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August 20, 2010

Digital Printing Won't Save Scholarly Publishing

...but a few successful books might

Via my colleague Mark Guzdial, I've just learned that Rice University Press is being shut down entirely. It's unfortunate to see a university press shuttered, but it comes as no surprise that some will fall given the perfect storm of a terrible current economic climate in both universities and in ...

August 18, 2010

The University of Stockholm Syndrome

On the "adjunct problem"

Brian Croxall writes in response to Anthony Grafton's New Republic review of Louis Menand's book The Marketplace of Ideas. In brief, one of Menand's suggestions is to admit fewer graduate students and shorten the time to the PhD to combat the lack of job opportunities; Grafton responds that grad school ...

June 4, 2010

The Cocktail Party Test

Branding Your Weird Academic Field

I've been meaning to post a link to Ethan Watrall's April article Building an Interdisciplinary Identity in a (Mostly) Non-Interdisciplinary Academic World. It includes a number of tips for branding yourself as an academic when working outside of or in-between traditional fields. I know that many academics, particularly those straggler ...

February 19, 2010

Pascal Spoken Here

Learning about Learning Programming from the Apple ][

Among the many, many things we talk about when we discuss curriculum for the Computational Media degree is how to make learning programming facile and appealing all throughout a student's career. Many sub-problems arise, for example, how can one help students learn new languages and environments after they've become familiar ...

January 31, 2010

Object-Oriented Ontology Symposium

April 23, 2010 at Georgia Tech

I'm happy to announce that we'll be hosting the first Object-Oriented Ontology Symposium at Georgia Tech, on Friday April 23, 2010. Speakers include myself, Levi Bryant, Graham Harman, and Steven Shaviro, with respondents from the local Atlanta area: my Georgia Tech colleagues Hugh Crawford, Carl DiSalvo, and Eugene Thacker, and ...

January 18, 2010

The Marketplace of Ideas

Louis Menand's new book on professors and professionalization

Via Peter Gratton, I've just read Slate's detailed review of Louis Menand's new book The Marketplace of Ideas, about the state of the university and the anxiety of the professoriate. Given that my own feelings about such matters are far less measured and far more informal than Menand's, I'll look ...

January 9, 2010

The Turtlenecked Hairshirt

Fetid and Fragrant Futures for the Humanities

In a reflection on all the recent hubbub about the sordid state of the humanities and the recently proposed possibility of a cure in the form of the "digital humanities," Cathy Davidson offers the following lament: When I think of what the humanties offer...it is astonishing to me (and tragic) ...

December 26, 2009

Boredom and Torpor

Mark Fisher on discipline and pedagogy

I read Mark Fisher's excellent little book Capitalist Realism this week. It's a short book long on insights, many of which provoked me, some of which I disagreed with, and a few of which I want to share. Here's the first of the latter kind, from a discussion of the ...

October 29, 2009

If You Follow Me...

Twitter and Subtlety

In June 2007, Ian McCarthy and I started performing Wandering Rocks on Twitter each Bloomsday. My original explanation of our project began with the phrase "I do not like Twitter." I hadn't realized it until today, but back in June (almost exactly two years after our first effort), my name ...

September 20, 2009

Computing as a Liberal Art

Thoughts on Education, Research, and Progress

I recently read Paul Lockhart's incredible essay "A Mathematician's Lament" [PDF]. Lockhart, a mathematics teacher at Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn, wrote the piece in 2002, but it wasn't published until last year, on Keith Devlin's monthly column. "A Mathematician's Lament" begins with the nightmares of a musician and a ...

September 4, 2009

Computers and Creative Play

Nolan Bushnell on Educational Videogames

I stumbled upon an article by Atari founder Nolan Bushnell about the educational potential of videogames. It's not dated, but based on the biographical one-liner I'd say it's from around 1982. Here's the first paragraph: The computer, the single most powerful development of the twentieth century, is still puny in ...

August 5, 2009

Why I Hate ACM Format

And why it's bad for digital media and game studies

Two key conferences in digital media and game studies, Digital Arts and Culture (DAC) and the Digital Games Reserch Association (DiGRA) use an unexpected format for their papers: ACM, the format devised by the Association for Computing Machinery for publications in computer science. I have nothing against computer science, but ...

April 22, 2009

Texture, Bleed, Afterimage

CRT Emulation for the Atari VCS

This spring, I had the pleasure of advising a Georgia Tech Computer Science capstone group. The capstone is a requirement for the degree that is meant to draw on all aspects of the students' experience in the program. Each project requires an advisor and a customer. In my case, I ...

April 27, 2008

Liberal Arts College vs. Research I University: Deathmatch

Ten principles for better academic career advisement

Jason Mittell, a media studies scholar at Middlebury College, recently wrote about his experience being a researcher at a liberal arts college. Mittell's offering points to and comments upon a related article in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Kristen Ghodsee, who explained her path from UC Berkeley graduate student ...

March 16, 2008

Text of my GDC Education Summit Keynote

Following reflections on Georgia Tech president Wayne Clough's appointment to the Secretaryship of the Smithsonian

Today G. Wayne Clough, the president of Georgia Tech, announced his plans to step down as of mid-summer to take the top post at the Smithsonian Institute. The Smithsonian has been plagued by many problems in recent years, from major budget overruns to a crippling executive corruption scandal last year ...