December Days 11 - Technology at Play

[It's December Days time! There's no overarching theme this year, so if you have ideas of things to write about, I'm more than happy to hear them.]

My previous self had issues with their geek cred. Because my friends' interests and expertise in electronics and circuit building, radio transmission, and computers and programming are the sort of thing that are solidly in the pocket of the nerd culture of my upbringing. I, on the other hand, was not so much fascinated by these things, much to the...something of my father, whose profession involves working with such things for pay.

My pursuits of technology have been mostly in favor of entertainment and playing games. Much of the things I have learned in pursuit of technology have been in the service of getting games and things to work. Which is why I know how to assemble a computer from parts - if I wanted to have a machine with sufficient power and memory and hard drive space, that meant putting it all together myself on the cheap. Which is why I know about things like boot disks, about arcane command prompts to make programs work, and is the reason I ended up learning command line things - because menu programs took up too much memory to run the games. I know console tricks and have seen game guides and performed some very cool things. I've hacked savegames, hexedited, used cheat devices, probably voided more warranties than I particularly want to count, and practiced the time honored craft of following in the footsteps of others with a fuckton more technical skill than I have. I have learned how to do research to find all of these things and their usage guides. I learned why to install anti-virus software, and the importance of backups.

And then, as time progressed, I learned that tools exist to unlock smartphones and root devices, and practiced with those tools during their copyright exempt statuses, against the difficult ones, and the ones that made it much easier. I learned Linux to capture tools that aren't available on Windows. I learned website programming and a little bit of scripting, and a lot of bits and pieces of where settings go and what they do.

Almost none of it was learned formally, just as needed to accomplish the next task or to make the game more enjoyable. It provides a prodigious amount of useful knowledge to use to tweak things here and there or to help a user get out of a jam.

But I'm still the kid who plays games. Not one of the people with the eidetic memory for shows and their minutiae. Not one of the people who can build a proton pack - whether as a prop or as a prototype. Not even, until somewhat recently (...well, sort of), that kid that wrote new stories for their world and shared them with others.

And while I play games, I'm not good enough to be the competitive circuit kind of player, so even in the place where my time invests, my results aren't top tier. It's the blessing and the curse of the Hufflepuff. We are best together and create all sorts of things. Individually, though, we're not necessarily the standouts in our field, and we've often got some weird secondary abilities that help us move things along paths more efficiently. But a lot of Hufflepuffs occasionally or constantly crave something closer to real credit and recognition for their work. And I've almost always felt like geek-adjacent for much of my life.

But I do have a damn good time playing all those games.

December Days 12 - A Failure To Illuminate

[It's December Days time! There's no overarching theme this year, so if you have ideas of things to write about, I'm more than happy to hear them.]

If I haven't mentioned it yet, I detest reading level systems like Accelerated Reader and Lexile, when they're not being used strictly as assessment tools. The general purpose of these systems is to assign, based on length, complexity, and density of text, a numerical score to any given work of prose. The higher the score, the more complex the text is, generally speaking. There's also a framework around the scores set so that each major division of score (single point for AR, 100 points for Lexile) roughly corresponds to what the average child of a given grade level can read. So a 3.0 AR score or a means a child entering third grade should be able to read the work without trouble. (Lexile explicitly disclaims this use, saying their system is just for classification, but providing what they consider to be the ranges of the 25th-75th percentiles for each grade level.)

As an assessment result, it's probably helpful for seeing who is reading at grade level and how far behind some percentage is. That way, those who need it can get extra instruction on reading in an attempt to bring them up to level. (Only for many of those behind to get struck by another Summer slide - enrichment and practice and books are often in short supply where they are needed most.)

One of the things that fosters enjoyment of reading and the commensurate amount of practice with text it takes to become fluent and able to read well is free choice of books. Being able to select materials according to interest, enjoyment, and format ensures that a reader has the best chance of a positive experience with books. Especially nonfiction text - interest trumps just about anything when it comes to learning facts, figures, statistics, and so forth.

There are fewer things more effective at killing someone's interest in reading than to tell them they can only read materials within a restricted range. And yet, that's what these systems are used to do in the service of reading practice when implemented poorly.

They are all implemented poorly, whether by teaching to tests that are supposed to reward comprehension, or by restricting reading, or by the very act of taking a complex child and their relationships to text and reducing it to a single number, one that can be posted for their peers to see and pass judgment on. Or for the teachers to pass judgment on.

How horrible it is that we take the act of acquiring knowledge and stories and reduce it down until we have distilled all of the fun out of it and eliminated any desire for someone to do it on their own.