ENGL 680M: New Media

This was a blog I wrote earlier this summer (for my own personal blog) on Haraway's notion of the cyborg. I've read the article a couple of times...well and I just wanted to post what I have written here.

This post has nothing to do with the reading or the project due this week. Instead, I need to pass along something that happened to me last Friday.

So here's a big question. What have you been playing? Of course it is expected that you have been playing something so what is it that you have been playing?

my friend mandi and her husband raymond came to visit for the weekend--yay--and while they were here, we took the obligatory trip to our local gamestop. raymond owns a gaming business. while we were in there, a few nerdy looking boys were playing various games around the store, including a dude playing guitar hero like mad--with no sound!! first of all, is that cheating? second of all, i'm really intrigued by the sound element of video games. so i'd like to take a quick poll: is the sound on a video game essential to your success/enjoyment of the game?

Hey all,

Linda Bergmann just forwarded this article to me and I thought I would toss it out there for wider consideration. What do you think about some of the claims about what Avatar selves do? In part the author seems to be talking about how the avatars both undermine the academy's bank (knowledge bank) image, but also seems to imply that in the process we loose some of our ethos. The article is interesting, and I want to fight with it a little, but I can't tell why...

http://insidehighered.com/views/2007/10/16/conway

Peace! MO!

Juliette mentioned to me last week that Yahoo News posted information about Nintendo sending out free "jackets" for Wiimotes. My sister just sent me the link (lazy me just waited for more information): http://www.nintendo.com/consumer/jacket/jacketrequest.jsp

I made it to the Games Forum's last panel (on using games and virtual worlds for education) and got to watch a pridful moment for rhet/comp folk. The talks were all interesting (Sarah Robbins is always charismatic, entertaining and the best Second Life eductation proponent one can ask for) but the question and answer period was my favorite part. Our own Morgan R, Cat, and someone else (apologies for the loss of memory) asked some pointed access questions that had been across the board not covered in the actual talks.

The panel I attended was “Brain, Behavior, Cognition and Gaming” with Ben Stokes, Alice Robison and William Watson. There were a number of themes that came out of the presentation that I found particularly interesting. The first was access, though not access in the same way we’ve been talking about it throughout the course. A second, related theme that I found interesting was the potential for gaming to build empathy in students; though none of the panelists discussed this directly, they all implied it in some way or other, and Stokes touched on it in his discussion of access.

We have been discussing our classrooms and our students, particularly their anxiety with writing, their inability to transfer their ideas from their heads to their papers, their lack of or different mode of critical thinking--the list could continue.

Long live the era of doing.