Posted by Danny on Friday, March 20, 2009 at 2:51 am
I haven’t tried it, but Second Life sounds a great deal like the forsoothing and *emoting* experience of my Ultima Online role-playing crowd from years and years ago, except without the opportunity to be virtually sodomised by roving bands of semi-literates wielding cheerfully rendered implements of medieval can-opening and firey death. It’s probable that the semi-literates persist, though I’m sure that sodomy of any sort is now at least restricted to consensual zones.
It’s been almost six years since my back was wholly divested of the UO monkey, and though I’ve found other online vices to supplant it and erode my academic viability, Second Life came up in my research for Clare Brett’s Educational Applications of Computer-Mediated Communication course last term. The article talked about virtual classroom environments being built and coördinated with university instructors to facilitate seminars and broadcast lectures—something that struck me as tremendously groovy and mitigates somewhat the picture of the silver-fox furry sitting among other virtual students. The picture on the top of p22 shows a group of students participating in a virtual seminar attached to a Harvard Law course, where apparently the video from the real-life seminar room is broadcast to groups of students in the virtual environment. It would be amazing if this was happening in real-time, with a corresponding portal in the real-life seminar room open into the Second-Life seminar, allowing for full two-way interaction (though I have no idea if this is how it worked, and suspect that it would be too bandwidth intensive under the restraints of present technology). With this in mind, and hearing Stian describe the micro-communities that formed from the broader ecosystem of his Wiley Wiki experience, I started doodling an interface pipe-dream upon which I shall presently expound. Read more »
Posted by Danny on Saturday, March 14, 2009 at 6:33 pm
As I acquaint myself with WordPress’ levers, pulleys, and screws, I’m haphazardly contributing to a directory of links you can find south (at time of writing) of my biography on the left-hand column. My intention was to devote a section entirely to Open Education links and then gradually introduce them (and the concept of open education itself) to you, patient readers, over the course and career of this ’blog. In typical fashion, however, Stian Håklev just brought together much more information that I would have mastered in the next few months, and presented it with nearly TED-like production value to a largely awed and enthusiastic crowd of our OISE professors. So, uh, you should read his ’blog.
I will still gradually introduce many of these resources myself, largely because I am myself gradually exploring them for the first time and find that they are less daunting if approached more leisurely (this is my pedagogical gambit to avoid a Semelean tan). For those of you with interest in the topic and even less expertise than me, just bear in mind that others have tread here first and if you’d like to move more quickly, Stian is your man. The fast track starts here.
Posted by Danny on Saturday, March 7, 2009 at 1:29 am
Alright, perhaps a high-twee mission statement with an extensive pre-ramble wasn’t the most astute PR decision I could have made, though in a few years, when Philomathy.org rules the Internet and cyber historians clamour to write its biography, its aggressive salutation will be vindicated and lauded. Luckily, I have between now and then to remove the actual first post where I was still fooling around with themes and emphasis colours.
Welcome, readers! At the time of this writing, you don’t exist yet. That’s fair: at its peak, my first (collaborative) website project was getting about two hundred unique hits per day, and nonetheless things were allowed to slide into dereliction—I suspect I won’t have a web-comic this time around to entice readers for whom my tedious prose and occasional verse are insufficient to foster loyalty and fanaticism. Read more »
Posted by Danny on Monday, March 2, 2009 at 2:37 pm
I am subject to a socially-debilitating frisson whereby my inner narrative slows and distends: queued sentences fall into clauses, then words, then morphemes, and then sometimes, constituent letters (though this last happens with increasing scarcity as the incursion of spell-checking software further and further into my patterns of composition is eroding my orthographical confidence). The outward manifestation of this phenomenon is that I have lost my train of thought, perhaps because I have been speaking ex-proctologically (this is not always never the case), but witnesses concerned for my cognitive acuity and fitness may be cheerfully reassured that I am even then merely in the throes of a kind of lexophilic masturbation which involves them only peripherally at best. My frisson culminates in the spontaneous synthesis of long forgotten, or at least hitherto dissociated, etymological data into a personally novel insight regarding the use, significance, and varying aptness of a commonly invoked word I had been presently planning to deploy. Naturally, by the time I have sanitised and condensed my epiphany into a generally edible product, its sovereign relevance to the conversation has waned and I wind up looking like a weirdo. Read more »
Danny Fekete is studying education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, appropriately. 