On a whim, I purchased access to a bundle of technology articles from the New Yorker, enjoying these long-form essays from the past years and decades. One of them, “In the Outlaw Area” by Calvin Tomkins (The New Yorker, January 8, 1966, p. 35), presents iconoclast architect and all-around scientific great Buckminster Fuller, whose work is fully visible from the Montréal skyline since the 1967 World Expo.

I was surprised to notice that Fuller had written about the future of education back in the 1960s & 1970s, and sounds like his vision fits with the broader lines of experiential & blended learning:

(Images taken from screen shots on my mobile device of the text as displayed, from The New Yorker, January 8, 1966, p. 35)

Definitely worth a read!

This is a vision I had a few weeks ago, that I shared with colleagues at the Technoculture Art and Games (TAG) research group at Concordia University. It also fits with a conversation I’ve had with Marius Buliga on his blog chorasimilarity about
data visualization, apps and open data (and much more).

It is a bit of a rant, but I wouldn’t want it stuck in some old email folder, not with this blog begging for this kind of weird, pie-in-the-sky, waking dream… essentially, this is a broad sketch of using MineCraft as a data visualization tool…

I love to be handed vague & seemingly impossible challenges. These usually involve plugging random tidbits together so that something can emerge. So, I’ve been trying to figure out something simple yet awesome to do with the […] Library project. Also, someone on this list (who shall remain nameless) said in passing: “it would be great to use minecraft for data visualisation” and that somehow stuck.

Granted, I did not quite know what minecraft was (my bad, Lynn’s lecture fixed that). But since the e.SCAPE conference, I’ve dabbled in gamification of libraries as well as experiential learning (which are related somehow). I’m also reading about the history of books, swarms and how games were used to figure them out, as well as my regular score of copyright stuff (must-write-phd-thesis). Also, something impossible happened in the past 12hrs, both my daughters slept a consecutive 7 hours, and my train was delayed long enough for me to make myself a 2nd cup of coffee. All these sources, sleep and stimulants gave birth to an epiphany (a good friend of mine would call that a brain fart, but let’s not get graphic here).

The […] library system is releasing its datasets in an open format (a friend told me that) – which means that you can download their entire catalogue via an open protocol. So, if librarians construct an intellectual edifice with the books they buy, this analogy can deliver an evolving structure in MineCraft. For example, you could use the Dewey decimal code (which is a proxy to the subject of the book) as well as the location (branch library, a proxy for neighbourhoods) to devise a form of city scape or structure. Collections evolve over time – books are bought or weeded – which makes it into a living thing as this incorporates the concept of time. Also, the library system uses standards to manage its collections (which translate into fields in the catalogue), these rules can be transposed in a virtual representation.

Now, if you think this is cool, imagine if we could get the (anonymous ) data-feed from individual loans made to patrons – we could incorporate a whole new level to the game (swarms of people borrowing swarms of books). In fact, this would allow people in the city to “play the game” by borrowing a book! I don’t know if Minecraft has en engine to run critters in its environment, but we could have a swarm of critters walking all over the place based on the book-loans… or more simply, the structures in the system could somehow change with loans as well.

I feel Borges would have been pissed off if I did not share this fascinating living evolving vivid virtual representation of a library, its use and its impact on a city with such fine folks as yourself. I will let people more adept than me explore the ramifications of such a representation on identity, institutions, swarms, gamification, representations…

The idea is that as a Librarian, we learn how to evaluate a collection – a living organism which evolves over time based on constraints (space, budget, degradation of the material with use). People read books from librarians and librarians read collections. The collection as “edifice” is a strong analogy of how I perceive librarians do their work. MineCraft can be a tool to share this vision of a librarian’s professional work with others.

I call this the Edifice ™ project (which also works nicely in French).

I’ve always wanted to learn a few more languages, and I am going to add a new one to my “must earn before I die” list: econometrics. I sense that this is the analytical tool that I will eventually have to use to really dig deep into the problems I want to research. The problem is that I’ve already done the math when I was younger, but I couldn’t remember it to same my life.

In any case, here are some sources to read… in my free time…

Mostly Harmess Econometrics (2008) from Princeton University Press (this book was cited on an interesting report on copyright from the National Academies Press)

ECONOMETRICS. Bruce E. Hansen c 2000, 20131. University of Wisconsin (free ebook!)

And this video series from Ben Lambert on YouTube :
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_5SLG7sUa0&w=560&h=315]

Of course, the two introductory textbooks that are often recommended are:
– Introductory Econometrics: A Modern Approach by Jeffrey Wooldridge
– Introduction to Econometrics by Stock & Watson

Google Reader is dead. Long live Google Reader. I’ve presented on RSS feeds before on this blog, but now I have a new feed aggregator. See also a presentation I held, in French, on blogging as a doctoral student (slides here).

Feedly Logo

I liked this interesting take on undergraduate tacit knowledge from this experienced librarian in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Some key take-back points:

Journals and magazines are published as ongoing series. For those of us who remember print, articles are bundled into issues, issues into volumes, and every year more articles are published in these bundles. If every article you ever read was found online, the relationship of articles to a particular journal published in a particular year is not at all obvious.
News is different than opinion. I’m so ancient I grew up with newspapers printed on newsprint, delivered to your doorstep every morning and afternoon. (Hard to believe, but even small cities typically had two major newspapers dividing the day.) One thing that is immediately obvious from the layout of a printed newspaper is that news and opinion are different categories. One could argue that news is strongly influenced by reporters’ opinions or the orientation of the publication, but when it comes to making choices about what information to use and how to use it, the distinction between reporting and opining matters. That distinctiveness is much harder to recognize online.
Read more: Inside Higher Ed

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/marinal/8291381232/sizes/o/in/photostream/

A colleague mentioned this game, called “The Last of Us” that one can watch as a movie or play like a game. According to her, the cinematographic parts are hard to discern from the game. See this walkthrough on YouTube:

I recommend this really interesting article from Alexandre Enkerli on the topic of which apps on the iOS platform he uses for his teaching, researching and… well… day-to-day life.

Of particular value is the discussion of his “workflow” and how each app supports him.

“Playing Outside” is a great essay by Leigh Alexander in The New Inquiey covers much ground on the role of play and fun in games.

An emerging digital ecosystem is emerging outside the contours of classic blockbuster video games. Alexander asserts that:

if genuine legitimacy for games lies in the idea that they can be creative expression, tools of global communication and teaching — that’s the evolutionary purpose of play, after all — fun decreases in relevance. Culture-changing entertainment is rarely described as “fun.”

See also this series of articles from The Economist on the video games industry back in December 2011.

Finally, this interesting article from the New Yorker by Nick Paumgarten called MASTER OF PLAY (profile of Nintendo’s great Shigeru Miyamoto ) and this quote of interest:

The Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga, in his classic 1938 study “Homo Ludens” (“Man the Player”), argued that play was one of the essential components of culture—that it in fact predates culture, because even animals play. His definition of play is instructive. One, play is free—it must be voluntary. Prisoners of war forced to play Russian roulette are not at play. Two, it is separate; it takes place outside the realm of ordinary life and is unserious, in terms of its consequences. A game of chess has no bearing on your survival (unless the opponent is Death). Three, it is unproductive; nothing comes of it—nothing of material value, anyway. Plastic trophies, plush stuffed animals, and bragging rights cannot be monetized. Four, it follows an established set of parameters and rules, and requires some artificial boundary of time and space. Tennis requires lines and a net and the agreement of its participants to abide by the conceit that those boundaries matter. Five, it is uncertain; the outcome is unknown, and uncertainty can create opportunities for discretion and improvisation. In Hyrule, you may or may not get past the Deku Babas, and you can slay them with your own particular panache.

The French intellectual Roger Caillois, in a 1958 response to Huizinga entitled “Man, Play and Games,” called play “an occasion of pure waste: waste of time, energy, ingenuity, skill, and often of money.” Therein lies its utility, as a simulation that exists outside regular life. Caillois divides play into four categories: agon (competition), alea (chance), mimicry (simulation), and ilinx (vertigo). Super Mario has all four. You are competing against the game, trying to predict the seemingly random flurry of impediments it sets in your way, and pretending to be a bouncy Italian plumber in a realm of mushrooms and bricks. As for vertigo, what Caillois has in mind is the surrender of stability and the embrace of panic, such as you might experience while skiing. Mario’s dizzying rate of passage through whatever world he’s in—the onslaught of enemies and options—confers a kind of vertigo on the gaming experience. Like skiing, it requires a certain degree of mastery, a countervailing ability to contend with the panic and reassert a measure of stability. In short, the game requires participation, and so you can call it play.

Caillois also introduces the idea that games range along a continuum between two modes: ludus, “the taste for gratuitous difficulty,” and paidia, “the power of improvisation and joy.” A crossword puzzle is ludus. Kill the Carrier is paidia (unless you’re the carrier). Super Mario and Zelda seem to be perched right between the two.

Notice how it refers to two studies who first addressed games and play. They are about in the middle of the article

[ted id=1752]
In this TED Talk, Paola Antonelli explains why, as the Museum of Modern Art’s senior curator of architecture and design, she identified 14 games to curate as part of the venerable New York City institution’s permanent collection. The goal is to integrate these games as perfect examples of “interactive design” – a particular section of the design collection.

Of particular interest is the selection criteria used in identifying the games: how we experience time, evolve or use the space, the aesthetics of the game and the design behavior. In addition, I was struck by the goal of preserving the original code of a game – that is seen as an essential element to preserve as part of a museum collection, not just copies of the game and other paraphernalia.

Actually, this is an interesting difference between museums and libraries. Libraries usually collect copies of works whereas museums focus on artefacts. The former are reproductions and the latter are originals (yes, I know sometimes libraries do have originals or artefacts, but they tend to be stuck in “special collections” because they are special). In that sense, the role of the institution is quite different when thinking about the institutional mission of preservation and access.

Mia Consalvo, Canada Research Chair in Game Studies & Design at Concordia University, just blogged about her experience in running a graduate course called: COMS 642Q: Cheating, Games, and the Ethics of Play Media (link to course outline).

Most interestingly, students had to create a running online game using the ChoiceScript platform. All the student games are available via the TAG/Hexagram website.

Full disclosure: I am an associate member of the TAG/Hexagram research center at Concordia University in Montréal.