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Digital Scholarship: A Practical Guide for Working Scholars.

In co-operation with Chandos Publishing (http://www.woodheadpublishing.com/en/ChandosHome.aspx), I am pleased to announce a call for chapters in an upcoming book on Digital Scholarship. I am looking for submissions of single page proposals for chapters in the book I am currently editing. The deadline for chapter proposals is July 1, 2013. Your chapter will undergo peer-review and the 16-chapter book will be published in 2014.

This book focuses on providing information both on the theory and practice of Digital Scholarship to technologists and scholars alike. Chapter topics are included in the full call attached to this email. Theory chapters are expected to be 4000~6000 words, while Practice chapters are 2000~3000 words.

If you are unable to contribute to the books, I’d appreciate forwarding on this call to any of your colleagues who may be interested, including any exceptional doctoral students. Multi-author submissions are also accepted.

Following the acceptance of your proposal, we will provide you with further details. Feel free to contact me should you have any questions or would like to discuss potential topics for your chapter. Thank you for your attention and I look forward to your reply soon.

Further information can be found in the full call here: Call for Chapters.

Thank You,

Paul Logasa Bogen II
Editor, Digital Scholarship:

A Practical Guide for Working Scholars.

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Why should we teach CS to middle schoolers?

This is kind of a rhetorical question as I really am not asking it as I think we should. Computer Science Education research has shown that early exposure to computational thinking can affect long term student career choice. While this can be positive as shown by work by the late Randy Pausch, this can also be a negative. If good, interesting instruction such as Pausch’s work with Alice, the excellent work on Robotics in CS0, and those who do mobile dev with App Inventor then students leave excited about Computer Science and hungry for more. But imagine a CS0 or CT class where the instructor is dry, disinterested and assigns boring assignments. You could hurt the outcomes more than a good class improves them. This says to me that the real issue is not coming up with pre-packaged courses as is common in the CSE literature, but to actually get the teachers excited and interested in the material so they can share their enthusiasm in their classes. Building teacher buy-in and commitment to creative education is the missing link in the CS0/CT movement.

So how do we train the teachers?  I’m proposing to the NSF that the answer is research experience programs. Bring teachers into a research center and have them conduct research while getting instruction on bringing CT to their own classes. This allows dissemination of ideas such as nifty assignments, and CT pedagogy while building their own excitement and appreciation for computational sciences.

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Basics of Costly Magic

I am currently working on the magical dynamics for a Well of Power. Currently I am designing some of the basic of my magical system. The Wells and other power sources, the aspects of magic, and foci.

Wells:

Banal – x1 Energy -Sleep, food, drink replenishes.- Can cause exhaustion, collapse.

Spiritual – x2 Energy – Meditation, Religious rites replenish. – Can cause depression, manifested existential crises, demonic or angelic backlash

Life – x8 Energy – Extended recuperation, Deep meditations, Magical leeching. – Can cause aging and death.

Humanity – x64 Energy -

 

Sources:

Wells – See Above

Fonts – Leylines, Mystical Creatures, Sacred Sites

Vessels – Sacrafices, Magical Reservoir, Charged Foci

 

Aspects of Magic:

Hue – Red, Blue, Green, Yellow, Purple, Orange, White, Black

Intensity – White, Bright, Pure, Dark, Black

Lightness  - Pale, Neutral, Intense

Trinsicty – External, External Favored, Neutral, Internal Favored, Internal

 

Foci:

Natural – Fonts, rocks, crystal

Channels – Staves, wands, rings

Containers – Boxes, Circles, Amulets

Ritualistic – Candles, Bells, Incense

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Disruptive Pedagogy

After hearing Mills Kelly speak on a pedagogy of disruption at THATCamp CHNM 2012, I’ve been thinking about how natural it would be to implement this in a Computer Science or Information Science context. There is ample supply of areas to draw from, The THATCamp movement, Mills Kelly’s own course on hoaxes, Sandy Stone’s programs in the Univesity of Texas’s ACTLab, Abertay University’s Ethical Hacking class, the MIT Hacker Club, Collegiate Cyber Defense Competitions and Patrick Burkart at Texas A&M’s Communication and Technology class.

The vision for a Disruptive Technology course in the CS or IS context would be to teach students how to think creatively and subversively about technology to flip the paternalistic role of tech they have been brought up on to show how technology is truly an open area that politics and philosophy are imposed on. How society shapes technology and how we can turn around and effect society via re-application of technology.

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Bridging the Gap between the CS DL community and the LIS DL community.

This is starting as a repost of my THATCamp CHNM session post, I will add more to this in the future.

I’ve notice a disparaging trend at both the ACM/IEEE-CS JCDL conference and at THATCamps. Digital Libraries researchers from Computer Science have never heard of THATCamp and don’t really interact with the people who attend. Conversely people at THATCamp don’t tend to think of the ACM/IEEE-CS community when they think about what is going on in digital libraries, digital archives, and digital humanities.

In fact the 2012 JCDL conference just ended at GWU the day before THATCamp V started at GMU. Here were two groups of people with similar concerns, interests, and goals across town and unaware of each other.

This session is to discuss why there is fragmentation between the more LIS DL people at THATCamp/ALA/etc and the more CS DL at JCDL/TPDL/etc and try and discuss ways to bridge the gap and bring both groups closer together.

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All magic has a price…

It started with a random wikipedia viewing of the article on the bag of holding. As I was reading the article I become fascinated with the idea of cursed bags and how you might actually desire the cursed properties. I saw a scenario where a group of heroes wants to get rid of a dangerous artifact. What better way than to drop it in to a bag of devouring and let it be spit out to another plane.

As I thought about this, it struck me. What if there was a role-playing game where every magical item was cursed. When the question become not if it would be cursed but how bad would the curse be. Then I thought better yet, why not draw a theme from Once Upon a Time, and have all magic have a price. My mind raced about dynamics where performing magic would have a cost and being mprudent could kill a PC (or worse), I then wondered if players would just shy away from magic. This was an issue, the point of the game would be to make people weigh the consequences of action and decide what sacrifices would be worth it. I wouldn’t want a bunch of warriors with maces running around whacking magical creatures in the skull and never having to make the choice.

So why don’t we make it more interesting? Make everything magic. Swinging a sword – magic; Gravity – magic; Cellular respiration – magic. Normal day to day actions like walking, making a spark to start a campfire, consuming food would just barely touch your well of magic inside you. Running at 25mph, throwing a fireball at an enemy or draining the life of a captured animal would drain you a bit more. Moving faster than sound, summoning a demon, of snuffing out the lives of village could kill you.

But I want to let you do that, so what if you had different kinds of magical energy. Some would be banal and would be used to walk to the store and push a plow. Sleep, food, drink could replenish that. Others would be your life energy, you could tap it to power your spells, but it would shorten your life. You could replenish it but you have to get the energy elsewhere. While banal energy could be a source to replenish it, which may make you collapse or go off and eat a sushi buffet out of business, you could tap your humanity itself. You’d be alive but at the cost of becoming less of a man and more of a beast. Would you sell your soul to live forever? Or to destroy your enemies? I want people to make that choice.

I’m going to think more about dynamics and try to develop a system and maybe some world details. I haven’t tried to make an RPG system in 15 years, I’m excited to give this a try. The current working name is “A Well of Power”.