What if there were a flaw so fundamental to the Internet, that one person could hack into anything and everything? Imagine that one person could gain access to every single piece of email, every single bank account login ID and password. If it were possible, that person would have unimaginable power over the entire world's web commerce. There would be no security. There would be no stability, and markets would come crashing down all over the world, causing economic ruin to dwarf what's happening in today's markets. A person with this power would be able to hold the world hostage in a way no Bond villain ever could.

The crazy thing is that this is no hypothetical exercise, this is no Tom Clancy story line. This flaw in the Internet actually existed, and it was discovered by a lone computer consultant working out of his apartment. The events that transpired tell the tale of how this man found the flaw and decided to engage the help of the DNS community to work in secret to find a way to fix the flaw. It was a race against time to find a fix and patch the Internet before it was too late.

In an article titled "Secret Geek A-Team Hacks Back, Defends the World Wide Web," Wired Magazine online tells the story of how this disaster scenario nearly came true. It's a fascinating read that sounds like the stuff great suspense movies are made of. Only it came that close to actually happening.

- Hap

Our students and prospective students are always thoughtful when it comes to their career paths after graduation, and this is especially true in the current uncertain economic environment. News from the video game industry is very good, and as NPD’s (market research group) Anita Frazier states, “Heading into the critical fourth quarter, the U.S. games industry is on solid ground.”

This is a very encouraging data point not just for our game students, but for all of our digital design students in general. The game industry directly employs multimedia developers, web programmers, and graphic artists with the skill sets our students have coming out of our Multimedia Technologies programs. Indirectly, through advertisers, service vendors, retailers, and many other associated businesses, the game industry pulls along with it the types of businesses that have a need for our students. This year, the game industry will hit $22 billion in sales. That’s huge, and our students should be feasting on that pie.

The articles below speak to the trends and provide some data you will find interesting. If you are a current or prospective student, this information should give you some confidence that our game and digital design programs are excellent programs as you consider your futures careers.

http://www.dvhardware.net/article31259.html - “It seems sales of video games and hardware aren't suffering at all from the financial crisis. Data released by indicates sales in the US jumped 18 percent last month and the forecast for the holiday season looks well.”

http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/stories/2008/11/10/daily115... - “Though the economy is slumping, sales of video games rose in October, according to NPD Group.”

http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSTRE4AD0MS20081114... – “The videogames industry is set to top $22 billion in 2008, according to NPD.”

http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/microsoft/archives/153946.asp - “Despite increasing economic anxiety, the video game industry continued to grow during the third quarter.”

- Hap Aziz

And hopefully you'll do so thoughtfully.  It's important to know what you're voting for or against.

- Hap Aziz

Growing up as the first child of immigrant parents, I developed very strong opinions and impressions of how culture influences attitudes regarding the value of education (as well as many other values).  My parents came to the United States in the late 1950s from East Pakistan, which is now Bangladesh—and which was originally part of India until 1948.  The Aziz family beachhead in the United States came about because my father got a scholarship to pursue his Master’s studies in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan.  My father came to this country, completed his studies, then married my mother and brought her back over here to start our family.

The experience of getting the scholarship and coming to the U.S. had a profound effect on my father: it etched in his mind the power of education to pull a person out of near complete poverty into a life of wealth and security.  East Pakistan was at the time (and it still is as Bangladesh) one of the poorest countries in the world.  My father dedicated himself to his education there, on his own he found that he could take advantage of scholarship opportunities, and finally he left his homeland, traveling by train most of the way into Europe and then by ocean voyage (during which he was convinced he would die from sea sickness) across the Atlantic to arrive to the sight of Lady Liberty welcoming him to what would become his new homeland.  Upon arriving in New York, there was a telegram waiting for him from the University instructing him to take a train from there to Chicago, and then to travel the rest of the way by Greyhound.  When he looked up “Greyhound” in his pocket dictionary, he saw that it was a dog and said to himself, “If Americans can ride dogs, then so can I!”

Some of my earliest memories of my father involve education in some way or other.  I remember when we lived in Troy, New York, there were these two very large gas or oil storage tanks (like the kind that you see for holding oil before shipping).  I was maybe 3 years old at the time, but I remember clearly that every time we drove by those two tanks, my father would say to me, “As the pressure goes up, the volume goes down.”  My first science lesson.  It didn’t take me long to have that memorized, so that every time I saw the tanks, I would be the one to recite the lesson.  So that, at least, is my first memory of how it all started.

Growing up, it was much “more of the same.”  Everywhere my father discovered teaching moments.  A statement that I often heard was, “you are a boy of letters,” though I didn’t understand that one right away.  Before first grade, my father found out what text books I would be learning from that coming school year, and he would order them early in the summer.  Then he would have me do the lessons in the book, or he would assign to me lessons of his own devising.  Every day during the summer, I would do the work that he would leave for me from my books, and by the end of the summer, I was well ahead of my classmates when we started the academic year.  Talk about being well prepared!  We did this every summer until my junior year in high school… at which point I pulled a teenage rebellion.

But the ultimate message to me was that education was of primary importance in my life.  I was never allowed to take a job while in school, since our family philosophy was that school was my main job.  My parents never pulled me out of school for early starts on vacation as often did the parents of my classmates.  In fact, everything we did as a family was dependent upon our school schedule coming first.  My father died in 2002, before I completed my Master’s work—in fact, I finally went back in large part because of my father.  And when I told my mother I was accepted at UF in the Educational Technology doctoral program, I could tell she was pleased in the way that meant I was doing something that would have made my father very happy indeed.

The road I took, however, was not a straight shot.  I wasn’t a traditional student going immediately from high school to college—I chose instead to start working out of high school.  When I graduated, my family (father, mother, and two younger sisters) all moved back to Bangladesh, leaving me on my own here in the suburbs of Washington, DC, where I grew up.  I got a job with a courier company in the city and worked there for a little over a year before getting quitting.  The owner of the company classified me as having been “laid off” so I could collect unemployment until I found new work.  When I went to the DC unemployment office, I saw entire families sitting on the grounds outside the building, as though it was a picnic—people on blankets, in lawn chairs, and at card tables all entertaining themselves.  When I entered the building, there were several impossibly long lines, so I found the line I was supposed to be in and attached myself to the end of it.  Then I wait for it to move.  And waited.

After three hours of standing in the line and only having moved a few feet, I finally got fed up and left.  There were able-bodied men and women in that line, all waiting for their government hand out, many having brought friends and family members to keep them company and create the atmosphere of festivity out on the grounds.  Something clicked in my mind on that day, and on the way home (to the room I rented from a family) I stopped a restaurant called Pizza Italia in my neighborhood.  There was a Help Wanted sign in the window, so I went in, applied for the job of busboy, and I was hired on the spot.  Probably a good three quarters of the people waiting for their unemployment checks could have applied for and gotten that busboy job, but they chose instead to take the government handout and not have to work.  That was the point in time when I began my transformation from idealistic liberal youth into a conservative adult.  And working at Pizza Italia was the part of my life when I realized I should have gone to college as my father had wanted.  (Funny how parents turn out to be smarter than they seem!)

So while bussing tables, I began to consider my options.  I had no money, other than what I earned at the restaurant.  Fortunately, I could eat all the pizza and steak sandwiches (my favorite!) I wanted.  I talked to some friends that were going to the local community college.  So I went there and worked with a counselor to see how I could do the same, having almost no money.  I learned that I could get a Pell grant and some student loans… all on my own.  So that’s what I did, and now, about 27 years later, I’m working on my doctorate degree.

- Hap Aziz

One of the questions that often comes up in discussions of game design related to education is "What makes a good educational game?"  I think it can be reasonably argued that there are truly very few examples of good educational games, and that is due to several reasons, some of which I will point out below.

One person that lays out the case well as to why it is difficult to create good educational games is Dr. Seymour Papert of MIT.  In the June, 1998 issue of Game Developer magazine, Dr. Papert presents his take on the state of educational gaming in an article titled "Does Easy Do It? Children, Games, and Learning."  A point that he makes is that edutainment software often ends up being a combination of the worst of both the education and entertainment worlds.  Having been both a professional game developer as well as an instructional designer, I very much agree with Dr. Paperts assertions in the article.  Here is a link to the article online.  In addtion to the original article, the link has a response to Dr. Papert written by an instructional designer.  Both pieces are worth reading.

While there are questions and concerns regarding the cost of game development (monetary, time, and technical expertise), there are ways of incorporating game design best practices into curriculum as well as developing games using rapid development tools (as opposed to using lower-level languages--comparatively speaking--such as C++).  Flash is one development option, as is its older and more powerful cousin Director.  Or one could use other development environments such as Runtime Revolution for its rapid application development capabilities.

Most people when talking about computer games usually mean something other than the trivial approach of a Jeopardy game.  Customizable Jeopardy templates are fine for drill and practice, but that does not exemplify compelling and deep gameplay of the type that promotes higher-order learning.  But before we begin to consider our design tool options, we would do well to originate some actual game ideas--apart from the underlying technology.

As is common in the game industry, we should brainstorm first and worry about execution later.  Anyone have any ideas to offer?  Consider games in the genre of the Civilization series of the Age of Empires collection.  Those games have true depth and high production values... can we build similar games primarily for the education market?  That is the $64,000 question.

- Hap Aziz

We're witnessing a convergence in the word of photography and videography, and it's an unusual one if you consider the history of the technology.  For years, digital video cameras offered the capability to shoot still pictures, while digital still cameras often allowed the photographer to capture short video clips.  For a variety of technical reasons neither cross-over solution was particularly impressive.  If you wanted to shoot good video, you used a camera built primarily for video, and if you wanted still shots, a DSLR was the typical choice.

This article at Wired.com gives a bang-up description of the technological convergence taking place, and it is fascinating reading.  The short story is that with new cameras hitting the market, such as the Canon 5D Mark II, the world of digital still and video photography is being turned on its head.  Imagine a 21 megapixel DSLR that shoots full-frame while using the amazing Canon L-series glass.  Now imagine that same camera shooting full 1080p video with a pricetag of about $2300, without the lenses.  That dual-purpose capability at that price point is simply amazing!

We are witnessing the beginning of a fundamental shift in our visual image-capturing paradigm.  And I think I've just figured out what I want for this Christmas.

- Hap Aziz

The Internet is truly an amazing repository of information.  In a previous post I mentioned Vannevar Bush's "memex" device, and it is clear that the Internet, specifically with its World Wide Web interface fills that role in grand fashion, well beyond his most optimistic imaginings, I'm sure.  Today's reminder of the power, reach, and memory of the Internet comes from an email out of the blue to my official Rasmussen address.

Many years ago, perhaps six or seven, I worked at Valencia Community College here in Orlando as their Director of Internet and Instructional Technologies.  While I was there, I created a "Rubric for Assessing Participation in Online Discussion Forums" based on the college's core competencies of Think, Value, Communicate, and Act.  Fast forward to the present.  A professor at a college in Pennsylvania looking for a rubric for students engaged in the online portion of their class came across the one I had authored.  By simply searching the web, this professor was able to locate me to ask permission to use the rubric--and I of course gave it.  (By the way, if anyone else sees the rubric and wishes to use it, you have my permission.  I only ask that I am credited with authorship and that you let me know if it proves useful to you.)

There are several interesting aspects to this episode, but one of the most interesting ideas to me is the fact that so much of what we create electronically now ends up as part of such a thorough system of record keeping, in the form of the Internet.  Just a handful of years ago, not many people would have been able to predict the far ranging consequences of the Internet in the area of "obscure record keeping."  Looking into the future, we see some tremendous opportunity for data mining search engines.  But even now, it's fun to see what "the world" knows about us.  Go ahead:  Google yourself and find out.

- Hap Aziz

Back in 1945, a gentleman by the name of Vannevar Bush (an MIT faculty member and a science advisor to Franklin Roosevelt during World War II) pondered the nature of his research: he observed that he spent much of his time just looking up what other people were doing in his field before he even got to the point where he could start making meaningful contributions to the field.  As a solution to this problem, Bush proposed a device which he called "memex" (for memory extender) that would be able to store the sum total of human knowledge, and if one had a question on any subject, one only needed to consult this device.  Look at his description of the memex, and keep in mind that he came up with this idea in 1945, before computers with keyboards and display screens where even on anyone's drawing board:

"A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.

"It consists of a desk, and while it can presumably be operated from a distance, it is primarily the piece of furniture at which he works. On the top are slanting translucent screens, on which material can be projected for convenient reading. There is a keyboard, and sets of buttons and levers. Otherwise it looks like an ordinary desk.

"In one end is the stored material. The matter of bulk is well taken care of by improved microfilm. Only a small part of the interior of the memex is devoted to storage, the rest to mechanism. Yet if the user inserted 5000 pages of material a day it would take him hundreds of years to fill the repository, so he can be profligate and enter material freely"

There's more to the description; in fact, he published his thoughts in an article in The Atlantic Monthly titled "As We May Think" in July, 1945.  A very interesting read.

A footnote to all this is that Vannevar Bush is widely credited as being the conceptual inventor of the Internet--that's what the memex really is, after all.  The irony is that when there was talk in the 2000 presidential election that Gore "invented" the Internet, Bush could very truthfully claimed that it was a Bush that really started it all.  :)

- Hap Aziz

• the original IBM PC - this machine came with a whopping 16kb of RAM, a single sided floppy drive with a 160kb storage capacity, and a green monochrome monitor. The CPU ran at a blistering 4.77 MHz speed. The total cost to me, monitor included, was about $2700 in 1981.
• Yamaha CD R/W drive - this was a tool necessary for my game company to burn master disks for reproduction. The drive had a 4x read speed and a blazing 2x write speed, and I got the drive for the bargain basement price of $3,000 in 1995. By the way, each recordable disk was a gold master, and they ran $10 apiece.
  
• Hewlett Packard fax machine - in 1988, the communications consulting partnership I had needed to receive and send documents by fax. We considered leasing a machine, but we decided to make a purchase for the long-term instead, picking up the machine for a cool $2800.
• 10 Mb hard drive - when it came time to upgrade my IBM PC, I found a great deal on a hard drive. 10 Mb of storage space (I'd never fill that up!), and only about 5 pounds. I got it cheap at $600. (Yes, that was 10 Megabytes of storage space.)
• NEC 3D Multisync monitor - Sometime in the early '90s (though I can't recall the exact date), I was so thrilled to get this $700 video monitor. It gave me an incredible 1024 x 768 interlaced resolution on a whopping 14" CRT. (Today I just ordered a 24" LCD monitor capable of a full 1920 x 1200 resolution for $269.)
• Online BBS service - before the ubiquitous Internet and World Wide Web, I paid an hourly rate of $12.95 for my blazing 1200 baud connection. Ah, the good old days of getting a $400 montly bill to get an online text service.