Some changes in my role and new initiatives
As my college just announced yesterday, I’ll be taking on a slightly different role at Georgia Tech. You can read the full release, but the relevant bits are as follows: I have been named Ivan Allen College Distinguished Chair in Media Studies I am also now jointly appointed in the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing I… read more
On massiveness, students, and flipped classrooms
The annual Computing Research Association conference is taking place this week at Snowbird in Utah, and one of today’s plenaries is about online eduction and Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs). Reading the description of the session, I noticed two common positions on MOOCs that I think are rhetorically effective yet misleading. The “massive” numbers of “students” Citing enormous enrollment numbers… read more
The question is, can they be more?
Earlier this week, Georgia Tech and eleven other higher education institutions announced their participation in Coursera, a company that hosts online courses. Reactions have been predictably dramatic, as exemplified by Jordan Weissman’s panegyric in the Atlantic, titled The Single Most Important Experiment in Higher Education. I’ll spare observations on the obvious problems with Weissman’s article, like the witless claim that… read more
Turing as a Philosopher of Imitation
It’s hard to overestimate Alan Turing’s contributions to contemporary civilization. To mathematics, he contributed one of two nearly simultaneous proofs about the limits of first-order logic. In cryptography he devised an electromechanical device that decoded German Enigma machine’s signals during World War II, an accomplishment that should also be counted as a contribution to twentieth century warfare and politics. In… read more
A new book in software studies
My next book is even stranger than my last. It’s an entire book, 65,000+ words worth, about a single-line Commodore 64 BASIC program that is inscribed in the book’s title, 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10. And if that isn’t strange enough, I wrote the book with nine other collaborators (Nick Montfort, Patsy Baudoin, John Bell, Jeremy Douglass, Mark C.… read more
Jimmy Maher's Platform Study of the Commodore Amiga
I’m very happy to announce the publication of the latest book in the Platform Studies series, Jimmy Maher’s The Future Was Here: The Commodore Amiga. It’s a terrific book about this influential multimedia microcomputer. As someone who never had an Amiga in the 80s and 90s, but who was often surrounded by them, I can vouch for the effectiveness of… read more
Work with me at Georgia Tech Digital Media
We have a job opening for a staff position in my program at Georgia Tech. The job is for an Academic Professional, who will serve as assistant to the Graduate Program in Digital Media. You get to work with me and nine other core faculty in the program, as well as with others in the School and College, to help… read more
A fresh look at computer games as a mature mass medium with unlimited potential for cultural transformation.
This book is available in digital or physical format. Buy from Amazon In recent years, computer games have moved from the margins of popular culture to its center. Reviews of new games and profiles of game designers now regularly appear in the New York Times and the New Yorker, and sales figures for games are reported alongside those of books,… read more
Part 2: The Digital Humanities
If we accept the premise that the humanities should orient toward the world and not toward a private, scholarly sanctuary, then what trends are already facilitating that process? One candidate is the “digital humanities,” a topic about which I have remained silent for too long, despite the fact that I direct a digital media graduate program and teach in a… read more
...and secure your fame and fortune forever*
Nick Montfort and I were thinking about the Platform Studies series today, as we are wont to do. There are two books in the series that are nearing completion now, which we are delighted about, but there are many more to be written. We were talking about some platforms that we thought were large and low-hanging fruit for any interested… read more