I think it would also be useful to start them with a non-video-games-based exercise - use GI Joes or index cards to create simple physical games to get everyone used to the idea that interaction is at the heart of the expression you're focusing on.
It is absolutely shocking to see how many folks do not understand the first thing about a Fine arts program here.
In answer to the question, while it's useful to get into toolkits, if your students are anything like the people I went to university with, they're going to chafe at being delivered into a constrictive set of tools. Take a sampling of the tools you've mentioned and that have been mentioned by other commenters, maybe add RPG Maker on top of it, but at the end of the day it's just as well to let them loose to do their own interactive medium experiments. Maybe someone will do an internet forum game or a simple website-based interactive experience. Someone else might take it down the road of a surrealist adventure using a text RPG engine. Very likely at least one person is going to try something in an augmented reality vein. If you've done a course in performance art, that might be the best starting point - everyone is going to have their own notion of what the core element is, and all you can do is throw some simple starter projects at them; they'll do all the work if they're serious about art.
Umm...That's not how that portfolio works. Most programs include a wide variety of media (pencils, paint, print-making, sculpture, performance art, etc) without banning students who have only one or two (sketches, paintings). In point of fact, what you're suggesting is about as far away from the goal of a BFA program as possible; much of the point of a BFA or conservatory or other formal art instruction program is to expose students to new ideas and techniques and give them the tools to be productive in those media.
Well, I feel bad for you. My experience with text search engines has definitely honed my ability to consider context. While google search isn't the end all and be all of search, the ability to pull context via its results is far better than any library search index I've ever used.
As for Amazon, you're dead wrong. I've been deeply involved in developing search solutions myself. If you don't know context, then certainly you can fail to find related material. But in a decent search system like the one powering Amazon takes care of that - there are data points that act as freeform indices and expert assistants in navigating not only individual entities but entire collections semantically. Sometimes you specify those points manually - in a good system, this means they benefit from the most expert people available - and sometimes you generate them manually from textual analysis. There are ways to correlate unrelated ideas, and thinking that text search is bad because you're not aware of them is limited and foolish.
"Looking around" on the internet has another name: data mining. Knowing how to recast a search to get results that are similar but not exactly the same is a skill unto itself, and thinking it doesn't apply to search engines is simply wrong. As to law and medical records, who's ever used a corporate custom-rolled search solution and compared it to something like Endeca knows exactly how those skills can be augmented technologically. Law and medicine are no less amenable to these solutions than sites like Amazon, it just requires some knowledge and investment to get there.
It's actually worse than that. The first clause of the EULA is that you're granted a limited license, and it then goes on to tell you what you can't do, which is basically anything besides install it on a computer you own. Clause 7 then repeats the claim that the game is "licensed not sold".
One has to wonder how Canadian dealers' sustained massive price premiums - despite the rise in value of the Canadian dollar - play into this study. If you could purchase a hybrid at the American price, which tends to be much easier on the car buyer in general, the difference might be more pronounced.
The species won't last forever, at least not if the current model of the universe is correct. That doesn't mean it's not worthwhile to try to build some insurance against unnecessary total extinction. Unless you're one of those VHEMT jerks, maybe.
If you'd asked my friends and I if we thought computers were a major force in our lives we would have said no, and we'd have been WRONG. Kids simply do not have the level of perspective required to determine whether something is intrinsic to their lives, and they certainly don't have the level of perspective to describe how we should be retooling our society. That's why Facebook can become a billion dollar company in the first goddamn place - because some savvy motherfucker with actual life experience knows how to inject this stuff into the lives of people without the filters required to avoid being seduced by technology. Also see: Extremely old people, people from extremely rural areas.
Lectures may be a necessary evil, but they're far from the core of a university education. A university education challenges students to begin to independently develop their own knowledge and opinions on subjects, to conduct research to back up those opinions, and generally to think on their own, all using a specific toolset that has been refined over centuries or even millennia (engineering and philosophy can both make the claim) of mental effort. Even in highly technical practice-based fields students have to do a ton of independent learning and development (admittedly at a level that is not of professional calibre but still forms an excellent basis for truly novel work later in their careers). Lectures are just a means for profs to communicate to students the core precepts they want to focus on, and for some students a basic way to approach material so that they can at least pass classes in which they have no real interest. A good professor will personally engage with both kinds of students and get them to engage with the material on an appropriate basis, expanding their mental toolkit.
It's important to recognize that there is a steady pressure to remove this kind of developmental philosophy from secondary education, pushing it out into the postsecondary programs of the world, where it is of practical use. But that push is a sin against the intent of a higher education, and taking away the trappings of university entirely just removes the guidance that students need in order to learn the tools that their forebears have spent so much time refining. It's possible there are gains to be made in getting away from that guidance, but it's hardly likely that the benefit to a few outstanding thinkers would outweigh the danger to those of us of more limited means.
I think you missed my original point. I wasn't saying this is a bad idea, I was saying that there is a strong likelihood that there will be an increased chance of cancer. I would imagine a significantly increased chance, given the combination of fewer defenses and massively increased opportunities, but time may tell. Regardless, my point was that I was hoping that this wouldn't be a case where regulatory caution put walls in the way of near-miraculous medicine.
After the drug dissipates, it will be destroyed, if it hasn't already metastasized or otherwise become a problem that the genes can't fix. In the meantime, two major cancer defenses are inert. I'm not sure how that would somehow not be an obvious window of opportunity for cancer to creep in, particularly when you've got massive tissue generation happening in the area affected
Is your theory that there will NOT be an increased rate of occurrence when you turn off two major defense mechanisms? I'd like to hear how you make that case if so.
Almost by definition, anything regenerated using this technology would have a higher incidence of cancer. One wonders if regulatory bodies can wrap their rules around the notion that the cure is still worth the possible side effects.
Personally I found Wave invaluable for any number of creative applications - gaming, writing, taking notes for projects, planning various activities. I blame its failure on all you jerks for not taking a second look.
You're right, all those totally honest not-in-a-conflict-of-interest corporate scientists and well informed slashdot commenters count as smarter than me.
Ah yes, the standard of scientific achievement is being friends with people. That's clear from the large collection of big-smiling emptyheads that run the scientific establishment.
I know you're not really going to get that, so let me be blunt: The bar for entry to science is 12 years of training plus 4 years of training plus 2 years of training plus defending yourself in front of your peers. The bar for entry to religion is a couple of years of bible study followed by proving that you really like God. Pedophilic tendencies optional.
And of course their standards of evidence are equivalent, and the 12 years of introductory clergical studies you took in elementary and high school helped you understand that fact.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a bit of a trick, though. They're effectively putting several drives in a specialized RAID package.
I think it would also be useful to start them with a non-video-games-based exercise - use GI Joes or index cards to create simple physical games to get everyone used to the idea that interaction is at the heart of the expression you're focusing on.
It is absolutely shocking to see how many folks do not understand the first thing about a Fine arts program here.
In answer to the question, while it's useful to get into toolkits, if your students are anything like the people I went to university with, they're going to chafe at being delivered into a constrictive set of tools. Take a sampling of the tools you've mentioned and that have been mentioned by other commenters, maybe add RPG Maker on top of it, but at the end of the day it's just as well to let them loose to do their own interactive medium experiments. Maybe someone will do an internet forum game or a simple website-based interactive experience. Someone else might take it down the road of a surrealist adventure using a text RPG engine. Very likely at least one person is going to try something in an augmented reality vein. If you've done a course in performance art, that might be the best starting point - everyone is going to have their own notion of what the core element is, and all you can do is throw some simple starter projects at them; they'll do all the work if they're serious about art.
Umm...That's not how that portfolio works. Most programs include a wide variety of media (pencils, paint, print-making, sculpture, performance art, etc) without banning students who have only one or two (sketches, paintings). In point of fact, what you're suggesting is about as far away from the goal of a BFA program as possible; much of the point of a BFA or conservatory or other formal art instruction program is to expose students to new ideas and techniques and give them the tools to be productive in those media.
Well, I feel bad for you. My experience with text search engines has definitely honed my ability to consider context. While google search isn't the end all and be all of search, the ability to pull context via its results is far better than any library search index I've ever used.
As for Amazon, you're dead wrong. I've been deeply involved in developing search solutions myself. If you don't know context, then certainly you can fail to find related material. But in a decent search system like the one powering Amazon takes care of that - there are data points that act as freeform indices and expert assistants in navigating not only individual entities but entire collections semantically. Sometimes you specify those points manually - in a good system, this means they benefit from the most expert people available - and sometimes you generate them manually from textual analysis. There are ways to correlate unrelated ideas, and thinking that text search is bad because you're not aware of them is limited and foolish.
"Looking around" on the internet has another name: data mining. Knowing how to recast a search to get results that are similar but not exactly the same is a skill unto itself, and thinking it doesn't apply to search engines is simply wrong. As to law and medical records, who's ever used a corporate custom-rolled search solution and compared it to something like Endeca knows exactly how those skills can be augmented technologically. Law and medicine are no less amenable to these solutions than sites like Amazon, it just requires some knowledge and investment to get there.
It's actually worse than that. The first clause of the EULA is that you're granted a limited license, and it then goes on to tell you what you can't do, which is basically anything besides install it on a computer you own. Clause 7 then repeats the claim that the game is "licensed not sold".
One has to wonder how Canadian dealers' sustained massive price premiums - despite the rise in value of the Canadian dollar - play into this study. If you could purchase a hybrid at the American price, which tends to be much easier on the car buyer in general, the difference might be more pronounced.
Having a perfectly nice house right now isn't really a good argument against building other houses in other places, even ones that are not as nice.
The species won't last forever, at least not if the current model of the universe is correct. That doesn't mean it's not worthwhile to try to build some insurance against unnecessary total extinction. Unless you're one of those VHEMT jerks, maybe.
If you'd asked my friends and I if we thought computers were a major force in our lives we would have said no, and we'd have been WRONG. Kids simply do not have the level of perspective required to determine whether something is intrinsic to their lives, and they certainly don't have the level of perspective to describe how we should be retooling our society. That's why Facebook can become a billion dollar company in the first goddamn place - because some savvy motherfucker with actual life experience knows how to inject this stuff into the lives of people without the filters required to avoid being seduced by technology. Also see: Extremely old people, people from extremely rural areas.
Lectures may be a necessary evil, but they're far from the core of a university education. A university education challenges students to begin to independently develop their own knowledge and opinions on subjects, to conduct research to back up those opinions, and generally to think on their own, all using a specific toolset that has been refined over centuries or even millennia (engineering and philosophy can both make the claim) of mental effort. Even in highly technical practice-based fields students have to do a ton of independent learning and development (admittedly at a level that is not of professional calibre but still forms an excellent basis for truly novel work later in their careers). Lectures are just a means for profs to communicate to students the core precepts they want to focus on, and for some students a basic way to approach material so that they can at least pass classes in which they have no real interest. A good professor will personally engage with both kinds of students and get them to engage with the material on an appropriate basis, expanding their mental toolkit.
It's important to recognize that there is a steady pressure to remove this kind of developmental philosophy from secondary education, pushing it out into the postsecondary programs of the world, where it is of practical use. But that push is a sin against the intent of a higher education, and taking away the trappings of university entirely just removes the guidance that students need in order to learn the tools that their forebears have spent so much time refining. It's possible there are gains to be made in getting away from that guidance, but it's hardly likely that the benefit to a few outstanding thinkers would outweigh the danger to those of us of more limited means.
I think you missed my original point. I wasn't saying this is a bad idea, I was saying that there is a strong likelihood that there will be an increased chance of cancer. I would imagine a significantly increased chance, given the combination of fewer defenses and massively increased opportunities, but time may tell. Regardless, my point was that I was hoping that this wouldn't be a case where regulatory caution put walls in the way of near-miraculous medicine.
After the drug dissipates, it will be destroyed, if it hasn't already metastasized or otherwise become a problem that the genes can't fix. In the meantime, two major cancer defenses are inert. I'm not sure how that would somehow not be an obvious window of opportunity for cancer to creep in, particularly when you've got massive tissue generation happening in the area affected
Is your theory that there will NOT be an increased rate of occurrence when you turn off two major defense mechanisms? I'd like to hear how you make that case if so.
Almost by definition, anything regenerated using this technology would have a higher incidence of cancer. One wonders if regulatory bodies can wrap their rules around the notion that the cure is still worth the possible side effects.
Thanks :D
Personally I found Wave invaluable for any number of creative applications - gaming, writing, taking notes for projects, planning various activities. I blame its failure on all you jerks for not taking a second look.
You seem to be using sarcasm there. You must be new here.
And of course those who get them are the scientists everyone turns to for opinions on the subject.
You're right, all those totally honest not-in-a-conflict-of-interest corporate scientists and well informed slashdot commenters count as smarter than me.
I defer to your obvious scientific mastery and superior knowledge, which you have totally proved here.
Ah yes, the standard of scientific achievement is being friends with people. That's clear from the large collection of big-smiling emptyheads that run the scientific establishment.
I know you're not really going to get that, so let me be blunt: The bar for entry to science is 12 years of training plus 4 years of training plus 2 years of training plus defending yourself in front of your peers. The bar for entry to religion is a couple of years of bible study followed by proving that you really like God. Pedophilic tendencies optional.
And of course their standards of evidence are equivalent, and the 12 years of introductory clergical studies you took in elementary and high school helped you understand that fact.