Interesting to see the identification of gender issues. I would expect by changing game design you would alleviate some of those issues. If we get the CMF project, it would be interesting to explore some of those issues in collaborative development.

Hi Jon,
The other day I was listening to a program about Marshall McLuhan on the radio. Apparently he would have liked to have lived before the widespread use of written language and lamented (if I was listening correctly) the ways in which the technology of written language has changed the world, the way we communicate.

As someone who does not love to read I've been considering what distance education without the use of the technology of the alphabet might look (sound) like. Not an easy task but an interesting rabbit trail and a good reminder that technological advances are nothing new. Maybe the difference between ordinary stuff and emerging technologies is just the edge to which we take them for granted.

You might be interested in Christopher Dewdney's 1993 book The Secular Grail, whose prose poems (especially the sequences "Ground of the Ideal" and "Shadows of Thought") extrapolate the McLuhanesque premise of language-as-technology, to posit language as a "self-replicating, lexical organism imbedded in our species"(139)--that is, as a viral kind of artificial intelligence. Dewdney develops some of these ideas further (and in a more openly McLuhanesque mode) in Last Flesh  (1998), suggesting that language is "downloading consciousness" (76).

In a decidedly non-McLuhanesque mode, Tony Burgess adapts this notion of language as a viral AI for his great Canadian zombie autobiography, Pontypool Changes Everything (1998).

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Deep thought! Thanks for cointnbutirg.
- Evaline

One could express the same feelings about technical writing and instructional design, if one finds the military that thoroughly repugnant.

I wonder if the author is the same H. Van Dyke Parunak, biblical scholar, with whom I corresponded when I was writing my master's thesis on the discourse structure of the Book of Romans?

Now *that's* a fascinating connection! Can't be many people with that name.

What would be your perspective on exams as part of professional certifications? Would you consider exams appropriate or would you suggest other approaches?

Exams might be efficient but, most of the time, completely lack any authenticity. The ability to answer questions in a weird and unrealistic setting may have little correlation with the ability to perform your professional duties, unless they are usually performed under exam conditions. Most professionals perform their functions in a rich community, supported by the tools and information sources of their trade, in a specific context. Exams of the sort we usually provide in academia do not allow that and, if they do, are not the things I am complaining about. Portfolios or similar tools would usually be far better, especially mapped to evidence. Fairer, richer and more revealing. Viva voces would work in some circumstances. So would descriptive essays in others. So would evaluations by accredited peers of work done in a professional context. There is no hard and fast rule about what works in a given situation but, whatever system you use, it should show that the person being accredited can perform the job they are being accredited to do. Exams seldom show that. If you want to show that you are a computer professional, show that you can do that under the conditions computer professionals work under. If you claim to be a surgeon, prove it by performing surgery (supervised by real surgeons of course :-). And prove that you can do it again under different conditions.

I am fully in favour of summative assessment in most areas, but there are many ways to do that which work better than unseen written exams of the sort academia has been infested with for the past couple of hundred years. In the Western world, they were invented because it was really hard to prove geometric knowledge in a viva (China had them over a thousand years before that). They persisted and gained traction because they were cheap and easy for academics to administer and showed *some* correlation with actual skill. But they are a million miles from being a universal solution for all situations and the correlation with professional ability is not that strong.  Many people fail them not due to lack of skill in the profession but due to lack of skill in taking exams, and vice versa. And they are not even that cheap in many situations. At Athabasca, for instance, they are incredibly expensive, stressful and time consuming, and attack the very people we most wish to support - typically, working people who, for one reason or another, did not follow the  standard academic path when others did. 

I don't want to get rid of them any more than I want to get rid of lectures or learning management systems or drill and practice approaches to teaching, though all have major and incontrovertible weaknesses. I just want us to choose when we use them wisely and reflectively. That will make them a lot rarer than they are.