Infinite games in childhood

A thought struck me this morning on my BART ride into work, in response to Carse’s talk. He describes infinite games as where the point of playing is to continue to play. Doesn’t this describe childhood? Over Christmas break, I was visiting some friends with kids, and I was playing Uno with their four year […]

More thoughts on gifted education

I’ve rambled about education before, particularly with regards to gifted education. But I’ve never been bashful about repeating myself. So here we go again. Here’s a thought experiment that a friend posited a couple weeks ago. From a purely academic point of view, how long would it take a smart kid, working at their own […]

Information Carnivore followup

As usual, Beemer had an interesting response to my last post. I was going to respond on LiveJournal, but decided to use my privileged position on the blog itself. Bwa ha ha ha. More people read it this way. Yeah. Not that readership matters. Because I’m more interested in the discussion. But if more people […]

Information carnivore

Sometimes posts start with no more than a good post title. Like this one. Actually, okay, this post started with some thoughts I’ve been having about different ways of perceiving and handling information. It’s something that’s been in the back of my mind for a while. In fact, one of my first rants on this […]

Social context in the Monkeysphere

I’m going to cheat here, and respond to one of Beemer’s comments in the blog itself rather than with another comment. Mostly because he brought up some points I wanted to address but hadn’t gotten around to. This is what I meant when I mentioned that I had a whole big ball of ideas that […]

Truth vs. Context

Beemer had an interesting response to my last post, which he called Truth vs. Context, and I’m going to steal that for the title of this post. As a warning, I have a ton of ground to cover, and this entry is probably going to span at least four posts, if not more. Just the […]

Context in modern physics

I mentioned that modern physics actually demonstrates the importance of context. This is a total aside, which is why I’m putting it in a separate post (think of this as a long DFW-esque footnote), but while I was contrasting the “objective physical reality” with the contextual social world, I realized that the objective physical reality […]

The Ultimatum Game

I mentioned that there would be cases when people would answer the question “Do you want $2 or $0?” with “$0”. This is what actually happens in the Ultimatum Game, described here, with references. The basic idea is that there are two players, asked to split up a pot of money, say $10. The first […]

The Incredibles as a commentary on gifted education

I liked this New York Times article, deconstructing the Incredibles as a commentary on the debate within education on how to handle gifted children. Read it soon before it becomes for pay (or email me because I downloaded a copy). The article also refers to the short story Harrison Bergeron, by Kurt Vonnegut, which danah […]

Whither social software

There’s a new group blog out there, started by Stowe Boyd, devoted to figuring out the Operating Manual for Social Tools. Since I’m always interested in this stuff, I’m going to be following along closely to see what ideas they have. danah boyd asks a really good set of questions in one of her first […]