Gamification has reached such a fever pitch that its proponents have begun sounding like parodies of themselves. An amazing recent specimen is comes from Mashable, under the title “9 Strategies to Gamify Your Startup”. The entire article is “worth reading,” so to speak, but this one’s my favorite: When people have a measurement, they work harder to see that measurement… read more
All the exciting parts of exploring the solar system have been leeched out. What's left is the drudgery of the everyday and the dreams of the rich.
All the exciting parts of exploring the solar system have been leeched out. What's left is the drudgery of the everyday and the dreams of the rich. The Shuttle, its escort, and traffic (Reuters). I am a Space Shuttle child. I ogled big exploded view posters of the spaceship in classrooms. I built models of it out of plastic and… read more
Some responses to some responses to some responses
All right, this one of those posts that responds to conversations taking place on multiple blogs and on Facebook, so it’s going to be confusing if you haven’t read everything. Let me try to give you the backstory: First, Levi wrote On Ontology, another account of the difference between ontology and politics. Alex Galloway linked to this post on Facebook,… read more
September 11 and Distributed Networks
On September 11, 2001 I was supposed to meet with Rick Harshman, an Akamai account executive, in my Los Angeles office. I only remember Rick’s name eleven years later because it kept staring at me from my Outlook calendar that morning suggesting an alternate timeline. I can’t remember why we were going to meet; I was working at a design… read more
On sport, games, success, and failure
On her blog, my Georgia Tech colleague Amy Bruckman writes about her dissatisfaction with this year’s Olympics. While she loved the games as a kid, Bruckman wonders if her new feelings of disappointment arise from watching them as an educator rather than as a little girl: “I look at young people and want to see positive outcomes for all our… read more
A dumb, frustrating prediction about OS X and technology reporting
I made this stupid joke on Twitter today: The primary innovation in OSX 10.9 will be the move to canine product names. I was referring to Apple’s longstanding tradition of code-naming their OS X releases after “big cats”: Cheetah (the original OS X), Tiger, Lion, Leopard, etc.. The thing is, they’re running out of big cats. I don’t think cougar… 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
Kickstarter is just another form of entertainment
Also: I expanded the ideas in this post into a short article for Fast Company, Kickstarter: Crowdfunding Platform Or Reality Show? The web is flipping out today over the OUYA, a hypothetical new videogame console posted today on Kickstarter. It promises “A New Kind of Video Game Console,” but it’s really just an Android device with yet another 30%-take uncurated… read more
More on Harman on Time
I recently described time as a phenomenon “on the inside of objects.” Peter Gratton objects that time is “at the surface level of objects” for Harman, because the latter describes it as the tension between sensual objects and sensual qualities. Gratton argues, “if time is at the surface of where things relate then it is not within the object.” Short… read more