Interactive Lecturing

Backwards planning is all the rage in education today. The "understanding by design" principle dictates that teachers decide on a goal for their unit, course, lesson, etc. and then scaffold their curriculum with the aim of getting students to said goal. In general, I love the ideas behind backwards planning.

However, there is a way in which backwards planning has become the unwitting accomplice of teaching in the style and spirit of NCLB and lecture-oriented teaching. I've observed, both in high schools in New York City, and in classes in my own graduate program at Columbia University, a teaching style based on UBD principles that crushes student exploration in the name of teaching the intended content. Teachers know what they want students to learn or "take away" from a lesson, and conduct discussions and activities with these concepts in mind.

One common setup for lesson activities involves teachers posing questions, eliciting responses from students, and then synthesizing what they say through class conversation and board writing. Teachers have in mind before the conversation begins what they want to be on the board, and the direction they want the conversation to go in. Students are involved in the lesson, are active participants in a sense. However, with teachers knowing exactly where the conversation will go, what students are supposed to learn, it seems that the difference between lessons of this mold and lectures are surface level.

Our Confused Randian Values

Adam Kirsch has a piece in The New York Times on Anne Heller's new book on Ayn Rand seeks to explore the connections between Rand's philosophy and the meandering modern Republican party. He winds up going more into exploring Rand's life and values as they are showcased in Heller's book. The most interesting part to me was his questioning of Rand's pedestalling of businessman and entrepreneurs. He writes,

Rand had no more reverence for the actual businessmen she met than most intellectuals do. The problem was that, according to her own theories, the executives were supposed to be as creative and admirable as any artist or thinker. They were part of the fraternity of the gifted, whose strike, in “Atlas Shrugged,” brings the world to its knees.

Rand’s inclusion of businessmen in the ranks of the Übermenschen helps to explain her appeal to free-marketeers — including Alan Greenspan — but it is not convincing. At bottom, her individualism owed much more to Nietzsche than to Adam Smith (though Rand, typically, denied any influence, saying only that Nie tzsche “beat me to all my ideas”). But “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” never sold a quarter of a million copies a year.

Metroid Prime and the Artistic Relevance of Video Games

Michael Thompson has a feature up on IGNWii advocating for the artistic merits of the 2002 Nintendo release Metroid Prime. Thompson makes the case that Metroid Prime is the interactive equivalent of Citizen Kane. While the format and audience for the piece seem to limit how deeply the article delves into an analysis of the game in terms of more formal artistic theories, it does make the case for the treatment of video games as serious art, using Metroid Prime as the fountainhead for its commentary. Thompson writes:

The novel is the art of writing; film is the art of editing; and videogames are the art of interacting. Developers create a space where interaction is necessary for progress and they author all the different consequences for interaction within that space.

Here, Thompson is making a fairly basic, but seemingly unrecognized statement about the medium of videogames. They are authored works that allow for direct, explicit engagement with the consumer. That engagement and interactivity is manipulated by the authors of the work. Thompson takes this premise and runs with it, providing a summary of the game's experience to make the case that it is, like Citizen Kane, a masterpiece of its medium.

Check this video for context on what Thompson is talking about. There is a strong attention to the detail and set up of the game's world, and a mixing of standard video game elements with a sense of almost peaceful isolation. The music does a great job of setting the mood.

IGN: Citizen Prime: Is Metroid Prime Our Citizen Kane?

The Grind: Nietzsche on Dreaming

So, since at this point, I'm trying out new methods of cataloguing and expressing various segments of thought in writing, I figure I'd try out naming different segments in an effort to organize and catalogue (huzzah) various trains of thought. This segment, this named category, will follow a certain train of thought I've been on for some time: a dissatisfaction with the way careerism and concepts of happiness function in American society. Sometime when I'm feeling inspired, I'll maybe try to write up some intro or summary of thoughts thus far, but for now, I'd like to set up a platform for writing about these thoughts. And so, it'll be called, for now, with all embarrassed self-consciousness, The Grind. Funny to be self conscious and embarrassed about something no one is reading.

Anyway, I found this quote from philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche a fitting way to start off:

Suppose someone has flown often in his dreams and finally, as soon as he dreams, he is conscious of his power and art of flight as if it were his privilege, also his characteristic and enviable happiness. He believes himself capable of realizing every kind of arc and angle simply with the lightest impulse; he knows the feeling of a certain divine frivolity, an "upward" without tension and constraint, a "downward" without condescension and humiliation-without gravity! How could a human being who had had such dream experiences and dream habits fail to find that the word "happiness" had a different color and definition in his waking life, too? How could he fail to desire happiness differently? "Rising" as described by poets must seem to him, compared with this "flying", too earthbound muscle-bound, forced, too "grave."

-Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, #193

Students Who Mess Up Learn Better

A new study by Scientific American shows that people learn things more effectively and remember them longer if, before learning them correctly, they get them wrong first.

In a series of experiments, [researchers] showed that if students make an unsuccessful attempt to retrieve information before receiving an answer, they remember the information better than in a control condition in which they simply study the information.

How can this study be used to inform teaching practices for educators? Perhaps building in time for students to play around with the content or skill that we hope them to learn before introducing specific methods would help engrain the material more deeply.

Getting It Wrong: Surprising Tips on How to Learn (Scientific American via Lifehacker)

And Yet It Moves

I recently came across And Yet It Moves, a new puzzle-platforming game for PC, Mac, and soon to be released in Nintendo's Wii Ware store. The game was produced as a group project at Vienna University of Technology's Department for Design and Assessment of Technology. Despite lacking a dedicated artist, the game's uniqueness is mostly derived from its use of cut-paper visuals and an overt aesthetic of isolation. The game also sports a unique gameplay mechanism in which players manipulate gravity to move through levels.

See the trailer here

Despite lacking a dedicated game artist, the team at VUT was able to produce an incredibly immersive and unique game experience, based almost entirely on aesthetic factors. While there is a sense of exploration and bemusement that is found in many games, the visuals and music push this game beyond what has come before. All of this without the aid of a visual artist! A team at a university, lacking in major capital or experts dedicated to specific aspects of design, was able to produce one of the most visually immersive games of the year. Here, And Yet it Moves serves as a strong representetive of the independent games movement currently taking off on PCs, Xbox Live Arcade, PSNetwork, and so on. While larger releases have skyrocketing budgets (as always), technology has become accessible enough that with only a few people, a game with strong aesthetic appeal can be put together. And not only made, but released to mass audiences through new distribution channels.

Pop Matters

It has been some time. This blog was started in an attempt to habituate myself to writing frequently. An implicit assumption in the creation of the blog was the difficulty in writing often, the need to create in one's self the habit of writing. As such, writing this post nearly a year later is proving a bit awkward. I'll begin then with a link to some other writing I've been doing. I realize the ego-boost in doing this (it's fun, ey), but it also serves as an archiving of sorts.

I've snagged a gig as an album reviewer with one of my favorite sites (Popmatters.com). I co-write reviews (about 1/month) with my ole' buddy Matt Vittone. Our first two reviews are here:

Blitzen Trapper- Black River Killer EP

Dead Prez- The Pulse of the People