Dr. B.'s Blog - Research and Writing

Happy Blogiversary to Me! (blogging metatheory)

Sun, 14 Aug 2005 11:38:10 -0400

As cheesy as it is it's true. Today is my blogiversary and Dr. B.'s Blog and I are celebrating our 4th!

4 years ago I started my first official blog. 2 years before that on October 10, 1999 I started blogging before blogging was cool. I was a fesh faced grad student keeping a writing journal online (with a webcam) to track progress of my dissertation writing.

Lately, there's been discussion on one of the professional listserv of whether or not teachers who use blogs should blog...my answer is hell yeah. I may be biased, but I think that we can't effective teach with a technology unless we know how it works mechanically, theoretically, and pedagogically.

We teach by example, they learn by practice. The two of those things together make the answer to the question "Do we have to blog with our students?" a resounding "hell yeah!"

No offense to anyone, but more and more it feels like folks wanna do things in the classroom in order to be cool without thinking it through, fully theorizing, or even necessarily knowing what they are doing. It is for that reason that I continue to mentor incoming GTAs year after year. I want them to know why they do what they do so that they can do it well.

Hell I've wasted plenty of time playing with new technologies that I thought had pedagogical value before I chucked them out. You gotta play with it yourself before you spring it on students. You gotta know that it will work for you . Just because it worked for everyone else damn sho' don't mean it'll work for you. We have to realize that all teachers are not the same.

:slowly puts the soapbox back under the desk

Happy Blogiversary to Me!

Links I've Been Following Today

Mon, 12 May 2008 15:59:49 -0400

Funny Indexed post

A Stuff White People Like that (as usual) can be applied to the entirety of mainstream America

Clay Shirky's talk on Web 2.0

New Wiiware download, Lost Winds. Really digging the new downloads of games and demos for the DS bought a 2 GB SD card to accommodate my coming addiction.

Learning environments research on virtual environments

What Lisa bought me for my birthday

What I gave her

What I bought myself this weekend

This will catch you up on how I have been spending (most) of my net time today. Now don't you feel enlightened?

Critical Thinking is the Key to Success! (aka Professor Layton and the Curious Village)

Sat, 01 Mar 2008 01:01:20 -0500

Don't you hate when you write a long post and it gets lost in the ether. Here's my attempt to recreate it before I go to bed.

So I've been playing a lot of Professor Layton and the Curious Village on my DS before I go to bed at night and I find it amusing that "Critical thinking is the key to success!" is one of the professor's key phrases. As a teacher, it would be great if all of my students thought that way, right?

Professor Layton is a lot like Brain Age with a narrative. You solve a series of puzzles to get clues from the villagers. The game offers an interesting cast of characters including the sloppy detective, the beautiful lady in distress, the flamboyant servant with purple lip(stick) to match his purple suit who interjects "Woo Hoo" in a Tourettes-esque manner during his speeches, matronly little old ladies, and an assortment of village idiots.

Oddly enough all of the villagers have puzzles that they want you to solve (and they can't solve them for themselves). You need the clues that they give you to solve a series of mysteries. There are disappearing artifacts, a murder, kidnappings, and more to come I am sure. I have finished 4 or 5 chapters of the game and the puzzles are starting to get a little challenging (either that or it's the cold medicine that I've been taking at bedtime). What is (so far) obviously absent from the game is word puzzles. Professor Layton 2 has already been released in Japan and a third is the works so hopefully the the developers at Level-5 will pull in some wordsmithy types to develop some word puzzles!

Additional game features?

In addition to the clues that you get from the villagers for solving the puzzles you can also earn money (picarats) that can be used to buy bonuses at the end of the game.

You can download new puzzles every week via the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection.

Wednesday Gaming @ GDC

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 02:53:26 -0500

While I spent far too much time touring the Expo at GDC I played a lot of games as well. Want to know what I played? Here's a quick list and my 5 word maximum first reactions!

Hellgate London- Really Liked It

Crysis- Liked It

Spore Creatures (DS-Pre-release)- It could grow on me

Wii Fit- Strangely addictive (and the Nintendo guy got me to hula hoop in public!)

Dishwasher: Dead Samurai (XNA community game for XBLA)- Definite Download

Little Gamers (XNA community game for XBLA)- Definite Download

Penumbra:Overture- Not for me

Warriors Orochi (Pre-release for the PSP)- A hack & slash feast. Gots to get me some of that!

Bionic Commando (watched a demo)- A Black, male, Lara Croft with dreads...not really my type of game this one.

Fez- A GDC Indie favorite...a cross between Echochrome and old school platformer

Tuesday GDC Notes

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 00:51:44 -0500

On Tuesday I went to sessions from both IGDA and the Serious Games Summits. You'll find those notes below the fold. :-)

GDC Day 1: Afternoon

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 21:34:06 -0500

So day one is over and here are my notes. You can find them below the fold. Now to find some food.

GDC Day 1: Morning

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 15:44:04 -0500

well the morning of day one is official in the bag! i made it through almost the whole morning before my body decided that food would be necessary to keep my blood sugar up and I had to sneak out before the last morning session, but 3 out of 4 ain't bad, right? I'm posting my notes from the a.m. below the break for those who are interested in what when on in the Serious Games Summit today.

Playing at Research?

Sun, 03 Feb 2008 02:29:12 -0500

ContraCostaTimes.com - Laptops log middle school students on to learning

The 17 sixth-graders in the Westhampton Beach Middle School classroom sat at tables, staring up at their teacher. In front of each was an IBM laptop, screen slanted down. "You're going to have to figure out how you think King Tut died," Cindy Hart said to her social studies students. Screens went up, fingers tapped keyboards and ear buds emerged from backpacks. Students skimmed a news story, clicked through photos, watched a video clip and visited an interactive Web site about the Egyptian boy king. "It's better than just looking in a textbook to find answers," said Ricky Wagner, 11, who received the assignment from his own teacher in a classroom down the hall.

More interesting to me than the fact that these students are using the internet to learn ancient history is how they get to the information that they need to complete the assignment. I am more and more interested in the paths that students "instinctually" take to do research. This can be fruitful stuff. I want to see where they go first, what tangents they take,how they multitask...in essence the work-play that they do.

Late night musings :-)

Back!

Tue, 27 Nov 2007 00:29:38 -0500

We are back from vacation and back in the swing of things. I am spending the week playing catch up with the our job search, considering applying for a study in a 2nd discipline program (or taking some some design and programming classes if that doesn't work out), and doing a Kairos review.

There is so much to do and so little time to do it. In the meantime I have been playing My Sims and Paper Mario for fun and contemplating the online the online space that accompanies Webkinz. I knew I should have bought the hairy frog at the airport when I saw them on sale!

Friday's Post

Sat, 10 Nov 2007 20:42:40 -0500

It's still Friday somewhere, right? Yesterday I had a great workshop with some of the student's from Dene Grigar's DTC program. We worked on storyboarding and machinima. The students worked really hard and did some good projects! I miss production. I really want to find some time to do more production in my own life!

It's Still Thursday Here

Fri, 09 Nov 2007 02:30:29 -0500

I do love the Pacific Northwest. I had the afternoon off so I spent some time walking around downtown Vancouver. I found a very cute little yarn shop where I did just a little shopping and then went to a coffee and crepe shop owned by the yarn shop owner's daughter.

I gave a talk on race in video games (MMO)RPGs mainly at a local art gallery and I think it went quite well. I was questioning the wisdom of putting a bull in a china shop (or me in an art gallery) but I think it went well. There were lots of great questions and there was good intersectionwith Sue Thomas' talk on the relationship between nature and cyberspace (check out her new project The Wild Surmise .

Staying on Track

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 01:57:45 -0500

Back in my cozy hotel room (where there is heat...unlike my house back in IN) after spending the day talking to folks about narrative and storyboarding and doing very cool activities that involved stick figures and Sam & Max. Ended the day with dinner and Heroes with Dene and John...be very jealous!

Safe and Sound

Sun, 04 Nov 2007 22:47:47 -0500

I have arrived in Vancouver, WA safe and sound and am blogging quickly before heading out to dinner. Gotta come back and go over my notes for my presentation on storyboarding in games tomorrow. I am looking forward to it and now have a good use for the pictures of Dragon's Lair and Sims storyboards that I took at the Game On exhibit. Hmmmmm, I wonder if that was legal...oh well, at least it was for a good cause!

Under the Wire

Fri, 02 Nov 2007 22:59:31 -0400

Just under the wire I am blogging for the 2nd day in a row. I have spent the evening pack for my trip to WSU-Vancouver where I will spend the next week doing a whole lot of talking about video games and game development. This promises to be fun. Alrighty then back to watching the Lakers game and doing some packing!

Jim Watson Has Mad Cow Disease

Sat, 20 Oct 2007 13:12:18 -0400

Now this won't make much sense if you don't watch Boston Legal. William Shatner's character, Denny Crane, is a crazy, dangerous, but amusing character who clearly has Alzheimer's but only claims mad cow. He shoots at homeless people, accosts, women, and makes inappropriate racial remarks.

Now don't get me wrong. I don't think that Watson is either innocent or funny. He is clearly a racist nutbag who has lost his fucking mind. Alzheimer's has settled in and he no longer knows his usual cronies (who he's been sharing these viewing with all of his life) from the media. Doesn't anyone else think that it's interesting that he's only started going public with these comments in (aborting fetuses with gay genes, stupidity as a disease, etc) in the last 10 years? Yep, 70 is a good age for nutbag's mind-mouth barrier to break down.

When you think about it doesn't it make sense that a racist nutbag with a strong belief in eugenics would devote his life to mapping DNA? This is a perfect example for our students (and for us) of choosing research areas that we are deeply invested in so that we do solid work. Nobel laureate nutbag was probably pretty sure that he would be the one to map the human genome and be able to zap out gay, black, and stupid genes at the very least!

The sad this is that in this vein of thinking Senor Nutbag (because I am sure that he would want to be among the "Latin lovers") must now either go and stick his head in an oven or OD on Viagra since he has become one of the inferior/damaged brood.

Nutbag's apology and story at CNN.com

Watson, 79, an American who won the 1962 Nobel prize for his role in the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA, told the Sunday Times he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours, whereas all the testing says not really."