A week ago I took some of the patter I’ve been developing about video games and put it to use, giving a presentation on MMORPGs to a group of students and others who’ve been meeting at the TC library to discuss technology and education. The group was pretty young — almost all of them around my age, plus Gary, a very forward-thinking library staffer who is already talking about developing a “virtual space,” meaning a PROJECTION virtual space, in the library — so the talk was really pretty exciting for me, with attendees asking excellent questions.
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In my last year of high school, I wrote a paper on government-run boarding schools for Native Americans. Books were quite hard to find. So I was thrilled to discover today, in the course of research for work, that primary source documents on the subject — see the autobiographies of Zitkala-Sa, whose name I remember, and Ah-nen-la-de-ni — have made their way online.
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Oh, oh, oh, I love Bruno Latour. Have I explained this yet? Here’s why I love Latour, as he speaks about relativism and the construction of reality:
Consider a sentence often cited by language philosophers: ‘ the present king of France is bald.’ This sentence has launched endless discussion in the philosophy of language, because it is both grammatically correct and completely devoid of meaning, as it does not ‘correspond’ to any real state of affairs….
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Mom, you asked the other day whether I dream in World of Warcraft. As of last night, I do.
The implications of this dream for Jim Gee’s hypotheses about the relationships between avatars and players might be interesting. I am not totally clear whether I was the avatar for most of the dream, but by the end it was clearly Me in the dream, along with the real life appearances and behaviors of a few of my guildmates.
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Home, where grass is greener
Where honeybees sing melodies
And orange trees scent the breeze
I wanna be a home sweet homer!
There I’ll settle down
Beneath the palms, in someone’s arms
In Pasadena town!
It’s kind of funny I can even remember that. When I was forced to learn it for the first-grade End-of-the-Year Sing, I angrily told my music teacher I would have a locked jaw for the entirety of the performance. I really didn’t like living in Pasadena — or California, really — as a kid.
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