Search Results for teaching

Over at the Digital Media and Learning blog, Liz Losh writes a nice introduction to the “emerging theory” of object-oriented philosophy. Her post discusses the surprise popularity of objects at last month’s Digital Arts and Cultures conference, including very prominent mention in Kate Hayles opening plenary. Losh then asks how object-oriented teaching might work at a practical level, offering some… read more

In June 2007, Ian McCarthy and I started performing Wandering Rocks on Twitter each Bloomsday. My original explanation of our project began with the phrase “I do not like Twitter.” I hadn’t realized it until today, but back in June (almost exactly two years after our first effort), my name appeared on a list of 100 Educators to Follow on… read more

I recently read Paul Lockhart’s incredible essay “A Mathematician’s Lament” [PDF]. Lockhart, a mathematics teacher at Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn, wrote the piece in 2002, but it wasn’t published until last year, on Keith Devlin’s monthly column. “A Mathematician’s Lament” begins with the nightmares of a musician and a painter, both horrified to see their art forms turned into… read more

Georgia Tech alumna Kate Compton has been working for Maxis on Spore for the past four years or so. Back when she was a masters student, she took my course on videogame translation and adaptation. This week, Kate announced a new official scenario for Spore Galactic Adventures, which she created based on Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. Given the pliant nature of… read more

I’ve been teaching Marshall McLuhan last week and today in my Introduction to Computational Media class. This year, for the first time in that class, I decided to assign excerpts from Laws of Media in addition to Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media. In particular I wanted to expose my students to the McLuhans’ tetrad of media effects. It’s really the… read more

I have an interest in game adaptation, something that we normally think of only as it relates to film-to-game licensing. In our forthcoming book on the Atari VCS, Nick Montfort and I also discuss another kind of videogame adaptation that was once its primary form: from arcade coin-ops to home consoles.

Jason Mittell, a media studies scholar at Middlebury College, recently wrote about his experience being a researcher at a liberal arts college. Mittell’s offering points to and comments upon a related article in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Kristen Ghodsee, who explained her path from UC Berkeley graduate student to Bowdoin professor. Both Ghodsee and Mittell question the assumption… read more

Each fall, students in my LCC 2700 – Introduction to Computational Media make Atari VCS games. The students work in teams of three to create them. This term we had a large enrollment and thus a number of games — 29 new ones, to be exact. There are some superb games, so I encourage you to check them out. I’ve… read more

In between sessions of Bioshock, this Labor Day weekend I’ve been updating this website. Of special note, I’ve added some of my courses over on the teaching section of the site. I haven’t included every class I’ve ever taught, but rather the ones I thought would be most useful or interesting for readers of the site. More importantly, I’ve finally… read more