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Code is not literature and we are not readers. Rather, interesting pieces of code are specimens and we are naturalists. So instead of trying to pick out a piece of code and reading it and then discussing it like a bunch of Comp Lit. grad students, I think a better model is for one of us to play the role of a 19th…
A twist in this learning contest is how teams can earn even more natural, military, sociocultural, or national will points to spend. Imperialism is a complex topic, and each country is an entire class of learners in competition with other classes. Classes can earn additional points in these four areas by doing…
Moreover, games use systems of points, scores, leaderboards, achievement walls, and other clever mechanisms to reinforce how well you are playing (or not playing). Feedback should force us to face reality and redirect our efforts where they are needed. Regular, systemic feedback is a rarity in the traditional school…
We are as gods and might as well get good at it. So far, remotely done power and glory—as via government, big business, formal education, church—has succeeded to the point where gross defects obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing—power of…
61. What others say Beware: All too often, We say What we hear others say. We think What we’re told that we think. We see What we’re permitted to see. Worse! We see what we’re told that we see. Repetition and pride are the keys to this. To hear and to see Even an obvious lie Again And again and again May be to say it…
The Destiny of Earthseed Is to take root among the stars. It is to live and to thrive On new earths. It is to become new beings And to consider new questions. It is to leap into the heavens Again and again. It is to explore the vastness Of heaven. It is to explore the vastness Of ourselves. We are Earthseed. We are…
What science actually does is to show that any natural object we please may be treated in terms of relations upon which its occurrence depends, or as an event, and that by so treating it we are enabled to get behind, as it were, the immediate qualities the object of direct experience presents, and to regulate their…
An understanding of what the Internet is. "I found it on the Internet" is not an accurate statement. You found it on a computer connected to the World Wide Web. Ways to formulate queries. Typing "childhood obesity" into a search engine is not the best way to discover what health problems are associated with being…
“I ain’t mad atcha” or “I am not angry with you.” Which should you say? Well, we’re teachers. Our quick response: “The latter.” Grammar and usage are typical components of speech rubrics— topics students need to think about as part of building a spoken presentation. But that doesn’t mean it’s always correct to choose…
When you strip away the genre differences and the technological complexities, all games share four defining traits: a goal, rules, a feedback system, and voluntary participation. The goal is the specific outcome that players will work to achieve. It focuses their attention and continually orients their participation…
Hu was well known as the primary advocate for the literary revolution of the era, a movement which aimed to replace scholarly classical Chinese in writing with the vernacular spoken language, and to cultivate and stimulate new forms of literature. In an article originally published in New Youth in January 1917 titled…
The game heavily relies on the "carrot on a stick" principle. All objectives appear to be increasingly possible, yet every goal point disappears moments before you achieve it. There also appears to be no reward for honesty, hard work, altruism, or loyalty.
In the early game, there are no clearly defined classes until you begin school and recieve the class of "Student". From there, you have a wide selection of sub-classes you can choose from, such as Nerd, Loner, Jock, or Cool Kid, though you usually just fall into one that fits your character. It can be difficult to…
The world with its quarks and chromosomes, its distant lands and spiral nebulae, is like a vast computer in a black box, forever sealed except for its input and output registers. These we directly observe, and in the light of them we speculate on the structure of the machine, the universe. Thus it is that we think up…
Thus it is that (to ensure feeding and breeding), "Nature" during the aeons of experimentation which we call "Evolution" has developed a variety of fixed preservative instincts, traits, and characteristics in the animal world. From the animal world, we as animals have inherited such of these instincts, traits, and…
Family Pyramides This family is named for the pyramid scheme structure common to all members of the family. Each specimen in this family will include a list of addresses of its last 4 to 10 hosts, and instructs the current host to alter this list by adding his or her address to this list and removing the oldest…
A Siren Server, as I will refer to such a thing, is an elite computer, or coordinated collection of computers, on a network. It is characterized by narcissism, hyperamplified risk aversion, and extreme information asymmetry. It is the winner of an all-or-nothing contest, and it inflicts smaller all-or-nothing contests…
Information may be categorized into primary and secondary material. If information is new and has never been published before it research, new legislation and survey results, like government is termed primary. It includes original statistics. Primary information is always up-to-date, detailed, accurate and…
If sleeping and dreaming do not perform vital biological functions, then they must represent nature's most stupid blunder and most colossal waste of time.
Gradually, at various points in our childhoods, we discover different forms of conviction. There’s the rock-hard certainty of personal experience (“I put my finger in the fire and it hurt,”), which is probably the earliest kind we learn. Then there’s the logically convincing, which we probably come to first through…