RE: [-empyre-] ~~NMR

[Nick Montfort <nickm@linc.cis.upenn.edu>]

Noah emailed me quickly; A family medical emergency has come up for him.
He regrets that he can't continue the conversation right now, but he
thanks everyone for the conversation so far and will be back by the end of
the month if possible.

This morning, I just wanted to agree heartily with Anna's call for
"genuine collaborative learning situations," situations that sound like
they'd be much easier to establish than they actually are. But so often
everything is focused on individual work -- evaluation in terms of course
grades and exams, in a university setting; the need to quickly name an
artist in discussions. ("Noah Wardrip-Fruin et al." is the shorthand I end
up using in casual emails for the four people who worked on the
Impermanence Agent, for instance, although I'd hate for people to use a
similar term to describe the group who put the New Media Reader together!)
And departmental structures, institutional boundaries, and our assumption
about people's roles also create barriers to collaboration. If a
programmer and a writer sit down to develop interactive fiction, of
*course* the writer is going to put all the descriptive texts together,
right? In fact, the real assumption might be more detailed (and even
worse): that the writer will go along trying to design everything, asking
the programmer what can and can't be implemented.

Jim wrote of 'computing for artists' courses:

> I would be interested to see syllabi of such courses.

One such course is Michael Mateas's "Computation as an Expressive Medium"
at Georgia Tech:

http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~mateas/courses/LCC6310-Fall2003/Syllabus-6310.html

-Nick Montfort
 http://nickm.com  nickm@nickm.com
 My new book, Twisty Little Passages: http://nickm.com/twisty