Blogs

You spend a month in residence in Italy, writing many hours a day, and eating the other hours.  Pasta at lunch.  Pasta at dinner.  Breadsticks.  Wine with each meal.  Dessert.  Carbs, carbs, carbs . . . You even go on a food blow-out in Parma (cheese, prosciutto, all that).  And, guess what, you can still fit in the skinny jeans. O, Michael Pollan!  O, omnivore's dilemma!  Maybe there really is a solution.  Caveat emptor: This blog posting has nothing to do with new media.

Joking on the backchannel. Fun, yes. But what does it do to the front channel . . . (not to mention the nucleus accumbens) . . . ?

I've posted information about the recent Games for Health conference, inluding a link to my pre-conference presentation slides, on the TechPsych blog.  My talk focused on game accessibility for games and applications in K-12 settings.  (The two pre-conference strands were Virtual Worlds and Game Accessibility.)

Spending a month at a scholar and artists' residency like the inimitable and incomparable Bogliasco Foundation in Liguria not only changes your work . . . it changes you!

On May 16, the Center for Digital Storytelling (CDS) and the Museum of the Person are celebrating the International Day for Sharing Life Stories.

The following day – Saturday May 17 –  at 10 AM PDT the CDS is proposing a reflection on storytelling in virtual environments in the form of a panel in Second Life.

I'm in Italy.  My county of Durham, NC, went 75% for Obama.  The Pope has taken up texting to court youth.  New media, anyone?

FINALLY, this is the study by an evolutionary biologist that I've been waiting for, one that does not begin from the assumption that humans are the be-all and end-all of evolution nor that what humans think of (and the tiny bit we know about) human "intelligence" is the raison d'etre of evolution, even within homo sapiens.  Theorists have made this point but it is a rare experimental scientist who reverses the equation and the teleologies.  Carl Zimmer of the NY Times reports on Tadeusz Kawecki's work which begins by asking (FINALLY, again), "If it's so great to be smart, why have most animals remained dumb." Duh. Readers of this blog know that I've been flogging this one for a long time . . . but it's nice to have a distinguished evolutionary biologist working from this side of the equation.

Last night we Bogliasco Fellows had the pleasure to attend a concert by a former fellow, the composer and pianist Robert Levin. He played the exact same two sonatas by Beethoven on the fortepiano and then on the pianoforte, the latter being the huge grand piano on which modern audiences have heard Beethoven played many times. Beethoven was not Beethoven on the fortepiano for which he composed. Hmmm . . . was McLuhan really right in that technodeterminism, that the medium is the message? (Short answer: no, but, well, let's think about it).

A shout-out to the team at Princeton for their recent performance on the PLOrk at Carnegie Hall!

The focus of my recent blogs is on MMO games and virtual worlds for learning. If you are involved with this in your work, please leave a comment!

Oakland Blues: Virtual Presevation of Oakland's 7th Street Jazz Scene, More about MMO's

NASA's Promotion of MMO's to Promote STEM learning; Vision-Play's SpaceStationSim; EASe Games