[Xmca-l] Re: The power of Humanities in a recursive loop

[Glassman, Michael]

I have been doing some prep work with students on using Second Life in the classroom and there is a lot of cross talk about Minecraft.  Boy did it make me feel old.  The general feeling is that it has not been as good since MicroSoft took it over (that may just be good old days phenomenon however), that it was fun and interesting but there are better building programs coming online - one of my students showed me one and it's amazing.  Minecraft also may be limited because it is not really set up for establishing goal driven communities (this is gossip for me, I never played it, and if I did I would be terrible at it.)  My primary worry about Minecraft is that because it is now  owned by MicroSoft which is very proprietary it won't have the same interconnections, import/export capabilities as other platforms.  The primary connection Minecraft seems to have now is with the New York Times magazine.

Michael

-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of Kindred, Jessica Dr.
Sent: Thursday, May 26, 2016 9:43 AM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: The power of Humanities in a recursive loop

I read a huge article in the Sunday Times magazine a few weeks back about Minecraft. It was a full on endorsement as far as I could tell, but at the end, buried in some point about how it teaches kids about coding and creating things from resources, it said "Kill a spider, get the silk." This is the wrong lesson to be teaching kids about spiders and other living things. Spiders don't make silk once they're dead, except in exploitative fictional landscapes like this that are teaching kids to kill nature for their own use. This seems tragic on the heels of a generation that was raised to save the earth, in the wake of what their parents have done to it.
________________________________________
From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu [xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu] on behalf of mike cole [mcole@ucsd.edu]
Sent: Monday, May 23, 2016 3:41 PM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: The power of Humanities in a recursive loop

Greg-- What do you make of the minecraft world? I know a lot of kids that love to play it (and adults who think they are wasting their time). What has impressed me is how little live adult co-presence is needed for a group of kids to develop pretty high level skills (the adult is behind the code, somewhere, of course).

I ask both because minecraft appears as an issue in places I inhabit and because one of the reasons live adults give if they think it is a good activity for kids is that it is a pathway into the world of coding.

I liked the poem as well. Thanks for that.
mike

(Martin does his flushing in Bogota, Annalisa; perhaps that accounts for the poor advice).

On Mon, May 23, 2016 at 12:27 PM, Greg Mcverry <jgregmcverry@gmail.com>
wrote:

> However coding should not be a social-darwinist experiment, which 
> tends to be the case because code interpreters are ruthless syntactic stalinists.
>
> I think this is  a stereotype, a specialized set of discourse 
> practices, and a reflection of gender inequity among coders.
>
> Nobody learns to code. You can just copy and paste better than the 
> next gal. It takes a long time to generate original code.
>
> I am a self taught....actually community taught...the auto-didactic 
> coder is a myth. I have been involved in a variety of open source 
> projects in the last few years as a non-technical contributor.
>
> Yet every project I get involved in, I learn a little bit more. Right 
> now its just html/css/javascript but its always a little bit more than 
> I knew yesterday.
>
> There are amazing and really inclusive places to reach out and learn 
> how to code or markup webpages.
>
> On Mon, May 23, 2016 at 3:21 PM Annalisa Aguilar <annalisa@unm.edu> wrote:
>
> >
> > Thanks Martin and Greg,
> >
> > Um... first things first. I never do the paint thinner down the 
> > toilet thing. I actually make an appointment with the waste 
> > management
> department
> > on Saturdays and drive it in. Do they not have such a thing for you,
> Martin?
> >
> > And, I love your poem Greg. Just because computers "think"
> algorithmically
> > doesn't mean we do. Humans first! :) And Humanities first (too!)
> >
> > As much as code is a stinky affair for some of us non-STEMers, there 
> > is something to be said of occupying the codebases. I don't mean 
> > github or reddit, as I'm not a masochist.
> >
> > However coding should not be a social-darwinist experiment, which 
> > tends
> to
> > be the case because code interpreters are ruthless syntactic stalinists.
> I
> > myself have tried to teach myself to code more times than I can 
> > count,
> and
> > it still eludes me! If I had the right teacher, I'd do some great 
> > things with code. I think it's because of my system-thinking 
> > (top-down rather
> than
> > bottom up) that it eludes me. You can't sketch with code, and then 
> > fill
> in
> > the lines (or can you?) I sense, if I were to learn to code, I'd 
> > become a dialectic coder.
> >
> > Is there such a thing?
> >
> > Kind recursions,
> >
> > Annalisa
> >
> >
> >
>



--

It is the dilemma of psychology to deal as a natural science with an object that creates history. Ernst Boesch