Category Archives: New Media

Spatial Learning

Writing with a hypertext tool is a learning experience in and of itself. I think real learning is captured in the journey: you learn as you go and when you hit a snag, you figure the problem out, connecting what you know to what you don’t, and then entering a room with objects that look but really aren’t familiar. Knowing what a metaphor is is just a beginning. One of my mentors, Rick DeMarinis, wrote in a story that story is a great teacher. This is a complex and nuanced idea.

So it goes with spatial literacies. My son (aged 4) has a ball with video games, and so do I with him. I grew up with games and game-like spaces: tennis, football, Go Fish, and the walk to school. S is growing up with DVD interactivity, the PS2, and a world of manipulatable virtual spaces. His in-game “girl hero” has become a persona. My persona or alter-ego was GI-Joe. Our experiences with play are similar but different.

The video game has allowed him to practice reading with a purpose not just reading “to read.” If he can’t read, he can’t play. They’ve allowed him to critically decode abstract objects, such as icons and buttons. They’ve offered an opportunity to experience, evaluate, and chose between multiple kinds of spatial representation in order to make different decisions. In one game, he must toggle between 3 different representations of the same space–2D top-view, 3D elevation, and 3D 3rd person POV–in order to orient himself to and make decisions about a particular objective in a game. This has generated an interest in mazes and maps, including a card game that “teaches” geography.

Hypertext and Space

Here’s an issue. In trying to understand a perceived weakness in a sectional story arc in Sandoval, as he’s working the hypertext to generate story and illustration of certain pet ideas of his, I keep wondering when certain dramatic issues should declair themselves. The answer should come from the creative drive of the writing, but often I have to break out of Sandoval and think “out” of him.

In some ways it’s a spatial question. 5 or 10 text spaces: is that the arc span? Sandoval dealt with the night lab issue by thinking about “what happened” and somehow a relationship between two other characters came from it in the illusion of creative performance, a relation that only became known because this and that actually happened in the story. (But I could be speaking still as Sandoval, or as Ejay Mariposa).

Space and pulse (time and rhythm) are thus concurrences. In other words, 10 text spaces could form the width of a poem in hypertext or the width of a necessary event in a character’s life.

Spoof Comments

Working with WordPress has been very nice over the last year or so, especially with the issue of comment spam. I’ve had a few spam comments waiting in the wings here and they’re relatively easy to do away with. But the latest versions have been odd as spoofers. The URIs are legitimate, but the messages are clunky declaratives, and sell or profer nothing. At least the older stuff attempted material sales, like pills and sex. For its dark side, spam has a purpose, but I can’t figure what the purpose is of my latest visitors.

Good Models

Good models are a requirement in the development of habitable space. Jeremy Heibert is doing just this at his weblog in regards to learning spaces. He’s definitely delivering in larger ways than I am in my own efforts at a “flexible center” using wordpress as a tool that pulls information into a complex hypertext node with links out and links in. The content management system is influencing my thinking here, but my model doesn’t give the student lots of freedom to mold the space. WebCT Vista is my anti-model, because a “course manager,” while striving to be a learning space, can easily become a rigid tyrant.

I guess the weblog model could indeed evolve into a flexible development space for work, play, demonstration, and thought, but at the moment I’m more worried about the code-side of the machine (maybe I shouldn’t be worrying about this). Additionally, I worry about a concept of accumulation of tools, which is beyond my control. Realistically, someone else is going to make the decision about which eportfolio system will become the standard. My gut tells me I’d rather the student decide how they want to deliver and organize the goods. I go back to the flash or storyspace model. The stage area wants you to think about what to put into it. Flash is a thinking space, as is Storyspace, like boxfuls of Legos.

The Hypertext Habit

In a few Years Sixnut will be pretty heavy into software that tracks and maintains custom general education, course, and program outcomes (i.e., what people can actually do after completing a course of study, like “build a house”). We’re going to be hearing a lot of about outcomes assessment at a national scale in the news with the feds now turning to the charms of national tests. At Sixnut, we’re not thinking about this (well, I’m not at least, I shouldn’t speak for everyone), we’re thinking about hypertext and the need to connect one thing with other things.

eLumen is essentially a metonymic system that depends on physical connections between digital ideas. The genuine link is a relation or association between the data, say a course that links to a specific outcome or skill concept or grouping of learning issues. Understanding the physical relations isn’t all that easy. A nice hypertext habit is good for this, thinking not in terms of a linear sequence, but in terms of the spatial qualities of ideas, data, images, whatever. Moreover, eLumen allows for the visualization of connections across disciplines in such a way that faculty who want their students to demonstrate learning in writing can provide their students institutional credibility in this regard.

Student Writing and Games

Gamasutra is asking for student writing

As part of its expanding video game student-related coverage, which will be featured on the Gamasutra education homepage, the editors of Gamasutra are looking for new features written for and about video game educators and students.

Some of the topics that we are particularly looking for in order to expand the student section of Gamasutra include:

– A ‘Day In The Life’ article, chronicling a typical day in the existence of a video game student or educator, in a similar style to recent articles in the main Gamasutra feature area. We are particularly keen to run these regularly.

– Postmortems of student games, describing the ‘What Went Right’ and ‘What Went Wrong’ of creating them.

– Soapbox-style opinion articles that are specifically related to game education or student-related concepts.

– Instructional articles on the best ways to teach game development with regard to teaching or tool approach (preferably presented as a comparative search, rather than promoting one particular institution.)

Servers and Intelligence

This semester–Spring 2006–WebCT Vista is having a particularly difficult time finding its server, lovingly displaying DNS errors. This software trudges through itself. The digestion of information is slow. Vista is a learning and teaching environment. So is a classroom. But the room in which I teach has a functioning door. The lights work; the desks, while uncomfortable, are shaped to admit the human body in seated position, and the way it organizes the bodies in it works relatively well.