The teaching cycle is a bit of a game

education View Comments
Dec 292006

I’m spending much of this month working out the process for a game I want to include in my portfolio for grad school applications, and it’s causing me to do way too much thinking about this site and how I want to grow it over the next year.

Specifically, I got to thinking more about the specific structure of the tutorials and quests I want to develop for the site. You see, for the site to successfully accomplish my objective, it will have to be able to complete the whole teach-assess-reteach-reassess cycle on its own, without the benefit of human intuition. I’m not into artificial intelligence, but I think I don’t have to be to make it all work on a superficial level.

You see, I’ve been reconnecting with video games (oh, how I have desperately missed them!), and I’m learning something very important. Teach-assess-reteach-reassess isn’t something that takes place only in a classroom. In fact, it’s something of how nonformal and informal learning work. You pick up a skill in a game. You then apply said skill. After being killed repeatedly because you can’t get the hang out of said skill, you find the tutorial area of the game to practice the skill again, or you find a resource to explain the skill more clearly. Then you go back to the game and correctly use the skill.

It makes thinking about both my game and the site redesign a bit more easier to plan out.

Posted by Rebecca at 1:06 am

Color symbolism, distilled

symbolism View Comments
Dec 282006

Did you take Tuesday’s color challenge? How did it go? What did you learn about your relationship with color?

I’m figuring about half of you probably did some sort of research into color symbolism to “color” your answer, as it were, but for the other half, here are some of the more common concepts associated with each color.

  • Red- strength, courage, energy
  • Pink- love, health
  • Orange- creativity, change
  • Yellow- imagination, cheerfulness
  • Green- health, healing, love
  • Blue- clam, friendship, loyalty
  • Purple- mystery, nobility

Interpretation, a always is a personal thing. If you find that your mind made different connections, that’s perfectly fine. This was more to get you thinking about meaning so you will apply colors with purpose in your own work.

Posted by Rebecca at 1:19 pm Tagged with:

An odd sort of writing prompt?

writing View Comments
Dec 282006

Miss Snark, who has become my new hero over the past few months, has been running her very well-attended Happy Hooker Crapometer over the last week or so.

The idea was that people would send in the hooks they’re including (or preparing to include) in their query letters, and Miss Snark evaluates them in her deliciously no-holds-barred manner. (I really hope she’s still running this when I finally have a book ready to share. Her advice, though blunt, is wonderful. Or maybe it’s wonderful because it’s so blunt.)

Finally frustrated by people who couldn’t write a hook after she shared so many good examples, she finally offered a basic form to help people start their hook. (As she reminds us repeatedly, it takes more than just this, but these are the basics of a good hook.)

Components of a good hook, care of Miss Snark:

  1. X is the main guy
  2. Y is the bad guy
  3. They meet at Z and all L breaks loose
  4. If they don’t solve Q, then R starts, and if they do, then it’s L squared.

It occurs to me, though, that you could also use this to help yourself work out a story that’s stuck in your head or perhaps one that is giving you trouble as you try to capture it on paper. Again, not as the entire cure-all, but just to get yourself started or through a rough patch.

Posted by Rebecca at 12:19 pm

The Princess Syndrome

writing View Comments
Dec 282006

I wish I could remember where it was, but I was recently reminded of an article describing two girls in the George R. R. Martin books (I may have just completely misremembered that. Please correct me if you are the person who originally pointed me toward that article.)

If I remember correctly (and my memory is pretty well shot this month), it was something about one girl being frilly and acting frilly while the other was a tomboy who acted tomboyish. (Yes, it’s quite fun trying to piece broken memories back together. Thanks for asking.)

I think it basically boiled down to wanting to see those stereotypes broken…or perhaps the two do actually break the stereotype.

At any rate, I was reading an article on how female characters tend to not be up front because they’re too busy being subplots, primarily in fantasy settings. The whole article is pretty fascinating, really, because it not only looks at these characters being pushed back and being made mostly helpless, but it looks briefly at the stronger female characters out there as well in this context. While managing to be strong women, these women are still subjected to stereotypes.

I’ve had too much time on my hands recently, so I’ve been trying to think, trying to view movies and shows I enjoy, but reversing characters’ genders. (In Sigma Six, it only made things a lot, lot worse, actually. Scarlett’s a pretty strong female character in her own right, and if she gets captured, at least one of the guys is stuck with her. It had everything to do with her being Sigma Six and little to do with her gender…so far…) In some cases, the property in question features a somewhat effeminate, yet still strong, male in the lead, so the whole thing falls apart because the argument feels moot. In others…I don’t know. I’m still trying to decide on that one.

It might be easiest to create a transcript of an episode of a couple of these shows, change all the names to a name of the opposite gender, let it lie somewhere forgotten for a bit, and then read over the transcripts and see what jumps off the page at me.

Posted by Rebecca at 1:04 am Tagged with:

Accomplishment: Time’s Person of the Year

finding my path View Comments
Dec 272006

All right, I think all of us who were targeted by Time’s lack of attempt to take their own Person of the Year award seriously are all having a fairly good laugh right now.

In fact, my good laugh came as I was telling my best friend, just home from Japan, about the award. We were already giggling when I suggested adding it to my resume as a joke. That had both of us laughing so hard we could barely breathe.

I’m grateful to know I’m not the only one who is concerned about the potential for this actually showing up on people’s resume, or who find the thought completely laughable. What concerns me more than anything, though, is when a reputable site (who has been on my radar for less-than-brilliant moves before) actually supports doing it.

Honestly, if your resume is so weak that you feel adding this “accomplishment” to it will put you over the top, then perhaps you seriously need to review your resume and stop selling you and your hard-earned skills short.

Yep, I am Time’s Person of the Year this year because I’m unafraid to share my life through blogging and various bits of social software, but in the end, that means nothing next to my long list of well-honed skills and talents.

Posted by Rebecca at 10:55 am

The conservation of “information artifacts”

anthropology View Comments
Dec 272006

I think this is something I probably keep revisiting, but I think it’s fairly interesting, especially in light of shifts slowly coming about in education.

When I was taking my oral comps for grad school, my chair asked me about my views on preserving data when the medium it has been captured on becomes obsolete.

I answered the question from a physical standpoint- you transfer the information onto a newer medium before the old one becomes obsolete. He thought that was a basically good, but incomplete response and kept asking me to consider the question from different points of view. It was hard to try to rethink preserving information in some form other than captured to a recent, relevant medium
The question was even more interesting because my background consisted of education and mythology. I loved sharing myths with people who visited the planetarium and then demonstrating how the myth were an oral tradition, capturing how a particular group of ancient people understood some astronomy concept or designated a constellation.

People have been looking to preserve information for all of time, prehistory and history both. What we’re currently seeing, though, is a desire, not so much to preserve, but to build up and fine-tune information as we work with it and become more familiar with its ins and outs.

In this time of collaborative learning, how do we approach the conservation of information that is constantly changing to reflect the newest knowledge?

Now there’s a question worth debating.

Posted by Rebecca at 12:58 am Tagged with:

Exploring color

creativity View Comments
Dec 262006

I’ve been going back through a number of my notes in an attempt to consolidate and reorganize them into something useful. Among my notes are entry after entry on color symbolism.

What’s interesting is that while there are some differences in how different cultures regarded various colors, there are some amazing similarities.

Your challenge, as you enjoy the lull between your preferred Solstice celebration and the New Year, is to become more aware of how you regard color. Look for chances to interact with various colors, and think about what that color says to you personally. Don’t research to find out what it “should” say to you. Analyze your own feelings toward each color.

What does the color remind you of? How would you invoke that color in your work and your life?

Posted by Rebecca at 1:18 pm Tagged with:

Public privacy

finding my path View Comments
Dec 262006

All right, this one baffles me a bit. Somehow, teenagers expect their parents to knowingly ignore what they say online.

How anyone expects to hide what they say online (outside of permissions and the like) is beyond me. I guess it’s sort of like politely not eavesdropping on the screaming person three feet away from you.

I think it’s also somewhat sad that these teenagers haven’t worked toward a culture of trust with their parents.

Of course, I’m also the girl who occasionally got calls at boarding school where it was a parental unit letting me know they had put some mail in my room. While I always appreciated that they were trying to respect my space, even when I wasn’t in it, it felt a bit silly. So I guess I feel that there really should be some sort of happy medium.

A happy medium that involves a building of trust and working to maintain that trust.

Posted by Rebecca at 10:27 am

Blogging challenge: Describing sound

writing View Comments
Dec 242006

I remember sitting through a particularly tedious section of tenth-grade English where we had to pick an object on Mr. Moore’s desk and describe it through four of the five sense. Lorelle’s blogging challenge this time reminds me of that horrible day.

That day, I picked a little red votive, standing proudly like a little soldier among all the other random objects. I think the closest I got to a sound for it was “thud”, the sound of it rolling off the desk, which it did after one of my roommates decided to see what sounds he could get from it.

Could I find some other way to explore a candle through sound? Probably not. Could I figure out a way to describe a flame’s sputtering and crackling in some way that doesn’t invoke images of fairies talking? Hmm…it also seems equally unlikely.

(For as long as I’ve been writing, one would think this particular challenge wouldn’t give me such a fit.)

Let’s see… A song is the spirit caged within rhythm. Except rhythm is a sound-dependent concept.
Have I mentioned that I’ve never been any good at purple prose, which is really what I feel this challenge is asking for?

A drill on concrete can sound like a chain being forced through rigging. (I actually used that to explain the horrible sounds my car was making one time. The mechanic looked at me funny.)

I’m tapped. I can’t figure out this one!

Posted by Rebecca at 12:51 pm

Keep it simple, stupid

gaming, writing View Comments
Dec 242006

I’ve been working off-and-on all month on turning notes for a choose-your-own-adventure book into an interactive game. (Okay, that was redundant. Show me a non-interactive game…) At first, I was just kind of playing at it, moving bits around, trying to determine a structure.

That was fine for the game’s puzzle side, the means of moving through the game. I had that drawn up the first afternoon.

Then I had to turn my attention to the story. I had several notes scribbled about characters, an idea for how the characters got into the story, but no actual plot to speak of.

So, now I’m trying to create scenes (three versions of each scene to match the puzzle side) to fill in the planned puzzles. I’m essentially building this game backwards, and it’s become a rather tedious task.

I may have to abandon this particular game over it.

Posted by Rebecca at 7:53 am
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