Consumption and Naturalism in Animal Crossing

Animal Crossing's Strange, Unresolved Conflict. Excerpted from Persuasive Games.

While some are learning about the peculiar pleasure of Animal Crossing thanks to the series’ latest release on Nintendo 3DS, the game has long charmed and puzzled players and critics. In recognition of this fact, in September 2013 Gamasutra re-published the excerpt below, from my 2007 book Persuasive Games. In the section presented here, I discuss Animal Crossing‘s first edition… read more

The Inverted Classroom

The "cool" origins of flipping

Last week I published an essay on the flipped classroom, arguing that condensation and abstraction might be better descriptions of what happens in such a classroom than flipping. I suggested that the flipped classroom is intimately connected to MOOCs and other educational efficiency measures, and that a truly flipped classroom would work more like a seminar than like an assessment… read more

The False Logic of Computationalism

Everything wrong with today's computing culture in two bullet points (maybe)

A premise: all the problems of computational solutionism can be expressed in terms of two fundamental misunderstandings of Turing: Simulation is not equivalence. A machine that acts like another changes that other and itself; it doesn’t reproduce them. Machines aren’t intelligent; rather they are persuasive. Thus, accepting or rejecting any individual one entails more than just reason and cannot be… read more

The Rudeness of Importance

Op-ed in the Atlanta Journal Constitution

Everyone’s been there: you’re having a face-to-face conversation when your interlocutor reaches for her smartphone. Just as often you’re the culprit: pawing your iPhone at family dinner, stealing glances at Facebook during a business meeting. It took fifty years for computers to move from office basements to handbags, and scarcely five more for them to enter our pockets. Now we… read more

The Condensed Classroom

"Flipped" classrooms don't invert traditional learning so much as abstract it

Some promote MOOCS as the future of lower-cost higher eduction, while others lament them a solutionist privatization of educational practice. Despite the polarization, both MOOCs and flipped classrooms enjoyed positive mentions last week from President Obama, who announced a White House plan to make college more affordable: A rising tide of innovation has the potential to shake up the higher… read more

What Grows when MOOCs Grow?

MOOCs scale for bankers and industrialists, not for students

You might want to read this New York Times article about Georgia Tech’s new online masters degree in computer science. The article is pretty good, reasonably balanced, and looks at the issue from (almost) all sides. Notable side missing, as usual: what students think. Anyway, I’ve said enough about this whole MOOC thing, but I did want to highlight one… read more

What You Can Get is What You Can Negotiate

Advice for negotiating academic jobs. And maybe others too.

Apropos of nothing, some advice for my academic friends who do or may have to negotiate a faculty position, either on the giving or receiving side. It probably applies well beyond academia, but I see the same disappointments year after year in the university. So much dissatisfaction among newly hired junior faculty (and the chairs who have to manage them)… read more

OAuth of Fealty

Resignation beyond sorrow on the Facebook Platform and beyond

In recent weeks, Facebook has been sending emails imploring me to complete a survey about how they might improve their development platform. I’d been deleting the messages, but after the third request or so, I decided to click through. For those lucky enough to have avoided it, the Facebook Platform is a set of tools and services that allows developers… read more

Rowling and Galbraith, Strangers

The meaning of JK Rowling's attempt at pseudonymous authorship.

I did a Twitter-series on this topic this morning, and here’s the Storified version of it for posterity. [View the story “Rowling and Galbraith, Strangers” on Storify]

YMMV

Sympathy without sympathy

originally published at Medium “YMMV” (Your Mileage May Vary) is among the most mistakenly noble gestures of modern online life. It seems generous on first blush. In online forum talk in particular, YMMV is used to flag one’s opinion, and purportedly to recognize that others might have a different one. I found this diet really helpful, but YMMV. A kind… read more

Writing