jason

Thanks to Rochelle I have these cool Flickr and Tag cloud widgets on the right side. They’re great… and hopefully useful. But cool nonetheless.

Mirrored from Lemmingworks.

Get Your Walk Score - A Walkability Score For Any Address seems neat. Rochelle twittered about this. It would be a great tool that if I ever moved, to find out where would be the best place to live. I’ll add it to my science class next year for sure.

Rochelle and Michelle… and Buridan were over for a festive dinner at my house this week. More roast elk and cranberries and sauces. And talk. My head was spinning by the end of the evening when the waltzed off into the snow.

Hey everyone!

Check out Innovate: Hacking Say and Reviving ELIZA: Lessons from Virtual Environments by Rochelle Mazar and Jason Nolan:

As text-based predecessors to Second Life, MOOs can offer educators important insights on managing virtual communities to create rich, meaningful learning experiences. Rochelle Mazar and Jason Nolan outline two instructional experiments in MOOs that have implications for current educational practice in Second Life. One involves modifying and modulating users’ ability to speak, first by strategically removing this ability altogether in an attempt to manage information flow and then by adding context-based text to a student’s speech to strengthen the immersiveness of the experience. The second experiment explores the use of chatterbots to deepen the richness and interactivity of a virtual build. While MOOs and Second Life appear to be vastly different technologies, Mazar and Nolan highlight their similarities and suggest that educators can apply the lessons learned from MOO experience to Second Life practice.

Originally published at Lemmingworks. You can comment here or there.

What Happens in a Virtual World Has a Real-World Impact, a Scholar Finds - Chronicle.com

Forget the pills, hypnosis, and meditation. Losing weight or boosting self-confidence can be achieved by adopting an avatar and living in virtual reality, says Jeremy N. Bailenson, an assistant professor of communications at Stanford University.

Well, Duh! Amy Bruckman’s work like a billion years ago explored that.

Originally published at Lemmingworks. You can comment here or there.

Is This Man Cheating on His Wife?

Alexandra Alter on the toll one man’s virtual marriage is taking on his real one and what researchers are discovering about the surprising power of synthetic identity.

Rochelle told me about this one. Yuka calls SL my “second wife” but I think she was referring to something slightly different.

Ex-Lemmingworks. ##.

Rochelle sent me this link: iPod History, Discovery Channel - Google Video. And it is not just about the iPod, but a nice quick little history of Apple turning around, and why some products change cultures.

Ex-Lemmingworks. ##.

Rochelle was telling me about this Jesus in Japan | MetaFilter thing… so I went to have a look. Lots of fun information on
Cercle Zetetique : Jesus Christ’s grave in Shingo, Japan! including: “…eat a nice “Dracula” ice cream, which, in addition to being delicious (Shingo garlic is not renowned for no reason!), will turn vampires away. The crucifix drawn on the lid will finish repelling any vampire still surviving after the garlic (and a crucifix is right in the theme of the place)!”

Now, what could be better than that?

Ex-Lemmingworks. ##.

Rochelle sent me this article which is really interesting: The Chronicle: 10/6/2006: E-Mail is for Old People: “As students ignore their campus accounts, colleges try new ways of communicating….” While I’m very happy that people are thinking this through, they don’t seem to be thinking that wisely or deeply. I did post something recently about this and thin technologies but it also is an issue of appropriate technologies. When I’m the prof. and I want to communicate with students about formal matters, sending an IM is, well, stupid. And with Facebook and Myspace, the cognitive equivalent of social communication as dressing up to go to a disco in a stripmall, you’ve got to wonder how far out of touch the admin might be. I’ve used IM for communicating with students for years. The problem wtih that is that they don’t use any of the ‘good’ ones and I have to use MSN (I guess I’m old school prefering IRC (yes, I know I trash IRC but that’s for a diff reason), ICQ, AIM/iChat, MOOs or the like).

I use AIM/iChat mostly to communcate with colleagues. While I was working with my RA on the songchild project (http://songchild.org) I was IMing with Danny, who teaches part time at ECE, showing him how to use media wiki, and editing the CSS for his wiki. We were in text, but when he was trying things out we switched to audio (which is a function of iChat) so we could type while we talked. And of course I could have 2-3 other chats going on with other faculty. Facebook isn’t quite up to that level of communication, though it is good for the rather thin communication that perhaps is all students want to engage in.

I’d prefer a jabber server for our school though, then we could be sure that we had a record that messages were at least sent. That’s what I like about institutional email… we have proof that it got to a student’s account, and the reverse. You can lead a student to email, but you can’t ensure they read it… Hmmm… I’d even think that setting up a monastic learning environment in World of Warcraft would be better than just getting a school facebook account. Now that’s a thought.

Our job is to improve student’s ability to communicate, not bring the level down to what has been marketted at young people. I’ve yet to find anyone who can justify FB or MS as a more rich or sophisticated form of tech over whatever else is available… and there are so many other ways of keeping in touch… of course blogs and livejournal, or even MOOs.

As well, if students were ACTUALLY more sophisticated they could do what I do. My university email is forwarded to my gmail account, and the email I send out from Mail.app is configured such that anything I send out appears to come from my university. And they wouldn’t need to go to the unversity account at all, nor embarass their friends with a stupid email account name.

This is also funny. UofT and Ryerson both allow for firstname/lastname@ email accounts. My students who try (they stop after the first try) to email me from elsewhere as fuzzybunny15634@coolmail.com are directed to try again from something slightly more appropriate.

The final interesting point is that I strongly suggest that students experiment with a more professional language register than they are used to.

Dear Jason;

I am sorry that I will not be in class today, as my new puppy ate my bus pass, and my student loans will not be in until next week, and there’s a meteor shower at the moment.

Sincerely,
Ed the Horse

Most of my students want a job when they graduate, and they see the point of knowing how to communicate effectively and professionally with their future employers, and later on with their employees. If they just want to communicate with their friends, they’re more than welcome to, since education is all about the choices we make based on the opportunities available to us.

Ex-Lemmingworks. ##.

I was about to post on this, cause i read it on /. but then I realized that everyone was doing it, so I’d just point to someone who had more spare time than I do… like Catspaw!

Nearly half of Radcliffe Publishing Course’s “top 100 novels of the 20th century” were banned at some point. This is not an occurrence from distant history. This is still happening today.

This week Google is promoting the American Library Association’s “Celebrate your Freedom to Read” campaign against banning books.

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Catsy seems to be cutting in on Rochelle’s job of being a force for good.