Where I’ve Been (to Feb 2 2013)

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  • Carbs were key in wolves’ evolution into dogs – latimes.com

    Long ago, some brazen wolves started hanging around human settlements, jump-starting events that ultimately led to today’s domesticated dogs. Now geneticists say they have identified one of the key changes that turned wolves into the tame, tail-wagging creatures well-suited to living by our sides — the ability to digest carbohydrates with ease.

    The report, published online Wednesday by the journal Nature, found signs that dogs can break down starch into sugar, and then transport those sugars from the gut into the bloodstream, more efficiently than can wolves. Comparing dog and wolf DNA, the authors pinpointed several changes in starch and sugar-processing genes that would have made early dogs better able to digest the scraps they scavenged from dumps in early farming villages, helping them to thrive as they gave up the independent life of the pack to entwine their lives with ours.

    “That food was obviously the same kind of food that we were eating,” most likely a mix of roots, porridge and possibly bread along with bones containing meat and marrow, said study leader Erik Axelsson, an evolutionary geneticist at Uppsala University in Sweden.

    tags: dogs animals domestication evolution

  • How I Failed, Failed, and Finally Succeeded at Learning How to Code – Atlantic Mobile

    What happened instead is that I burned out after a week. The text itself was dense and unsmiling; the exercises were difficult. It was quite possibly the least fun I’ve ever had with a book, or, for that matter, with anything at all. I dropped it as quickly as I had picked it up.

    Remarkably I went through this cycle several times: I saw people programming and thought it looked cool, resolved myself to learn, sought out a book and crashed the moment it got hard.

    For a while I thought I didn’t have the right kind of brain for programming. Maybe I needed to be better at math. Maybe I needed to be smarter.

    But it turns out that the people trying to teach me were just doing a bad job. Those books that dragged me through a series of structured principles were just bad books. I should have ignored them. I should have just played.

    Nobody misses that fact more egregiously than the American College Board, the folks responsible for setting the AP Computer Science high school curriculum. The AP curriculum ought to be a model for how to teach people to program. Instead it’s an example of how something intrinsically amusing can be made into a lifeless slog.

    tags: learning how to code atlantic programming

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Where I’ve Been Online (to Jan. 26 2013)

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  • SCVNGR’s Secret Game Mechanics Playdeck | TechCrunch

    Guide To This Document: This list is a collection of game dynamics terms, game dynamics theories that are interesting, useful and potentially applicable to your work here at SCVNGR. Many of them have clear applications within the SCVNGR game layer (progression dynamic, actualization), many of them don’t… yet (status, virtual items). Many of them are just interesting for your general education on game dynamics theory (epic meaning, social fabric of games). Many of these game dynamics concepts are well known and are sourced from all over the internet and from researchers such as Jane McGonigal, Ian Bogost and Jess Schell and articles on gamasutra (which I highly recommend reading). Others are used exclusively internally here and won’t make any sense outside of HQ. Along with a link to this document, you will have received these dynamics in a set of flash cards. Please memorize those. If you’re on the engineering / game-design team you can access our internal game dynamics visualizer (with the most up to date dynamics) through your account. Download the SCVNGR app for iPhone& Android (if you haven’t already) and start playing. Find places where these game dynamics exist or places where you could implement them by building on the game layer using our tools, or others.

    tags: gamification gaming mechanics game

  • The 22 rules of storytelling, according to Pixar

    On Twitter, Pixar storyboard artist Emma Coats has compiled nuggets of narrative wisdom she’s received working for the animation studio over the years. It’s some sage stuff, although there’s nothing here about defending yourself from your childhood toys when they inevitably come to life with murder in their hearts. A truly glaring omission.

    tags: storytelling writing pixar screenwriting rules

  • Here’s the Real Reason There Are Not More Women in Technology – Forbes

    In the past, technology jobs were viewed by women as populated by men in basements, working alone, as an organ of the computer. Harvey Mudd’s President, Maria Klawe compiled her own research and offered a more substantive explanation, “We’ve done lots of research on why young women don’t choose tech careers and number one is they think it’s not interesting. Number two, they think they wouldn’t be good at it. Number three, they think they will be working with a number of people that they just wouldn’t feel comfortable or happy working alongside.”

    But, in today’s world, those views are officially over. Technology careers are interesting, women are great at it, and they get to work alongside extraordinary men and women. Being technology illiterate just doesn’t cut it anymore. It can’t when so many more job functions require so much more technical know-how.

    That’s my point. It’s not just that we have to encourage more women into technology related jobs; it’s that we need to show all women as Intel’s CIO Kim Stevenson put it to me, “the impact a technical background can have on a woman’s career, and the economic potential that accompanies it.” Stevenson, agreeing with Bates adds, “Often women don’t understand what options are available in tech fields – and that stops them.”

    tags: technology women careers

  • Engineers are cold and dead inside, research shows • The Register

    The computing students, once gender effects had been eliminated, actually came out basically the same as medical and caring types: they had turned out to be normal, warm, caring human beings. It was in fact the physics-based classical engineers who were dead inside.

    Obviously many Reg readers would fall more into the computing group, and as such need not fear that others find them cold, detached and emotionless.

    We’re aware that we also have many readers in the physics-based professions, but we needn’t worry about them as they obviously won’t care what anyone thinks of them or be able to see why they should

    tags: research register engineers

  • The Document: ‘A Bill of Rights and Principles for Learning in the Digital Age’ – Technology – The Chronicle of Higher Education

    ‘A Bill of Rights and Principles for Learning in the Digital Age’

    The document, drafted by a dozen educators brought together by the MOOC pioneer Sebastian Thrun, proposes a set of “inalienable rights” that the authors say students and their advocates should demand from institutions and companies that offer online courses and technology tools. (See a related article.)

    tags: document higher education bill of rights mooc

  • Workshop 18-CoGames – CTS 2013

    SCOPE AND OBJECTIVES
    The video game industry has grown from being a small industry that produces products mostly for young boys to a huge industry targeting the whole population. The development of video games is by definition a multi disciplinary process involving several professions, ranging from artists to engineers. The AAA game titles produced today require rather large teams with a high level of competence (technology, programming, networks, architecture, etc.), creativity and skills. Compared to traditional software development, game development is characterized by rapid changes of hardware, high performance requirements, and software requirements that are unstable and hard to predict. Video games are also used for other purposes than pure entertainment, e.g., for education, training, exercising, and simulation. In addition, game developers are focusing more and more on games where players must collaborate to achieve goals in the game. Collaborative games introduce challenges for the game developers to handle technical issues, performance issues, network issues, distributed environments, sharing of information, and heterogeneous networks and devices. Further, collaborative games open new areas and applications for games to be used for new purposes that can benefit from more than just being fun. As players expect that games can be played anywhere, the integration of mobile gaming, hand-held and online-gaming on PDAs, smartphones, consoles and PCs is becoming ever more important. This integration introduces new challenges and leads for new opportunities.

    tags: workshop conference

  • Scale of Universe – Interactive Scale of the Universe Tool

    Educational site

    tags: science universe interactive astronomy scale flash

  • Values At Play

    Values at Play™ investigates how designers can be more intentional about the ways in which they integrate human values into their game-based systems.

    tags: Design Education Games game videogames

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Report: International tests severely misrank U.S. students | eSchool News

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“In today’s news, a new report says that international tests like PISA are misleading, and the U.S. actually ranks much higher on the global scale–in some cases as high as Finland–once you re-weight data on social class.”

Report: International tests severely misrank U.S. students | eSchool News.

Seriously? SERIOUSLY? You’re saying that if you ignore your poor and disadvantaged, then the US ranks well. So, your rich kids do as well as average kids elsewhere.

Are you seriously saying it’s OK to dismiss and ignore your poor? Shame, SHAME on you!

This is one of the big reasons why I never seriously considered moving to the U.S.

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BBC News – Viewpoint: Computer code frees us to think in new ways

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BBC News – Viewpoint: Computer code frees us to think in new ways.

Very well said. There’s lots here to like and agree with:

To date the reasons behind the changes have seemed very skills-based, as if instilling particular skills will lead to growth in business and the economy.

Really, though, teaching about computers should go beyond mere literacy, beyond focusing on a particular set of skills, and emphasise the fluency that true innovation demands.

…

We need to understand how to have ideas that can be framed to suit the internal workings of computers – and the things they are best at. We need to be able to express thoughts “in computer”. Those are the skills needed to innovate, to invent, with new technology.

…

We need more people who can think not faster, but think new thoughts.

The training that fosters that should be about learning to think in this new world; learning what is possible. Cultivating a sense of smell, and a sense of balance, to exist in the code-assisted world.

We will always need the engineers, but we also need the others: artists, journalists, politicians who understand the prostheses and exoskeletons of this digital world; of using the tools around them as rocket boosters to take us to strange and new worlds, not just more profitable ones.

Teaching children the value of programming may be more useful than classes focused on specific IT skills

Technology education, then, should not just be about teaching skills, it should really be about instilling a set of values. A way of thinking, taught as part of a broad, diverse curriculum.

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What happens when professionals take on-line CS classes: When Life and Learning Do Not Fit « Computing Education Blog

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Another great bit of info from Mark Guzdial’s blog:

Home About Computing Education BlogWhat happens when professionals take on-line CS classes: When Life and Learning Do Not FitJanuary 9, 2013 at 9:46 am Leave a comment The journal article on the research that Klara Benda, Amy Bruckman, and I did finally came out last month the ACM Transactions on Computing Education. The abstract is below. Klara has a background in sociology, and she’s done a great job of blending research from sociology with more traditional education and learning sciences perspectives to explain what happens when working professionals take on-line CS classes. This work has informed our CSLearning4U project significantly, and informs my perspective on MOOCs. We present the results of an interview study investigating student experiences in two online introductory computer science courses. Our theoretical approach is situated at the intersection of two research traditions: distance and adult education research, which tends to be sociologically oriented, and computer science education research, which has strong connections with pedagogy and psychology. The article reviews contributions from both traditions on student failure in the context of higher education, distance and online education as well as introductory computer science. Our research relies on a combination of the two perspectives, which provides useful results for the field of computer science education in general, as well as its online or distance versions. The interviewed students exhibited great diversity in both socio-demographic and educational background. We identified no profiles that predicted student success or failure. At the same time, we found that expectations about programming resulted in challenges of time-management and communication. The time requirements of programming assignments were unpredictable, often disproportionate to expectations, and clashed with the external commitments of adult professionals. Too little communication was available to access adequate instructor help. On the basis of these findings, we suggest instructional design solutions for adult professionals studying introductory computer science education.

via What happens when professionals take on-line CS classes: When Life and Learning Do Not Fit « Computing Education Blog.

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Where I’ve Been Online (Jan 5 2013)

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  • About This Project | Adjunct Project

    About This Project

    Two-thirds of the faculty standing in front of college classrooms each day are off the tenure track. But getting information about the salaries of this army of adjuncts and the campus working conditions for them has proven nearly impossible. This site represents the evolution of a simple spreadsheet created in 2012 by Joshua Boldt, a composition instructor in Athens, Ga., to track salary information of adjunct professors around the country.

    tags: project adjunct academia teaching

  • Study: Gamers Have Friends, Healthy Relationships – Lindsay Abrams – The Atlantic

    The players, most of whom turned out to be male college students, reported spending over $200 per year on video games, and dedicating an average of 20.5 hours per week to playing them. But how much time and money was spent, found the researchers, was in no way related to the gamers’ social success.

    tags: study gamers friends relationships

  • The Lives They Lived – NYTimes.com

    This issue is meant to be a celebration of life, not an expression of grief. But since the tragedy
    in Newtown, Conn., grief has been unavoidable. Our wish for those who knew and loved the 20 children
    and 6 adults killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School is that they are held up by those around them
    until the day comes when they might feel something other than terrible loss. And our wish
    for the rest of us is that we all might help turn despair into hope.

    tags: nytimes

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The significance of plot without conflict – still eating oranges

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The significance of plot without conflict – still eating oranges.

COOL.

I’ve been looking for something like this for ages!  I’ve never been entirely convinced that conflict is essential, and now I have a way to describe the alternative: Kish?tenketsu

Kish?tenketsu contains four acts: introduction, development, twist and reconciliation. The basics of the story—characters, setting, etc.—are established in the first act and developed in the second. No major changes occur until the third act, in which a new, often surprising element is introduced. The third act is the core of the plot, and it may be thought of as a kind of structural non sequitur. The fourth act draws a conclusion from the contrast between the first two “straight” acts and the disconnected third, thereby reconciling them into a coherent whole. Kish?tenketsu is probably best known to Westerners as the structure of Japanese yonkoma (four-panel) manga; and, with this in mind, our artist has kindly provided a simple comic to illustrate the concept.

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Please refrain from the use of digital native again | From experience to meaning…

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Please refrain from the use of digital native again | From experience to meaning….

I like this. This is the response I’ve been seeking for those Educationists who are forever repeating these myths. Often those who generate more heat than light here are those who profess to be experts, namely the Educational Technologists. And, really, one would think we should believe them when they say today’s youth are different.They’re supposed to know. Unfortunately, far too often, they themselves understand so little about the technology in which they claim expertise that they genuinely don’t know.

Blind men and elephant3

It’s the old blind men and an elephant joke. All they can “see” is the surface of the tiny bit they can touch. If you have convinced yourself that using something means you understand it, then, sure, it looks very much like the current generation “understands” technology. And if you yourself don’t actually understand more than superficial things about it, why would you think differently. After all, it’s hard to know what you don’t know, right?

‘Cept, of course, if you claim to be an expert in technology, then, you really should know. If you actually did understand tech as opposed to simply how to use tech, it would be obvious that the following are NOT true:

  1. Possessing new ways of knowing and being. A persisting claim within digital native discourse is that there is an urgent need for educational institutions (administrators, educators) and parents to recognize and adapt to digital native learners who possess new learning styles or different ways of knowing and being. This viewpoint sees current problems with education as a part of old ways of schooling (i.e., old ways of being and knowing), often associated with digital immigrants.
  2. Driving a digital revolution transforming society. Another dominant claim is that there is a pressing need to acknowledge and accept a digital revolution transforming society. Many argue that this revolution is especially evident within and important for higher education.
  3. Innately or inherently tech-savvy. Within digital native discourse, students are seen as innately or inherently tech-savvy, desiring and using digital technology in all arenas, as opposed to older educators who lack tech-savvy.
  4. Multi-taskers, team-oriented, and collaborative. Net generation students are often said to be multi-taskers, team-oriented, and collaborative.
  5. Native speakers of the language of technologies. Purported as native speakers of the language of technologies, digital natives are often seen as having unique viewpoints and abilities, especially regarding their unique aptitude for the language of technology.
  6. Embracing gaming, interaction, and simulation. According to digital native claims, gaming, interaction, and simulation (i.e., multi-linear, visual, virtual environments) are both embraced by and well-suited to the Net generation.
  7. Demanding immediate gratification. The Net generation is often portrayed as demanding immediate gratification, with short attention spans and no tolerance for delays. However, even some digital native proponents dispute this argument, such as Tapscott.
  8. Reflecting and responding to the knowledge economy. Proponents of digital native notions often present a strong relationship between needs of the Net generation and the knowledge economy (i.e., students as consumers, demanding customer satisfaction), specifically within the context of the Information Age.

If, on the other hand, we give up on these convenient claims, we are left having to examine the failings of education system itself, including the Educationists. That isn’t nearly as much fun.

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