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Notice: we begin the second section of the course.
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This week: we finish the poster prototyping days, and have the first of the website ones. We won't be having prototyping days for a while. Why? How does that fit into the "story" of the course?
please be clear and careful, honest with yourself and in the logbook and your other records.
Consider: you want to get the most learning for the resources you have to put to the task.
Not, the best grade for the least amount of work. This is another issue entirely. I will do my best to support you in recognizing and finding resources, and in knowing what this thing "learning" might really be about!
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>>>GATHERINGS: WITH PROCESSES, THINGS, BEINGS AND DISTRIBUTED POSSIBILITY
Tuesday 1 October, The Arts and Protests of Games
· Reed, Games Chapter in ms, sent by email (last week); Arts, read Ack & Intro, pick a chapter that calls to you!
· NOW IS THE TIME TO BEGIN WORK FOR CON #1: A GATHERING! WILL YOU PARTNER WITH SOMEONE?
LOTTERY TODAY FOR POSTER OR PAPER!
LOTTERY TODAY FOR POSTER OR PAPER!
At first glance Reed’s book on social movements may seem a bit out in left field here. But is it? Why is it not? What clues about this might Flanagan have suggested having heard her vid and seen Grow a Game? (We will be reading her work next.) What does putting Reed’s new essay into connection with our book of his tell you about all this as well? Which chapter did you choose to read first and why?
Thursday 3 October, Prototyping: website creation and curation
· Check out the Feminists in Games Workshop website: http://borderhouseblog.com/?p=10905
· LOOK UP ALL YOU CAN ABOUT OTHER FEMINIST GAMING SITES ON THE WEB! BRING IN A PRINT OUT OF SOME SPLASH PAGES!
· Also useful: Easyedutools: http://easyedutools.weebly.com/collaborate.html
Our fourth “flipping the classroom” Thursday! You MUST BE PREPARED so we can spend our time MAKING THINGS! If you have never made a website, you might start off with a Blogger version: https://www.blogger.com/tour_start.g Blogger is what I use for the class website. I use Weebly for my professional website: http://education.weebly.com/ Both of these are very simple. Or you might like to build a site on Word Press: http://en.support.wordpress.com/using-wordpress-to-create-a-website/ If you have already begun crafting websites, pick your favorite platform for something new, or enhance what you already have going with projects from our course.
[Images: http://max.limpag.com/article/create-wordpress-theme-yahoo-ui-css-aptana/ & http://jonghwapark.wordpress.com/2010/02/27/reflection-of-19th-february-website/
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All important learning begins with making mistakes. You want to make them as quickly as possible, as many of them as are needed to learn or unlearn what is important.
"The concepts of intellectual virtue, epistemic responsibility, and personal “care-abouts” demonstrate the link between knowledge and values. . . . Intellectual virtues are character traits . . . that work in combination with knowledge . . . [and] have a motivational component. . . . [And because they are] so difficult to develop . . . consequently develop gradually over time. . . . [Indeed] knowers are responsible for their knowledge and responsible for knowing well. [Lorraine] Code has called this responsibility epistemic responsibility. . . . Care-abouts are personal character traits that motivate knowers to create, maintain and share knowledge." [from Sue Stafford's article "Epistemology for Sale," 2002:221)
The psychic investments of intellectual virtue, epistemic responsibility, and personal “care-abouts” make them all goods in themselves, as well as proper actions and practices and even complex cocreated “rewards” in mindful contexts of distributed production and being. Opportunities for practicing intellectual virtues in contexts of good faith are far better and much less addicting rewards than intensified and increasingly differentiated forms of discipline and control.
[from Katie's book, Networked Reenactments, 294]
writing about values: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/science/jan-june09/achievement_04-17.html
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"Facing" the Crisis [Reed 2005:202]
"One of the key questions facing a social movement is how to represent the forces against which the movement is struggling. ...this process entails a paradox. On the one hand, if the forces against which the movement is arragyed are portrayed too abstractly, both personal recruits and movements members may find it difficult to identity with the struggle. On the other hand, if a movement personalizes the struggle too much by naming particular individuals as the opponent, the important insight that structural factors, not just individuals, are the ultimate target is lost. ....placing too much emphasis on individual commitment plays into the process by which the dominant society undermines collective opposition by personalizing and individualizing all social problems."
About AIDS, but how might we connect with our issues about values, and with the govenment shut down today too?
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"Bateson, in Steps to an Ecology of Mind describes the two forms of schismogenesis and proposes that both forms are self-destructive to the parties involved. He goes on to suggest that researchers look into methods that one or both parties may employ to stop a schismogenesis before it reaches its destructive stage.
Complementary schismogenesis
The first type of schismogenesis is best characterized by a class struggle, but is defined more broadly to include a range of other possible social phenomena. Given two groups of people, the interaction between them is such that a behavior X from one side elicits a behavior Y from the other side, The two behaviors complement one another, exemplified in the dominant-submissive behaviors of a class struggle. Furthermore, the behaviors may exaggerate one another, leading to a severe rift and possible conflict.
Symmetrical schismogenesis
The second type of schismogenesis is best shown by an arms race. The behaviors of the parties involved elicit similar or symmetrical behaviors from the other parties. In the case of the United States and the Soviet Union, each party continually sought to amass more nuclear weapons than the other party, a clearly fruitless but seemingly necessary endeavor on both sides.
A form of symmetrical schismogenesis exists in common sporting events, such as baseball, where the rules are the same for both teams." [From Wikipedia on schismogenesis]
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Telling the difference between social panic and social critique....
Moral Panics?
From Reed's ms. shared with us: "In the UK, Canada and Australia, they call them 'moral panics.' In United States, there is no name for them, but they occur in abundance. They usually take the form of 'phenomenon X is destroying the moral fiber of the nation," or "corrupting our youth," or "bring about the downfall of civilization...it is clearly video games that have generated the largest and most sustained panic attacks in the 21st century." (4)
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