Elisabeth Hayes: Becoming a new kind of girl through gaming

How can modding The Sims enable girls to develop tech-savvy identities?

Becoming “new kinds of people” as Jim Gee suggests in his post, is at the core of Tech Savvy Girls project. We use gaming to help girls develop fluency with computer and information technologies. Gaming might not seem to be the most promising way to recruit girls to IT. As Nicole Pinkard describes, programs that focus on game design or gaming tend to attract few girls. While girls do play video games, they are less likely to see themselves as “gamers” or to engage in the modding practices that can lead to IT fluency.

Becoming “girl gamers”
In Tech Savvy Girls, we encourage girls to create new identities as “girl gamers” who are fluent with computer technology. Our approach recruits their existing identities and interests through starting with a game, The Sims, already widely played by girls. We’ve had no trouble eliciting girls’ interest in joining our group when we tell them that they’ll be learning new things to do with The Sims. We have found that girls already use The Sims to explore identity and relationship issues through creating in-game stories, avatars, and families.

And far from simply buying into existing and potentially oppressive norms for women, the girls do sometimes use The Sims to transgress such norms and engage in “identity play,” for example by having men get pregnant, as well as playing in entirely “unfeminine” ways.

However, what they create with The Sims also reflects, as Susannah Stern suggests, their desire to act out what our culture suggests is desirable and “normal” for women, such as creating pretty and stylish avatars. We introduce the girls to new modding techniques that extend their IT skills yet build on their existing interests and pleasures. They have learned how to use tools such as Adobe Photoshop to create clothes, used storyboarding to construct narratives, and started their own fan sites to share their creations with other fans from around the world. As part of this process, the girls are creating new identities within the TechSavvy group, their families, and in broader fan communities. One girl, for example, has become an “expert” within the group as well as in The Sims fan community. She has uploaded over 70 different Sims and items of clothing of her own creation to her fan site and many of her items have been downloaded over 200 times each by other fans. She now responds to requests for custom items from other fans as well as girls in the TechSavvy Group.

She has begun to see herself in a new light - as “a person who is good with computers” and her family sees her differently as well. Now she is thinking about “going to college for computer programming or something like that.”

We have adopted a potentially controversial approach of allowing the girls to start with their own interests, including fashion and romance, to offset the image of gaming and modding as masculine and counter to their identities as girls. At the same time, we hope to help them create new images of desirable female identities. In the second year of our work, we are working with girls to create machinima - movies with The Sims - that tackle issues such as “the culture of beauty” head on. We see the goal of Techsavvy Girls as ultimately helping girls themselves changing the “normal” perception of who girls should be.

Editor’s Note: See Jim Gee’s thematic overview & index for more posts in this seven-part series on digital learning and identity.

original link: http://spotlight.macfound.org/main/entry/hayes_new_girl_through_gaming/

For some reason I can’t get into the backend to have the reblog publish it, so I added this the old fashioned cut-and-paste way. -matt

For many years, the western Shoshone have been protesting the terms set by the Indians Claims Commission, which was set up initially to reward Native Americans for their service during WWII and pay them for lands taken during white settlement of the West. But the Shoshone refused to accept money from the government, claiming the agreements made at the time were unfairly established. That money currently sits in an escrow account, and the Shoshone say the government never fairly obtained this land from them. In the meantime, gold and alluvium mining companies are mining and polluting much of the area, power lines may soon go right through some of the Shoshone lands, and once the government’s Yucca Mountain repository for spent nuclear fuel finally opens for business, trucks carrying nuclear waste will travel directly through the Shoshone homelands.

Click here for rest of article:

http://www.acfnewsource.org/science/tribal_maps.html

Tags: AT&T, fcc, Google, spectrum, Verizon Wireless

A veil of mystery is about to descend over the auction of the 700-megahertz band, a useful swath of the electromagnetic spectrum that is being freed up by the move to digital television.

Today was the deadline for potential bidders to file with the Federal Communications Commission. Once they do so they become subject to strict “anticollusion” rules that in effect prohibit participants from discussing any aspect of their bidding until the auction is over. The commission is trying to prevent bidders from getting into various forms of mischief, such as maliciously bidding up prices to hurt competitors or colluding with rivals to keep prices low.

Those rules explain why Google announced Friday that it was going to bid in the auction. It can’t discuss its bidding once it filed to participate.

The rules are so sweeping, in fact, that if Echostar and AT&T each filed to bid in the auction, they would have to stop any potential discussions about AT&T buying Echostar, for example.

For those of us interested in watching this $10 billion poker game for the future of wireless communication, this will make for a lot of guessing with little official information. The next official word will be sometime at the end of December or in the middle of January, when the F.C.C. announces who has been approved to bid.

The auction will start on Jan. 24. Participants will use an Internet system to enter bids on any of 1,099 separate licenses that are being offered. The bidding will be conducted in a series of rounds, and the commission will announce the amount of the high bid for each license at the end of each round. But it will not identify the high bidder.

“We will all be speculating about it, but we won’t know what is really happening,” said Blair Levin, a technology policy analyst with Stifel, Nicolaus & Company. “Envision a football game, where you know one team has six and another team has nine, but you don’t know who has what or the story behind it.”

This process is meant to help bidders become comfortable with the market and compare alternative strategies. Experts figure it may well take two months for all the bidding to be done.

Then things really get interesting. The winning bidder will have ten days to put up 20 percent of the amount it bid. After that, it is allowed to discuss its bids publicly and negotiate with potential partners, such as losing bidders who may want to get in on the action. But it only has ten more days to make deals before it has to pay the rest of the money it bid.

How frenzied this all will be, however, is very much up in the air, as there are now only four presumed bidders on a national scale: A&T, Verizon, Google and Clearwire, a startup founded by Craig O. McCaw, the cellphone veteran.

Sprint and T-Mobile, the other two major wireless carriers in the United States, are not expected to be significant bidders in this auction. And today, the two biggest cable carriers, Comcast and Time Warner, said they had decided not to bid in the auction.

Of course, bidders could come from any corner: investor groups, foreign wireless companies, even retail names like Wal-Mart and Best Buy have been bandied about in the press. The regional phone companies, like Alltel, which are expected to use the auction to expand their networks, might get more ambitious.

There are several attractive options for bidders. Most coveted seems to be the C block, 12 regional licenses that can be combined to create a national wireless network. This is the spectrum Google is presumed to be most interested in. There is also the D block, which is one nationwide license, but it has to be shared with local police and emergency workers. The A, B, and E bands are cut up into smaller units but could be useful to a carrier with existing operations.

All this means that if there really turn out to be only four major bidders, the veil of mystery over the auction may not stay on as long, and the money raised for the Treasury may not be as much as many had expected.

Free Rice is an online game that aims to end world hunger while improving people’s vocabulary. It’s an online word game you can play, and for each one you answer you correctly, you are donating 10 grains of rice for free. The rice is paid for by advertisers seen on the bottom of the game page. Pretty nice.

http://www.freerice.com/

Wow. This site has it all. It uses the internet to educate in both literacy and social issues, while allowing people to contribute to a great cause for no money. This is such a great model for fund raising - everyone gets something and anyone who can access the medium (the internet in this case) has an equal (and ever increasing) opportunity to do something good for other people.

Originally
from b l o g . F A B R I C A

reBlogged

on Nov 21, 2007, 1:41PM

Originally from b l o g . F A B R I C A on November 21, 2007, 6:41am

BugMirror from oriol Ferrer Mesià on Vimeo.

BugMirror is a different screen saver; it’s packed with bugs that move, change color and interact with each other. They think independently reacting to camera input and trying to mimic what the camera sees.
Your face formed by hundreds of bugs? You have to try that!
Find Oriol’s unique software here.
¡Muy bien Matador!

another thing that’s just really cool.

Originally
from b l o g . F A B R I C A

reBlogged

on Nov 26, 2007, 10:45AM

Originally from b l o g . F A B R I C A on November 26, 2007, 3:45am

these just look really cool

Originally
from Coudal Partners Blended Feed

reBlogged

on Nov 30, 2007, 12:50PM

Originally from Coudal Partners Blended Feed on November 30, 2007, 5:50am

Talk about going out with a bang. It’s interesting to think about what he was possibly trying to say with this project. I must admit I’m at a slight loss for getting it, but I’d imagine that there was purpose in his action. Perhaps it was just to depict the power of media, though the package was label “not a bomb” and the video was labeled “fake bombing.” Perhaps the young man was making a statement about the power of images - labeling his work did not prevent him from getting into trouble because he chose such explosive imagery (no pun intended), that it overshadowed any other component to piece, such as possible intent.

Originally
from Coudal Partners Blended Feed

reBlogged

on Nov 30, 2007, 6:55PM

Originally from Coudal Partners Blended Feed on November 30, 2007, 11:55am

Originally
from Coudal Partners Blended Feed

reBlogged

on Nov 30, 2007, 8:24PM

Originally from Coudal Partners Blended Feed on November 30, 2007, 1:24pm

Codecs and Containers

The use of two FOSS video and audio codec combinations are recommended:

* Xvid/LAME Use of the Xvid codec for video and LAME codec for audio in the medium term as both codecs are well developed and generally well supported but are encumbered with patent issues that mean they may be plagued with legal issues into the future.
* Ogg Theora/Vorbis Use of the Ogg format, Theora video codec and Vorbis audio codec as they are patent-free technologies that have seen great improvements in usability and the number and quality of tools available to create and play them is increasing.

Players

There are many good FOSS players of both Xvid/LAME and Ogg Theora/Vorbis available, some more suitable for certain purposes than others. However the recommendation is that Transmission projects promote the use of one player application primarily, VLC, in order to share documentation and training resources more easily by adopting the same software:

* VLC Use VLC as it is highly-developed FOSS media player for FOSS codecs available on all platforms.

Link

(Thanks, Lachlan!)

Originally
from Boing Boing

by Cory Doctorow


reBlogged

on Dec 3, 2007, 5:52AM

Originally by Cory Doctorow from Boing Boing on December 2, 2007, 10:52pm

The Canadian minority Tory government is planning to do just that, first thing in the New Year, with a full-court press for a Canadian DMCA that goes way beyond the US counterpart, making it one of the worst copyright laws in the developed world, with extra-strong anti-circumvention rules that prohibit making and using tools that open up locked digital files, even when those files belong to you.

The last two Canadian Members of Parliament who championed a Canadian DMCA lost their jobs. Good things come in threes.

# Write to your local Member of Parliament. Nothing is more obvious or more important. Letters (which are better than email) from just a handful of constituents is enough to get the attention of your local MP. It is often a good idea to ask the MP to forward your letter to the relevant Ministers. Contact information for all MPs is available here. Online Rights Canada also provides an easy way to write to your local MP.

# Write to the Prime Minister of Canada. Contact information here.

# Write to Jim Prentice, the Minister of Industry. Minister Prentice is responsible for the Copyright Act in Canada. Despite the fact that Minister Prentice trumpeted his pro-consumer approach on the spectrum auction issue, the rumour mill suggests that he supports DMCA-style reforms and has little interest in advocating for consumer concerns. Minister Prentice’s contact information is here.

# Write to Josee Verner, the Minister of Canadian Heritage. Minister Verner is one of the two ministers responsible for copyright policy in Canada. Prior Canadian Heritage Ministers have been perceived to be close to U.S. copyright lobby groups and copyright collectives. Ministry contact information here. Minister Verner’s contact information is here….

Link

(Thanks, Ryan!)

See also:
Canada’s coming DMCA will be the worst copyright yet
Canadian DMCA: how it might have happened
CBC radio show needs your input for question with Minister responsible for Canadian DMCA

Originally
from Boing Boing

by Cory Doctorow


reBlogged

on Dec 3, 2007, 6:02AM

Originally by Cory Doctorow from Boing Boing on December 2, 2007, 11:02pm

While shopping for your loved ones (or for yourself), don’t forget to think about donating to Child’s Play Charity, Tycho and Gabe’s (of Penny Arcade fame) effort to give video games, movies, and toys to children’s hospitals worldwide. We could laud the charity for a thousand words, but we’ll spare you and just say this: donate, donate, donate.

Without further ado (donate!), here are our picks for the week’s best game-related webcomic; be sure to vote for your favorite!

<!– // End Pollhost.com Poll Code // –>

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Originally
from Joystiq

by Ross Miller


reBlogged

on Dec 1, 2007, 6:30PM

Originally by Ross Miller from Joystiq on December 1, 2007, 11:30am

By LOUISE STORY and BRAD STONE

Published: November 30, 2007

Faced with its second mass protest by members in its short life span, Facebook, the enormously popular social networking Web site, is reining in some aspects of a controversial new advertising program.

Within the last 10 days, more than 50,000 Facebook members have signed a petition objecting to the new program, which sends messages to users’ friends about what they are buying on Web sites like Travelocity.com, TheKnot.com and Fandango. The members want to be able to opt out of the program completely with one click, but Facebook won’t let them.

Late yesterday the company made an important change, saying that it would not send messages about users’ Internet activities without getting explicit approval each time.

MoveOn.org Civic Action, the political group that set up the online petition, said the move was a positive one.

“Before, if you ignored their warning, they assumed they had your permission” to share information, said Adam Green, a spokesman for the group. “If Facebook were to implement a policy whereby no private purchases on other Web sites were displayed publicly on Facebook without a user’s explicit permission, that would be a step in the right direction.”

Facebook, which is run by Mark Zuckerberg, 23, who created it while an undergraduate at Harvard, has built a highly successful service that is free to its more than 50 million active members. But now the company is trying to figure out how to translate this popularity into profit. Like so many Internet ventures, it is counting heavily on advertising revenue.

The system Facebook introduced this month, called Beacon, is viewed as an important test of online tracking, a popular advertising tactic that usually takes place behind the scenes, where consumers do not notice it. Companies like Google, AOL and Microsoft routinely track where people are going online and send them ads based on the sites they have visited and the searches they have conducted.

But Facebook is taking a far more transparent and personal approach, sending news alerts to users’ friends about the goods and services they buy and view online.

Charlene Li, an analyst at Forrester Research, said she was surprised to find that her purchase of a table on Overstock.com was added to her News Feed, a Facebook feature that broadcasts users’ activities to their friends on the site. She says she did not see an opt-out box.

“Beacon crosses the line to being Big Brother,” she said, “It’s a very, very thin line.”

Facebook executives say the people who are complaining are a marginal minority. With time, Facebook says, users will accept Beacon, which Facebook views as an extension of the type of book and movie recommendations that members routinely volunteer on their profile pages. The Beacon notices are “based on getting into the conversations that are already happening between people,” Mr. Zuckerberg said when he introduced Beacon in New York on Nov. 6.

“Whenever we innovate and create great new experiences and new features, if they are not well understood at the outset, one thing we need to do is give people an opportunity to interact with them,” said Chamath Palihapitiya, a vice president at Facebook. “After a while, they fall in love with them.”

Mr. Palihapitiya was referring to Facebook’s controversial introduction of the News Feed feature last year. More than 700,000 people protested that feature, and Mr. Zuckerberg publicly apologized for aspects of it. However, Facebook did not remove the feature, and eventually users came to like it, Mr. Palihapitiya said. He said Facebook would not add a universal opt-out to Beacon, as many members have requested.

MoveOn.org started the anti-Beacon petition on Nov. 20, and as of last night more than 50,000 Facebook users had signed it. Other groups fighting Beacon have about 10,000 members in total. Facebook, they say, should not be following them around the Web, especially without their permission.

The complaints may seem paradoxical, given that the so-called Facebook generation is known for its willingness to divulge personal details on the Internet. But even some high school and college-age users of the site, who freely write about their love lives and drunken escapades, are protesting.

“We know we don’t have a right to privacy, but there still should be a certain morality here, a certain level of what is private in our lives,” said Tricia Bushnell, a 25-year-old in Los Angeles, who has used Facebook since her college days at Bucknell. “Just because I belong to Facebook, do I now have to be careful about everything else I do on the Internet?”

Two privacy groups said this week that they were preparing to file privacy complaints about the system with the Federal Trade Commission. Among online merchants, Overstock.com has decided to stop running Facebook’s Beacon program on its site until it becomes an opt-in program. And as the MoveOn.org campaign has grown over the past week, some ad executives have poked fun at Facebook users.

“Isn’t this community getting a little hypocritical?” said Chad Stoller, director of emerging platforms at Organic, a digital advertising agency. “Now, all of a sudden, they don’t want to share something?”

Facebook users each get a home page where they can volunteer information like their age, hometown, college and religion. People can post photos and write messages on their pages and on their friends’ pages.

Under Beacon, when Facebook members purchase movie tickets on Fandango.com, for example, Facebook sends a notice about what movie they are seeing in the News Feed on all of their friends’ pages. If a user saves a recipe on Epicurious.com or rates travel venues on NYTimes.com, friends are also notified. There is an opt-out box that appears for a few seconds, but users complain that it is hard to find. Mr. Palihapitiya said Facebook is making the boxes larger and holding them on the Web pages longer.

Mr. Green of MoveOn.org said that his group would be tracking the effects of the latest changes before deciding if it would still push for a universal opt-out.

The whole purpose of Beacon is to allow advertisers to run ads next to these purchase messages. A message about someone’s purchase on Travelocity might run alongside an airline or hotel ad, for example. Mr. Zuckerberg has heralded the new ads as being like a “recommendation from a trusted friend.”

But Facebook users say they do not want to endorse products.

“Just because I use a Web site, doesn’t mean I want to tell my friends about it,” said Annie Kadala, a 23-year old student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Maybe I used that Web site because it was cheaper.”

Ms. Kadala found out about Beacon on Thanksgiving day when her News Feed told her that her sister had purchased the Harry Potter “Scene It?” game.

“I said, ‘Susan, did you buy me this game for Christmas?’” Ms. Kadala recalled. “I don’t want to know what people are getting me for Christmas.”

The service would allow people to store any kind of data on Google servers and access it from any computer with an Internet connection. An unspecified amount of storage would be offered for free with additional amounts available for a fee, the report said.

haha! Just give google ALL your information. -matt

Originally
from Smart Mobs

by Emily Turretini


reBlogged

on Nov 27, 2007, 7:36AM

Originally by Emily Turretini from Smart Mobs on November 27, 2007, 12:36am

(via Hit and Run)

This frightens and excites me.
-matt

Originally
from Smart Mobs

by Bryan Alexander


reBlogged

on Nov 30, 2007, 4:41PM

Originally by Bryan Alexander from Smart Mobs on November 30, 2007, 9:41am

Chris sez, “One of my favorite songwriters, Kristin Hersh (Throwing Muses, 50FOOTWAVE, and solo) has founded the Coalition for Artists and Stake Holders, on the assumption that both artists and fans are stakeholders in the production of music. She’s built a framework to distribute music on the internet while taking donations (sort of Radiohead-style: pay what you want) and taking full advantage of the medium — including offering ProTools tem files via BitTorrent so you can remix her song!”

Link

(Thanks, Chris!)

Can’t see the video? Click here

Originally
from Boing Boing

by Cory Doctorow


reBlogged

on Nov 28, 2007, 6:00AM

Originally by Cory Doctorow from Boing Boing on November 27, 2007, 11:00pm

Azariah’s Cafe, Mudd Library.

The site, 23andMe , is named after the 23 pairs of chromosomes in the human body. It claims to offer the first “personal genome service” for $999 (£488) a customer.

Using hi-tech analysis software, the company says it can read up to half a million points in an individual’s genome. The service is intended to help people understand their inherited traits and to allow them to compare themselves with friends and family.

PETER– i had no idea about google before hearing Nathan talk about their empire. looks like they are gathering more codes and data, too — PETER

Originally
from Smart Mobs

by Emily Turretini


reBlogged

on Nov 21, 2007, 6:41AM

Originally by Emily Turretini from Smart Mobs on November 20, 2007, 11:41pm

Now all we need is a never-ending bottle of merlot and a loop of Marvin Gaye.

Via VSL.

Originally posted by andrewprice from Good Magazine:, ReBlogged by Jenny Broutin on Nov 20, 2007 at 02:08 PM

PETER — I find this interesting because looking at the sunset on this website is a terrible experience. If anything, the technology is what is fascinating/stimulating, not the event that it renders “visible.” It makes me think about how certain technologies reappropriate our interests/stimulate us in different ways and therefore change the “meaning” of an experience –PETER

Originally
from Eyebeam reBlog

by andrewprice


reBlogged

on Nov 20, 2007, 7:08PM

Originally by andrewprice from Eyebeam reBlog on November 20, 2007, 12:08pm

Originally from Christian Science Monitor | Sci/Tech, ReBlogged by Leah Gauthier on Nov 17, 2007 at 10:32 AM

PETER — more on the intersection between technology and natural processes, this article makes me think a lot about genetic engineering as a practice: the speed and convenience of genetically modified and grown crops does not skirt reliance on certain natural growing processes, like pollination. More crops, less variation, more intense pressures on factors we can do less to technologically augment. — PETER

Originally
from Eyebeam reBlog

reBlogged

on Nov 17, 2007, 3:32PM

Originally from Eyebeam reBlog on November 17, 2007, 8:32am