WCN Thinkspace – Page 2 – My Thinkspace for Uni

Assessment item 1 – Online Reflective Journal Blog Task

Digital games have been a big part in my life ever since I was a little child. But I was obsessed with education and is a large reason why I took a philosophy degree, so that I could focus on the philosophy of education. I have written five books and I have released countless films. I turned education into a fun activity. The goal was to use these forms of media to make education indistinguishable from entertainment. This is why I am so interested in video games now. Because I want to learn how to make educational games that feel like pure entertainment without stooping to techniques such as violence to obtain and maintain the player’s attention span.

I am particularly interested in games that test and develop your moral compass. Fallout 3’s Karma indicator goes from Devil to Messiah. I like games that guide you through an adventure and tests character aspects like courage and honour. I want to develop a game that teaches moral philosophy. I would have it so full of resources, one could explore it for the rest of their lives. But doing this would be tricky because I envision a 3D game without violence. I don’t even have a single quest mapped out and I don’t really know how I would create the quests.

I have always been attracted to games that pull you in, where you are the main character and entered your name upon its request. The best stories are always the ones where you have to save the world. In fact, I have a recurring dream where I have super powers and I am trying to save the world. In my real life, I try to save the world with my work. Games that make you feel special are well designed games. Inspiration can be spread through text, audio, video, and now, through video games. Their educational purposes are boundless if we are only creative. How can we tell a story worth hearing while pulling the player into said story? How can we use that story to convey meaningful information that the player can take with them away from the game? How can we create new experiences with the player in which would reward them both in and out of game?

My inspiration for making this game is because of all of the violence that exists in schools. I wanted to create an alternative to traditional schooling and I see the possibilities within games to bridge the gap. I am amazed with the Nintendo Switch and it would be amazing if I could provide a comprehensive education system cleverly disguised as a game for a platform like that. My eyes are on the future because I want to be able to include my 500+GB of videos and currently that would not fit on a Nintendo Switch cartridge. My eyes are on the future when storage is no longer a problem. Then I can use the data I have created in many different ways.

Assessment item 1 – Reflective Journal Blog post

I am an online teacher so I am constantly manipulating data and trying new things to learn how the data can be best interacted with. I started out by creating online philosophy courses but they eventually evolved into “television shows” as I could trick the viewer into learning but by presenting my information as entertainment. These countless films are then presented along with five books which include audio versions. Digital media is my best friend and I am very good with it. Text, audio, and video all collect on your site and mould it into its best version.

I like to compare this with the story of Pygmalion and Galatea. The Internet is like the Ivory in which can be slowly chipped away at. The result is a beautiful woman. I use this story literally, metaphorically, and allegorically all throughout my work. All of my projects are like Ivory projects, starting out with a shapeless mass and eventually ending up with perfection. Doing many things on a website over time will eventually evolve that website. Chipping away at a website is like chipping away at the statue until she is perfect.

In my line of work, I am constantly sending and receiving information in useful ways. I can see what people like and what they dislike. Information such as website statistics can be used in various ways if and when I choose that. My job is to manipulate the information that I have previously created into a receptive media format. A new example of this is me attempting to get all the chapters in all of my books to have hyperlinks to their location. The information that I receive in which is generated automatically assists me in deciding future direction. The World Wide Web is a feedback system and you can build something great if you merely start with something basic and build upon that until you have a masterpiece. But any true masterpiece, takes a lifetime. This is why I have now shifted my focus to games.

Within digital games, as you create environments, assets are automatically created. This enables you to easily copy and paste another, let’s say, tree. The tree is identically copied and now you need only play around a little with the colour settings to get a unique tree. This copy and paste trick makes assets very valuable. This is why I am focused on making environments in my game and I haven’t yet done a lot insofar as storyline. Those environments and their resources will come in very handy in my future. Investing in expanding one’s game assets is important to easily create new future assets.

“Learning design entails mapping desired learning outcomes onto learning activities and experiences, taking into account psychological, pedagogical, and technological factors.” (Ford, 2008. p. 81)

Taking into account the above quote, through my game I must create activities and experiences (quests) that will lead the player through a compelling story. My challenge is that I must make this 3D adventure RPG without any violence within it. But this game has high hopes, aspiring to be a DLE (Digital Learning Environment), quite literally digitising a campus in which you will learn in and around.

I am a “digital native” if one truly ever did exist. I have worked with audio-video technology for a very long time. I was very young when we got our first computer. I am a man of many skills but I do lack certain abilities, particularly, I am very weak in programming. There is this website called fiverr that you can very affordably hire people from around the world to do tasks for you that you are struggling with. This website bridges the gap between what is possible between the rich and the poor. Where there is a will, there is a way. And where there is fiverr, there is a way if the price is right.

Reference:

Ford, Nigel. (2008). Web-based learning through educational informatics: information science meets educational computing. Hershey, PA: Information Science Pub.

Fiverr. www.fiverr.com

Content Curation

Mainstream news sources are turning into a phenomena of the past as individuals create their own content while organising other relavent content they stumbled upon. I share important stories to my facebook feed and I hope that feed stays around long after my death because it clearly demonstrates what I cared about in this life. In addition, I constantly am lead back to the feed to find something within the information which I need for a new project. In addition, the feed that I receive is highly customised so the information that I wish to receive is generally the information in which I receive.

We live in a very fast paced world and it can be very difficult to know what we should keep up with and what information we should discard. Organising our news is like organising our lives and how we will direct them.

The Digital Dark Age

The threat of this era becomming a digital dark age of our future history is very real. Censorship on the Internet has gotten out of hand, removing precious educational content merely because it does not fit with the agenda of the overall society. I am an author and a filmmaker and I have been censored and banned from every mainstream and alternative platforms merely for utilising my “freedom of speech”. My books have been banned everywhere just like my videos have been banned everywhere. It took me a long time to plant my content all throughout the Internet so it is not possible to remove. I had to use many different platforms to upload to as well as fight very hard for the right to keep that information up.

I see censorship everywhere. Content must fit within the agenda of the Sabbatean Frankist Satanic cult otherwise, it is censored. This is a real problem for the future because if it is so easy for them to remove information that they do not like now, what will our future look like? If they can just click a button and remove all of your content from the Internet, then this creates a digital dark age where the only information allowed is reviewed and accepted by mainstream opinion or deleted.

“Who controls the past controls the future.” (Orwell, 2008, chapter 3, paragraph 39)

This is by far not a new conception, however, it has become extremely relavent recently since the average person has access to the Internet. Our entire history is fabricated by the social elites of the world. What they say happened in our past is debateable. The strongest military power is the one who writes history. And when we militarise our Internet, the war becomes the rich versus the poor. The poor have never had the ability to write history (and as a result the future) because the social elites utilise their resources to squash the bug. But the war is very real. In truth, this is a spiritual war. The rich who control mainstream opinion stomp out any possibility for the truth to be written into history. Instead, they frame the truth in a context that is innapropriate and misleading.

The truth is that most of our fields of practice are complete and utter bullshit. Every area of practice creates bucketloads of false information and frames it into an “educational” context. It then encourages teaching these falsehoods with very sophisticated academic language. This is to ensure that the uneducated are unable to comprehend what they are reading/watching/listening to. K-12 doesn’t teach life skills. It doesn’t even teach about money, which is required to live a successful life. K-12 is not about education but indoctrination. K-12 was created to form a specific type of individual who will be happy slave (employee). The modern day education system is not there to educate but instead, indoctrinate.

nesmith.net

(image source: Watts)

Orwell, George. (2008). Nineteen eighty-four. Project Gutenberg Australia.

Watts, Alan. Music and Life.

Reflection

The process of reflection is vital to the development of teachers. I found this out long ago in my childhood. I found out that extensively documenting what I did and what was happening around me exponentially increased my learning capabilities. Essentially, this is what I did with all five books that I have written as well as the countless hours of films that I have created. Documenting what you are doing is not only a way to increase your own education but also others, for those documents have the ability to follow us around for the rest of our lives. And if media is going to attach itself to us, what media do we want attaching to us? What keywords do we want to relate to us? I have typed philosophy and sociology so many times that these two words are forever attached to me. These are the words I want representing me after I die.

The process of reflection is not only of benefit to the one involved in the reflection. Because consise reflections about a topic is actually creating knowledge. New information arises from our reflections which can then be applied in countless ways. The more you give to the Internet, the more it learns who you are. Eventually artificial intelligence will become your best friend if you used the Internet efficiently. The more the Internet knows who we are as people, the more it has the ability to help us in our day to day lives. But we must be careful because this technology can be used for evil. Because the more the Internet learns who we are as people, the more it can manipulate us.