Where I’ve Been Online (to March 9, 2013)

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  • Your Game! Offer

    Serious Games Price Breakthrough: Your Game! Your content in an engaging, immersive, rapidly developed simulation. New from Totem Learning, our February launch promotion: Your content in a bespoke serious game at less than eLearning prices! Harness our award winning technology and over ten year’s serious games heritage, to make a lasting impact in your training. We’ve chosen the familiar topic of induction training to illustrate this offer and suggest an opportunity you might like to seize! Play through our demo here, and let our avatars explain it all to you! Totem Learning places your employees at the centre of a multi-dimensional training experience using cutting edge instructional design and technology.

    tags: game wrapper serious_game learning

  • Dogs Domesticated 33,000 Years Ago, Skull Suggests – Yahoo! News

    A canine skull found in the Altai Mountains of Siberia is more closely related to modern domestic dogs than to wolves, a new DNA analysis reveals. The findings could indicate that dogs were domesticated around 33,000 years ago. The point at which wolves went from wild to man’s best friend is hotly contested, though dogs were well-established in human societies by about 10,000 years ago. Dogs and humans were buried together in Germany about 14,000 years ago, a strong hint of domestication, but genetic studies have pinpointed the origin of dog domestication in both China and the Middle East.

    tags: dogs skull domestication

  • A victim of gun violence who is also a video game developer weighs in on the debate.

    I’m a gamer, a game designer, and a victim of gun violence. In the current climate, that creates a bit of friction in my life. When I was a college student in Rochester, N.Y., in 1998, I was shot in the left side of my chest. I was lucky—the bullet basically bounced off my rib cage. I spent a few nights in the hospital, but I escaped serious physical injury (though I was wickedly sore). The 17-year-old stranger who shot me was eventually arrested and served five years for first-degree assault. After I healed, an alarmingly large proportion of the people who heard my story immediately suggested I get a gun “to protect myself.” I repeatedly explained no, I didn’t want to carry a gun. If I ever actually needed it, it would likely be inaccessible in the bottom of my backpack, or I’d be overpowered and the bad guys would take it away from me. Carrying a gun was not a solution to the random violence I had faced.

    tags: victim gun violence video game developer

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Dewey called for workers to be “masters of their own industrial fate” and for all institutions to be …

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Dewey called for workers to be “masters of their own industrial fate” and for all institutions to be brought under public control, including the means of production, exchange, publicity, transportation and communication. Short of this, Dewey argued, politics will remain “the shadow cast on society by big business.” 

http://www.alternet.org/noam-chomsky-can-civilization-survive-capitalism

Noam Chomsky: Can Civilization Survive Capitalism?
Capitalism as it exists today is radically incompatible with democracy.
This was posted on Google+…

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36 Things Every 21st Century Teacher Should Be Able To Do

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36 Things Every 21st Century Teacher Should Be Able To Do.

Some of this is clearly subjective (and a few are rather faddist), but it’s a nice touchstone.

It’s also a lovely list for people in Ed.Tech. I think an Educational Technologist should not only be able to DO all these things (I’ve come across more than a few who can’t), but they should also know how a good number of these things actually work. My experience has been that most don’t know how most of what they use works. When you don’t know how something works, you will be forever at the mercy of those who do. This is getting to be the case more and more when it comes to technology.

In a way, it kind of highlights the difference between Apple’s view of “user” (consumer) and the Tron “user” (who was a programmer).

There’s a lovely little book that came out recently called “Program or be Programmed” (programorbeprogrammed.com/) that does a pretty good job of explaining the difference, and why it matters).

1.      Select the right platform to communicate.

2.      Send large files.

3.      Take a screenshot on PC, Mac, and mobile devices.

4.      Appreciate memes.

5.      Explain how and why to use technology to those who don’t use it.

6.      Use digital media in light of privacy, copyright, and other legal issues.

7.      Communicate clearly.

8.      Search for, install, organize, use, and delete apps.

9.      How to create, open, use, and share a variety of filetypes.

10.  Help students share files.

11.  Subscribe to and manage YouTube channels, podcasts, learnist and pinterest boards, and other dynamic sources of digital media.

12.  Create and maintain digital portfolios.

13.  Blog.

14.  Share learning data with students.

15.  Support students in managing their online “brand.”

16.  Manage your own social media and internet use.

17.  Plan around a lack of technology elegantly.

18.  Delineate the difference between academics and entrepreneurial learning for students. [so long as it does not deteriorate into being about money and greed]

19.  Troubleshoot stuff that breaks.

20.  Skim and process large quantities of information.

21.  Use the cloud to your advantage.

22.  Model digital citizenship.

23.  Casually name-drop reddit. [I hope this is more than a little tongue in cheek]

24.  Support students in finding their own voice.

25.  Research effectively.

26.  Use formal or informal learning management systems.

27.  Leverage the relationship between physical and digital media.

28.  Highlight the limits of technology.

29.  Connect students with communities using project-based learning.

30.  Model the value of questions over answers.

31.  Understand how play leads to learning.

32.  Use Game-Based Learning effectively.

33.  Curate functionally.

34.  Record, process, mash, publish, and distribute digital media.

35.  Visualize learning data for students.

36.  Connect with other educators both in person and online.

37.  Personalize learning.

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Why Americans Are the Weirdest People in the World

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Why Americans Are the Weirdest People in the World.

the “weird” Western mind is the most self-aggrandizing and egotistical on the planet: we are more likely to promote ourselves as individuals versus advancing as a group.

Fascinating. Greedy and selfish.

In the end they titled their paper “The Weirdest People in the World?” (pdf) By “weird” they meant both unusual and Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. It is not just our Western habits and cultural preferences that are different from the rest of the world, it appears. The very way we think about ourselves and others—and even the way we perceive reality—makes us distinct from other humans on the planet, not to mention from the vast majority of our ancestors. Among Westerners, the data showed that Americans were often the most unusual, leading the researchers to conclude that “American participants are exceptional even within the unusual population of Westerners—outliers among outliers.”

Having actual REAL interactions with animals and the natural world is essential. (Might I say… I TOLD YOU SO!) According to this, it is quite possible that vegan and  animals rights types have no real connection to the natural world (though they all seem to think they do).

The WEIRD mind also appears to be unique in terms of how it comes to understand and interact with the natural world. Studies show that Western urban children grow up so closed off in man-made environments that their brains never form a deep or complex connection to the natural world. While studying children from the U.S., researchers have suggested a developmental timeline for what is called “folkbiological reasoning.” These studies posit that it is not until children are around 7 years old that they stop projecting human qualities onto animals and begin to understand that humans are one animal among many. Compared to Yucatec Maya communities in Mexico, however, Western urban children appear to be developmentally delayed in this regard. Children who grow up constantly interacting with the natural world are much less likely to anthropomorphize other living things into late childhood.

Given that people living in WEIRD societies don’t routinely encounter or interact with animals other than humans or pets, it’s not surprising that they end up with a rather cartoonish understanding of the natural world. “Indeed,” the report concluded, “studying the cognitive development of folkbiology in urban children would seem the equivalent of studying ‘normal’ physical growth in malnourished children.”

 

 

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Were I’ve Been Online (to Feb. 16 2013)

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  • Daily Kos: Narcissistic Personality Disorder w/ poll

    According to DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), NPD (narcissistic personality disorder) is distinguished by: …a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy indicated by five or more of the following: An exaggerated sense of self-importance. (check) Preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love. (yup) Believes that he or she is “special” and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high status people. (yes) Requires excessive admiration. (si) Has a sense of entitlement. (from mama) Selfishly takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends. (six fer six) Lacks empathy. (no doubt) Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her. (not sure about this one) Shows arrogant, haughty, patronizing, or contemptuous behaviors or attitudes. (yes)

    tags: personality disorder

  • Rabbit Books – Find Rabbit Books for Sale

    Click on the Sample Book Cover Images Above to view Sample Pages from this Book Book Description: If you are looking to purchase a good rabbit book on the subject of raising and breeding rabbits, Raising Rabbits 101 is a MUST HAVE. This 173 page full color book is filled with information which will help you get started raising rabbits or improve the success of your existing project. Raising Rabbits 101 contains tons of rabbit information covering many important topics such as feeding, breed selection, housing, breeding, marketing and rabbit health. Buy this book and bypass tons of frustration that many rabbit newbies experience when getting started in this industry. Book Specifications: 173 Pages. Full Color.

    • Click on the Sample Book Cover Images Above to view Sample Pages from this Book

       

      Book Description: If you are looking to purchase a good rabbit book on the subject of raising and breeding rabbits, Raising Rabbits 101 is a MUST HAVE. This 173 page full color book is filled with information which will help you get started raising rabbits or improve the success of your existing project. Raising Rabbits 101 contains tons of rabbit information covering many important topics such as feeding, breed selection, housing, breeding, marketing and rabbit health. Buy this book and bypass tons of frustration that many rabbit newbies experience when getting started in this industry.

       

      Book Specifications: 173 Pages. Full Color.

  • Inheritance of Color in the Australian Shepherd

    The Australian Shepherd breed shows a unique kaleidoscope of color variety in the coats and eyes. This field guide presents both the common standard colors listed in the ASCA breed standard as well as the common nonstandard colors we see and gives the genetics of each, when known. The Technical section includes a color breeding FAQ, a list of of known loci and their actions, a chart of color nomenclature, and a glossary of genetic terms. The Markings section shows the many interesting markings, modifying genes, patterns of iris pigmentation of the eyes, and some fascinating series of 2 puppies changing colors as they mature, as well as two adults changing color. There is a section on the birth of a pair of identical twin blue merle puppies. There is also a section on visible eye defects. A true self merle is pictured on the red merle page, and some phantom (cryptic) merles have been added. There is also a page showing several dogs that are two colors at once – a somatic mutation. Genetics is a rapidly developing field, and updates will be made as new information and photos become available.

    tags: inheritance color australian shepherd

  • CV Dazzle: Camouflage From Computer Vision by Adam Harvey

    The Future of the Future CV Dazzle is an independent project, but it won’t be for long. If you’re a coder, computer vision expert, fashion designer, hacker, makeup artist, hair stylist, 3D modeler, privacy enthusiast, activist, fashion designer, or have something to contribute to the project, you should really introduce yourself: adam@ahprojects.com

    tags: computer vision camouflage

  • Disney ‘Connected Learning’ Aims To Infuse Games with Learning | EdSurge News

    When Disney rolls something out, there’s a fanfare of trumpets, a red carpet and sometimes even a glittering burst of fireworks. By contrast, the launch of the Disney Connected Learning program has been as subtle as, oh, say a green screen. Six years ago, Disney began exploring how use its considerable design, entertainment and financial muscle in the “learning” arena. It decided to try to create games that children would find genuinely entertaining that were nonetheless built on legitimate learning “goals.” Over the past two years, it has quietly been refining eight games based on learning objectives in its wildly popular online site for kids, Club Penguin. Several of the games have been hits. “Pufflescape,” for instance, is the second most popular game in Club Penguin. More than 30 million children have played it over the past two years.

  • Will This Be the Museum of the Future? | Picture This | Big Think

    Imagine walking into a 1,300-year-old Buddhist cave carved from a cliff overlooking a stretch of the ancient Silk Road in Dunhuang, China. You point your flashlight and frescoes showing musicians and bodhisattvas come alive with sound and color. The experience is life-changing. Now imagine doing all that in a room in a museum thousands of miles from the Silk Road. When the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, hosted Pure Land: Inside the Mogao Grottoes at Dunhuang last week (shown above), it marked not just a groundbreaking new standard for virtual reality exhibitions, but also a glimpse of what the museum of the future may look like. Where paintings and sculpture fill galleries today, could immersive virtual realities and 3D printed replicas of priceless originals fill the physical (and online) galleries of tomorrow?

    tags: museum future

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Where I’ve Been (to Feb. 9 2013)

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  • Corporate Serious Games Are Changing The Rules Of Product Development

    Corporate Serious Games Are Changing The Rules Of Product Development
    by Tom Grant on Sep 03, 2011

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    For software developers, serious games provide new ways to gain insights into customers and make smarter decisions faster. In many respects, serious games complement Agile, Lean, and other process improvements. While serious games have general application in innovation, we are using software development as a starting point for understanding their potential.

    tags: games development product serious_games

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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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