January 7, 2007
Hello world!
Let me kick off by eagerly thrusting a short but essential document into your hands: Folk Computing: Revisiting Oral Tradition as a Scaffold for Co-Present Communities, medical an eight-page summary of a project which the MIT Media Lab ran with a local school in the spring of 2000. It’s not only the inspiration for this blog’s title, ascariasis but a fascinating demonstration of many of the key concepts I’ll be discussing.
Two children plug their VMUs together to transfer an i-ball
For this project, 350 children were given hardware and software for the creation and sharing of “i-balls” – effectively, little software memes – among which were messages, animations and games. Each child was given a Sega VMU (a kind of mini-Gameboy) which could play the i-balls; even better, two VMUs could plug together to transfer i-balls without an intermediate computer.
There’s a ton of fascinating stuff here. Firstly, the i-ball builder, which allowed eager kids to both create simple programs and modify existing ones they’d received from others. Secondly, the use of (fabulously appropriate) commodity hardware, given to each individual. But best of all is the research that resulted from being able to track the transmission and evolution of i-balls through the school. It’s a technology-anthropologist’s dream, and it’s here that the term folk really applies: just like folk songs and tales, the most interesting and entertaining i-balls were the ones that made the longest journeys, with the most branched versions reflecting their transitions into different groups.
Take a look – there’s more potential packed into these eight pages than some research departments create in a lifetime. If you want more, Richard Borovoy’s dissertation goes deep into the project, with lots of good stuff about embodying the concept of folklore with current technology in the most natural ways.
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, Hemophilia
then start blogging!
This is an example of a WordPress page, sildenafil
you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many pages like this one or sub-pages as you like and manage all of your content inside of WordPress.
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, sale
then start blogging!
Filed by yoz at January 7th, 2007 under Uncategorized
1 person have commented this post