Yes indeed. I actually won the Mischief Makers contest on Gaia Online! It feels a little odd, but it’s pretty cool. Virtual fame and fortune! You can see the winning entries here: http://www.gaiaonline.com/mischiefmakers/?action=gallery . I chose an “Ancient Katana” item, which is worth hundreds of thousands of Gaia gold. I just think it looks badass.
Reading these articles got me thinking about the capability of virtual reality. I think virtual reality is the next big leap in video games and it can use the web for interaction with other people, like MMORPGs. There is a book by Piers Anthony that is all about the dangers of a virtual reality game called “Killobyte”. It’s kind of cheesy and at times sex-obsessed, but it was my first introduction to the idea of a virtual reality game. The three main characters are players in this game. One is a diabetic young woman, one is a parapalegic ex-cop, one is a psychotic teenage boy. The teenager is a hacker who got mentally scarred by a virtual sex program and makes a game out of trapping and messing with players in the game. The debate about violence in video games reminded me of this and it’s interesting to look at how players react to shooting and killing other people’s characters, especially in a virtual reality setting, where you are making the motions with your body and will actually feel the recoil and see the person bleed to death before you.
I have to say that this reading was probably my favorite so far. It was interesting to thank about both sides of Selden’s situation. On the one hand, he was the best of the best that Earth had to offer who was being given the opportunity to experience something very few other humans would ever even hear about. On the other hand, he was sort of a slave, a primitive who was shown an advanced civilzation and could go back to Earth, but would know what he was missing. This made me think of what Kipling termed “The White Man’s Burden,” that it was the job of a civilized nation to show the barbaric, primitive, backwards native people of the world what they should be. Kimonians, however, seem to have found only a source of entertainment in the funny little people who landed on their planet.
I was wondering though, if Kimon does not use money or bartering of any kind, is it come sort of communal society where the Kimonians have just agreed upon who should have how much? And the schooling analogy sort of threw me off. School just prepares you for more school? What? Then what’s the point?
Alright, I need help coming up with ideas for what to do with GaiaOnline for my project. I have the mastery part down, I just need to know what to make as the creative part. I have made an account for people in the class. Screen Name: UMWNMS, email me for the password if you’d like to try it out: elemons at umw.edu. There’s so much to do/use on this site.
This article reminded me of a few songs: Little Boxes, by Malvina Reynolds; 21st Century Digital Boy, by Bad Religion; and Closer to Fine, by Dixie Chicks. It seems that the “deschooling” of America is a topic of great interest to those who feel slighted by “The Establishment”. I think I’ve bought into it though. I think things are working okay. Maybe I’m selfish and can’t see past my nose, but I’m satisfied with the way things are. There are problems, I know, I’ve seen school from two sides, as teacher and student. We don’t need, or have the time or resources for, a complete teardown of “The System”. What we have now isn’t perfect, and I think it takes more than bubblegum and duct tape to fix it, but a remaking is unnecessary. I think Illich’s specialization of education would prevent people from learning in the breadth that is available now. They wouldn’t get a chance to find what they really love to do. Illich, alas, suffers from the same lack of a solid plan that hounds other radical proposals.
Reading this I was (of course) reminded of several memory-related items. The first being of the movie Johnny Mnemonic, made in 1995 starring Keanu Reeves. The second, and much more interesting I believe, is a mnemonic device which I don’t remember where I learned (irony!). I googled relevant terms and what I came up with were two systems called “Roman Room” and “Town”. These are essentially the same, where you set up a building or room in your mind and link things that you want to remember to whatever is in the buildings or rooms. These made complete sense in the context of “Condominiums in Data Space”.
It also made me think about a show I saw last night on The Discovery Channel called Time Warp where a video engineer at MIT takes high (1000) fps video of various things and then manipulates the video to show exactly what happened. In the first episode he shows a glass shattering from noise, a dog drinking water, a baloon popping, and a guy getting punched in the face. Oh yeah. It’s awesome.
Breaking the Fourth Wall is another interesting aspect of comic spacetime that was not considered in the piece we read for class. Many comic (by which I mean graphic, by which I mean picture) settings are self-contained worlds. The audience is separate from and has no interaction with the characters. Sometimes however, the characters interact with the audience by directing speech at them. This is called “breaking the fourth wall” and can also be applied to theatre and television. (I realize that McCloud was trying to separate them.) Some comic characters, from Calvin and Hobbes (on occasion) to Deadpool in the X-men comics, “speak to” the audience and are sometimes asked by other characters who they are talking to as though they are speaking to someone who is not present.
I have personally been reading graphic novels and manga since I was a sophomore in high school. My favorite series would have to be Sin City by Frank Miller, which was made into a movie in 2005. I also read graphic novels by Neil Gaiman, and manga like Fushigi Yuugi and Mars. I never thought about how time and space were portrayed in graphic novels and McCloud is right, they are the same thing. Spacetime.
Reading this article put me in mind of the teaching strategy called “Constructivism”. In a classroom using Constructivist techniques, students use what they already know to learn what they don’t know yet. This not only helps the students to better understand what they are learning (much better than being told and reciting), it also leads to meta-cognition, described by Papert as “thinking about thinking”.
Looking at how technology is currently employed in classrooms, it seems that the skeptics and critics seem to be right so far. New technology is being used to teach the same old way. “Smart Boards” are just more expensive and complex overheads. Laptops are provided to students who can essentially only use them as electronic notebooks. Teachers are catching students plagiarizing by running it through a program that checks for “cut and paste-ing” from internet sources. Schools have strict “technology rules” that restict them from certain websites.
I barely remember working with LOGO in elementary school. The #1 computer program to students like me at that time was Oregon Trail. What I remember about LOGO was how frustrated I got with it because the Turtle would never do what I wanted it to. I think I just didn’t have the attention span to listen when the teacher was talking about how to program it. This same kind of frustration is felt by people today who can’t get software programs to do exactly what they want (sometimes because they didn’t RTFM).
I also remember a class I took as a Freshman in High School called “Computer Math”. This was the precursor to “Computer Science” which had the actual useful programming in it. In Computer Math we wrote in QBASIC which is a pretty simple programming language but, as with LOGO, I got frustrated by the more complex commands because I either didn’t pay attention or got it wrong the first time and gave up. (I had really bad grades in school since the 4th grade.)
The question was posited in the last class: What sort of device would you want to help you in your life? The sky’s the limit. So, What would I want? Well, besides the obvious application of a teleporter, I would LOVE to have something that remembered where I put things. Basically I need something that will organize my life for me. Because I don’t have that skill. Maybe something that will think for me sometimes too… lol, j/k.
As for a device to transfer our thoughts to the page, I wonder if there couldn’t be a nefarious use for this type of thing. Like warrantless wiretapping, but into yout brain. Bad stuff.
In the book Rant, by Chuck Palahniuk, movies have been upgraded to this thing called “boosting”. It’s video on acid. You not only see what’s happening, you actually experience it, in a sort of virtual reality type thing. Everyone has a port in the back of their head to upload experiences and to “boost peaks”. This can also be affected by advertizers, like one time when the characters drive past a fast food place, they get a craving for that food. NEFARIOUS!
Nelson and Engelbart have a few points on which there is huge disagreement. They don’t agree on who should be able to use computers: Engelbart wants it to be restricted to a select few so they can do the most advanced work so no time or resources are wasted on trivial pursuits, Nelson says “Everyone should understand computers.” I’d really like to get both of them in a room and watch them go at it.
Nelson’s idea of shared media and computers being used to create media is seen today in the many music and artwork sites but I wonder how he would feel about things like flikr pictures being used without permission for advertising and all types of pirating going on.
I really liked that the drawings were included and appreciated that he did them in the first place. His point about the importance of media (and interest in how people absorb information) really came through in his drawings.
