The Shallows

This is the first week of classes, and I'm registered in a course called 'Digital Games and Learning'.

I have some trepidation about this course.  One of the books on my summer reading list was Nicholas Carr's 'The Shallows - What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains'.  Strangely, it's a book about why people don't read books anymore.

Marshall McLuhan famously said "The medium is the message", a cryptic way of saying that communication technology doesn't just deliver content but also directly influences how we  think about that content.  Each new technology modifies our brains.

Carr's message is this:  if we had intentionally set out to build the most effective brain-modifying technology possible, it would probably look a lot like the Internet.   The more we use it, the more it changes us.  We're using it a lot.  And it may not be changing us for the better.

Specifically, Carr is talking about 'deep reading'.  Reading has been at the center of mankind's rapid intellectual progress for the last three millennia.   The printed book focused our attention, the written word organized our thinking, the library captured our collective progress.

But books and periodicals are quickly losing ground to newer media.  We now average 8 1/2 hours a day looking at our televisions, computers, and cell phones (often simultaneously), but only 20 minutes reading print publications.

Worse, those 20 average minutes includes seniors who tend to be the heaviest readers.  Young adults between 25 and 34 are only reading print media for 7 minutes a day.  (!)

Maybe that's not a problem.  Reading web pages is still reading.  But it's a jerky, distracted, multi-tasking,  shallow-browsing kind of reading, punctuated with hyperlinks, graphics, and videos.  The average time spent on a web page is only33 seconds - including banners and ads.

Reading an e-book on an iPad sounds similar to reading an old-fashioned book, but the reader is continually interrupted by emails  from friends, advertisers, and spammers, IM pop-ups, news updates, stock market reports, and RSS feeds.  Plus the endless temptations of viral distractions.    It's hard to achieve focus in all that noise.

Carr worries that we may have squandered mankind's greatest treasure, traded it for, well, we're not quite sure what yet.




When Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he replied, "Because that's where the money is".

So yes, let's explore games as a teaching medium.  Books aren't working anymore, and the Internet isn't going away.  Carr was wrong about the internet being the most effective possible tool - games tap into the most basic wiring of our brains and invoke our deepest primal fears and instincts.

If that isn't enough, we also have the toolbox of operant conditioning - game controllers that serve up electric shocks, and others that read our very thoughts.  We would have to justify to the ethics committee before we could use this stuff on rats.

Maybe we can turn this technology to our use, mindful of McLuhan's warning.  But I have this trepidation...

First Screenshots

First Screenshots

School started today, and I am using my version of Agenda for organizing my courses and interests.

The look-and-feel is still very primitive, especially since I haven't put in much effort with the style sheets yet. 

But the functionality is beginning to emerge, and the underlying code structures are strong enough to keep me moving forward.

Here's the file menu.  Each user has a library of files, usually sorted by last-accessed.  Because they are in a single database, searching them is easy.

Zooming in, below is what an Agenda view looks like.  (This example doesn't show any categories, I'm not happy with that part of the code yet.

Most of the screen widgets are from JQuery.  The menu tool at the top right is based on Jonathon Sharp's  jdMenu ( http://jdsharp.us), it 'floats' in an absolute DIV so that it stays on the page as you scroll through the items.

The tabs at the top are for 'sections'.   This view only has one section so far - 'Tab 1'.  I first tried 'Accordian' tabs, their vertical operations were closer to the original Agenda concept but not quite as functional.

The icons let me attach files to items, edit the details, link the item to my Google calendar (not yet done), and email an item. 

As well, they let me manipulate the order of items.  If anyone remembers 'MaxThink',  I'm hoping to add some of its  hierarchical and bin-sort capabilities.  If you don't know about MaxThink, then you MUST visit  http://www.maxthink.org.

Zooming into an item gives access to the underlying notes and blogs.  I'm using TinyMCE as my note editor, which allows me to embed graphics and hyperlinks into my notes, and also provides spell-checking.  Not pretty yet, but functional.

I've built the horizontal tabs into all the pages.  It's easy to disable later, but it occurs to me that I will soon want to group files, and that the details of an item may become complex enough to justify tabs.

The design is drifting away from the original Agenda.  Two reasons :  my 'university notes' application is pretty specific (and requires richer items than say a contact manager), and the capabilities of a web program are so different from what the original DOS environment offered.

The nicest part about backing Joomla! out of the design is that I can now use AJAX to update pages on the fly.  This potentially solves some of the UI issues , like editing directly on the view without requiring a SUBMIT button.  But no hurry, first I want to finish the functionality.

And that may take some time at the slow pace I am going.  I figure I'm giving this project about 5-6 hours a week.   There's no hurry, I'm up and running, I'll focus first on the features that I need for my own use.   That might mean adding APA-style references before finishing categories.