Posted by Danny on Thursday, June 18, 2009 at 11:13 pm
Dad was a devotee of computers probably minutes after discovering them as an undergraduate at Waterloo in the 70s. He repeatedly tried to instil the same wonder and excitement in me, groping for ways to connect the nature of computing machines to my own interests and probably disappointingly artsy foci—anything, at least, to extend their significance beyond the video games I was playing. One of the early uses, I learned, was for academics studying literature to compute word frequencies in texts, which was for me at once a completely novel idea, and seemed spectacularly boring and pointless.[1]
I hadn’t thought much about it until “tag clouds” started popping up on popular sites and the possibilities of this kind of data visualisation started revealing themselves despite my benightment. Recently, Geoff brought Wordle to my attention. Read more »
Posted by Danny on Friday, March 20, 2009 at 2:51 am
(Update: I’ve since expanded the following ideas into the final paper for my Constructive Learning and Design of Online Environments course. If you want a slightly more rigorous treatment, the document is available here as an ePub or PDF.)
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 »
Danny Fekete is studying education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, appropriately. 