Soon, I’ll be moving over to a new WordPress weblogging system, host, and reconception of GLH, and playing with design there. For now there’s nothing going on at ersinghaus.combut I’ll be up and looking like something soon. Thanks to Jim for the help. And Christopher for the example.

I had a nice conversation before an esteemed committee at Tunxis recently about using Storyspace as a means of organizing college learning outcomes and other information related to assessment, which would be a big job for those close to the information, which I’m not, and for Storyspace itself. This could mean a huge expansion in the use of Storyspace as an institutional tool and more dramatic presentations to other colleges in the state of Connecticut, for the Federal Government, and to our regional accrediting agency.

The goal is to “link” course and institutional outcomes to readily available data, assessment tools and models, and to broader college learning outcomes in a space that easily makes those links clear, visual, and streamlined. The job is to explode lots of docs and to start linking in the non-linear space of the program. Of course, working in the environment calls for a rethinking of text navigation, moving beyond the word processor window and the critical element of the slidebar, to reading in terms of paths, keywords, and the fantastic invention of the “guardfield.”

This could mean more customers for Mark Bernstein, one of the chief developers of Storyspace and chief scientist at Eastgate Systems and a call for an enterprise version of Storyspace. Regardless of that, this is why I’m waiting hungrily for a new version of Storyspace that can flex it’s muscles given future demands of content, which may involve embedded video, customizable workspaces, and the involvement of different forms of narrative working inside a Storyspace environment, such as a vector graphic animation.

But this starts me thinking about broader issues related to education, because sometimes I wonder about our choice to involve the word processor alone in writing courses. Convenience or good thinking? Everything must be word processed, especially work to be turned in for evaluation. Fine, but consider the issue of an online writing instructor expecting emailed papers and something comes in in txt form or not in the safe rtf. The question is, should all students be expected to learn a writing technique in a wordprocessor? Why that model alone these days? Some people have a tough time reading Neil Gaimon’s designed art spaces, such as those in Sandman; they are otherwise fine upstanding citizens. Could problems that we attribute to lack of skill, such as organization and tight thesis, be attributed to the very space people are expected to use for development?

I haven’t done a whole lot of work with this but the Stoning Field project has been going through some prep in Storyspace prior to work in Flash. The following image shows some of the possible ways of considering how a project would merge text, hypertext, and video elements:

I’ve worked through a few programming sequences in Flash that have interest, at least as far as I’m concerned, beyond the syntax, roots, and variables. The first instance below presents a “paradoxical” image in five layers and three different actions.

The second instance which follows is a variation on the first and represents just a bit of tinkering.

But what’s the beef? The beef comes in the possibilities for different modes of presenting information in an interactive sense. I was messing with a little “presentation” on one of my son’s DVDs in which a child can decorate a party scene by “guessing” where an object, such as a banner, might go. Problem is there was only one place where the banner could go on the stage and if we tried to put it somewhere else, a woman’s voice would tell to try again as if we had chosen incorrectly. It wasn’t our fault that we preferred the banner on the ground outside Rabbit’s house. There wasn’t much play, choice, or fun in the “game” at all, so we sat around clicking all the wrong answers and making fun of the “nice” person’s voice.

In the Flash bits above, all kinds of possibilities could be constructed. The display of images from odd placeholders, interactive maps, multiple captions, surprising drags and masks, and even possibilities for writing in different ways, poems maybe that sleave out into white space for different effects. You learn what looks like a neat trick and then think about its variations.

The New Media Communication program as conceived at Tunxis Community College is a program that teaches people to understand the surface and the deeper structures of digital systems. It teaches people to visualize, evaluate, and manipulate the structures and components of media forms. To these ends, we recognize that the trees and the forest are both important. We take students who are focusing on a particular skill or competency area (trees)–these could be programming, drawing, and/or studies in history–and provide a foundation in media, communications, narrative, systems, and teamwork and provide an environment where students can collaborate on new media projects. New media coursework will provide time and space for the novice programmer to work with the novice artist on a common project or set of projects from conception, planning, and testing. How can a team of students given problems X, Y, and Z design a system or digital environment to produce a desired effect? In this way we work within the system to build skills, animate concepts, and offer students a means to put what they’re learning to work in a larger context.

In my mind this is the meat of the program here at Tunxis. At Tunxis, we require a new media kind of thinking in our everyday work, collaboration, compromise, planning, integration, and a continual tussle with the demands of systems, government regulations, and good teaching and service provision. Are we good at this? We try. Call it what you will, we struggle constantly with what makes for good teaching under the pressures of grants, heavy teaching and committee loads, truncated time schemes, technology competencies, hardware requirements, and the time to teach our areas of expertise.

It’s not an easy thing to teach writing or economics and at the same time keep up with what is offered as new or rewarding to academic fields and the continual pressures, good and bad, of education technology. It’s not that easy to incorporate new systems such as electronic portfolios or weblogs for a good-sized and active college. Dealing with such systems involves rethinking pedagogy, re-managing already busy schedules, and reorganizing the work of academic and administrative departments at a deep-structural level. Altering or adding to the tasks of an office manager or teacher means big change. The question for educational technology is not color, ease of use, or usability; the question is how does the system augment practice? How does it make the job more interesting, flexible, creative, and meaningful?

Eportfolio is meant to help organize information and time. As I work with the system and get to know it, I’m finding that it does neither very well. Yet as I work through the English Department’s action plans and work flows in Storyspace, putting together a “picture” of what we’re doing and need to do, I find that Eastgate’s tool (and I’m looking forward to the Windows version of Tinderbox for the very same purpose) with its ease, simplicity, and emergent power for “visualizing” how we work is a smashing example of new media principles at work. Flexible, unabtrusive, imaginative, clean, and it gets the job done (if I could get it to call up a Word doc, then it would be perfect). It makes thinking about what needs to be done smarter and more interesting. An entire strategic plan can be put together in Storyspace and you’d be able to figure out exactly what you need to do and find what you need to find. Next stop Tinderbox, when ready.

When you open up Flash or Storyspace, you’re met with an empty stage. Both environments wait for you to do something. Both programs want you to think big and rough them up a little. Eportfolio presents a series of fields for plug in, like an old style workbook, at once dull, and employs very little planning archicture, no agents, or search capability. It’s not really a development software package that ask for much work other than to plug in and respond in fields to questions that will become redundant very soon.

The contents of a portfolio of whatever kind are important. Indeed, a portfolio, a demonstration of one’s work, should, I’d say, provide for some amount of flexibility to the person using it, which gets me to thinking. An electronic portfolio system should behave like a development or management tool.

It would be a nice project, just to add to the others we already have planned, for new media students to develop a portfolio system for other students that is interesting to use and deep and powerful enough to grow with the user. Over the course of a year artists, programmers, writers, and budding teachers could put something together and in the process apply what they’re learning elsewhere in a different context. This is the key. Storyspace, Feeddemon and Premier act as brilliant case studies in tools oriented for human use.

Greg Schneider (needs registering) on systems

Laptops are standard around Atlantic Motorsports, where Chamberlin works when he’s not studying at George Mason University. Today’s automobiles are packed with about a thousand times as much computing power as was in the Apollo moon landers, according to the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers. Computer chips run more than 86 percent of the systems in an average vehicle, according to the alliance. Modifying them can ruin a car as quickly as juice it up, but if you know how, you can reprogram controls such as timing and air/fuel ratio to milk more power out of an engine.

More thinking in terms of systems.

One of the things inching around my head these days is how to generate an environment where student writers can practice writing value claims and evaluative approaches in argument in a concrete ways. A problem in serious games concerning writing is that much of the apparatus of composition is abstract. Consider the complexities of standard ethical, aesthetic, and utilitarian judgments. Value claims sometimes aren’t as simple as text books make them sound. It’s one thing to generate criteria to judge a movie, but even in such an enterprise value systems come into play audience to audience. Criteria for measuring art can be quite contentious. In value claims, definitions are of supreme importance. Thus a space in a digital environment would have to be immense, non-linear, and intensely mnemonic.

Let’s say the concrete company wants to start up a plant in town. Such an enterprise would generate jobs, taxes, and but would also potentially hurt quality of life and property values. The company has a right to exersize the use of its property, but what is the balance of equal protection? Which values do we pledge to define in context?

To write about this is fine but what should be learned here through the writing? So we create a game where the big box store is about to come into town. The place is populated with people with good intentions all around. The scene plays out. Does the writing come “after” the experience; is this research; what can or should be measured as an outcome? Does such an environment become a muticredit, mutidisciplinary operation?

Barrett, Eubank, and Smith write in the current SciAm on the subject of EpiSims

To understand what a social network is and how it can be used for epidemiology, imagine the daily activities and contacts of a single hypothetical adult, Ann. She has short brushes with family members during breakfast ad then with other commuters or carpoolers on her way to work . . . We can visually represent Ann’s contacts as a network with Ann in the center and a line connecting Ann to each of them. All Ann’s contacts engage in various activities and meet other people as well. We can represent these “contacts of contacts” by drawing lines from each–for example, Ann’s colleague named Bob–to all his contacts. Unless they are also contacts of Ann, Bob’s contacts are two “hops” away from Ann. The number of hops on the shortest path between people is sometimes called the graph distance or degree of separation between those people.

Here’s A: what does A do when confronted with A.1 or A.2? Hense, hypertext, simulation, and the choices in writing. Mind.

John Timmons comments thustly on a reaction to Halo 2 by David at Buzzcut:

But is this just part of the reality of play with many games or is it just an expression of frustration and/or disappointment?

Some people might argue that a first person shooter with a good story is about as possible as a dramatic porno movie. That is, who’d watch it without the porno? Who’d say, “Wow, without that sloppy stuff this’d be a damned good film.” A little beside the point, but there you go.

In John’s demo of Deus Ex and Medal of Honor I noted that “story” had been woven into DE as a spur to accompany levels of complexity. There was no guarantee that the story would be fulfilling beyond the surmounting experience or that, in any case, one player would care about it while some other player would be influenced more by circumstances, filial relationship, or darkness. I didn’t see enough of MOH to really grasp a sense of story beyond the intro mission. These describe my ignorance of the game but also the sense that I get of how story is involved in action games rather than those of adventures.

In chess we have a story behind the play–two kingdoms going at it, an image of perpetual conflict, triumph or stalemate resolves the story. All chess games, it could be said, are different, but all chess games are the same because they are, in any instance of play, “the game of chess.” An infinite game with infinite variations but restricted to a simple set of rules or computations. But there’s more. I used to play chess with a friend after tennis. M could whip me on the court so chess was my revenge. It was more than just the rules. And more so than my own frivolous revenge. It was a way for us to discuss, vent, siesta, and drink beer. My father would look over our shoulders and tell us what dumb moves we were making. What’s more, we’d shift the rules a bit to include a graduation of push-ups per taken piece–five for pawn, 50 for Rook, 75 for Queen, and so forth. So chess also became another way to workout.

It’s hard to talk about chess as just a set of rules. Chess is an infinite space. John Timmons is fascinated not just by how games change space but how space changes games, finding things in Deus Ex that he’d never encountered in prior play because of how “the situation of play” altered decisions. When we watched Susan Gibb play her hand at Silent Hill I saw another game being played beyond the one I’d had going. Variations on a theme. In a way we’re not studying games, but we’re learning a lot nonetheless about what makes for interest and complexity in serious play.

Jim Munroe on Half-Life 2 via The Cultural Gutter

As a novelist, I strive for verisimilitude: the appearance of reality. I try to give a sense of place, a person’s life, a situation, not by giving exhaustive descriptive detail but by giving just enough detail to evoke a feeling of realism. The videogame has to do this with the visuals and the narrative, but faces an additional challenge: giving people the illusion of free will.

People sometimes criticize the Half-Life series for being “on a rail” — more or less like a funhouse ride on which you’re shuttled through constructed scenarios. Having tight control like this is a trade-off for a nuanced and complex narrative. In opposition to this, games in the Grand Theft Auto series offer scenarios, rather than stories, and are often referred to as “sandbox games.” While both limit the player’s free will, they employ different strategies of evoking the illusion of maintaining it.

. . .

Half-Life 2 does this through a steady diet of marvels, a lot of them based on how smart the objects are. If, in a moment of panic, you grab a nearby paint can and throw it at a zombie, the zombie will be covered in paint. If you grab a circular saw and throw it, the zombie will be sliced in two (and if you go to look, you will see the saw half-embedded in the wall behind). Shoot someone with a crossbow and they will hang literally pinned to the wall. Physics are used a lot in puzzles — if you weigh down one end of a see-saw with the concrete debris lying around, you can get up to the second level. At another part, the buoyancy of plastic barrels in water comes into play.

Thanks John for the link.