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

[mike cole]

Hi Jessica -- Your observation of deep commitments of Western common sense
to a culture/nature dualistic ontology fits with my experience with
"edutainment" games as a genre that was very
important at least from about a 20 year stretch. Oregon trails is an award
winning game whose underlying
schema can be the source of rich educational experiences, but fits the
Grand Narrative of American expansionism excusing mass genocide that Jim
Wertsch writes about in terms of the influence of national narratives.

There must be a whole academic industry in games studies doing such
critical analyses but I have not read much of it.

mike
little about it.

On Thu, May 26, 2016 at 6:42 AM, Kindred, Jessica Dr. <jkindred@cnr.edu>
wrote:

> 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
>
>


-- 

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