S15 Awakening the Digital Imagination
New Media Seminar for Virginia Tech faculty, staff and graduate students
This week, we read Scott McCloud’s (1993) “Time Frames,” a comic that performs a meta-analysis of time as represented within comics as a genre, along with Tim Berners-Lee, Robert Cailliau, Ari Luotonen, Henrik Frystyk Nielsen, and Arthur Secret’s (1994) “The World-Wide Web,”which describes the now ubiquitous system that enables widened access to information across servers…
This piece by Illich is useful for how it illustrates the benefits of open access to information and the problems that accompany de-contextualized learning, wherein objects are removed from every day use, brought into educational settings separated from the contexts in which they tend to be used. And yet, even though I agree with this point,…
The readings by Laurel, “The Six Elements and the Causal Relations Among Them,” and “Star Raiders: Dramatic Interaction in a Small World” draws on Aristotle’s Poetics to understand human computer interaction as drama, and using six qualitative elements: action, character, thought, language, melody (pattern), spectacle (enactment). This comparison of HCI to drama is probably most clearly visible…
To start, I enjoyed Viola’s “Will There Be Condominiums in Data Space,” and it seems like something I’d want to and need to read a couple more times to more fully take in. Today, I’m reading it rather quickly as I’m using Audacity to edit audio, which seems to be an interesting illustration (yet not quite)…
McLuhan, M. (1964). “The Medium is the Message.” Understanding Media. “Post something abut the communication medium you think has had the biggest impact on our world and why.” I’m having a hard time responding to the above prompt, in part because my answer depends on what “impact” means, and for whom (who is impacted?)– or maybe it is my concern…
Hi, folks. Haven’t updated for a while as we had a snow day over here at Virginia Tech, and I spent last week in Tampa for the Association for Teachers of Technical Writing Conference and the Conference on College Composition and Communication. Had a great time. Someone else I know pointed out how different it…
This week we are reading Alan Turing’s “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” and thinking about “machines that can think and learn.” At the same time, I was clearing out my 1000 open browser tabs, bookmarking things I still wanted to get back to at some point when I ran into “We Know How You Feel,” a New Yorker article…
For our second meeting of the New Media Seminar I’m participating in, we were assigned to read Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” and to blog about a meaningful nugget/passage. Some things that stand out for me about the text is the ways in which Bush was concerned with several dimensions with regards to technological…
Hi folks. I’ll be participating in a new media seminar for faculty and staff here at Virginia Tech, and we’ll be blogging, so I thought I’d attach it to this site. Stay tuned for more. The syllabus: http://amynelson.net/NMSS15/ Twitter hashtag: #vtnmss15
