The paper describes "an approach" to the design of learning environments that builds on the educational properties of games, but deeply grounds them within a theory of learning appropriate for an age marked by the power of new technologies.
(Source: http://www.worldcat.org/title/video-games-and-the-future-of-learning/oc…)
Whereas schools largely sequester students
from one another and from the outside world,
games bring players together — competitively and
cooperatively — in the virtual world of the game
and in the social community of its players.
In this interview Serge Bouchardon resumes his many activities in the realm of digital media. Besides a professional background in e-learning and the activity as researcher and professor he has also authored a book about electronic literature and several literary works. He explains why in his book he chose the theories of structuralism to analyse a topic that reaches out to post-structuralism or post-modern theories. Furthermore he describes the way the aesthetics of the literary text changes in the digital context. He then ponders about the status of electronic literature in the field of academia and talks about his current projects.
This public research/community project explores the use of database narrative in the process of “counter-storytelling” using oral history and Critical Race Theory (CRT) in a public history touch-table project. The research is based on a case study of an ongoing digital humanities project at the historic Kimball African American War Memorial Building, built by black veterans of WWI in 1928 in the southern coalfields of West Virginia. The Kimball Project’s aim has been to further develop the significance of the renovated Kimball African American Memorial, which was once a vibrant center of local community life for all ethnicities and races. A central goal of the project is to create an identity as a national treasure and unique destination for historical tourism through the innovative use of digital information technology. One of the objectives of the project has been to involve the community in telling their own historical narratives using iPhone and iPod-based mobile journalism tools for incorporation into the Memorial’s exhibits, digital content, and to upload these stories to the Memorial website. The focus of this presentation is the research, development and design of an interactive, database narrative-driven touch table experience physically located in the Memorial’s exhibition space, as well as an interactive website. The database narrative uses a rare book discovered in the process of research and collection of artifacts and documents – a book of social protest poetry, entitled War Poems, written by two young black women, sisters Ada Tessabell Peters (age 18) and Ethel Pauline Peters (age 17) while students at the West Virginia Negro Collegiate Institute in 1919. The research and project present a paradigm shift in theory and practice for cultural workers engaged in mining invisible voices of the “Other” vis–à–vis “majoritarian” representations of race in digitally interactive public histories. (Source: author's abstract)
Computer-generated poetry is now almost sixty years old, stretching from the work of Christopher Strachey, Jackson Mac Low and Theo Lutz in the 1950s to the wealth of interactive poetry generators freely available online today. According to Antonio Roque, this history comprises four distinct (but overlapping) ‘traditions’: the Poetic; the Oulipo; the Programming; and the Research. But despite the inherent ‘literariness’ of the enterprise, one tradition is conspicuous by its absence: the ‘Critical’. It is the object of this paper to rectify this omission, proposing a mode of critical engagement that might allow interactive poetry generators to be naturalised as objects of textual study according to the protocols of literary criticism. It seeks to achieve this by means of a comparative analysis between what might be construed as the first interactive poetry generator – Tristan Tzara’s ‘How to Make a Dadaist Poem’ – and one of the most recent (and most powerful) – Chris Westbury’s JanusNode. It argues that a full critical understanding of Tzara’s text can only proceed from a phenomenological engagement attentive to the 'reader-plays-poet dynamic' that is a feature of any ‘Dadaist poem’. This approach is then applied to present-day interactive poetry generators via an interface-centred close reading of JanusNode that draws on the phenomenology of Gaston Bachelard and the work of concrete poets such as Eugen Gomringer. This analysis serves to assert the literary pedigree of interactive poetry generation and, more importantly, establishes some ways to critically fix a textual object for which flux might be said to be a primary characteristic. Previous to the advent of the web, the failure of literary criticism to engage with poetry generation might be excused, as the critic’s access was limited by problems of distribution and resources and a lack of specialised knowledge. In the contemporary online environment, however, this failure is no longer tenable. This paper strives to encourage deeper critical engagement with interactive poetry generation and the recognition that these programs constitute virtual aesthetic objects in their own right worthy of literary study. Furthermore, it aims to engage Roque's other ‘traditions’ in dialogue, in the hope of further developing and extending the myriad possibilities of poetry generation.