Wiki

Many moons ago, my friend Hannibal and I were tasked with making a project Wiki for the Naval Academy's CDX  team.  Every lesson learned, every tool used had to have the appropriate documentation added to the Wiki.  By the end, I felt pretty savvy on the Wiki stuff.

That was then, this is now, however. Revisiting the MediaWiki software, I was quickly reminded about some of the quirks of the markup language and all the various ways an administrator has to customize the interface to get it up to a familiar level of Wiki functionality.

The biggest markup issue I had was with the image alignment. Somewhat counterintuitively, the markup language built into MediaWiki does not add breaks after images. More counterintuitively, the standard html "<br />" doesn't do the job either.  As a result, this was our article:

All that was left, of course, was to dig waaaaay into the documentation and I finally found--sandwiched between all sorts of other image format code a single sentence that provided a "<br style="clear: both" />" snippet. I'd never seen this before. It worked, however.

Finished page: http://www.english.digitalodu.com/courses/fa10/539/wiki/index.php?title=The_Joshua_Tree_Epiphany

That said, I still find MediaWiki extremely easy and user friendly.  It is still my favorite Wiki software out there and I appreciate that the Wikipedia Foundation folks are still willing to distribute older versions of their software for free. It really is a great example of why Open Source products can work.

Purpose:  

WikiMedia is an environment that allows users to publish Wiki articles in private domains. It produces a Wiki product that is similar in look and feel to Wikipedia.org's pages. 

Product: 

About as good as it gets. I know that the Wikipedia folks use a newer version of this software, and that it has additional functionality that I looked for when developing our page. The version of WikiMedia that we used was appropriate for the task.

Process:

Generating pages in groups is always ideal.  Having multiple users working on the same page provides a QA and often deepens the depth of the information presented. Larger groups make for better groups. I'm sure there is a number of diminishing returns, but Wiki software is by it's very nature collaborative. I think doing one article as an entire class would have been a more interesting exercise.

ENGL 662 Post II: Past as Prologue (A metaphor examination)

Because of last week’s reading from Nayar, I had feminism and depictions of females with reference to technology on the brain. Likewise, Halo: Reach came out last week, so I have video games on the brain as well. My wife does not think so highly of my video game habit--her words: “I hate them [video games]”--so I looked to the past to find out why this might be. Recalling my youth, I went to YouTube to scrounge up old (circa 1985) commercials for Nintendo games quickly finding this gem, an advertisement for the first Legend of Zelda game.  The message of this video seems pretty apparent: Video games are made for white, upper-middle class teenage boys who may or may not be nerds and/or Vanilla Ice wannabes. While I am certain that I was the target audience for this commercial when it was released, I shudder to think that I could have, at any age, been influenced by such an awkwardly pitched item.

Bad rapping is not the only thing that is going on here, however. From Nayar: “...[T]he woman’s projected and real role in the use of...technological artifacts has prompted the artifact’s development in particular ways” (p. 116).  I reviewed other early video game commercials, from Atari and Sega as well as Nintendo, and in almost every case it was males playing, with women either being non-present or acting as spectators to the action. Granted, there were market forces at work here, and pre-teen/teenage boys had likely already been identified as the most likely video game players from early video game trends of the 1960’s and 1970’s (i.e. SpaceWar). Yet, I can’t help but think that these commercial set the popular tone of video and computer games being a primarily male-oriented medium all the way up to the present day. Whether incidental or intentional, the exclusion of female players from the commercials of the first generation of home video game consoles created a cultural precedent.

Of course, it’s not just males that are being given the privileged position in this commercial.  Certainly, as depicted in the commercial, nerds of the 1980’s could take pride in being the subject matter experts of contemporary gaming (“You mean you haven’t played it yet!? You can play it on my Nintendo Entertainment System!”).  Likewise, my “digital native” ears found especially jarring the narrator’s “...your parent’s help you hook it up.”  I forget that the Regan-era power dynamics hadn’t yet adopted the concept of youth being tech savvy to the point of (rather comfortably) usurping authority. Although this is taken for granted today, the proto-hacker character that Matthew Broderick portrays in WarGames (1983) was a novel concept at the time.  I remember my parents hooking my various series of video game consoles only once--the very first time because (and this was probably because I was only four and couldn’t read the instructions).

Fast forward a quarter of a century or so. A commercial exemplar from the present day is the recent campaign for Halo: Reach and it provides an enlightening contrast about where video games are today. A few glaring things stand-out. First, the “players” are gone. Segments of the commercial are even shot from a first-person perspective. Gaming has evolved into an ‘experience’, an ‘immersion’. Second, gender is non-present. There is even suggestion of female features in the wounded protagonist's face.  Third, the game system is vastly de-emphasized compared to the 1980’s.  Although this last point can be contributed to a change in the industry’s business model (emphasis on selling games [software] over new systems [hardware]), it is still important to recognize that the shift is contextualized visually in the presentation of the experience of gaming itself. Gone are the controllers and TV screens, the living room and couch: the fourth wall has been removed completely from the the gaming experience and thus it’s need for a rhetorical player--be it nerd or white-boy rapper.

ENGL 662 Post I: Orientation

The general thesis of my proposed paper idea is that video games, as a form of rhetoric, can, like other forms of rhetoric, be used to 'teach' ethical thought and decision making. As such, I have done a good deal of browsing for research and publication already done on the subject and have found some interesting sites and books.

Perhaps the best of these is a blog run by a conglomerate of Harvard professors called "Valuable Games" (http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/games/).  There are a number of interesting articles here, as well as some mixed media. The most useful to me, perhaps, was a video of a lecture that Harvard law professor Gene Koo gave at MIT on the presence of ethics and morality in video games. (Video found here: http://blip.tv/file/1480114?utm_source=player_embedded).  Mr. Koo gives a brief but thorough overview of ethical systems within games, starting with Classical games and quickly moving forward to Dungeons & Dragons, and then the video games that attempt to emulate some of the moral paradigms that had been embedded in the paper and pencil role playing games.

Mr. Koo also makes brief forays into ethical theory, mentioning other scholars like his Harvard colleague Steven Pinker and others who have used more traditional thought experiments in the past to examine ethical reasoning and postulating that video games can provide a similar stimulus.  Of special note is his use of two illustrations: First, his 'holocaust tetris' example, which, much like Sicart (2009, MIT Press) more extensively argues, conveys--rather shockingly--that video games are very much "moral objects" and that game designers have implied moral responsibility.  Second, Mr. Koo goes 'old school' rhetorical with the famous "trolley car" thought experiment. Although I think there is far more mileage in considering video games as types of thought experiments, Mr. Koo is probably being deliberate when he brings it into his presentation here.

The final portion of Mr. Koo's presentation involves a fairly standard introduction to some of the controversy involving video games as a stimulus that provides negative, violent provocations in youth.  The bulk of any inquiry into scholarship involving video games and ethics tends to this sort of slant and it is ultimately unfortunate that such an alarmist--and in my opinion, which seems to concur with Mr. Koo's--misguided stance is so widely represented in academic text.

Fortunately, in addition to Mr. Koo's presentation above, I have found a number of other resources that take a far more nuanced view of the ethics video games, as well as what I have summarized above. I will discuss those further in later blog posts.  That stated, Mr. Koo seems to be one of the more serious scholars on the subject of ethics in video games-- it seems like Harvard/MIT faculty are leading the way on this subject as a whole--and this presentation serves as an excellent introduction to some of the more critical issues in game studies and moral thought.

References:

Koo, G. (2008, November 18) Talk on Games Morals and Ethics. [Blog Post]. Retrieved from
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/games/category/theory/morality-theories-of/

Sicart, M. (2009). The Ethics of Computer Games. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

The ENGL539 Blogging Meta-Post: "Rust"

(Updated 15 September 2010)

The Blogger CSS Editing Tool

The Challenge

I've been hammering away at this blog off and on most the weekend.  My biggest challenges have been doing the formating for the webpage.  In many ways I sabotaged myself by using Blogger's templates.  They generate a great deal of code, most of which involves JavaScript and some challenging variable assignments that had me scratching my head most of the weekend. I remembered enough from my undergrad days to identify why the generated html was so horrible to work with, but I definitely didn't remember enough to be very efficient at fixing things the way I wanted them.

Background troubles
My first efforts were directed at setting up a custom background for the blog.  I found the image in a Wikipedia entry on ancient maps. It's a WikiCommons image that I edited with Paint.net software (download from here: http://www.getpaint.net/download.html), which I hadn't used since college, but was able to pick back up fairly easy.

After that, I had to brush off my CSS knowledge to figure out exactly how to get the picture to show up as I wanted it to.  I had no small trouble with Blogger's CSS entry tool.  While I certainly appreciate the inclusion of this in their template editors, because of where it puts the code in the generated html, I had a number of syntax issues that weren't easy to track down in an editor like notepad++ (http://notepad-plus-plus.org/ --again, another tool I frequently used while programming for my undergrad work).  Copy and pasting my code in Blogger's native HMTL editor kept on generating errors arising from the JavaScript coming from the template editor, so I was really forced to do a lot of trial-and-error coding within the CSS editor.

No big problem, but it took a while...

All's well that ends
I'm feeling more comfortable with the Blogger interface now, and with a little more time, I will probably be able to strip out a lot of the messy auto-generated code for something a bit more streamline.

That said, Blogger does do a good job of coding in some really nice HTML4 and 5 features, such as identifying a mobile web browser and providing all the code that pares down the site to fit a smaller screen.  I had never coded something like this myself, and it probably would have taken me the entire semester to come up with the right 'formula' to pull it off myself.

All in all, not too frustrating... Now if I could just get these posts to stop showing up as center-justified all the time...

The Problem

Candyland: War College Edition

Wired.com Dangerroom Blog Post (27 Aug 2010)

Last week, Wired's Dangerroom Blog wrote about a Army Colonel who was relieved of duty in Iraq after writing a generally unflattering article about the US military's use--or rather, mis-use--of PowerPoint. The Colonel laments,  "endless tinkering with PowerPoint slides to conform with the idiosyncrasies of cognitively challenged generals in order to spoon-feed them information.” He was relieved less than 48 hours after the article hit UPI, a newswire service.

While I can't quite figure out why the colonel would choose to release this over a wire service rather than a blog or some other, less 'commercial' forum--as Wired points out, the Army (and the military in general) has been generally hands off soldier's blogs and online postings--I agree with his general conclusion. The military has developed a PowerPoint habit to the point of inanity.  Rather than using it as a tool to convey information in a visual form, it has become the sole, de facto medium of communication from the Grunts on the ground and deckplate Sailors up to the general officer and Pentagon command structure. 

As a student interest in the rhetorical and functional implications of various forms of electronic media, the drawbacks of relying solely on PowerPoint are obvious. Take, for example, the infamous PowerPoint slide at the top of this post. The New York Times and others have reported on the military's reliance-to-a-fault on PowerPoint and have used this leviathan slide to illustrate their point. To the credit of the flag-level Officers who view these everyday, it's obvious that they know that all nuance and many important details are stripped from the information by the data gets delivered to them in slide form, yet this does not prevent this from the being the day-to-day status quo of decision making strategists. 

Two issues:

1. From my level, I am usually directed to format a slide(s) in a particular way that I know is less effective than another method I have either learned or studied. There are certain formats ("stop-lights," "quadrant-slides," etc.) that I continuously produce or see being produced that are just not the most effective way to convey information to the "chain-of-command," but this is what the CoC demands--or implies that it demands.  The reliance on these slides likely derives from the lowest common denominator of PowerPoint users.  Most military users suck at PowerPoint, do all or most of the PowerPoint sins, and this ineffective use has evolved into an equally ineffective culture of information flow.  

I believe that it is absolutely essential to fix the culture of ineffective info flow.

2. Returning to the slide that starts this post, the slide itself is essentially accurate. But, if the "medium is the message," then it's the medium that muddles the usefulness of what is presented here.  The question I'm am very much concerned with is the same one The Guardian poses: How can it be done better? Can it be done better with PowerPoint or any other tool for that matter?  The Guardian posed it as an open-ended question, and seems to have received anything in the comments section of any real substance. 

So, professional writers, there's our gauntlet. America needs our help.

Hello ENGL 539!

Tuition? How about a kidney!

I went through the initial motions of starting the "Travel Is Fatal" blog last year as a replacement for my China blog that I wrote as part of my job/life as a travel writer/journalist/English teacher/restaurant reviewer/student from 2004-2007 while living in China. After a drastic transition from civilian back to military life, the travel writing--and non-academic writing in general--was interrupted.

So, this is me getting back on the wagon.  And getting academic credit for it.

It took a deal of good fortune to get me to get here. A fortunate schedule that has my ship in an extended repair period, kidney surgery (see picture), and an upcoming transfer out of the Surface Warfare Community all aligned to allow me the opportunity to take a full graduate course load at ODU this fall. It may still be a challenge to accomplish everything--especially when I'm back to full duty--but this was my window of opportunity.

So, for the English 539 and 662 assignments and every other void that having an online expository platform such as this might fill: Hello World!