The new enclosure movement | Harold Jarche

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The new enclosure movement | Harold Jarche.

I’m really quite conflicted about this. On the one hand I believe we should share our skills and knowledge so others can benefit. I think this is especially true for academics, who benefit from public funds. This is true even in private universities, and even when funded by private companies because they all get grants and tax breaks. Directly or indirectly, a great deal of the research done in academic institutions is funded by the taxpayer. Therefor, they should share when they learn with the people who paid for it.

On the other hand, I am not currently employed by any university. Should I still share my research? My leaning is to  say yes, but I still have bills to pay like everyone else, so now what?

There’s also that central piece there in the image: trust.

When it comes to instructional design and teaching, I have had quite a few innovative ideas. I have made illustrations and examples that took many, many hours to create. Over the years I have put a LOT of my ideas out there. Then people started taking my ideas without crediting the source. I don’t mind sharing my ideas, really I don’t…. but I HATE people who take my ideas without giving me credit for having had them…. and I especially hate it when people start to pass my ideas off as their own.

So now I watermark my pictures (I have literally 1000’s of pictures on our farm website). I put copyright notices on everything. I fully realize that this does not stop people from stealing, but at least it’s something.

I used to teach a data architecture course, and I had a great many notes and examples. They used to be publicly available, but then other instructors started using my stuff without asking or crediting me. Along with the usual thefts from places like China and India, I was getting regular requests for assignment solutions. What pushed it over the edge was when other people in my own department started using my stuff without asking.

In the last year I’ve started playing around with gamification in one of the courses I teach (correction: TAUGHT). I’ve been looking around, and there are precious few Education courses that deviate from the standard: read these papers; discuss them; do an assignment or two; write a paper. Everything has a rubric (whether it makes sense to have one or not), and everything is marked that way it’s always been marked. Mine is different (more on that in subsequent posts).

I DID have the whole course publicly available (except for student work of course). I don’t anymore. The problem? TRUST. I know people who would take my ideas and “forget” to mention where they came from. Sad, but true.

What’s the solution? If anyone has any ideas, please feel free to share!

 

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Gamasutra: Adrian Chmielarz’s Blog – You Have an Idea for a Game – Here’s Why Nobody Cares

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http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/AdrianChmielarz/20130509/191987/You_Have_an_Idea_for_a_Game__Heres_Why_Nobody_Cares.php

Gamasutra: Adrian Chmielarz’s Blog – You Have an Idea for a Game – Here’s Why Nobody Cares
The following blog was, unless otherwise noted, independently written by a member of Gamasutra’s game development community. The thoughts and opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of Gamasutra or its parent company. Want to write your own blog post on Gamasutra? It’s easy!
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New Report on the value of Game-based Learning

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New Report on the value of Game-based Learning

Game-based learning: latest evidence and future directions
The role of video games in teaching and learning is a source of debate among many educators, researchers and in the popular press. Detractors and advocates have been discussing the influences and the …
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How not to write a PhD thesis | General | Times Higher Education

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How not to write a PhD thesis | General | Times Higher Education.

Many of these apply to papers submitted for publication, generally. I have lost track of how many game papers I have reviewed where the authors had an idea, did what appeared to be a quickie Google search in their own discipline, and concluded that their idea was NEW! This seems to be ESPECIALLY true in Education.

  1. Submit an incomplete, poorly formatted bibliography.
  2. Use phrases such as “some academics” or “all the literature” without mitigating statements or references.
  3. Write an abstract without a sentence starting “my original contribution to knowledge is…”
  4. Fill the bibliography with references to blogs, online journalism and textbooks.
  5. Use discourse, ideology, signifier, signified, interpellation, postmodernism, structuralism, post-structuralism or deconstruction without reading the complete works of Foucault, Althusser, Saussure, Baudrillard or Derrida.
  6. Assume something you are doing is new because you have not read enough to know that an academic wrote a book on it 20 years ago.
  7. Leave spelling mistakes in the script.
  8. Make the topic of the thesis too large.
  9. Write a short, rushed, basic exegesis.
  10. Submit a PhD with a short introduction or conclusion.

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Gender Bias Found in How Graduate Students Review Scientific Studies | Computing Education Blog

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Gender Bias Found in How Graduate Studen2013-02-19 @11-36-04ts Review Scientific Studies | Computing Education Blog.

Looks like we still have a ways to go….

From Mark Guzdial’s Blog:

We’ve heard stories like this before, about the implicit bias in how STEM professionals are judged.  This one is striking because the participants are graduate students, not established researchers who reflect years of experience in the community.  These are the new researchers, and they’re already biased.

The research found that graduate students in communication — both men and women — showed significant bias against study abstracts they read whose authors had female names like “Brenda Collins” or “Melissa Jordan.”

These students gave higher ratings to the exact same abstracts when the authors were identified with male names like “Andrew Stone” or “Matthew Webb.”

In addition, the results suggested that some research topics were seen as more appropriate for women scholars — such as parenting and body image — while others, like politics, were viewed as more appropriate for men.

These findings suggest that women may still have a more difficult time than men succeeding in academic science, said Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick, lead author of the study and associate professor of communication at The Ohio State University.

“There’s still a stereotype in our society that science is a more appropriate career for men than it is for women,” Knobloch-Westerwick said.

 

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For all those who think the country life is simple,… or easy.

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For all those who think the country life is simple,… or easy.

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The Best Anti-Piracy Measure Ever – IGN

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As an experiment, the developer decided to release a cracked version of Game Dev Tycoon onto torrent sites along with the genuine version, pre-empting piracy. “The cracked version is nearly identical to the real thing except for one detail,” explains Greenheart on its website. “Initially we thought about telling them their copy is an illegal copy, but instead we didn’t want to pass up the unique opportunity of holding a mirror in front of them and showing them what piracy can do to game developers.” After a few hours of building up your virtual game studio, this message appears:

The Best Anti-Piracy Measure Ever – IGN.

What a great idea. Sadly, media has the greatest effect confirming already held beliefs and the least effect in changing them (source: Henry Jenkins III).

Or maybe… people are just getting thicker:

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Where I’ve Been Online (April 2013)

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This is a record of places I have bookmarked. (I also post them to Diigo, but since I don’t like to leave stuff only in the cloud, I am also keeping a copy here.

  • Careers in Games – Skillset

    Careers in Games Within these pages you can find information on careers in the computer games industry – how to get in, get on and get the most out of your skills. Read job profiles and interviews with practitioners to find out what it takes to work in games, and read our guides to the industry to see how you could fit in. You can also access our careers pages or call the careers helpline to get further advice. Visit Creative Skillset’s careers services for more information.

    tags: careers games

  • How Can MOOC Platforms Be More Dynamic?: A Comparison of Major MOOC Providers – moocnewsandreviews.com

    This past winter, like many prospective students, I browsed through hundreds of college course descriptions to find subjects right for me. Yet, unlike other students, I wasn’t enrolled in a degree program. Instead, in February, I became the MOOC equivalent of a full-time student. I enrolled in five course (listed here), from five different universities (over 1,600 miles apart), attending lectures weekly, submitting assignments almost daily and interacting with other students on a regular basis.

    tags: platforms dynamic comparison providers mooc

  • Machinations: Game Feedback Diagrams

    Welcome to the Machinations page. Machinations is a conceptual framework and diagram tool that focusses on structural qualities of game mechanics. The tool you see below is an interactive tool to make and play Machinations diagrams. If you scroll further down, you can find links to the Machinations Wiki, Forum and few tutorials explaining the concepts, as well as links to many of the ready-made examples. Machinations version 4 is now out. It is fairly compatible with version 2 and 3 files, files from older versions can be read, but need to be checked. Also some of the concepts have changed slightly. The version 1 is still available here.

    tags: game diagrams tool design game_design

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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