Papyrus News

I saw an interesting presentation on Machinima the other day (thanks, Julia!), which basically refers to the creation of animated  film (digital video) through use of 3D video game engines, either through recording video game output or otherwise exploiting video game engines for creation of new material.  Due a search on Google, and you’ll be taken to a couple of hundred thousand sites.

The presentation helped drive home for me how rapidly "literacy" is changing in today’s world, and the important role of video games in this shift.  See (Jim Gee’s book) for further comment on videogames, learning, and literacy.)  I wrote about this in the introductory chapter of my Electronic Literacies book, and many times since, and its startling to see how fast it’s unfolding: the ways of making meaning with texts, symbols, and images are changing so rapidly in the industrialized world–and in an astonishingly stratified way, with some (well, lots of) kids using on the cutting edge of these changes, and other kids using computers to reinforce the most basic skills.

Comments welcome, as always….

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Hold on to your hats–here comes Google Scholar!!

You can read a bit about it in a New York Times article, read Google’s information about it, or simply try it out.

What do you think of it?

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Here’s your chance to post any links, news, or anything else you’d like to share with Papyrus News readers.  Just do so in a comment below.

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Here’s a paper on twenty years of educational technology policy in the U.S.

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You can download a PowerPoint presentation from this page about positive deviance.  PD is an approach to social change that involves identification of best practices, sifting through to determine their replicability, and active dissemination to others.  Originally designed for health research, I think it’s a good model to try to identify and spread positive educational practices.

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Educational Testing Service has launched a major initiative to measure Information and Communication Technology literacy.  You can download the 52-page framework for the initiative, read a press release on it, or visit the ETS website on the it.

Thanks to Sandra Fotos for passing on this info–and congratulations to Sandra on her recently released book, New Perspectives on CALL.

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Two centuries of U.S. progress.

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A personal appeal from Mrs. Suha Arafat.

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Well, a couple of people have said that you can get this blog, and other blogs, via email through services such as Bloglines and Bloglet.  I did set up a link on the right side of the page to subscribe to this list via Bloglines.  I’m not quite sure how you get from there to receiving the blog via email, but perhaps some of you are smarter than I am.

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Though the public funds much U.S. research–through federal grants and public universities–access to this research is, for the most part, controlled by for-profit journals that charge exhorbitant fees.  Now, the National Institutes of Health in the U.S. is considering whether it should require all its grantees to provide copies of their to-be-published manusripts so that, six months after publication, they will be made available free to all via publicly accessible archives.

The NIH has solicited feedback on this proposed policy by Nov. 16.  I consider this an important initiative and encourage people to reply.

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