Cleanliness is...

For the past month or so, I have been very aware of how often I have been cleaning. I wash dishes (and the sink and the cutting board etc) every day. I put things away every day. I am surprised at how quickly things get dirty. Time to scrub the tub again. Again? Shower my body scrub my face brush my teeth.

Life is like a never ending cycle of soil and clean, soil and clean. Vacuum, dust, scrub, mop. Laundry. Fold. I'm not even obsessive about it. I let things go. I don't shave as often as I should (I am a graduate student after all). I sometimes wait until I can see the ring in the bowl before I scrub it. I wear clothes multiple times before I wash them. Not my unmentionables, of course. They get washed after just one wear because it's dirty down there.

I'm not complaining about life being a cycle of chores. In fact, when I motivate myself to do clean something, I often take some pleasure in it. Particularly washing dishes: the hot water, almost hurting hands, soap so powerful, and elementary shapes of plates and cups and bowls. Or the tub: I attack it with gleeful determination, big yellow rubber gloves on, sweating, imagining that I could take a toothbrush to the grout and butterknife the cracks.

Is there a lesson in these chores? In this cleaning? In the order? Does God indeed love cleanliness? Would it be the same if I had the means to pay someone to do the cleaning? It would be cleaner...

What do you clean? What do you like to clean? What do you learn from cleaning?

Resident Evil 4: Good

I recently started playing Resident Evil 4.

I didn’t really play video games that much growing up. I never owned an Atari or Nintendo, so my opportunities for playing were always limited to friends’ systems. And since I wasn’t practiced at the games, the kids who had the games mastered them before I even had a chance to play. I played a bit of Spyhunter as a kid. Some Mortal Kombat in college. Some Fifa Gold on Sega Genesis. Some Goldeneye at a friend’s house.

It seemed like an appropriate time to start playing a game. Lots of folks around here spend time (both recreational and professional time) on games. I figured I would learn a bunch of stuff related to my work but not too related to my work. Which makes gaming pretty much the perfect procrastination.

I am loving Resident Evil 4. I had no idea that graphics had progressed so much. Also, this game is very playable, meaning that controlling Leon (my character) is very intuitive.

So, Resident Evil 4 is very good. One of things that makes it good is that the game forgives mistakes. Certainly, some mistakes result in being beheaded or other types of gruesome demise. But I can retry without having to go very far back in the game. Also, there are no penalties for failing certain tasks, such as a number of logic puzzles in the flow of the game. The game simply won’t proceed until I figure them out.

The game’s forgiving nature makes it hard to stop playing. Even when I fail, I can instantly try again, with an improved perspective on how succeed the next time. That’s a pretty useful balance. The possibility of succeeding has to be in sight. The game can’t seem impossible.

Board Game

The Financial Page in the New Yorker is not a section of the magazine that typically covers issues that closely relate to the field of educational psychology. In the Oct 9th, 2006 section, however, James Surowiecki responds to the recent news that private investigators had been hired to snoop around the Hewlett-Packard Board of Directors in an attempt to find out which members had been leaking info to the press. Rather than joining the chorus of those outraged by the privacy violation involved, Surowiecki focuses on the problems that leaky boards cause companies, and more importantly, the problems on the board that leaks reveal.

According to Surowiecki, leaks are generally power moves, attempts to use public or media pressure to spin a debate one way or another. The problem with leaks is that they betray the solidarity of the board.

While I am frequently dismayed by who seems to win the public debates surrounding education these days, what concerns me more is that the debates are not even about the right things. So much time and money and argument about assessment, and we are not even clear about what we are preparing students to do and be!

Surowiecki’s observations about leaky boards highlights an area where we are failing in education that really matters. Shouldn’t collaboration be a primary goal for education? Is this not a skill that will serve students no matter what career they choose? The ability to trust the competence of one’s peers, to engage in hard conversations to solve difficult problems, to compromise?

Maybe an epistemic game of the future will be a Board Game, where a group of players manage the fortunes of company…

I should go to Puerto Rico...

...for the Candela music and art festival. $99 each way on jetblue from NYC to San Juan.

Oh yeah, I don't live in New York. Madison to San Juan is more like $800. Not alot of Puerto Ricans round here, that's for damn sure.

It's supposed to snow here in Madison for the next two days. We're not even halfway through October.

On the bright side, I found out that someone intercepted my new credit card and has been making cheapo sneaker purchases in Connecticut (the new Starbuys?).

Needless to say, tonight is SCOTCH night.

Grand Theft Education

The cover story of the September 2006 issue of Harper's Magazine is a forum entitled Grand Theft Education: Literacy in the Age of Video Games. Participants in the forum include Steven Johnson (author of Everything Bad is Good for You), Ralph Koster (video game designer), Jane Avrich and Thomas De Zengotita (authors and high school teachers), and Bill Wasik (senior editor at Harper's).

While the forum is good read, I was disappointed that they didn't have someone who actually studies the intersection of gaming and learning (I can think of a few folks here at Madison who would fit the bill rather nicely). I felt that the group really only skated on the surface of the possibilities and intricacies of video games as learning environments. I wonder whether there is an unedited, more complete record of their conversation available somewhere.

One area that they did briefly discuss was the phenomenon of players writing game guides. Clearly the impulse to write guides is one that cuts across areas of expertise, with examples both amateur and professional (off the top of my head: travel guides, restaurant guides, ratemyprofessor.com serves to help one navigate the game of school, etc). I wonder whether the act of creating game guides is a performance of proficiency that could be incorporated into epistemic games. For example, in Journalism.net, the type of things that reporters choose to write might be a useful way to assess the performance of the editors, or simply to improve the next iteration of the game.

What I miss...

That's the view from my old apartment.

I am missing NYC terribly. But even more than any one aspect of brooklyn or my job or my friends or my apartment or the food or the diversity or the grandeur, I miss myself. I am not, can't be, who I was. And I liked who I was. I miss me. I'm not sure who I am here. I am finding out.

The other night I found out I still like rum on the rocks with lime. Thank goodness for that.

Ye Ole Rustic Tavern

My closest bar is Ye Ole Rustic Tavern. I went there to play chess with my friend Brian.

My friend Brian:



You can see that he is domestic. You also can see that this photo was taken a long time ago before it had snowed already. You can see I only had my shitty camera on my phone to take the pictures in this post.

Anyway, Brian and I ply chess in the Tavern. The beer is cheap. The Packers are losing by a gazillion, so the bar patrons are morose and hammered, but not violent, because it's a preseason game.

The Tavern sells pickled eggs. I am surprised. I thought they were only sold at Moe's, in Springfield. Of course I have to have one (Brian eats them regularly). And I have to have it with a shot of bourbon, in a plastic shotglass:



With mustard.


Oh yeah, there was a bug zapper in the corner. So our game was punctuated by the sweet sound of death. ZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzt!