I had an interesting–and terrible–experience this past week. My email/calendar/addressbook/to-do list system had a catastrophic crash. For basically a week it just stopped working. Or, almost worse, it worked sporadically and unreliably.
I was suddenly caught without my external memory field, without reliable communications, and without any way to reliably deal with the information that was coming into my life. I had come to depend on this technology, and then it failed.
A lot of things fell through the cracks: phone calls, doctor’s appointments, email exchanges.
[For those of you wondering, I did manage to recover the data. But if you sent me email last week and didn't hear back, it might be a good idea to resend it!]
The result, though, was an opportunity to ponder, first hand, one of the darker sides of technology…
Bagley, E., Shaffer, D. W. (2011) Promoting Civic Thinking through Epistemic Game Play. In R. Ferdig (Ed.), Discoveries in Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations: New Interdisciplinary Applications (pp.111-127). Hershey, PA: IGI Global.
http://epistemicgames.org/eg/wp-content/uploads/EBBook-chapter.pdf
Chesler, N.C. Bagley, E., Breckenfeld, E., West, D. and Shaffer, D.W. (2010). A Virtual hemodialyzer design project for first-year engineers: An epistemic game approach. Proceedings of the ASME 2010 Summer Bioengineering Conference. Naples, FL, .
http://epistemicgames.org/eg/wp-content/uploads/EF-Games-for-SBC-FINAL.pdf
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Hatfield, David & Shaffer, DW (2010). The epistemography of journalism 335: Complexity in developing journalistic expertise. Paper presented at the International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS), Chicago, Illinois.
http://epistemicgames.org/eg/wp-content/uploads/hatfield-ICLS2010-review.pdf