Dr. B.'s Blog - My Teacherly Self

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!

October Fever

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 09:41:14 -0400

I haven't posted a lot lately so I thought I'd break the silence by posting about why I have a love hate relationship with October. This is the month when all of the much awaited games start coming out for the holiday season. While there are a gazillion new big budget games coming out this month I am only in for 3. Yeah, 3 to the tune of about $200+ (damn!) In order they are:

1. Fable 2 (already playing the pub games on XBLA)
2. Fallout 3 (the game that I bought the PS3 for all of those months ago)
3. Little Big Planet (while everyone else is uber excited for this one I am still a little lukewarm, but I need something else for the PS3, right?)

In other news, if you hadn't heard it yet Ninetendo is forcing me to buy a 3rd DS. Yep, they are releasing the Nintendo DSi which is going to be thinner, have a bigger screen, improved WiFi, and a camera! Nintendo has thus far been the only company to get me to buy the same system multiple times (no matter how badly I want PSPs in various colors). Damn them!

In non-what I want for Christmas type news. Micro$oft has teamed up with the NYU system to form a Games for Learning Institute. They've got $3 million to "cover the first three years of G4LI's research, which will focus on evaluating video games as potential learning tools for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects at the middle-school years." Geez, how can I get down with that?? It sounds like a great project. Do you think that we can convince M$ that they need to do a separate study on Mid-West kids and start a consortium with Indiana universities?

And with that I will take my leave...for now :-)

Tangential Learning and Video Games

Sun, 21 Sep 2008 14:20:17 -0400

Very cool YouTube video on Tangential Learning in video games. Definitely something that can be shared with New Media or Computers in Language and Rhetoric course. There are a few others (by the same guy) that are interesting, like video games and sex. Definitely worth checking out.

Social Bookmarking and Annotating on Crack

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 13:12:58 -0400

Daisy twittered about Diigo today and that was all I needed to draw me away from what I should have been doing and into something that I would have rather have been doing. It is like del.icio.us meets Google notebook, meets instant messenger 2.0. I have been playing around with it this morning and it looks pretty cool.

They now have a free premium account just for teachers that will allows them to interact with and follow their students research. Definitely something worth checking out!

That Time of Year

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 08:35:45 -0400

It is once again that time of year when I do too much traveling and not enough blogging. After C's there was the Shapiro Writing Festival and now the AP Review Commission. School ends next week so after projects have been graded I will once again feel a bit more human (I hope!).

I have been knitting a bunch of fun stuff just for the hell of it and Meredith is bugging me to open an Etsy shop, but I think that is just because she covets my mad knitting skills and wants all of the cool stuff that I knit.

I haven't been gaming nearly enough! I am currently playing Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass on the DS and Bioshock on the XBox 360. Bioshock has me really wanting to re-read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged which I haven't read for over 20 years and I have no memory of, but the game is supposed to be based on the novel so I want to see for myself! Since it isn't available for the Kindle yet I may actually have to take that monstrosity on the plane with me to ATL.

Oh yeah, I got an Amazon Kindle about a week or so ago and can I just say that I love it?? I haven't been able to get home delivery of the NYT since I moved out to the sticks 2 years ago and now it gets delivered to me every morning again (straight to the Kindle) so that I can read it with my coffee. This electronic paper technology is pretty friggin' sweet and surprisingly easy on the eyes. The books are fairly inexpensive ($9.99 or less for most fiction) and I don't have to find somewhere to store the damned things when I am done reading them.

Now for the downside...the copylefter in me hates DRM. When I am done reading the book I can't just give it to someone else and the Kindle format (but it does also read pdfs and mobi files) is most definitely proprietary. There is also the question of the actual placement of the buttons on the machine. There are 2 next page, 1 previous page, and one back button and they are all awkwardly placed. They are impossible not to hit by accident at least once when you are holding the thing. And then there is the ambiguous naming of "Back" and "Previous Page". They are a bit confusing. While PP literally takes you to the previous page in the document and not the previous page that you were looking at and Back takes you back to the last storefront or "library" page that you were looking at. There had to be a better word or phrase to use for that button, but at least it is tiny compared to the other button. All things considered, I have definitely consumed the Kindle Kool-Aid and you'd have to fight me for and then pry it out of my cold dead hands and I just don't think you are that bad.

Gotta go teach now, I'll come back add links later.

Briefly

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 20:44:31 -0400

Just a brief announcement. Penny Arcade is sponsoring a scholarship for students interested in going into the games industry. It is not field specific, and I am really interested in seeing if they award it to someone in the humanities :-)

via GamingAngels

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.

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 :-)

Snow Day Good Intentions

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 14:37:13 -0500

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Knowing that we were supposed to get an insane amount of snow I thought that I would use today to play catch up with the ever growing stack of dissertation prospectii and chapters waiting for my comments (none are over my 2 week self-imposed deadline). Instead I slept late.

You all might remember that I have a history of insomnia...well it's back. Even with no coffee and a max. of one diet soda a day I haven't slept more that 2 or 3 hours a day (naps included) in weeks. Well I finally fell asleep at 6 this morning after watching hours of debates and political pundits on CNN. I actually got 5 hours of sleep! Since then I have spent hours staring at the snow and reading blogs. Now I'm thinking about knitting. I think that the insomnia has drained my will to work. So I guess I'll have to find that will in the bottom of a coffee cup!

Today I am going to find some time to catch up my work journal and look at least one prospectus/chapter. I think that I am going to go for the one with the 20 attached to it. Since a couple of folks emailed me to let me know that they were attaching bribes to their work I'm going to be looking for those. ;-P I really like having the work journal, but I have fallen a bit behind lately. Now I can catch up on that so that I know what work I've been doing.

Hopefully this update will keep Pepper from deleting me from his RSS feed as threatened to do in class yesterday. I haven't been blogging a lot, but I have been bookmarking lots of things that I want to blog about...that has to count for something, right? Damn maybe we're back to that road to hell, eh?

You know that I am really interested in the Wii hardware and I really want to play around with it's use in work/education contexts, but I found the notion of a Wii whiteboard a cheap and practical option. As I get ready to do a presentation on Web 2.0 I've been thinking about Twitter a lot...ok, the fact that I am Twitter junkie has me thinking about Twitter a lot. That being said if I can think of a pedagogically sound reason to use Twitter in the classroom I can feel accomplished.

Preparing for the New Year

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 13:46:17 -0500

Yesterday I went out buying Moleskine notebooks and such. A few I needed to complete Christmas gifts and I bought a a 2008 planner for myself so that I can better keep track of my academic work. I spend tons of time doing stuff that seems to fall through the cracks and I find myself trying to figure out what I've actually done. Odd, since things seem to get done. I just want to know for my own purposes.

It's strange when our invisible work is even invisible to us!

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!

Don't Run With Grammar Drills, You Might Put An Eye Out!

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 06:21:19 -0500

A new study, funded by Carnegie, just published it's results on a study on grammar drills and comprehension/retention. While we have known since the 60's that grammar drills don't work this new study has actually found that there is actually a negative correlation. Yet more of a reason to teach grammar and mechanics only in the context of larger pieces of writing. You can download the study report here.

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!

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!