Search Results for culture

Inequality in American Education Will Not Be Solved Online

With funding tight, the state of California has turned to Udacity to provide MOOCs for students enrolled in remedial courses. But what is lost when public education is privatized?

One night recently, it was raining hard as I drove to pick my son up from an evening class at the Atlanta Ballet. Like many cities, Atlanta’s roads are in terrible condition after years of neglect. Lane divider paint is so worn as to become invisible in the wet darkness, potholes litter the pavement. But this time the danger was… read more

On Human Dangers

Prosperity and austerity in contemporary philosophy

I’ve had the pleasure of visiting with a number of classes recently after they’ve read Alien Phenomenology. Very different groups as well, from freshmen to graduate students. A common question that arose in many of these conversations relates to the consequences of object-oriented ontology. This question usually takes a form like, “Doesn’t object-oriented ontology risk turning our attention away from… read more

10 PRINT CHR$(205.5 + RND(1)); : GOTO 10

A whole book about a single line of code. By ten authors.

This book is available in digital or physical format. Buy from Amazon This book takes a single line of code—the extremely concise BASIC program for the Commodore 64 inscribed in the title—and uses it as a lens through which to consider the phenomenon of creative computing and the way computer programs exist in culture.The authors of this collaboratively written book… read more

Opener Than Thou

On MOOCs and Openness

In his keynote at the recent Educase conference, Internet zealot Clay Shirky made the case that MOOCs are not provocative because they are massive, but because they are open—except they are not really that open. So, I’m no big fan of Shirky’s fanatical obsession with Internet openness, but he’s right in this case. Still, it’s worth pointing out that there’s… read more

Tenure-Track Position in Digital Media at Georgia Tech

My department at Georgia Tech has an open tenure-track position. Please distribute, apply, etc.! Georgia TechDigital Media Tenure-Track Position Georgia Tech’s School of Literature, Media, and Communication (LMC), which provides diverse humanistic perspectives on a technological world, is seeking to fill one Digital Media tenure track position at the rank of Assistant Professor, beginning in the fall of 2013. We… read more

Pretty Hate Machines

A Review of Patrick Crogan's Gameplay Mode in Game Studies 12:1

If game scholars share any intellectual common ground, perhaps it is our tendency to stake claims regarding the scope of game studies. Games are their own cultural form, extending back for millennia, say some. Games are a kind of computational media, say others. Games are a social practice, say others still, or a formal structure, or a kind of storytelling,… read more

Speaking of Fees…

The facile scourge of paid speaking

Writing for Esquire, Stephen Marche writes about The real problem with Niall Ferguson’s letter to the 1%, which amounts to “paid speaking gigs.” Here’s the money quote: Ferguson’s critics have simply misunderstood for whom Ferguson was writing that piece. They imagine that he is working as a professor or as a journalist, and that his standards slipped below those of… read more

Get Well, Galen

A lesson in fiction and reality

My kids just delivered some hand-made get-well cards. I was instructed to deliver them to Galen, the main character in the Wizard 3000 videogame series, a series of my kids’ invention which is not only fictional but fictionally fictional. Pop culture being what it is, Hollywood has started to make films based on the Wizard 3000 (fictionally speaking, that is).… read more

The Great Pretender

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 Toaster is Not an Octopus

Consequences of poststructuralism

Today I posted a reply to a mailing list which has been discussing OOO off and on. One complaint registered was that OOO is not “fuzzy” enough, and fuzzy or “soft” things are more desirable. It may not seem a very substantive comment, but I think it hits on what’s really going on with many rejections of OOO on purportedly… read more