Apparently Merrill Lynch has given $5 mil to Sesame Workshop to research and develop financial literacy materials for kids. Read carefully; there’s some verrry interesting things going on between the lines.
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Been doing a little fooling around on a dating site which has a mathematical algorithm which matches you to people who answer questions similarly. It works surprisingly well.
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We just finished up one of our meetings for the Spencer EGGPLANT games research group, and it occurs to me it might be a good idea to start posting some notes online. Having feedback from various and sundry, including faculty who are away at conferences, might be useful, and we’re developing categories and going through processes of revision which I think might be useful to other academics studying video games. Heaven knows it’s freaking ridiculous how little of a common language we seem to have. So here’s the first batch of notes; hopefully this will become a regular feature.
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I really like the concept of distributed cognition — the idea that in everyday life we do a lot of our calculating, reasoning, and other thinking by making use of objects and other people in our environments, implying that stimulus-free environments like those demanded by standardized tests are not going to put any of us at our best. Being a longtime fan of anthropology, I also have been thrilled to discover definitions of literacy which go beyond traditional reading and writing, encompassing grafitti, webpages, almost any text you can think of, probably including tee-shirts and other means of signifying within given Discourses. Something bothersome about both of these ideas has been rattling around the back of my head for some time, though, and I think I just figured out what it is: they contradict some of my earliest ideas about what’s important about a person.
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One last thought for the evening. I started writing a note to a friend who doesn’t play video games tonight and once again found myself typing the words “I can’t really explain them to you — you have to play them yourself” — words which over the past few months I’ve spoken over and over to folks who did not grow up with video games. They started feeling a little odd running around in my head. Was it because this hands-on imperative (as Stephen Levy puts it about hacking culture) is really bogus?
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