Skip to main content

Home/ DIGH5000-14W/ Group items tagged e-journals

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Filter: All | Bookmarks | Topics Simple Middle
Danuta Sierhuis

DIGH 5000 Jan 20 Libraries, Archives and Databases - 28 views

When Christina mentioned that the article she was looking for on Hacking the Academy archive no longer existed, I thought about the issues that digital preservation programs in archives and museums...

started by Christina Stokes on 22 Jan 14 6 follow-ups, last by Danuta Sierhuis on 27 Jan 14
Christina Stokes

Small Assignment #2 - 74 views

I think it's a good idea too, however I'm not sure how we would implement this this late in the semester. It might be a bit tight to do this kind of peer-review presentation for the visual analysis...

digh5000 smallassignment2 evaluation

started by Devin Hartley on 10 Feb 14 18 follow-ups, last by Christina Stokes on 08 Mar 14
Jordon Tomblin

Pirated Books as per our last discussion... - 42 views

Origins of copyright and intellectual property emerged in concert with capitalist structures and institutions. Ridha is correct in pointing out the fact that the academic community is not as a fina...

started by Matt Bastin-Millar on 29 Jan 14 6 follow-ups, last by Jordon Tomblin on 12 Feb 14
Chris Milando

»Highlights for Chapman's: Privileging Form Over Content: Analysing Historica... - 0 views

journalofdigitalhumanities.org/...m-over-content-by-adam-chapman

video games digh5000 digital humanities experience information accuracy history form content

shared by Chris Milando on 11 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • At this early stage in the serious study of historical videogames, we must be sure to adopt an approach that privileges understanding the videogame form (and the varying structures this entails) and its integral role in the production and reception of historical meaning, rather than solely, or even primarily, on the content of specific products as historical narratives.
  • In essence, when we play we may well be “reading” (i.e. interpreting and negotiating historical signifiers and narrative) but we are also “doing” (i.e. playing).
  • Content cannot be separated from its form, just as history cannot be understood separately from the modes in which it is written, coded, filmed, played, read, or viewed.
  • ...27 more annotations...
  • This last concern is integral to understanding games because, unlike the majority of historical forms, videogames have an additional layer of meaning negotiation because they are actively configured by their audiences
    • Chris Milando
      Chris Milando on 11 Mar 14
       
      This is super important and defines the idea of the form (the experience) as what we look for in a video game.  This is what the genre will be used for in learning about history.
  • To do so requires an analytical approach that fuses Salen and Zimmerman’s three schemas of games: play, rules, and culture, while allowing the consideration of the player’s role in the negotiation and fusion of this triad.
  • This article calls for academic work on historical videogames to move beyond the examination of the particular historical content of each game (i.e., historical accuracy or what a game ‘says’ about a particular period it depicts) and to adopt an analytical framework that privileges analysis of form (i.e., how the particular audio-visual-ludic structures of the game operate to produce meaning and allow the player to playfully explore/configure discourse about the past).
  • Simply focusing on the accuracy of the game often re-informs us about popular history rather than recognizing the opportunities for engaging with discourse about the past (and the nature of this discourse) that this new historical form can offer
  • Critiques of particular historical films were assumed to be indicative of some kind of basic structural inability of film to function as a mode of historical expression. Many scholars concluded that film could not constitute “proper history.”
  • the notion of “accuracy” or “truth” is collapsed with and thus taken to mean, “in alignment with the narratives of book-history.”
  • historical videogames mostly relinquish the telling of the experiences of specific historical agents, and favour instead typical historical environments, characters, scenarios, and experiences.
  • Obviously the aim of the developers of historical videogames like Civilization or Brothers in Arms (in addition to create an entertaining game), is to create history, not as it can be represented in a book but as it can be represented in a videogame.
  • Analysis on the basis of content alone almost invariably involves comparisons with historical narratives constructed and received in book form, which is often problematically understood as the only form capable of producing “proper” history
  • Most often these narratives are used as the benchmark for establishing truth or accuracy and thus, the examination of content
  • These written interpretations are taken to be history (or more accurately, the past) itself, rather than history as it can be written, which naturally cannot be bluntly compared to history as it can be played
  • history on film must be considered on its own terms.
  • Games will likely never produce the same opportunities for discourse as a book, but then why should they?
  • Each form utilizes different structures that, considered alongside one another as part of a larger transmedia meta-discourse, create much more interesting collaborative opportunities for establishing historical understanding than one or the other alone.
  • Examining only content also necessarily involves asking questions about what is included or left out of a particular videogame’s representation. This is rarely a useful question beyond the basis of a general common sense. Historical videogames are, like all histories, mimetic cultural products
  • The benefit will be more than just increased knowledge of a particular historical representation, but also insights about form (a particular game-structure’s operations) that are transferable to an understanding of games with similar ludic (and audio-visual) elements.
  • how much is to be actually gained by knowing, for instance, that certain shoes were not genuinely available until the 1490s rather than the 1470s, or that a particular character, though historically typical, did not truly exist? Relatively little, compared to the “feel” of a period or location, the life, colour, action, and processes (with which the book can struggle) and which can be easily communicated in games.
  • It is only by focusing on form that we can understand how the game can produce meaning in these, arguably, new ways, that neither book nor cinema can effectively utilize, whilst still remaining engaged with a larger historical discourse.
  • Historical videogames must be understood on their own terms, without relinquishing our understanding of the basic tenets of historical theory as they universally apply to history as a practice within any form (e.g. history is referential and representational).
  • Accepting this challenge requires a new approach to historical videogames, one that involves analysing the structures that produce meaning.
  • These are structures which create opportunities for players to negotiate meaning in the ways that we are familiar with from other more “passive” media but also allow them to actively configure their own historical experience through play.
  • the agency which the player wields and the challenges they confront, which allow a somewhat unique form of engagement with historical discourse.
  • though written logically, are still subjective aesthetics that attempt to represent historical experience through reactively producing signs to be read and responses to be acted upon.
  • In short, in any historical videogame, the aesthetics of historical description also function at a ludic level, producing a form of “procedural rhetoric” that, depending on a particular game’s (or genre’s) structures, can influence virtually all of the other historical signifiers through which the game produces meaning.
  • Having identified combinations of these audio-visual-ludic structures, we can then approach other games that operate similarly with an understanding of what opportunities for historical meaning-making they are likely to offer
  • When we look at the videogame form in this way we can, I hope, begin to create a cohesive understanding of how games represent the past and what structures create particular playful opportunities for players to explore, understand, and interact with these representations.
  • Chris Milando on 11 Mar 14
     
    Quick Summary: Do we need to look to games for historical accuracy? Chapman argues that we don't really - instead, we need to look to them for a historically accurate experience. This is what helps us to understand the context behind the information we get from books.
Chris Milando

Debates in the Digital Humanities - 3 views

dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/...26

dh digh5000 reevaluating redefining work labour academia para-academics

shared by Chris Milando on 08 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • The alternativeness of careers in digital humanities has in fact been a subject of long debate and much concern; many early researchers in what was then termed “humanities computing” were located in liminal and academically precarious institutional spaces
  • how and whether this domain could become a discipline, with its own faculty positions and academic legitimation.
  • And although those faculty positions and degree programs are starting to appear, many jobs in what is now called “digital humanities” are still para-academic, though their funding and institutional position has been consolidated somewhat
  • ...48 more annotations...
  • The phrase “alternate careers” is thus remarkable at second glance not for suggesting that there are alternatives but for the centrality it still accords to those academic careers that are not alternate. This centrality is not just an effect of graduate study and not only perceptible within the academy; it shapes the way universities are understood as workplaces even by those who stand outside them.
  • strongly defined intellectual and professional career trajectory that, as Alan Liu astutely observes in The Laws of Cool, may no longer be characteristic of modern knowledge work: “to be a professional-managerial-technical worker now is to stake one’s authority on an even more precarious knowledge that has to be re-earned with every new technological change.
  • These “alternative” or “para-academic” jobs within the academy have a great deal to teach us about how academic labor is quantified, about different models of work and work product, and about the ways that aptitude, skill, expertise, and productivity are weighed in assessing different kinds of work.
  • the significant parameters were essentially these. My pretax income for the academic year was $12,500, and my formal work responsibilities were to prepare and teach two undergraduate writing courses of my own design. The time commitment for my teaching responsibilities was assumed to be approximately twenty hours per week. In addition, it was assumed that I would undertake my own research and make progress toward my PhD.
  • the research I conducted as a student (preparing for professional advancement through field exams, writing conference papers, and participating in the intellectual life of the department by attending public lectures and university seminars) was not considered work, or at least not compensable work.
  • Students are positioned as net gainers from, rather than contributors to, the reservoir of knowledge the university contains, and the fellowship stipends they receive are characterized as “aid” rather than as compensation
  • I was accountable for all my time to the PhD program I was in, not just for my paid duties or even for a standard forty-hour work week, but potentially all the hours not devoted to sleeping and eating.
  • this erosion of a boundary between the professional and personal space is a familiar and very common effect of graduate study, and (even more anecdotally) I would observe that the people who typically enter a graduate program are likely to have the kind of personality that lends itself to this erosion: highly motivated with a strong sense of duty and an established habit of hard work and deferral of personal pleasure (or an ability to experience hard work as pleasure)
  • I tended to feel that the research work required of me was effectively limitless: that no amount of effort could be sufficient to really complete it and that therefore no time could legitimately be spent on anything else.
  • Each hour of project work, in other words, stood on the back of a fairly substantial apparatus that was necessary to make that hour possible. Without the e-mail, the payroll, the servers, and so forth, project work wouldn’t be possible. However, for many collaborators and funding agencies, this model appeared not only counterintuitive but deeply troubling because it made our work look much more expensive than anyone else’s
  • Running in parallel to this entire narrative is another with an entirely different developmental trajectory. Since 2000, my partner and I have had a small consulting business through which we have worked on an eclectic range of projects, ranging from simple database development to digital publication to grant writing
  • Almost all our projects have some connection with digital tools, formats, or activities,4 but it is not our purely digital expertise that is most important in these projects but rather our digital humanities expertise: in the sense that our literacy in a range of humanities disciplines and our skills in writing, strategic planning, and information design are essential in making our digital expertise useful to our clients
  • one client said that what she found valuable about our intervention was that it mediated usefully between purely technical information on the one hand (which did not address her conceptual questions) and purely philosophical information on the other (which failed to address the practicalities of typesetting and work flow)
  • The value of this kind of consulting work—for both the consultant and the client—is the self-consciousness it provides concerning the nature of the work being done and the terms on which it is conducted
  • For the client, self-consciousness results from having to bring all of this to articulation, and the result is often a better (because more explicit, transparent, and widely shared) set of intellectual configurations within the client’s project or environmen
  • For instance, work processes might be explicitly documented; latent disagreements might be brought to the surface and resolved; methodological inconsistencies or lacunae might be examined and rationalized.
  • it is interesting to observe that digital humanities, as an institutional phenomenon, has evolved very substantially out of groups that were originally positioned as “service” units and staffed by people with advanced degrees in the humanities: in other words, people with substantial subject expertise who had gravitated toward a consulting role and found it congenial and intellectually inspiring. The research arising out of this domain, at its most rigorous and most characteristic, is on questions of method.
  • Mark selected text as Mark
  • our technical expertise (in this case, familiarity with markup languages and XML publishing) had an obvious relevance and importance, but arguably more important was the ability to understand and explain the editorial significance of technical decisions and to serve as a bridge between the two strands of the project: the project’s editorial work (conducted by senior humanities faculty) and the project’s technical implementation (overseen by professional staff at the MLA who manage the production of the editions in print and digital form but for whom the XML is largely unfamiliar terrain).
  • The discourse around the use of XML was substantially instrumental: it concerned the practicalities of supporting a digital interface and generating PDF output and similar issues.Treating this work as information modeling, however, has produced a subtle shift in these relationships.
  • Where in the print production process the editorial manuscript was taken as the most informationally rich artifact in the ecology (whose contents would be translated into an effective print carrier for those ideas), in the digital process the editorial manuscript is a precursor to that state: the XML encoding brings information structures that are latent or implicit in the manuscript into formal visibility.
  • what has proven most useful (and what students most remark on in their evaluations of the class) is the kind of embedded knowledge I represent: the understanding of methods, approaches, and strategies that arise out of real-world experience at a functioning digital publication project
  • The course I teach covers a number of highly technical subjects (schema writing, XML, metadata), but its emphasis is strongly on how we can understand the significance and contextual utility of these technologies within a set of larger strategic concerns. Although on paper I only became a plausible hire with the completion of my PhD, the credential that really grounds the teaching I do is actually the fifteen years I spent not completing that degree and working instead in the variety of roles detailed earlier.
  • for the typical humanities faculty member, most of these paradigms of work are equally alien; only the first will look truly familiar (the adjunct faculty position is familiar but not to be identified with).
  • what characterizes mainstream academic work is two qualities. The first is the unlimitedness of the responsibility: work interpenetrates life, and we do what is necessary. For instance, we attend conferences without there being a question of whether it’s our “own” time or our employer’s time;
  • The second, related characteristic is the way time is conceptualized as a function of work practice. Time for academics is not regulated in detail, only in blocks. (For nine months you are paid; for three months you are free to do other things; at all times you should be working on your next book.)Most digital humanities work, however—as performed by library staff, IT staff, and other para-academic staff who are not faculty—is conceptualized according to one of the other models: hourly, by FTE, or as an agenda of projects that granularizes and regulates the work in quantifiable ways. Increasingly, the use of project management tools to facilitate oversight and coordination of work within IT organizations has also opened up the opportunity to track time, and this has fostered an organizational culture in which detailed managerial knowledge of time spent on specific tasks and on overhead is considered virtuous and even essential.
  • The importance of qualitative rather than quantitative measures of work is similarly a kind of class marker: the cases in which specific metrics are typically applied (e.g., number of students and courses taught, quantity of committee work) are those that are least felt to be characteristically scholarly work. Quantifying scholarly output can only be done at the crudest level (e.g., number of books or articles published), and the relative and comparative nature of these assessments quickly becomes apparent: a monumental, groundbreaking book is worth much more (but how much more?) than a slighter intervention, and it takes a complex apparatus of review to establish, even approximately, the relative value of different scholarly productions.
  • In particular, I wonder whether the digital humanities may cease to operate as a locus of metaknowledge if (or, less optimistically, when) digital modes of scholarship are naturalized within the traditional disciplines.
  • the tension between quantitative and qualitative measures of productivity was a constant source of methodological self-consciousness.
  • This last formulation—accomplishing the same task with available resources—reverses the narrative of academic work that is on view at liberal arts colleges and research universities, in which a thoughtful person pursues his or her original ideas and is rewarded for completing and communicating them. In this narrative, the defining and motivating force is the individual mind, with its unique profile of subject knowledge and animating research vision.
  • The managerial consciousness turns this narrative on its head by suggesting that in fact the task and available resources are the forces that most significantly define our work and that the choice of person is almost a casual matter that could go one way or another without much effect on the outcome.
  • the effect of this model of work is to treat people as resources—as a kind of pool from which one can draw off a quantum of work when needed. The result of this fractionalization may be felt as a positive or negative effect: either of fragmented attention or of fascinating variety. But in either case it constitutes a displacement of autonomy concerning what to work on when and how long to take
  • What is the effect of this fungibility, this depersonalization of labor on the para-academic staff? What is my life like as a worker (and a self-conscious manager) in these conditions?
  • Our expectations of what work should be like are strongly colored by the cultural value and professional allure of research, and we expect to be valued for our individual contributions and expertise, not for our ability to contribute a seamless module to a work product. Our paradigm for professional output is authorship, even if actual authoring is something we rarely have enough time to accomplish.
  • But in 2025, what will the now-commonplace jobs (web programmer, digital project coordinator, programmer/analyst, and so forth) look like as professional identities, especially to people who may never have imagined themselves as scholars in the first place?
  • What are the larger effects of accounting for time and regulating it in these ways? One important effect is that time and work appear fungible and interconvertible. The calculus of time and effort by which we know the cost and value of an hour of an employee’s time is also the basis for assessing how those resources could be used otherwise. On the spreadsheet that tracks the project, that unit of funding (time, product) could be spent to purchase an equivalent quantum of time or product from some other source: from a vendor, from an undergraduate, from a consultant, from an automated process running on an expensive piece of equipment.
  • Will a new set of credentials arise through which these jobs can be trained for and aimed at, avoiding the sense of professional anomaly that (in my experience at least) produces such a useful form of outsiderism?
  • most PhD candidates the idea of accepting a job other than a tenure-track faculty position is tantamount to an admission of failure. The reason why Mr. Silva assumed that I was Professor Flanders—the reason that no alternative is visible to him—is that no alternative can be articulated by the profession itself.
  • And yet the vast preponderance of actual work involved in creating humanities scholarship and scholarly resources is not done by faculty.
  • As we already noted, for every hour of scholarly research in an office or library, countless other hours are spent building and maintaining the vast research apparatus of books, databases, libraries, servers, networks, cataloguing and metadata standards, thesauri, and systems of access.
  • If the academic mission, in its broadest sense, is worth doing, all parts of it are worth doing.
  • I think one of the most interesting effects of the digital humanities upon academic job roles is the pressure it puts on what we think of as our own proper work domains.
  • In the archetypal digital humanities collaboration, traditional faculty explore forms of work that would ordinarily look “technical” or even menial (such as text encoding, metadata creation, or transcription); programmers contribute to editorial decisions; and students coauthor papers with senior scholars in a kind of Bakhtinian carnival of overturned professional usages.
  • For technical staff, these collaborative relationships produce a much richer intellectual context for their work and also convey a sense of the complexity of humanities data and research problems, which in turn makes for better, more thoughtful technical work. For students, the opportunity to work on real-world projects with professional collaborators gives unparalleled exposure to real intellectual problems, job demands, and professional skills across a wide range of roles, which in turn may yield a more fully realized sense of the landscape of academic work.
  • With these benefits in mind, there are a few things that we can do to encourage these interactions and to develop a professional academic ecology that is less typecast, that obscures less thoroughly the diversity of working roles that contribute to the production of scholarship (digital or not):
  • Make it practically possible and professionally rewarding (or, at the very least, not damaging) for graduate students to hold jobs while pursuing advanced degrees. This would involve rethinking our sense of the timing of graduate study and its completion: instead of rushing students through coursework, exams, and dissertations only to launch them into a holding pattern (potentially for several years) as postdocs, finished but still enrolled students, or visiting assistant lecturers, graduate programs would need to allow a bit more time for the completion of the degree and ensure that students graduate with some diversity of skills and work experience.
  • Devote resources to creating meaningful job and internship opportunities at digital humanities research projects, scholarly publications, conferences, and other professional activities with the goal of integrating students as collaborators into these kinds of work at the outset.
  • Encourage and reward coauthoring of research by faculty, students, and para-academic staff. This involves actions on the part of departments (to create a welcoming intellectual climate for such work) and on the part of journals, conferences, and their peer review structures to encourage and solicit such work and to evaluate it appropriately.
  • Chris Milando on 08 Feb 14
     
    Julia Flanders explores what "work" means within academia, what is considered payable labour in comparison to what needs to be done first (that is not paid for and done on our own time) . She discusses means of redefining academic labour, what (and who else) it involves and strategies for changing the relationships between students, faculty and para-academic staff.
Chris Milando

» Napster, Udacity, and the Academy Clay Shirky - 3 views

www.shirky.com/...apster-udacity-and-the-academy

digh5000 dh MOOC udacity online education

shared by Chris Milando on 08 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • How did the recording industry win the battle but lose the war? How did they achieve such a decisive victory over Napster, then fail to regain control of even legal distribution channels?
  • Hey kids, Alanis Morisette just recorded three kickin’ songs! You can have them, so long as you pay for the ten mediocrities she recorded at the same time.
  • Napster told us a different story. Napster said “You want just the three songs? Fine.
  • ...36 more annotations...
  • hey just couldn’t imagine—and I mean this in the most ordinarily descriptive way possible—could not imagine that the old way of doing things might fail.
  • Once you see this pattern—a new story rearranging people’s sense of the possible, with the incumbents the last to know—you see it everywhere. First, the people running the old system don’t notice the change. When they do, they assume it’s minor. Then that it’s a niche. Then a fad. And by the time they understand that the world has actually changed, they’ve squandered most of the time they had to adapt.
  • Higher education is now being disrupted; our MP3 is the massive open online course (or MOOC), and our Napster is Udacity, the education startup.
  • We have several advantages over the recording industry, of course. We are decentralized and mostly non-profit. We employ lots of smart people. We have previous examples to learn from, and our core competence is learning from the past. And armed with these advantages, we’re probably going to screw this up as badly as the music people did.
  • A massive open online class is usually a series of video lectures with associated written materials and self-scoring tests, open to anyone. That’s what makes them OOCs. The M part, though, comes from the world. As we learned from Wikipedia, demand for knowledge is so enormous that good, free online materials can attract extraordinary numbers of people from all over the world.
  • Last year, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, an online course from Stanford taught by Peter Norvig and Sebastian Thrun, attracted 160,000 potential students, of whom 23,000 completed it, a scale that dwarfs anything possible on a physical campus.
  • The size of Thrun and Norvig’s course, and the attention attracted by Udacity (and similar organizations like Coursera, P2PU, and University of the People), have many academics worrying about the effect on higher education. The loudest such worrying so far has been The Trouble With Online Education,
  • As most critics do, Edmundson focussed on the issue of quality, asking and answering his own question: “[C]an online education ever be education of the very best sort?”
  • “Why would anyone take an online class when they can buy a better education at UVA?” But who faces that choice? Are we to imagine an 18 year old who can set aside $250K and 4 years, but who would have a hard time choosing between a residential college and a series of MOOCs? Elite high school students will not be abandoning elite colleges any time soon; the issue isn’t what education of “the very best sort” looks like, but what the whole system looks like.
  • But you know what? Those classes weren’t like jazz compositions. They didn’t create genuine intellectual community. They didn’t even create ersatz intellectual community. They were just great lectures: we showed up, we listened, we took notes, and we left, ready to discuss what we’d heard in smaller sections.
  • The large lecture isn’t a tool for producing intellectual joy; it’s a tool for reducing the expense of introductory classes.
  • Higher education has a bad case of cost disease
  • An organization with cost disease can use lower paid workers, increase the number of consumers per worker, subsidize production, or increase price. For live music, this means hiring less-talented musicians, selling more tickets per performance, writing grant applications, or, of course, raising ticket prices. For colleges, this means more graduate and adjunct instructors, increased enrollments and class size, fundraising, or, of course, raising tuition.
  • Cheap graduate students let a college lower the cost of teaching the sections while continuing to produce lectures as an artisanal product, from scratch, on site, real time.
  • The minute you try to explain exactly why we do it this way, though, the setup starts to seem a little bizarre. What would it be like to teach at a university where a you could only assign books you yourself had written? Where you could only ask your students to read journal articles written by your fellow faculty members? Ridiculous. Unimaginable.
  • e ask students to read the best works we can find, whoever produced them and where, but we only ask them to listen to the best lecture a local employee can produce that morning. Sometimes you’re at a place where the best lecture your professor can give is the best in the world. But mostly not.
  • And the only thing that kept this system from seeming strange was that we’ve never had a good way of publishing lectures.
  • Any sentence that begins “Let’s take Harvard as an example…” should immediately be followed up with “No, let’s not do that.”
  • ny institution that tries to create a cost-effective education will move down the list.
  • Outside the elite institutions, though, the other 75% of students—over 13 million of them—are enrolled in the four thousand institutions you haven’t heard of
  • As Ian Bogost says, MOOCs are marketing for elite schools.
  • Clayton State educates as many undergraduates as Harvard. Saint Leo educates twice as many. City College of San Francisco enrolls as many as the entire Ivy League combined. These are where most students are, and their experience is what college education is mostly like.
  • The fight over MOOCs isn’t about the value of college; a good chunk of the four thousand institutions you haven’t heard of provide an expensive but mediocre education.
  • The fight over MOOCs isn’t even about the value of online education. Hundreds of institutions already offer online classes for credit, and half a million students are already enrolled in them. If critics of online education were consistent, they would believe that the University of Virginia’s Bachelor of Interdisciplinary Studies or Rutger’s MLIS degree are abominations, or else they would have to believe that there is a credit-worthy way to do online education, one MOOCs could emulate. Neither argument is much in evidence.
  • the fight over MOOCs is really about the story we tell ourselves about higher education: what it is, who it’s for, how it’s delivered, who delivers it.
  • How will we teach complex thinking and skills? How will we turn adolescents into well-rounded members of the middle class? Who will certify that education is taking place? How will we instill reverence for Virgil? Who will subsidize the professor’s work?
  • The possibility MOOCs hold out isn’t replacement; anything that could replace the traditional college experience would have to work like one, and the institutions best at working like a college are already colleges. The possibility MOOCs hold out is that the educational parts of education can be unbundled. MOOCs expand the audience for education to people ill-served or completely shut out from the current system, in the same way phonographs expanded the audience for symphonies to people who couldn’t get to a concert hall, and PCs expanded the users of computing power to people who didn’t work in big companies.
  • Those earlier inventions systems started out markedly inferior to the high-cost alternative: records were scratchy, PCs were crashy. But first they got better, then they got better than that, and finally, they got so good, for so cheap, that they changed people’s sense of what was possible.
  • In the US, an undergraduate education used to be an option, one way to get into the middle class. Now it’s a hostage situation, required to avoid falling out of it. And if some of the hostages having trouble coming up with the ransom conclude that our current system is a completely terrible idea, then learning will come unbundled from the pursuit of a degree just as as songs came unbundled from CDs.
  • If this happens, Harvard will be fine. Yale will be fine, and Stanford, and Swarthmore, and Duke. But Bridgerland Applied Technology College? Maybe not fine. University of Arkansas at Little Rock? Maybe not fine. And Kaplan College, a more reliable producer of debt than education? Definitely not fine.
  • Udacity may or may not survive, but as with Napster, there’s no containing the story it tells: “It’s possible to educate a thousand people at a time, in a single class, all around the world, for free.”
  • For people used to dealing with institutions that go out of their way to hide their flaws, this makes these systems look terrible at first. But anyone who has watched a piece of open source software improve, or remembers the Britannica people throwing tantrums about Wikipedia, has seen how blistering public criticism makes open systems better. And once you imagine educating a thousand people in a single class, it becomes clear that open courses, even in their nascent state, will be able to raise quality and improve certification faster than traditional institutions can lower cost or increase enrollment.
  • Open systems are open.
    • Chris Milando
      Chris Milando on 08 Feb 14
       
      I really like this point. I want to eventually host my own online course, and I think it would be great to have criticism! I come from a writing background, so I know how powerful and wonderful criticism can be. I was in a writers circle a few years ago and we used to completely tear down each other's work. But when we rewrote our stories (with their criticism in mind), they were /always/ much stronger than they had ever been. For something like a massive online course to work, it has to work /well/, so if criticsm can help bring it to the level of quality it needs (to provide the justification for its existence), then that is what we need to employ! I, for one, welcome criticism in everything that I do (so long as it is constructive). The only way to improve is through criticism, and as literary scholars - whose degrees are based on criticizing the work of others - I find it very odd (and wrong) that we cannot take criticism of our own work.
  • The cost of attending college is rising above inflation every year, while the premium for doing so shrinks. This obviously can’t last, but no one on the inside has any clear idea about how to change the way our institutions work while leaving our benefits and privileges intact.
  • In the academy, we lecture other people every day about learning from history. Now its our turn, and the risk is that we’ll be the last to know that the world has changed, because we can’t imagine—really cannot imagine—that story we tell ourselves about ourselves could start to fail.
Chris Milando

» Highlights for McCall's: Historical Simulations as Problem Spaces: Criticis... - 0 views

journalofdigitalhumanities.org/...blem-spaces-by-jeremiah-mccall

video games digh5000 experience information history simulations problem spaces classroom

shared by Chris Milando on 11 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • The concept of problem space is a highly useful tool for studying historical simulations, teaching history, and using the former to help in the latter.
  • Simulation games are interpretations of the past designed as problem spaces
  • In the field of educational and cognitive research a problem space is a mental map of the options one has to try to reach a goal, the various states.
  • ...54 more annotations...
  • There is no implication of physical space. In contrast work by some scholars of video games, most notably Jenkins and Squire, discuss video games as contested spaces: here there are certainly problems, but the space itself (or rather the representation of it) becomes critical.
  • concepts a historical problem space has the following features:
  • Players, or in the physical world, agents, with roles and goals generally contextualized in space
  • Choices and strategies the players can implement in an effort to achieve their goals
  • That simulation games represent problem-spaces is in some respects just a more sophisticated articulation of the basic core of game-ness. By most definitions games require players, conflict, and a quantifiable outcome.
  • What a historical simulation game does beyond this basic game-ness, however, is craft a virtual problem space that represents to some degree a real-world one.
  • As expansive as a game might be in its treatments, it will impose arbitrary limits on its subject. These limits begin with the roles and goals of the player, decisions that shape the entire design
  • The quantifiable gameplay elements and mechanics all, in a tightly designed game any way, factor directly into whether the player achieves their goals.
  • There has been excellent discussion on Play the Past about the appropriateness of, and methods for critiquing simulations historically.
  • they are interpretations in the form of quantifiable problem spaces
  • It suggests considerations for rigorous and meaningful criticism that is holistic and sensitive to the medium
  • why Colonization codes native peoples the way it does, why Civilization does not deal with social issues in cities, or why East India Company does not represent the tensions between English and Indian customs—one needs to consider holistically the problem space selected by the designers
  • Generally speaking however—and I welcome examples where this is not the case—simulation games, especially pleasurable and/or commercially successful ones  must commit to a very small set of roles and goals, often one role and one goal. Even where roles and goals differ and conflict, they tend to be set up as binary opposites or at least draw from the same well of constraints and affordances.
  • This is in large part, again, because games must be closed functioning systems: each part must connect to every other part. So a game cannot represent roles and goals well that do not fit into the core choices, affordances, and constraints of the chosen problem space.
  • Slaves in the game become a commodity, a valuable source of cheap labor and it is not unreasonable at all for players to initiate battles in the hopes of gaining more slaves for mines and building projects.
  • Suppose, however, one wanted to criticize formally this historical representation of slaves. One might start by noting that these slaves have very little agency.
  • slaves become nothing more than affordances, resources for the player to exploit in the game
  • Why does the game not portray the agency of slaves? How Longbow defined the primary problem space, the human player’s problem space, is a critical answer. For the player Philip king of Macedon is the role with a goal of uniting Macedonia and building a Balkan empire. With this role and goal driving the articulation of the problem space, depicting slaves in the game as affordances is fully understandable.
  • It is important to note, however, that saying a portrayal of ancient slaves, native Americans, Hessian mercenaries, railroad barons or any other agent or aspect of the past, takes the form it does because of the problem space is not meant to be a tactic for ending discussion or defending an implementation (one could imagine such a chilling effect: “why are they portrayed this way? Because the problem space demanded it. Oh … okay, so what’s for lunch?”). It is meant to focus criticism on a game holistically and consider how the affordances and constraints of the simulation game medium and the interests and goals of a game’s creators (their concerns, assumptions, hopes, attitudes, what have you) shape a game’s interpretation of the past.
  • These designers have their own goals, and they are generally different from those of the historian.
  • At no point in the process of identifying problems of historical interpretation in a simulation game should the goal be to blame a game designer for somehow failing to get “the facts straight” (whatever that means) or for intentionally misrepresenting the past.
  • I suggest, as historians, that sentiment also applies to understanding why a historical game takes the form it does. The goal should not be to assign blame but to understand how the past is represented in games that suggest they are about historical topics and why it is represented in the ways they are. This requires understanding the medium and its constraints and affordances, the audience and its expectations, the designers and their goals, and the ways these and other factors shape how knowledge of the past is transmitted from that past to our living rooms
  • So, what kinds of questions might one ask of a simulation game as a problem space and what kinds of meaningful criticisms/evaluations can be made? A few, necessarily incomplete suggestions:
  • One might meaningfully question why the particular main roles and goals for the game were selected in the same way one can meaningfully question why certain generations of historians privileged one set of topics and questions over another. Indeed meaningful answers to such questions can be given based on careful research of prevailing ideas at the time. Simulation games, for example, tend to be inclined to issues of domination whether in political, military, or economic forms – discussing why this is continues to be a lively debate.
  • One absolutely should question whether the roles and goals selected for the players are historically legitimate. In other words, do they reflect what our evidence suggests were some important roles and goals in the past?
  • A thorough critique of why slaves are mere tools in Hegemony, happiness is the defining metric for success in CivCity: Rome, Indian culture is not represented in East India Company, or any other element in any game, should consider the goals set out for the game and the supporting game mechanics to be compelling.
  • So, suppose that one accepts the roles and goals of a game as historically valid goals, i.e. goals that reasonably represent what good evidence suggests motivated some peoples of the past. That might well mean that a thorough challenge to the portrayal of some historical agents in the game could only be made by suggesting:
  • the agents could not reasonably be conceived to play that role  in the problem space from the point of view of the player, the primary agent
    • Chris Milando
      Chris Milando on 11 Mar 14
       
      So it's not just the experience. The spacial context also helps us to understand what caused specific decisions and events in history. While books can accurately tell us what happened, games can make us understand /why/.
  • So challenging the portrayal of slaves in Hegemony, if one accepts the historical validity of the role and goals (which I do), would require suggesting how slaves could have been portrayed more complexly and validly within the defined problem space, how they could have had a greater portrayal of agency through expanded roles and goals.
  • It becomes necessary to move outside the game design itself and consider what external factors (modern cultural assumptions and misunderstandings, design deadlines, demands of game-ness) shaped the inaccuracies.
  • simulation games are human interpretations of the past subject to certain constraints, as sources and media they should be considered holistically, and this can be done by thinking in terms of problem spaces.
  • When it comes to the history class, there is significant educational value to studying the past in terms of historical problem spaces. This is not to say that students should come to view the past exclusively or mostly in terms of problem spaces. It is simply to suggest that problem spaces provide an excellent framework for achieving certain goals in a 21st century history education.
  • Players and actions in physical space: One of the points I made in Gaming the Past[3] is that teachers and students too easily and often forget that humans in the past (and present) operated in physical, spatial contexts. Even the most intellectual/emotional/spiritual of goals is embodied in a physical and spatial context. Understanding that context helps understand agents’ roles, goals, choices, affordances, and constraints.
  • what more legitimate roles the agent could have played in the game that would mesh with the system incorporating the player’s roles and goals in the problem space
  • Players with choices and strategies
  • Affordances and constraints: Agents in the past (and present) have opportunities and roadblocks, abundances and scarcities, talents and weaknesses, access and exclusion. These affordances and constraints shape their choices, goals, and roles.
  • Spatial context: it is worth repeating. Human motives, goals, and actions are physically contextualized as are many of the affordances and constraints that influence these things. The psychological, the emotional, the spiritual, and the intellectual play critical roles, to be sure. Human goals and actions, however, cannot be severed from their environments and remain fully comprehensible.
  • Why use the idea of problem space as a framework for studying, teaching, and learning about the past?
  • One of the goals of history education should be for students to understand how factors shape and promote certain actions and outcomes over others, how everything is hardly ever equal, and how everything is contextualized.
  • It teaches to contextualize actions within space rather than divorcing choices from their real-world context. Humans in the past and present do not make decisions in vacuums. Learning to consider the context for decisions and actions before considering the decisions and actions is critical to studying human behavior.
    • Chris Milando
      Chris Milando on 11 Mar 14
       
      This is what it is all about. We can learn from history books what happened, but games allow us to feel and understand /why/. Information on its own is insufficient - we need context to get a proper understanding.
  • It fosters flexible problem solving and critical inquiry as students consider why actors made the choices they did, what else they could have chosen, and what the likely results of those other choices might have been (all of which is important counter-factual reasoning). It undermines the perennial problem of viewing the past as pre-determined. Training flexible problem solvers like this should be a goal high on the list for history teachers. These are the thinkers that can see many sides of a problem, analyze different possibilities, and, hopefully, come up with excellent solutions.
  • make notes on the following: role, goals, geographical setting, types of choices available, affordances (I didn’t call them that at first, but got there quickly), and constraints.
  • I indicated I would start the class off by giving some background biographical information on Pliny.
  • Comprehension: even those who sometimes struggled with the challenge of making sense of primary sources and organizing a variety of historical evidence reported their sense that they understood Pliny and his world better than they normally understood many topics we explored
  • t is too easy for evidence and facts (such as they are) to get divorced from one another and appear meaningless, particularly when one lacks a deep background in a subject.
  • Engagement: problem solving is inherently engaging
  • Flexibility and Creativity: Historical imagination requires individuals not only to understand the evidence for what did happen but also to use that evidence to consider what could have happened. To be able to reconstruct a world of possibilities requires creativity and flexibility far beyond that fostered by the rote examination of what did happen and the simple acceptance of standard explanations for why it had to be that way. Again, this is the kind of powerful thinking a 21st century history education should foster: ending not with how things are but considering how they can be.
  • what reasonably valid simulation games offer most of all to students of the past is the ability to explore problem spaces from the strategic, if not emotional and intellectual, perspective of a player/agent in the space.
  • Simulation games are particularly good at modeling choice in problem spaces.
  • When students play and critique simulation games, they can actually make choices within a problem space and see how they are resolved.
  • potentially a much closer analogy to the reality of the past problem than regular classroom media
  • Of course we must be very careful when using simulation games to help students study problem spaces. The games will tend to focus on one set of roles and goals in the problem space and it is essential to remind students that there are many roles and goals.
  • Chris Milando on 11 Mar 14
     
    Quick Summary: McCall explores problem spaces - self-contained moments in history where a gamer can relive the experience of a specific event in time, and understand how history came to be through the decisions they are forced to make.
1 - 8 of 8
Showing 20▼ items per page