S15 Awakening the Digital Imagination
New Media Seminar for Virginia Tech faculty, staff and graduate students
This week’s readings for my New Media Seminar encompass how we understand time (according to McCloud’s Understanding Comics, which I am proud to say I read way back in 1993 when it came out in graphic novel form). Those who know me well know that I have a very complicated calendaring system using Google Calendar […]
“Both the readings (McCloud & Berners-Lee, et al.) consider how interfaces shape user experience. For this week’s make, do a brief analysis of time (like McCloud did for comics) as encoded in a digital interface of your choice. For instance, how is time represented on your web browser, smart phone, Apple Watch, Mac or Windows […]
Reading: Time Frames by Scott McCloud, New Media Reader. This reading was a great finale to Virginia Tech’s New Media Seminar. McCloud’s dissection of time and space in comics is fantastic! Take a look at the image below – is it one point in time, or are there a sequence of points? Are you aware […]
In response to Ivan Illich’s chapter on “Learning Webs,” I would like to offer my defense of a certain materialist mysticism inherent in deschooled pedagogy, i.e. life. Illich states, as a criticism: “Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends on knowing … Continue reading In defense of a certain materialist mysticism inherent in deschooled pedagogy
I loved the proposed makes for this week, so of course I did something different. In my own defense, I posted in the theme of Sara’s suggestion here, and I still think the connected learning model is 100% Illich inspired. I also blogged about a physical representation of my de-schooled work when I took the […]
Reading: Chapter 7 (“Learning Webs”) of Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich, 1971. This week we were challenged with the task of considering a “deschooled society.” Illich writes, We must conceive of new relational structures which are deliberately set up to facilitate access to [educational] resources for the use of anybody who is motivated to seek them for his […]
As a sociologist of education, I often assign students to read Ivan Illich’s “Deschooling Society,” and it inevitably starts the same discussion: how would a large and complex society such as the United States function without formal schooling? Of course, my university students—benefactors of and true believers in schooling structures for the most part—may put […]
I don’t really care if Brenda Laurel got Attic drama “right,” because thinking about networked human-computer interaction as drama (“to do or act”) and “enactment” (to represent through action) opens up so many creative and important possibilities. Our “make” for today was to identify a current example of human-computer interaction that has most or all […]
Reading: Two Selections by Brenda Laurel, available from the New Media Reader. “The Six Elements and the Causal Relations Among Them.” Computers as Theater, 49-65. 2nd ed., 1993. “Star Raiders: Dramatic Interaction in a Small World,” Ph.D. Thesis, Ohio State University, pp. 81-86, 1986. I am going to tackle the task of identifying a form of […]
In case this is shocking to anyone, I’ll put this up front: my spouse and I are gamers. Granted, our enthusiasm has waned over the years, especially since having children. We also tend to enjoy different types of videogames now than in the past. While I might have delighted in solving complex and sometimes nonsensical puzzles in […]
