Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Gibson: Pattern Recogntion

I'm finally reading William Gibson's latest novel, Pattern Recognition. First thoughts: it's a delight. I'm enjoying seeing the author move from visionary cyberpunk creation back in time to the present day, which is partially shaped by his vision. His tone has shifted, with drier descriptions and a steady, quiet wit. The plot offers no sf so far, just the internet and the post dot.bomb globalized world, with major time in London, Tokyo, and Moscow (so far). It's also, in a minor, tactful way, a 9-11 text.

While I finish the thing and compile notes, here's an obsessive site of PR annotations.

Games, information, and learning: Rise of Nations

A new paper from James Paul Gee, "Learning About Learning from a Video Game" explores the implicit pedagogy of computer gaming.  Focusing on the example of Rise of Nations, the author describes a learner-centered, self-paced, learning style-oriented approach.

Inspired, I downloaded the game, and concur with Gee.  RoN has depths to it, beginning with the opening tutorial, a rich introduction to history and interface, intertwined.  Repeated play adds more information about the dynamics of national planning and strategy, developed into learning by application and game feedback.  Some of schoolings' structures - classes, progressive planned learning, involuntary socialization - are absent.  Others appear in new forms: assessment by feedback and victory conditions; constructive learning by building a nation; information absorption.  Critical thinking is embedded within the game and its feedback mechanisms: interface, production and development cycles, interaction with other nations.  And I haven't gotten to the online multiplayer version yet.

The world's guru of fun, Bernie DeKoven, adds more thinking, noting, first, Gee's subtle point about the future of games and learning.  Quoting from the paper:

Shortening and dumbing games down is not an option, since most avid players donÂ’t want short or easy games. Thus, if only to sell well, good games have to incorporate good learning principles in virtue of which they get themselves well learned. Game designers build on each otherÂ’s successes and, in a sort of Darwinian process, good games come to reflect yet better and better learning principles.

Speaking of the future, and thinking of educators, Bernie adds:

It's heady stuff. It has to be in order to be recognized by the community it needs to reach. But it's well worth the read, as are the other three papers in this collection - a taste of the promise of play and hope for the future of learning.

Learning is happening with RoN, on numerous levels.  How do we capture this for education?  Think of the questions: the fit of gaming cultures with K-12 and academia; mapping game topics and curricula; selection and implementation of preexisting games; the long, hard, storied creation of new ones, perhaps better suited; games as learning objects; the preservation problem.  We'll come back to this.

(via Reed College's Technology Advisory Council)

Blogging as network literacy

Jill Walker has blogged notes for her talk on blogs at Brown. It's a rich text, including a solid discussion of teaching writing with blogs, and this model of blogging as a form of literacy:

What's more important to teach our students is network literacy: writing in a distributed, collaborative environment. Weblogs are the first native web genre. Serial, unstable (ethics: edit? annotate? delete? change your mind? - compare net journalism, post-editing), networked.

(em added)

(thanks to Howard Rheingold)

Smartmobs wins Utne award

Smartmobs has won Utne's award for best online cultural coverage. Howard Rheingold and the rest of us on the blogteam are very pleased.

Internet coffeehouse: The Economist broods

The Economist thinks again about the coffeehouse-cyberspace comparison.

In discussion groups and chatrooms, gossip passes freely—a little too freely, think some regulators and governments, which have tried and generally failed to rein them in. Snippets of political news are rounded up and analysed in weblogs, those modern equivalents of pamphlets and broadsides. Obscure scientific and medical papers, once available only to specialists, are just clicks away; many scientists explain their work, both to their colleagues and to the public at large, on web pages. Countless new companies and business models have emerged, not many of them successful, though one or two have become household names. Online exchanges and auction houses, from eBay to industry-specific marketplaces, match buyers and sellers of components, commodities and household bric-à-brac.

Howard Rheingold made this connection years ago.

The Economists also make the WiFi connection:

Such hotspots allow laptop-toting customers to check their e-mail and read the news as they sip their lattes. But history provides a cautionary tale for those hotspot operators that charge for access. Coffee-houses used to charge for coffee, but gave away access to reading materials. Many coffee-shops are now following the same model, which could undermine the prospects for fee-based hotspots. Information, both in the 17th century and today, wants to be free—and coffee-drinking customers, it seems, expect it to be.

(via Dave Winer, via Instapundit)

Jessica Litman on sharing and stealing

Digital copyright scholar and teacher Jessica Litman has Webbed up a draft of a significant, new, and delightfully-written paper. You can download "Sharing and Stealing" as a .pdf file, but also explore and discuss it through a nice QuickTopic version.

I'm still rereading it, working through notes, but wanted to mention one of her major insights. While intellectual property in the form of songs and movies is moving towards a very controlled regime (DRM, tethered downloads, terror-subpoenas), information has already moved in the opposite direction. Googling, databases, information literacy, and a growing Web ethic of correcting mistaken infomation has yielded a very rich, shareable, public-domain-like space. Litman's provocation is to describe this as a success (with which I agree), then to see what IP can learn from it.

Meiwes update: Savage column

Dan Savage takes stock of the German cannibal case. Some good observations about the American media silence on the issue, and some nicely noted shuddering (the Star Trek novel is a good touch).

Panders, shadow governments, and banned journo-blogs: cyberspace governance problems, continued

After the debacle of Friendster's creative identity insurgency and suppression, we learn of another cyberspace governance problem. EA's The Sims Online has not been doing as well as hoped - except for an energetic red light district budding into an enthusiastic movement. Enter a philosophy grad student and prof, who plumb the avatarworld and blog about it. The Alphaville Herald, named after one of the greatest films, and the blogosphere's TSO for avatar Urizenus, has dedicated itself to scoping out Sims' misbehaviors. After pressing EA on some discoveries (underage cybersex, a confession of RL violence), the bloggers found their account revoked.

Excellent Farhad Manjoo reports on this (Salon sub or daypass only)

...what is becoming increasingly apparent in the virtual world: There's a fundamental divergence between the interests of a community (typically high-minded goals like freedom of speech and assembly) and the interests of the corporations that run those communities (typically not very high-minded but otherwise understandable goals like making money and avoiding public association with words like "prostitution").
...a group of players in Alphaville joined together to form what they call the Sim Shadow Government -- a development that some players have welcomed, but that others can't stand.

One comparison is apt: Julian Dibbell, whose classic essay "A Rape in Cyberspace" (1993) is very germane here, has this sad commentary:

"It's similar to what you have with shopping malls. They're becoming the last refuge of public space for teenagers, but they're run by companies, and they can kick you out on a whim."

Beyond the Friendster FoF echo, we can also reference James Grimmelmann's fine article on IP and cyberspace governance.

(thanks to Sarah Roberts)

US Government Accounting Office: p2p and Web porn equally available

Despite the horrors attached to p2p, a United States General Accounting Office (GAO) report finds that p2p porn is... as easy to find as the Web kind.

(thanks to Jesse Walker)

On Wagner, Tolkien, movies, and sound

There is a New Yorker essay on Wagner and the film version of Lord of the Rings. We can consider this part of the long-needed correction of film studies' underappreciation of music and other sound.

Ross focuses on the Wagnerian and Wagner-ish Shore-Jackson collaboration in supporting the narrative and visuals with musical forms.

I would take issue with his too-brief contrast of Tolkien's implied politics with a supposed trace of Wagner's earlier anarchist interest. The books' love of the Shire is very much an anti-nationalist, anti-bureaucratic affair. It's a small world, automously and collectively run, which many anarchists would have loved.
(Fwiw. he also notes one of my favorite lines from the books, the despairing: “Ride to ruin and the world’s ending!")