You Be The Dragon Slayer: LARPing And The Role Playing Renaissance. Ethan Gilsdorf: As electronic gaming grows, and the digital world becomes more ubiquitous, interest in participatory storytelling is growing. Audiences don’t just want to passively absorb, they want to participate. (JuditK/ flickr) Sure, it’s easy to laugh at people in costume who wave swords or wands at each other and shout “Lightning bolt! Lighting bolt!” Adults dressing up. Playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. But “interactive storytelling” should be understood, not dismissed. Such gamers’ entertainment is self-made — real, live, immediate and transformative, and not bound to Happy Meals and marketing campaigns. The term interactive storytelling is used to describe all manner of games where both the audience and actors are part of the performance: live-action role-playing (LARPs); alternate reality games (ARGs) that often mix in technology or mobile devices; interactive theater; and everything in between, including old-fashioned role-playing games (RPGs) like D&D.
Why? Related: The PATRIOT Act and the Constitution: Five Key Points. Currently, two of the PATRIOT Act’s key provisions are up for reauthorization by Congress. As the deadline draws nearer, it is important to re-engage on the importance of the PATRIOT Act and explain how the law helps authorities to track down terror leads and dismantle plots before the public is in any danger. Given the vast amount of misinformation about the act, it is equally important to lay out the constitutional basis for the PATRIOT Act as well as how it works to ensure that its powers are not abused.
Five Key Points Here are five key points about the PATRIOT Act: It protects civil liberties and provides for the common defense. Next Steps Opponents of the PATRIOT Act have repeatedly sought to repeal the act’s provisions or hamstring the act with yet another set of bureaucratic hoops. Reauthorize the PATRIOT Act sunset provisions. Little Danger of Abuse. Effects of Technology on Classrooms and Students. A r c h i v e d I n f o r m a t i o n Change inStudent andTeacherRoles When students are using technology as a tool or a support for communicating with others, they are in an active role rather than the passive role of recipient of information transmitted by a teacher, textbook, or broadcast.
The student is actively making choices about how to generate, obtain, manipulate, or display information. Technology use allows many more students to be actively thinking about information, making choices, and executing skills than is typical in teacher-led lessons. The teacher's role changes as well. Project-based work (such as the City Building Project and the Student-Run Manufacturing Company) and cooperative learning approaches prompt this change in roles, whether technology is used or not. IncreasedMotivation andSelfEsteem The most common--and in fact, nearly universal--teacher-reported effect on students was an increase in motivation.
The kids that don't necessarily star can become the stars. Constant surveillance a fact of modern life. The growing 'surveillance culture' created by closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras, viewed as an essential tool in the global battle against crime and television, raises important questions of concern to all. Firstly, there is the issue of whether the technology is really effective in dealing with crime, thus justifying a certain level of intrusion into our private lives; second, is the obvious growing abuse through camera footage that ends up, illegally, on the Internet and TV.
Britain, undoubtedly, has become a 'surveillance society' where every public action is monitored repeatedly. The country now has 4.2 million CCTV cameras, about one for every 14 people, and someone spending the day moving around any city or town can appear on a TV screen at least 300 times, which seems excessive and unnecessary. Even the Information Commissioners Office, an independent body promoting access to official data but also trying to protect personal details, is concerned.