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Monday, July 24, 2006 |
NYT on serious games. In the NYT, there is a good article by Clive Thompson about serious games or the inherent potential of games to be learning platform. Some excerpts:
Games, they argue, can be more than just mindless fun, they can be a medium for change.
(…)
“What everyone’s realizing is that games are really good at illustrating complex situations,� said Suzanne Seggerman
(…)
Henry Jenkins, an M.I.T. professor who studies games and learning, said the medium has matured along with the young people who were raised on it. “The generation that grew up with Super Mario is entering the workplace, entering politics, so they see games as just another good tool to use to communicate,� he added. “If games are going to be a mature medium, they’re going to serve a variety of functions. It’s like with film. We think first of using it for entertainment, but then also for education and advertising and politics and all that stuff.�
(…)
This is the central conceit behind all these efforts: that games are uniquely good at teaching people how complex systems work.
(…)
But do these games actually work? Even proponents admit that it’s still difficult to say. “These things are just at the prototype level,� Professor Jenkins said. “We’ve just got one classroom here, one classroom there, where we’ve documented some benefits.� And without more studies documenting the effectiveness of the games, he said, “oxygen’s going to be sucked out of this.�
(…)
“Ultimately, a video game is just another medium for artistic expression,� he concluded. “Which is why I like this game in a weird way, because if you are going to play games, why not learn something important in the process?�
The article is also full of examples of this types of games.
[unmediated]
7:51:41 PM 
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Arrest mars second
day of HOPE (IDG).
Tensions ran high on the second day of the Hackers on
Planet Earth
(HOPE) conference, as the FBI made a surprise visit to arrest one of
the scheduled panelists.
Steve Rambam, a noted private investigator who runs Pallorium, Inc.,
an online investigative service, was set to lead a panel discussion
titled "Privacy is Dead... Get Over It." According to other members
of the privacy panel, four men in blue coats appeared shortly before
the panel and led Rambam away in handcuffs.
"If you know Steve you know he's flamboyant, and at first I thought,
oh, it's PR, you know," said a visibly distraught Kelly Riddle, one of
the other members of the privacy panel, to the audience. Riddle said
that the FBI had also taken Rambam's presentation -- which included
Rambam's laptop and around 500 pages of documentation that Rambam had
amassed from the Internet to illustrate his talk. . . . .
True to the hacker ethos, at least one conference attendee was already
sporting a "Free Steve" T-shirt a few hours later--an echo of the
long-running "Free Kevin" campaign to release famed hacker Kevin
Mitnick.
Mitnick was also missing in action on Saturday; the hacker, who was
released in 2002 after serving five years in jail, was set to star in
the hotly anticipated "Hackers in Prison" panel, in which three of the
most notorious formerly imprisoned hackers--Mitnick, Mark "Phiber
Optik" Abene and bernieS--were to appear onstage, together, for the
first time. Mitnick was also scheduled to lead an "Kevin Mitnick
Unplugged" talk afterward.
According to conference organizers, Mitnick was in a hospital in
Colombia, and they did not know when he would return.
Even without Mitnick, the "Hackers in Prison" panel captivated the
crammed hall. . . . .
7:01:28 AM
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Scott: One blog ends, another begins.
This blog is moving. Almost exactly four years ago, on July 22, 2002, I started my first blog. Blogging felt natural to me since I'd been writing for the Web since 1994 and self-publishing since 1974 (originally via mimeograph). My blog was part of a larger blogging program I'd put together at Salon, in partnership with Userland. It was the tech-downturn doldrums -- an era when every time we at Salon opened the papers or fired up our browsers we knew that someone, somewhere, would be predicting our imminent demise. And there wasn't a lot of extra cash at the company at the time, so the blogs program was chiefly a labor of love, launched in the wee hours. I did the CSS, wrangling Salon's home-page design into Radio Userland templates, all by myself (which anyone who knows anything about CSS can probably tell with a single glance at the unruly code). I loved Radio Userland at the time for the way it combined a blog publishing system and an RSS reader. But times change; Userland put its energy into other products; Salon Blogs produced many great blogs but not a substantial change in Salon's business; and my blog settled down from the program's focal point to a personal-publishing bullhorn. Several months ago, in anticipation of Salon's plan to build a new platform for users to contribute their own writing, we closed off new signups to the old Salon Blogs platform. Today I'm moving my own blog to a new home, here, at Wordyard. I've managed to export my whole four years' worth of archives (over 1000 posts, averaging about one per weekday for the whole timespan) to Wordpress. (For those who care, I used the Radio Userland exporter, which pops out a plaintext file in Movable Type export format; edited that file to make things like titles and categories work; then imported into Wordpress.) The comments, alas, will remain back at the original Salon Blogs location, where they will continue to be available. With this move, I plan to blog somewhat more vigorously, and to provide more posts about my forthcoming book, Dreaming in Code, as its January 2007 publish date nears. I also look forward to leveraging some of the great features and plugins created by the Wordpress open-source community. If you subscribe to my RSS feed in Bloglines (the reader I've been using daily for years), the transition should be transparent -- Bloglines will do the flip for you, you don't need to touch anything. If you subscribe through other feed readers or services, you'll have to resubscribe to the new feed address, which is here. More anon! [Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment]
6:24:10 AM
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