{"id":9701,"date":"2012-06-16T22:36:17","date_gmt":"2012-06-16T22:36:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=9701"},"modified":"2012-06-16T23:04:09","modified_gmt":"2012-06-16T23:04:09","slug":"in-response-to-lewis-shepherd","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=9701","title":{"rendered":"In response to Lewis Shepherd"},"content":{"rendered":"

[ by Charles Cameron<\/strong> — prescience, edutech, a twitter exchange — Glass Bead Games, Harper’s magazine and Microsoft ]
\n.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
\nTwitter avatars, left to right: Mark Safranski, Enriqueta Turanzas, Lewis Shepherd<\/em>
\n.<\/p>\n

Mark Safranski<\/strong>, whom I like to think of as the Zen of Zen<\/strong> since there are now three of us who blog here, was tweeting with Lewis Shepherd<\/strong> and Enriqueta Turanzas<\/strong> about the future of education the other day, and Shepherd — who blogs at Shepherd’s Pi<\/a> and is, as far as I know, Director of the Microsoft Institute for Advanced Technology in Governments — tweeted a phrase that caught my eye:<\/p>\n

Education’s future = MMPORG\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

My friend Mike Sellers<\/a><\/strong> had released the path-breaking game Meridian 59<\/a> in 1996, and Richard Garriott<\/strong> coined the term MMORPG<\/a> (for massively multiplayer online role-playing game) in 1997 — so the tech side of things was just swinging into view in 1996-97, though it would be another five years before MIT began offering courseware<\/a> (2001), and eight years before Games for Change<\/a> was founded (2004). <\/p>\n

Back in 1996 and 1997 I was writing up my ideas on education and games for the Magister-L<\/strong> mailing list, and pushing them on anyone who would listen at the Computer Game Developers’ Conference<\/strong> — now renamed the GDC, since it has since become obvious that games and computers are a match\u2026 and to shorten a long story, my ideas back then seemed to me to rhyme with Shepherd’s tweet this week.<\/p>\n

And rhymes between ideas are important to me.<\/p>\n

I tweeted back to Shepherd, offering a link to a piece I’d written in 1996 titled Myst-like Universities, Oxford-like Games?<\/b> — and along with the link, my tweet said, ee cummings<\/strong> style:<\/p>\n

if i wrote this in 1997 i was prescient, eh?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To which Enriqueta, bless her, quickly agreed, while Shepherd responded:<\/p>\n

Prescient, yes. And if you patented it in ’97. you should get a call from Sebastian Thrun : )<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

*<\/p>\n

So. <\/p>\n

That got me thinking, and I went back to look a little more carefully at what I’d written back then, and decided I should re-up it here on Zenpundit, which I will do in a follow up post to this one.<\/p>\n

But first I should respond to Lewis Shepherd on the question of patenting.<\/p>\n

I am a lot closer to a hermit than a man of business, to be honest \u2013 for reasons that Zenpundit regulars will have intuited from my two recent posts<\/a> about Trevor Huddleston<\/a><\/strong>, and which followers of my games will know from my recent biographical sortie on the Sembl <\/strong>pages<\/a>. <\/p>\n

So, no \u2013 I didn’t patent my ideas, and indeed am deeply indebted to whoever engraved the words “to give, and not to count the cost, to labour, and not ask for any reward” on my heart early enough for me to be something of a Creative Commons type avant la lettre<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I’m not a purist, some of my writings have that dastardly little \u00a9 mark attached, and I don’t mind getting paid on occasion \u2013 but to be honest, much of what I love about blogging is the free circulation of ideas and the cameraderie of bloggers\u2026<\/p>\n

The other thing that’s just a tad ironic about all this, though, is that back in April of 1997, Lewis Lapham<\/strong>, who was then editor-in-chief of Harper’s<\/em>, wrote an extended editorial called Notebook: The Spanish Armadillo<\/a> in which he recommended that Microsoft should consult me \u2013 publishing my email address for their convenience, no less: <\/p>\n

Hesse’s bead game lends itself so obviously to the transcendent aspirations of the Internet that it’s probably only a matter of months before Microsoft buys the rights to his name for one of its software programs. The company’s marketing strategists might first want to consult Charles Cameron, reachable on the Internet at hipbone@earthlink.net, the foremost of 263 correspondents concerned with the implications of Hesse’s novel.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Well, I never got the email from Microsoft. I came to the conclusion they likely didn’t read Harper’s<\/em>, or not at the requisite level for initiating consultations. And I was busy writing and thinking, thinking and writing, and taking pauses.<\/p>\n

I still am.<\/p>\n

But perhaps if Microsoft had <\/em>called on me back then, I’d have blurted my thoughts out to them in greater detail than I was able to in that one HTML 1.0 post, so many years ago.<\/p>\n

And perhaps they’d have thought I was prescient — and patented my idea or ideas, back in 1997. <\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

It’s interesting to compare my thoughts back in 1996-97 with what we’re up to these days with the Sembl project<\/A>.<\/p>\n

Next up, for your amusement: the text of that 1997 post of mine<\/a>, giving my thoughts on games and education sixteen years ago \u2013 when I thought a terabyte was huge, huge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[ by Charles Cameron — prescience, edutech, a twitter exchange — Glass Bead Games, Harper’s magazine and Microsoft ] . Twitter avatars, left to right: Mark Safranski, Enriqueta Turanzas, Lewis Shepherd . Mark Safranski, whom I like to think of as the Zen of Zen since there are now three of us who blog here, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[526,34,529,624,718,678,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-charles-cameron","category-education","category-games","category-hipbone-games","category-rethinking-thinking","category-sembl","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9701"}],"version-history":[{"count":29,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9701\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9801,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9701\/revisions\/9801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}