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CMS News Archives
Hi-Tech Who Done It! is part of a research project called the Education Arcade that aims to make computer and video games a valuable component of teaching. The undertaking is a collaboration between MIT and the University of Wisconsin-Madison and will ultimately bring together a consortium of educators, game designers, publishers, and policymakers to develop sophisticated games that range from quick demonstrations that illustrate points made in lectures to semester-long projects that support the content of courses. The educational games will be aimed at motivating high-school students or helping advanced-high-school or first-year college students learn complex concepts. Teachers will also benefit, as the Education Arcade is developing a website that will serve as a clearinghouse for lesson plans coordinated with existing commercial games, projects and programs to help students learn to create games, and online forums where teachers can share best practices with their peers.
Read more at the Technology Review . . .
Comics have emerged as a key means of interpreting and disseminating controversial and contested histories: Chester Brown's Louis Riel, Keiji Nakazawa's Barefoot Gen, Joe Sacco's Palestine, and Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis are just some of the works that take definitive social and political conflict as their topic. Why has historical material become so important for comics art? What unique opportunities does comics allow for critiquing and revising dominant historical narratives? These are the questions our speakers discussed, in relation to their own work and to the comics world in general.
Diana Tamblyn is writing a biography of Canadian arms trader and weapons engineer Gerald Bull; Ho Che Anderson authored King, a 3-volume biography of MLK; and Jeet Heer is a historian and a leading comics scholar.
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Continue reading "Podcast: "Comics and Social Conflict" with Ho Che Anderson, Jeet Heer and Diana Tamblyn" »
So studying "video games themselves" isn't [complicated]? All the social science projects and behavioral research into games and violence and/or aggressive behavior as well as their potential cognitive learning benefits and rhetorical/theoretical relationships between players and virtual worlds is all tantamount to some implied catch-all screw-off drug trip? (Not that I agree with the implication's analogue here in terms of the oft and unimaginatively scapegoated Pink Floyd.)
Anyone care to tell that to academics like Ian Bogost and Edward Castranova and Henry Jenkins? All the folks working not just in game design, but the study of ludology and/or narratology? Game luminaries like Will Wright and Peter Molyneux and Shigeru Miyamoto, who've made it their business (never mind quite a bit of cash) to figure out what players are thinking and feeling when they play?
From What's Wrong with Studying Video Games?
Greenblatt continued to say that last year Harvard passed a vote that faculty would be required if they wrote an article to allow access to a digital version for Harvard, so that all their scholarly work would be universally accessible digitally. "As a general principle, the idea that the work that we do should have value digitally and have universal access," is what Greenblatt said he had been calling for for years.
From if:book, a project of the Institute for the Future of the Book
For three days this week, Oct. 23-25, educators, journalists, researchers, and all those interested are invited to Philadelphia for "Rebooting the News: Reconsidering an Agenda for American Civic Education." The goal? To finds ways to bring young people back into a civic mindset--helping them learn how to navigate the news in ways that make them feel more connected to their world.
[. . .]
Ellen Hume from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for Future Civic Media, along with Renee Hobbs, a professor with the Media Education Lab, are among the participants. So far, attendees include journalism professors, students, researchers, and news professionals in radio, online, and print.
From the School Library Journal . . .
 A pioneering scholar of the Enlightenment and of the history of the book, Robert Darnton is the director of the University Library and the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor at Harvard. A former Rhodes Scholar and MacArthur Fellow, his books include The Business of the Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopedie, The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History, and The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Prerevolutionary France. He has written extensively on the impact of digital technologies on the culture of print and on the responsibilities of libraries in the computer age.
In this Forum, Darnton discussed and took questions about the emergence of the discipline of the history of the book, the future of books and reading, and his own vision of the ways in which new and old media can reinforce each other, strengthening and transforming the world of learning.
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Continue reading "Podcast: Communications Forum: "Books and Libraries in the Digital Age with Robert Darnton"" »
With respondent Diana Henderson, Greenblatt speaks on the transformation of literary study in America and his own career as a teacher and writer.
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Continue reading "Podcast: Stephen Greenblatt" »
The main message to come out of the German TV festival and confab, which wrapped Monday, was that big industry bugaboos including Internet piracy and TiVo-like time-shifting technology won't mean the end of TV.
"Television is a parasite that lives on the back of other platforms," said MIT professor and media historian William Uricchio in his keynote. "The panic I'm seeing now (with regards to the Internet) has happened to TV before ... with the advent of the remote control and the video recorder."
While Uricchio acknowledged he thinks the traditional ad-supported TV model is on the way out, other Cologne Conference speakers provided some hope with examples of other profitable ways to produce drama content.
Read the rest of the Hollywood Reporter's article "Tech fears tackled at Cologne Conference" . . .
This presentation delivers a first-person anthropological report on a dive to the seafloor in the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution's three-person submersible, Alvin. Meditating on the sounds rather that the sights of the dive, Helmreich explores multiple meanings of immersion: as a descent into liquid, an absorption in activity, and the all-encompassing entry of an anthropologist into a cultural medium. Tuning in to the rhythms of Alvin as a submarine cyborg, he shows how interior and exterior soundscapes create a sense of immersion, and he argues that torquing media theory to include water as a medium can make explicit the technical structures and social practices of sounding, hearing, and listening that support senses -- scientific, everyday, and anthropological -- of embodied sonic presence. Stefan Helmreich is an anthropologist who studies life scientists, from those who engage in the computer modeling of living things (Silicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World, University of California Press, 1998) to those who work in deep-sea environments (Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas, University of California Press, 2009). He is particularly interested in the limits of "life" as an analytical category for contemporary biology.
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Continue reading "Podcast: "Submarine Media: Sounding the Sea with Cyborg Anthropology"" »
How have American news media responded to this historic presidential campaign? Is it true, as many have suggested, that the influence of newspapers and television has declined in the digital era? Have the media become more partisan and polarized? More preoccupied with polls and campaign strategy than with substantive issues? Has the coverage by traditional media been qualitatively different from that by online news sources? In this first of two forums on the campaign and the media, noted journalists Tom Rosenstiel, who directs the Project for Excellence in Journalism in Washington D.C., and John Carroll, a local reporter and media critic who teaches at Boston University, will offer report cards on the current state of American political journalism.
Co-sponsored by the Center for Future Civic Media and the Technology and Culture Forum
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Continue reading "Podcast: Communications Forum: "The Campaign and the Media 1"" »
This presentation / lecture / infomercial examines the nature and implications of object performance both as a global cultural tradition and as a contemporary medium that dominates our culture. While performing objects traditionally include puppets, masks, icons, and other "things", the more recent innovations of film, television, and the internet can also be seen as aspects of our need to play with stuff. In all cases, the central dynamic of this form involves a focus on the material world instead of humans. The talk will be accompanied by images from 20th-century avant-garde film and performance work. John Bell began his performance work with Bread and Puppet Theater, after which he earned a Ph.D. in theater history at Columbia University. He is a founding member of the award-winning Great Small Works theater company of Brooklyn, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT, and Director of the Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry at the University of Connecticut. This spring he will be directing a "Living Newspaper"-style production about the politics of global healthcare with MIT students. His latest book, American Puppet Modernism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), examines particular moments of puppet, mask, and object theater in the United States over the past 150 years. He is a trombonist with the Somerville-based Second Line Social Aid and Pleasure Society Brass Band, and organizer of the upcoming October 12th HONK! Festival Parade from Davis Square to Harvard Square.
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Continue reading "Podcast: "Playing with Stuff: The Material World in Performance"" »
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