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Video Games: Entertaining, Educational or Dangerous?
Video games are fun and addictive. I cannot argue against this. I have my own troubled past with them. When I was in college I wasted enormous amounts of time playing games. Later, this interest with games became a professional interest and I began graduate school with the hope of doing research on how computer games can be used for educational purposes. Ironically, the graduate school experience entirely transformed my perspective about video games. As I learned more about human cognition, I realized that video game playing might have some long-term unwanted effects.
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Part 2 of my Conversation with Firat Soylu: gnovis and the Role of Blogging in Academia
Firat Soylu is a doctoral candidate in Instructional Systems Technology and Cognitive Science at Indiana University Bloomington. Here is Part 2 of my interview with him; you can find part one here. In this interview, Firat talks about his experiences publishing with gnovis, writing his first blog ever, and the critical role of blogging in academia:<o
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Academic Views on and uses of Wikipedia: A Conversation with gnovis Contributor Firat Soylu, Part One
Firat Soylu is a doctoral candidate in Instructional Systems Technology and Cognitive Science at Indiana University Bloomington. Last Spring, gnovis published Firat’s article, Academic’s Views on and uses of Wikipedia.
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Good Hair, Bad Hair
Chris Rock reportedly settled on the topic of his latest film project after his 5-year-old daughter, Lola, asked him, “Daddy, how come I don’t have good hair?” It’s an interesting and complex topic, but not one that we haven’t heard about lately, which is why perhaps I didn’t enter the theater expecting what turned out to be a key critical text about Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Interview with Pennylane Shen: Graduate Student Publishing
I recently had the opportunity to ask Pennylane Shen, a graduate student at NYU who published a paper in the Spring 2009 gnovis journal, about her experiences publishing as a graduate student. While this was not Pennylane’s first time publishing, it was her first experience with peer review.
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Revisiting Google as God
All mighty, yes? All knowing? Perhaps not. At the 2009 New York State Communications Association conference last week John Durham Peters, professor of communication studies at the University of Iowa and author of Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication delivered a keynote address revisiting Google’s likeness to God.
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Considering Emerging Technologies for Learning
With the range of course management systems/learning management systems (LMS) available on the market (i.e., Blackboard-WebCT, Angel, Sakai, and Moodle), I often question whether any of them offer anything remarkably innovative for teaching & learning?
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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The Weekly Round-Up: Warring with the Media
Despite campaign pledges to use diplomatic channels to solve conflicts, the Obama administration continued this week to escalate and return fire in its war of words with Fox News Channel. While receiving support from some on the left, the media fell silent and pundits increasingly looked on the conflict as ill-conceived and distracting for the White House as it continues to attempt a soft landing for the healthcare bill. Politico, the Huffington Post, RedState, and Daily Kos all parachuted onto the battlefield and in the process perpetuated the story long past its expiration date.
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Towards A "Too-Smart" City
One area full of possibilities for exploration within media studies is the incorporation of technology into the physical environment that surrounds. The constant connectivity of modern (or postmodern) life presents unique challenges when attempting to harness the technology to improve the spaces we inhabit in the “real-world.”
Category: The Gnovis Blog
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Visualizing CCT: Adventures with NodeXL
It’s been an ongoing joke between fellow gnovis blogger, Trish, and I that a semester full of stats and social network analysis has seduced me into post-positivism. It’s true. I’ve learned that I like to measure things.
But in all seriousness, quantitative naysayers out there should consider the benefits of visualizing data. On the one hand, charts, graphs, and indexes are limited by their simplicity, and can often hide nuances and complexities. On the other hand, these same tools can be quite powerful for illuminating patterns previously indiscernable among data sets.
Category: The Gnovis Blog