The MIT Online Educational Policy Initiative

Anyone who taught in a computer classroom in the 90s remembers how those classrooms always seemed to be made for doing something other than teaching. They were designed by technicians ostensibly for teachers. Unfortunately, most of the time, those technicians had never themselves taught, so their designs often didn't fit our needs. As often happens in academia, the designs fit the dimensions of some room in the basement where the computer lab was--right next to the Writing Center, and just as difficult to find.

For those of us who taught writing, the layout was even more foreign, since those rooms always seemed to be set up like a lecture, something we'd long since moved away from. We couldn't rearrange those computer desks in a circle for class discussion or in multiple circles for group work. I remember asking all the students to pull their chairs up to the front of the room and squeeze together. Thank goodness the chairs all had wheels.

So, it's no surprise to me that the MIT study came to the conclusion that we should, "focus on people and process, not technology" (IHE). In other words, teaching should guide technology, not technology guide teaching. Surprise.


MIT Online Education Policy Initiative: https://oepi.mit.edu/final-report

Summary in Inside Higher Education (if you don't have time to read the whole report): https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/04/20/mit-online-learning-report-notes-importance-teachers-instructional-designers?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=f4741c5510-DNU20160420&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-f4741c5510-197508093

Drive By Book Review: The State of Play: Creators and Critics on Video Game Culture

The State of Play: Creators and Critics on Video Game Culture, Edited by Daniel Goldberg and Linus Larsson.

With it's bright orange cover, The State of Play immediately announces that overly subtle academiceze will not be in play--though insight and intelligence is widely displayed. This little book contains 13 diverse essays that, as the title suggests, explores video game culture from the inside. 

Forget Fox Channel clichés about video games causing violence. This issue isn’t ignored; it’s handled in a sophisticated enough way that, as Cara Ellison and Brendan Keogh write in “The Joy of Virtual Violence,” “It's the rest of the world that needs to catch up” (155).

Essays range from straight on commentaries on gender discrimination—a more critical issue than violence for most gamers—representation of race and ethnicity, to esoteric explorations of identity, as in Ola Wikander’s “The God in the Machine”:  

“There is an interesting relationship that can be imagined between this type of Gnostic mythology and the role of the video game player in relation to the character he or she plays. Just like the fallen human soul described by Gnostic religions, the video game player steps into a false world that only exists for as long as one believes in it” (246).

Twine: an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories.

I've been playing with Twine (http://twinery.org/).

From their website:

Twine is an open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories.

You don't need to write any code to create a simple story with Twine, but you can extend your stories with variables, conditional logic, images, CSS, and JavaScript when you're ready.
Twine publishes directly to HTML, so you can post your work nearly anywhere. Anything you create with it is completely free to use any way you like, including for commercial purposes.
Twine was originally created by Chris Klimas in 2009 and is now maintained by a whole bunch of people at several different repositories.


I found the stories I was most attracted to were the nonlinear (not necessarily plot-based) stories that explicitly took advantage of the format. Here are a couple of interesting ones:

http://www.fahlstaff.com/

https://sub-q.com/play-a-man-in-his-life/

http://www.magicalwasteland.com/the-arboretum
I'm playing round with the possibility of using Twine to deliver instruction online. Could lecture notes, even lectures, become interactive using Twine. I'll play with the possibilities this summer.