Monday, October 30, 2006 - Posts

Henry Jenkins On Serious Games

Henry Jenkins
DeFlorz Professor of Humanities and Director of MIT Comparative Media Studies

In his new book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Henry Jenkins describes a world where old and new media collide, where grassroots and corporate media intersect, where the
power of the media producer and the power of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways. His book describes the emergence of a new participatory culture and a struggle over the terms of this participation. The book discusses the new kinds of collaborations that occur as large scale knowledge communities pool knowledge and work together to solve complex problems. What does all of this mean for serious games?

Are games the key interface to participatory culture in learning, messaging, training, and especially opinion research and expression?

What shifts in the media environment are paving the way for the serious games movement and which are blocking its forward momentum? How can serious games designers tap the collective intelligence and participatory impulses of their consumers? What might we gain by exploring such convergence culture phenomenon as user-generated content or transmedia storytelling as we pursue our own goals as educators and activists?

posted Monday, October 30, 2006 11:28 AM by paul with 0 Comments

Photo Share

A Dot-Com Survivor’s Long Road

I've never used Shutterfly, OFoto or any other Web 1.0 photo site.

I learned about Flickr at the first Web 2.0 conference by sitting next to investers, so I was an early adapter and have several cool usernames.

Tagging ROCKS, it was amazing when we first began using Flickr. When I go to a conference and snap a hundred photos I'll find the best shots, crop them, Tag them and put them up on Flickr, but then some other guy snaps two hundred photos, some of his feet and other nonsensical things and then he spames the Tag.

I have five accounts on Flickr because they only let you store 200 photos before they charge you and I can't delete photos because other people have used them on their blogs, so I have a reasonability to keep them up there.

My favorite photo sites today are Bubbleshare and Zooomr, I know the developer-owners of these sites and I can tell you they won't need to burn $90 Million to become profitable.

posted Monday, October 30, 2006 4:47 AM by paul with 0 Comments