Ken S. McAllister

Playing with Techne: A Propaedeutic for Technical Communication

Frustrated by textbooks that push technical communication students prematurely into workplace scenarios, as well as theories that condemn techne in order to advance a particular agenda, we offer a perspective on techne that respects the formative-not professional-situation of technical writing students and emphasizes the importance for technical writers to attend to history, artistry, and well-developed social relations in their work. We offer historically grounded, creative meditations on techne that emphasize its manifold nature: it is conversational, ingenious, cunning, full of trickery, and unpredictably artistic. Such meditations can replace overly complex workplace scenarios in technical communication classrooms, particularly when an instructor wishes to emphasize knowledge making rather than the mechanics and politics of document production.

Virtual Harlem as a Collaborative Learning Environment: A Project of the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Electronic Visualization Lab

purposes have been developed at University of Illinois at Chicago’s (UICs) Electronic Visualization Laboratory, we focus on the Virtual Harlem project because it is designed as a collaborative learning environment (CLN)—a VR application that structured as a networked collaboration with the goal of building a model of the subject being studied (see “the Virtual Harlem Project” below for a more detailed description). Virtual Harlem is a learning environment (Sosnoski & Carter, 2001). Visitors can enter Virtual Harlem and navigate through it as a way of learning about the historical context, the events, the everyday life of persons who were living in Harlem at the time.

How To Do Things With Videogames. Ian Bogost.

Introducing a new hobby for other people may inspire them to join with you. Reading, as one of mutual hobby, is considered as the very easy hobby to do. But, many people are not interested in this hobby. Why? Boring is the reason of why. However, this feel actually can deal with the book and time of you reading. Yeah, one that we will refer to break the boredom in reading is choosing how to do things with videogames ian bogost as the reading material.

If they build it, they will come (panel): creating a virtual academic department in cyberspace—a presentation by the E-works collective of the University of Illinois at Chicago

The English Department at the University of Illinois-Chicago, like many humanities departments, is moving into an era when electronic textuality and pedagogy will be the norm. This is not an easy process. State universities everywhere are working hard to provide students and faculty with access to computers and Internet connections. At a few fortunate institutions, selected classrooms are quite high-tech, equipped with Interchange networks, video installations, projection displays, white boards, and other technologies that facilitate real-time networked discussion and distance learning. In the fields of English and Composition Studies, many scholars now use the Internet to conduct their investigations, rather than older, less thorough and reliable methods. As a result of this cyclone of change, writing, both as a practice and as an object of study, is being radically transformed as authors increasingly compose with computers and as scholars turn their attentions to the place of written texts in the new media ecology.