal and professional reasons.

I am not dismissing the multicultural ed class here. I just don’t feel it is essential at the moment. I will leave the subject to the experts right now. I don’t know enough. I am a student with aspirations on world domination… in a good way.

peace

Creativity

I am always interested in new ideas. I also feel like I have to constantly up the creativity factor in the field I work in. Maybe an impossible task but this interview seems to point at work we can do to boost our creativity:

How To Unleash Your Creativity

I like Julia Cameron’s “morning pages”—three pages of longhand writing about anything: “I don’t like the way Fred talked to me at the office”; “I need to get the car checked”; “I forgot to buy kitty litter.” They don’t look like they have anything to do with creativity, but in fact, as we put these worries, which are sort of a daily soundtrack for most of us, down on the page, we are suddenly much more alert, aware, focused and available to the moment. And we begin to see that we have many creative choices.

Creativity is problem solving. Serious/educational games can foster this kind of thinking. In play and dreaming we sometimes visualize creative solutions. I remember reading somewhere about dreams being the way the brain processes and stores information, forms memories and connections. I’ll try to find that.

A Guitar Resurrected

Had a chance to visit my guitar last week. It has been in surgery. The headstock broke off (yes, I know) several years ago. I kept it in storage because I could not find a luthier crazy enough to accept the job.

Well, I finally found one crazy enough! Peter J.

At first, we were just going to glue the head back on… use some boat glue and see if the piece of junk sticks. Well, then we find out that the guitar is actually a really good, rare guitar. Peter decides to try and repair it properly.

The short of it… it is going well. It looks beautiful. I expected it to have a big foamy cauliflower of Gorilla Glue holding it together. Maybe a carriage bolt holding FrankenGuitar’s head together. Instead, it looks lovely. He gave it a nice clean as well and revealed the fact that it was made out of nice rosewood with a beautiful fretboard.

How to Prototype a Game in Under 7 Days

Gamasutra - Feature

Not really a technology but I thought a good article on rapid prototyping. Here is the cutout list to give you an idea of what is inside

Handy Cut-Out List!

Setup: Rapid is a State of Mind

• Embrace the Possibility of Failure - it Encourages Creative Risk Taking
• Enforce Short Development Cycles (More Time != More Quality)
• Constrain Creativity to Make You Want it Even More
• Gather a Kickass Team and an Objective Advisor – Mindset is as Important as Talent
• Develop in Parallel for Maximum Splatter

Design: Creativity and the Myth of Brainstorming

• Formal Brainstorming Has a 0% Success Rate
• Gather Concept Art and Music to Create an Emotional Target
• Simulate in Your Head – Pre-Prototype the Prototype

Development: Nobody Knows How You Made it, and Nobody Cares

• Build the Toy First
• If You Can Get Away With it, Fake it
• Cut Your Losses and “Learn When to Shoot Your Baby in the Crib”
• Heavy Theming Will Not Salvage Bad Design (or “You Can’t Polish a Turd”)
• But Overall Aesthetic Matters! Apply a Healthy Spread of Art, Sound, and Music
• Nobody Cares About Your Great Engineering

General Gameplay: Sensual Lessons in Juicy Fun

• Complexity is Not Necessary for Fun
• Create a Sense of Ownership to Keep ‘em Crawling Back for More
• “Experimental” Does Not Mean “Complex”
• Build Toward a Well Defined Goal
• Make it Juicy!

What is reality? What is virtual reality?

I have been thinking about the alternate realities that people enjoy in WoW and 2nd Life, etc. The hardcore users of which are becoming less fringe. People that I respect: very intelligent, reliable, productive, admirable; are members. They still express a bit of embarrassment talking about their pleasure in these pursuits, but why? It is no stranger than the D & D nerdsessions we had as youths(some of us anyway).

I found this quote of PKDs in an old article. I twittered the name of the article for googling(what crazy words I use these days!)

The pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides taught that the only things that are real are things which never change… and the pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Heraclitus taught that everything changes. If you superimpose their two views, you get this result: Nothing is real. There is a fascinating next step to this line of thinking: Parmenides could never have existed because he grew old and died and disappeared, so, according to his own philosophy, he did not exist. And Heraclitus may have been right—let’s not forget that; so if Heraclitus was right, then Parmenides did exist, and therefore, according to Heraclitus’ philosophy, perhaps Parmenides was right, since Parmenides fulfilled the conditions, the criteria, by which Heraclitus judged things real.

Later in the article he discusses the creation of virtual worlds breeding fake fakers. Worth a read.

This is how I feel today

Mother’s Day 1974

Distributed Cognition

In the pursuit of my path through grad school, I have been given the term Distributed Cognition. Thanks, Pamela.

people think in conjunction and partnership with others and with the help of culturally provided tools and implements(Salomon).

What is it? Proponents argue that cognition is not to be found within the head only; rather cognition is distributed over other people and tools. From everything I have read it does not seem to be defined very well as a theory. Rather, it seems like a broad educa-psycholo-technical framework.

I like the idea that a facet of our thinking is not only within ourselves but embedded within our world, animate and inanimate objects. It has that “Ghost in the machine” vibe.

From a designers POV I hope that this is so, because I am trying to both, get people to think about a particular topic and not think about how I am doing it. Did that make sense?