13Mar2009
Media Literacy Skills illustrative list (that kids should have):
* Ability to critically assess information gathered from multiple sources
* Ability to appreciate works from many different aesthetic traditions
* An understanding of context within which media are produced, distributed, and consumed
-- More powerful gatekeepers also becoming less significant
* Ability to express self through range of media
* Ability to assess which media is most appropriate for a given purpose
* Ability to meaningfully participate in collective intelligence community
* Ability to think in multimodal terms
* An ethical framework for thinking about our freedoms and responsibilities as educators
-- Copyright industries are feeding schools information about copyright ethics
Thus our first biq question, can game software development as it is now conducted scale in the face of advances in hardware, appetite for content, and capped costs?
Our story now migrates to *objects*They looked friendly enough--at least, no one had fruit ready to throw at usIt was simply kind of surreal, after reading the comments on TN this past week and hearing other things at the conference about the problems with game studies and developer/academic relations
After our "high energy" presentation, the questions were even strangerSomeone asked why humanities research got left out, and we had to say that we couldn't find it to be directly relevant on our top 10 list of bulleted pointsIan made the point, and I agreed, that doing the research for this panel made us think differently about academic researchWhile I'm not going to say that what we've done personally has no value, it was a definite challenge to try and make it *directly relevant* in a BULLETED POINT for developersAnd there are huge gaps in what we don't knowWhere is the research about sports games, to take just one example? Anyway, the point is, I enjoyed the exercise, and learned a lot from itI hope the audience did as well
But overall, I like to think that the attendance demonstrates that developers are interested in what academics might be able to tell them (again I will point out: no fruit was thrown)And all week, I talked with developers who were interested in what was going on with research, from the smallest to the largest companies
Maybe the issue is the "larger" communityIt's always easy to abstract and oversimplify at that levelBut I know that on an individual level, there are real conversations and collaborations going onI don't want this to turn into some rosy "it's better than we think" or "can't we all just get along" thing, but I do think that perhaps the situation is not as dire as it's hyped to beBut then again, I haven't gotte my evals back yetIf you have a hurry using of WOW Gold, you may come here and Buy Warhammer GoldThe importance you will acknowledge when you have no Cheap WOW GoldIf Code is the Law in our realm, then the modern conceptualization of code (see Footnote [1]) often aspires to be object-basedThe craft of software objects is then Object Oriented Programming, even if it is only sometimes realizedBy and large, software object-oriented design has been a cultural touchstone for nearly a generation of software developers and designers - objects provide a convenient and intuitive means of partitioning/ decomposing problems and mapping them onto code building blocksChallenges emerge, however, when one scales interactions from small numbers of objects to large sets of objectsThrow in parallel threads of computation and all hell breaks looseWhy the concern with large numbers of objects? Well, that is arguably where gameplay simulation is heading
This is where Tim's slides enters our stageThey worry a particularly difficult and central problem: how to have large numbers of objects interacting across many threads of computation Or maybe notSchool deskills learners by not providing technologies that students use outside of schools?
Paradigm Shift -- media literacy should be taught across the curriculumMulticulturalism was an example--new media should be another example (not an added-on subject).