Digital Immigrant HELL? or Learning Experience ... Global Game Jam 2011

My ongoing attempts to extricate myself from the tribe of the most digitally retarded of the Digital Immigrants made grand strides this weekend as I participated in the Global Game Jam.

Not being a programmer or animater yet, I spent the weekend doing some analog activities such as drawing images of endangered cute and furry animals.  Late Saturday night I ventured into digital territory and downloaded free audio editing software Audacity, found royalty free audio sites and making some cool sounds (wav file at bottom of link below).

The theme of the jam this year was Extinction. 

I worked on a team led by Daniel Jaramillo, grad student at NMSU Computer Science dept... he is DEFINITELY a digital native, being a programmer guy, and taught himself how to program for Windows 7 mobile phone games to make our game, Veloutinous (yes, it's from the French word Veloute).

http://www.globalgamejam.org/2011/velutinous

Anyone interested in GAMES worldwide will have FUN on the Global Game Jam site.

One of the cutest endangered primates in the world the Silky Simpona from Madagascar.

Digital Native or Immigrant?.... May I print that question out please?

Even were I not a WORD based thinker, who not only enjoys the feel of paper in my hand but REQUIRES a print out to actually READ anything, I definitely belong in the Digital Immigrant camp.

I was born the same year that Ben Hur was made, which includes a famous action scene, the chariot race, in which special effects as we now know them were not yet invented.  Watch it...a couple guys DIED in the making of this film... today, sissy actors wouldn't dream of jumping into a chariot like Charlton Heston did... digressing... oops.

I was fortunate to attend a small private school in Sun Valley, Idaho.  Jack Hemingway was my French teacher.  We studied LATIN, ancient Greece, European history... then we'd go skiing all afternoon. 

It was a very physical lifestyle, full of snow and mountains, paper and pens, books and notetaking... and in class, we'd look at EACHOTHER around a big rectangular table. 

If you were stoned, or hadn't read last nights assigned chapters of Look Homeward Angel, the teachers could SEE it in your eyes. 

Seeing people's eyes these days, much less their faces, is more likely to happen on facebook than in person, in class.

Why is this?  Because they are staring at SCREENS.

all the time.

Ten Things I've seen Students Do while Staring at Screens: 


1.  Risking their lives by staring at their cell phones while in a crosswalk.
2. Talking on cell while skateboarding on a crowded sidewalk.
3.  








Staring at Screens while Skateboarding