Lately, I’ve been interested in novel approaches to teaching interactive media. I’ve been looking (from afar) at how Jason Mittell (television and media scholar at Middlebury College and a fellow product of the University of Wisconsin-Madison) has been “teaching The Wire“ this semester, conducting a fascinating pedagogical experiment — how does one teach long-form media, [...]

I’m taking a brief break between major writing projects to pop in on the blog and let you all know that I’m still alive. It’s been a rather busy few weeks, and looks to continue to be that way until the end of the holidays. I suppose it’s quite telling that, in this day and [...]

Recently, I attended the first meeting of the semester for the “Pragmatics & Poetics Reading Group” here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, led by UW-Milwaukee anthropology professor Thomas Malaby. We began with William James’ classic The Varieties of Religious Experience and, while not the favorite James text of mine (I prefer the Principles of Psychology), [...]

This has been a particularly blah, grey, rainy morning, so I’ve spent more time than usual poking around blogs and cleaning out my Google Reader. Oh, before I forget, here’s another plug for my shared items from Google Reader — this, and my Twitter, are really my “blogs” these days (serving up links to things [...]

I’m posting this from Madison, but wrote most of it in O’Hare, where I was stuck for a few hours about a week and a half ago (cancelled flight, waiting for a delayed connection, blah blah blah). It’s been a busy month, first with travel to LA (for Sandbox), and then Boston. I logged a [...]

I’m interested in interactive fiction again lately, so when I stumbled across a picture of a younger Dave Lebling on The Computer Chronicles from 1985, I had to track down the episode and watch it. My Dad and I used to watch this show every Saturday morning when I was a kid! It’s actually a [...]

Constance forwarded the absolute best, most hilarious bit of “press” (sort of) about our talk at the American Psychological Association in Boston the other day. Here’s an excerpt: The forums present that gamers are “creating an surround in which epistolatory scientific thinking practices are state learned,” said Sean Dancer, a student intellect who worked on [...]

APA went pretty well — I saw a few interesting talks, and saw a bunch of stuff that I found frankly perplexing. I’ve never fully understood this odd mish-mash of clinical practitioners and social scientists, I admit, and it was odd to be at an academic conference which had more opportunities for massage than research [...]

Had a pretty good reception for my talk at Sandbox 2008 today. It was a tough crowd; trying to convince ACM people that the collaborative construction of stories can be considered “design” was a bit of a task, but I think it worked out pretty well. I chatted with a few folks I’m happy to [...]