Weird Decentering: The Unnatural in H.P. Lovecraft\u27s At the Mountains of Madness

The \u27weird fiction\u27 of H.P. Lovecraft has frustrated any attempt to place the author safely in the canons of genre fiction. Writing in the brief period of 1917 - 1937 with a keen mind towards the era\u27s scientific discoveries, Lovecraft\u27s stories about cosmic horror, insanity, and inhumanity cultivated the author no fame during his lifetime. The weirdness of his \u27weird fiction\u27 derives from a unique combination of science, supernatural, metaphysics, and speculation all in service of the decentering and reduction of mankind on a cosmic scale. The mythology maintained across Lovecraft\u27s numerous short stories depicts a world that is determined to undermine the ideals and arrogant assumptions of twentieth-century rationality, a nightmarish undoing of everything that could have been called human or humanity. The mo t merciful thing in the world ... , Lovecraft wrote, is the inability of man to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far (The Call of Cthulhu 381)

The Hero Industry: Spectacular Pacification in the Era of Media Interactivity

In Ben Fountain’s 2012 novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Half­time Walk, the titular US soldier and the Bravo squad become canonized Iraq War heroes when their rescue attempt is captured on digital video. In recognition of their bravery, their tour of duty is halted for an American media stint that culminates in their participation during the 2004 Dallas Cowboys Thanksgiving halftime show. This celebratory return allows the proud American public to interact with the heroes from the video, subsumed, however they may be, by the militarized media spectacle and abstracted into icons of precious, simplified mean­ing. Commodities like War Hero Billy Lynn are a neces­sary product when images of postmodern warfare do not bring a nation’s culture any grounding, pacifying sense of meaning. Better than a mere screen, Billy is alive; he can be touched. Endowed with the experiential knowledge of soldier subjectivity, he becomes a ready vessel brought close for an American public to inhabit . .

What Makes a Good Reader : International Findings from PIRLS 2016

Fifty countries from around the world participated in the PIRLS 2016 international assessment of reading comprehension at the fourth grade, and in every country there was a wide range of reading achievement from basic skills to advanced comprehension. The fourth grade students in the Russian Federation and Singapore had the highest reading achievement on average. These two countries also had more than one-fourth of their students reaching the PIRLS Advanced International Benchmark. Students reaching this level interpreted, integrated, and evaluated story plots and information in relatively complex texts. Hong Kong SAR, Ireland, Finland, Poland, and Northern Ireland also performed very well, with approximately one-fifth of their students reaching the Advanced Benchmark

Review: A Play of Bodies: How We Perceive Videogames

Review: A Play of Bodies: How We Perceive Videogames, by Brendan Keogh. MIT Press. 2018. ISBN: 978026203763

Australian Indigenous students: addressing equity issues in assessment

This article provides the background and context to the important issue of assessment and equity in relation to Indigenous students in Australia. Questions about the validity and fairness of assessment are raised and ways forward are suggested by attending to assessment questions in relation to equity and culture-fair assessment. Patterns of under-achievement by Indigenous students are reflected in national benchmark data and international testing programmes like the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Sstudy and the Program for International Student Assessment. The argument developed views equity, in relation to assessment, as more of a sociocultural issue than a technical matter. It highlights how teachers need to distinguish the "funds of knowledge" that Indigenous students draw on and how teachers need to adopt culturally responsive pedagogy to open up the curriculum and assessment practice to allow for different ways of knowing and being

Book Review: A Play of Bodies: How We Perceive Videogames

Review: A Play of Bodies: How We Perceive Videogames, by Brendan Keogh. MIT Press. 2018. ISBN: 978026203763

Perceiving Time in Videogames and Virtual Space

A phenomenological turn is taking place within the field of gamestudies (Keogh), encouraging players and scholars to consider perceptions which were always present during the act of play but rarely so apparent as to be studied directly. With this research I mean to discover a direct approach to studying the unique perception of time (or timelessness) created by 3D videogames. The work of urban planners like Kevin Lynch, filmmakers such as Andrei Tarkovsky, and the unclassifiable William S. Burroughs comprise my theoretical framework for understanding virtual time and space. Particularly, Burroughs’ experiments about affecting perception through the adaptation of cinematic editing techniques in prose writing seem as strange as they do relevant when studying how a medium that accomplishes an impression of space like videogames might also produce an impression of time. What this research ultimately aims at is revealing how videogame mechanics, audiovisuals, and kinetic sensations are and can be mobilized to affect the embodied subjectivity of players, and perhaps facilitate encounters with the ludic sublime (Vella)