Collaborative Storytelling: Composition Pedagogy and Communal Benefits of Narrative Innovation

Can gaming be considered narrative? Should gaming be allowed in a pedagogical space? Tabletop roleplaying games are probably not the first thing that come to mind when thinking about how to innovate narrative structure and teaching composition. Often considered a nerdy pastime, participants ridiculed for playing pretend and caring about imaginary characters, TTRPGs have nonetheless entered a sort of renaissance in recent years. While video games have slowly become more incorporated into pedagogy by teaching students more abstract concepts of interactivity with narrative, audience, and player engagement, TTRPGs have been slower on the draw. But incorporating the highly interactive and freeform narrative structure into composition curriculum is far from impossible. In addition to helping students break out of their comfort zones, TTRPG-like assignments can help build community and strengthen communication skills, allow students to explore ownership and leadership in group work, and teach real-time improvisation and problem-solving techniques. TTRPGs are a vastly underestimated and underutilized form of narrative structure and innovation, and deserve consideration as a valid form of composition and pedagogy for practical and theoretical applications

College Senate Minutes May 18, 2019

Minutes for the meeting of the College Senate on May 18, 2017

THE REALISM OF ALGORITHMIC HUMAN FIGURES A Study of Selected Examples 1964 to 2001

It is more than forty years since the first wireframe images of the Boeing Man revealed a stylized hu-man pilot in a simulated pilot's cabin. Since then, it has almost become standard to include scenes in Hollywood movies which incorporate virtual human actors. A trait particularly recognizable in the games industry world-wide is the eagerness to render athletic muscular young men, and young women with hour-glass body-shapes, to traverse dangerous cyberworlds as invincible heroic figures. Tremendous efforts in algorithmic modeling, animation and rendering are spent to produce a realistic and believable appearance of these algorithmic humans. This thesis develops two main strands of research by the interpreting a selection of examples. Firstly, in the computer graphics context, over the forty years, it documents the development of the creation of the naturalistic appearance of images (usually called photorealism ). In particular, it de-scribes and reviews the impact of key algorithms in the course of the journey of the algorithmic human figures towards realism . Secondly, taking a historical perspective, this work provides an analysis of computer graphics in relation to the concept of realism. A comparison of realistic images of human figures throughout history with their algorithmically-generated counterparts allows us to see that computer graphics has both learned from previous and contemporary art movements such as photorealism but also taken out-of-context elements, symbols and properties from these art movements with a questionable naivety. Therefore, this work also offers a critique of the justification of the use of their typical conceptualization in computer graphics. Although the astounding technical achievements in the field of algorithmically-generated human figures are paralleled by an equally astounding disregard for the history of visual culture, from the beginning 1964 till the breakthrough 2001, in the period of the digital information processing machine, a new approach has emerged to meet the apparently incessant desire of humans to create artificial counterparts of themselves. Conversely, the theories of traditional realism have to be extended to include new problems that those active algorithmic human figures present

Modding the Apocalypse: (Re)Making Videogames as Post-Structuralist Free Play

This dissertation is about seeing videogames, and videogame design, through the lens of Gregory Ulmer ™s electracy apparatus theory. Videogame modding is emphasized an electrate approach to intervening in existing media. Mods have the potential to make potent rhetorical arguments, but they are little-understood in the field of rhet-comp, and there are numerous obstacles to carving a space for them in academic curricula; nevertheless, they are an increasingly common form of participatory engagement that make use of a broad digital skillset. Modders fit into Gregory Ulmer ™s electracy apparatus as egents ”agents of change in the Internet age ”and their playful appropriation of objects from various archives resembles the electrate genre of MyStory (personal alternative-history). By positioning modding as electrate composition praxis, a new gateway for academic game study and production is opened, one where play is integral to the process of knowledge formation. Fallout 4 (2016) serves as an example of a moddable game whose rhetorical affordances can be adapted to craft MyStories and MEmorials

Integration + Innovation: Proceedings of the 2019 Building Technology Educators\u27 Society Conference

This volume contains papers, abstracts, and posters from the 2019 Building Technology Educators\u27 Society (BTES) Conference, which focused on Integration and Innovation as the theme. Innovation can begin with conjecture, with a searching for more effective solutions, or with an application to currently unknown or unarticulated needs. Innovation scholarship examines the personal intellectual habits that support new ideas, such as openness and exploratory behavior, as well as the circumstances behind the places in which creativity flourishes, such as support for cross-disciplinary fertilization and access to resources. The 2019 BTES conference explored the role of technology education and curriculum in cultivating these intellectual habits in our students (and ourselves) and in creating the organizational spaces in which the future of practice will be shaped. Sessions shared exemplary proposals of research and pedagogical applications that explore innovative practices and integrative thinking in the academy and profession

Rhetorical Invention in a 21st Century Technoculture: A New Ludic Framework for Learning

This dissertation proposes the ludic framework for learning as an innovative pedagogical model that privileges play, possibility, failure, and social affinity as states of being and positions for learning. The ludic framework works through rhetorics of play as a frame of reference; rhetorics of possibility and invention as a means of production; the acceptance of transformative failure; and engages with digital communities to further knowledge through social affinity while being grounded in constructionist learning theories. The principles that facilitate this are: curiosity, play, flexibility, metacognition, collaboration, invention, persistence, and creativity. To demonstrate this, the dissertation has two case studies: a semester project that explains the need and procedures for teaching technologies in a workflow and a three-dimensional representation of the research in Minecraft: Education Edition