Casey’s post yesterday about games being designed to “do” things resonated with the research that I’ve done on technologies in industries, first on Building Information Modeling in commercial design & construction and now on consumer biosensors. In both cases, advocates for these new tools tout them as “revolutionary” with the ability to enact sweeping organizational […]
The Brewing Storm Between Games and Education
This one has been brewing for a while. Perhaps, as Stephen Totilo notes, ever since Raph Koster voiced his concerns back in 2006. I believe that there is a storm coming between “game people” and educators, precisely at a moment when money is flooding into these realms. So, perhaps, that is reason enough for a storm. But the foundations […]
On Moderation Algorithms
Here’s a quick thought that comes from my dissertation. It deals with Newsvine, one of the sites on which I did fieldwork, but it involves no inside knowledge of the site. It was originally posted on my personal site, but Hector’s recent comment interrogating the nature of algorithms inspired me to cross-post it. I’d also […]
The Digitization of Comic Books… only without the heroes and villains
Venturing again into an example I do not know enough about, I wanted to recommend this Wired article on how the comics industry has been managing the shift to digital formats and distribution. The title, “The iPad Could Revolutionize the Comic Book Biz — or Destroy It” is deeply misleading, a predictable gloss from a […]
Tracing the Path of Online Video
In recent years, video has been blowing up in popularity across the Web and on mobile networks and most of us just watch it without thinking much about what it takes to bring it to our screens. It’s simple to assume that it’s just ABC, Hulu, or MSNBC.com publishing streaming files to the Web, and […]