Touch the firehose of ds106, the most recent flow of content from all of the blogs syndicated into ds106. As of right now, there have been 92468 posts brought in here going back to December 2010. If you want to be part of the flow, first learn more about ds106. Then, if you are truly ready and up to the task of creating web art, sign up and start doing it.

  1. isharacomix

    All work and no play…

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    I recently purchased a ticket for Minecon 2013, an annual convention for the fun and open-ended game, Minecraft. At $150, this is much cheaper than any academic conference I’ve registered for, even though it’s going to be a drastically different environment from what I’m used to. Why on earth …

  2. isharacomix

    Getting Back in the Groove

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    EDM and AIED were some awesome conferences, but were still no match for the overwhelming force of the post-conference slump. The post-conference slump is the state of complete and utter exhaustion after doing your best to maintain multiple days of first impressions in a row, delivering dozens of elevator pitches …

  3. isharacomix

    EDM 2013

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    No… not Electronic Dance Music… Educational Data Mining! I’m in Memphis, Tennessee with a great crowd of academics – the folks who are creepily spying on students in order to teach them something.

    Given the latest PRISM nonsense, that joke has some unfortunate connotations. :)

    But seriously though – for …

  4. isharacomix

    Unsubscribed

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    Yesterday I unsubscribed from everything. Mailing lists, newsletters, social network updates. I get anywhere between 50 to 200 e-mails every day, and for the most part, I probably only read between three and five of them. And the ones I read all have something in common: it’s written by a …

  5. isharacomix

    What are ‘one-player’ games?

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    When I read Ian Bogost’s book Racing the Beam, there was a particularly interesting part I came across regarding the perception of video games as a social artifact. When video games were first developed, they were developed with many of the same assumptions as other games: activities for two …

  6. isharacomix

    Django Template Syntax

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    Something that I find infinitely interesting is how the usage of the programming languages of today influence the design of the programming languages of tomorrow. Today, I want to write about the
    https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/templates/’Django Template Language, which is appropriate since #8bitmooc is essentially built on top of it.

    The …

  7. isharacomix

    Using Github to Improve Code Literacy

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    Whenever we teach English classes, we don’t just teach our students the grammar and vocabulary of the language and then expect them to produce a novel. They start by writing short sentences and essays to develop their understanding of the language, and then they read short stories and classic literature to see how the great writers express their ideas in poetry and prose.

    We don’t do that in Computer Science.

    In Computer Science, the bulk of the focus of the curriculum is on developing the students’ understanding of syntax and coding paradigms, but we don’t often ask students to read code and then test their reading comprehension. My question is… why not?

    Recently, I’ve been trying to get my brother to learn how to code, so I’ve had him doing the Python track on Code Academy in order to develop his fluency in the language. However, I realized after watching him that the toy examples from Code Academy are too isolated and artificial to actually develop any understanding of code deeper than the surface of the syntax. Normally I say “well, go work on an open source project,” but that’s terribly overwhelming. Even just going to try to read open source code is a tremendous task, since it doesn’t really give the reader any idea of where to start.

    And that’s when it hit me - the commit log!

    The commit log is a brilliant place to get students to begin reading code, because it brings the student’s attention to a specific, intentional change made by a programmer. Code can’t be read from top to bottom like a novel since it grows non-linearly through additions and refactoring. Code is better read chronologically, and best read topically. Commit logs provide a digestible chunk of code that can be read in the context of how the programmer was attempting to accomplish something specific.

    When a student reads a diff, there are three questions to consider:

    • What did the programmer change?
    • How does this change affect the code?
    • Why did the programmer make this change?

    After my brother completes a section in Code Academy, I then seek out one of the changes I made to #8bitmooc and ask my brother to answer those questions and look at my code, and we discuss the changes for about 10 minutes. We don’t only look at the change, since whenever I end up calling a function, we look through the code base to find where it’s declared and what it does. However, these conversations seem to be very valuable at showing how the language is used in a “real language”.

    It works really well with him, so I’d love to try this out in the classroom. I imagine it would be a great way to start class.

  8. isharacomix

    Yet Another MOOC

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    I think they would be offended if I called them that, but if it quacks like a duck…

    I’ve decided to pile another class on my plate for 2013 - this time, I’ll be taking ds106: Digital Storytelling, a tight-knit community around artistic expression in a digital age, and definitely relevant to the research I’m doing. Like many cMOOCs, they also need me to keep a seperate blog for my interactions with them, so I launched another tumblelog to go with my tumblr for #oldsmooc.

    Feel free to use the ask box to query me on this adventure. Maybe I can use this class as an excuse to get back into drawing and making games! :)

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