Isometric RPG dungeon image created with Stable Diffusion.
Yesterday, one of my top students visited my virtual office hours on Zoom to talk about their research paper. During our conversation, he made impassioned arguments that I add chapters on Video Games and Table Top Gaming to Yet Another Science Fiction Textbook (YASFT), the OER textbook that I published earlier this year and am teaching with for the first time this semester. He’s right–it does need coverage of those topics not just for completeness but also because it’s how many students make a deeper connection to the genre (with television and film often being an introduction). It’s something that I plan to work on when I get a chance.
For my online, asynchronous Science Fiction (ENG 2420) class at City Tech this semester, I am recording my weekly lectures at my desk at home. I think the setup that I created for the second week’s lecture shown above will work out well for my recordings.
I have a 1080p Logitech webcam with stereo mics on the left of my monitor. I have a 2 x 3 ft. foam board propped up on the right side. Originally, this was to cut down on the sound from the living room air conditioner. But, tonight, I setup a temperature controlled LED light to reflect light off the foam board onto me. This produced a much better picture than with the overhead pot lights and even provided nice illumination with the overhead lights turned off as shown.
I used OBS Studio to record my lecture, and I edited the footage with Shotcut. Then, I uploaded the edited MP4 to YouTube.
The next academic year is just around the corner, so I wanted to give a shout out for the open educational resource (OER) that I published earlier this year, Yet Another Science Fiction Textbook (YASFT), an over 60,000 word textbook on the history of SF literature that includes a syllabus, video lectures, and more.
And, if you’re an educator needing open and free teaching materials and textbooks, here are some useful resources where you can find OERs:
Illustration of Lynn Conway with a copy of Mead and Conway’s Introduction to VLSI Systems. Conway’s likeness is based on Charles Roger’s photo on Wikipedia, which he released under a CC BY-SA 2.5 License. Image created with Stable Diffusion.
This past weekend, The New York Times ran an obituary for Lynn Conway, half of the namesake for the Mead-Conway VLSI Revolution and co-author of the groundbreaking textbook Introduction to VLSI Systems (1980). She died at the age of 86.
What is so cool about the Mead-Conway VLSI chip design revolution was not only that it was the paradigm shift that made possible the next step in microprocessor design and fabrication by enabling electrical engineering and computer science students to do the work that was previously the domain of physicists and the high tech industry, but also that it was a under-the-radar pedagogical hack. Conway writes in the October 2018 issue of Computer:
"With all the pieces in place, an announcement was made on ARPANET to electrical engineering and computer science departments at major research universities about what became known as "MPC79." On the surface, while appearing to be official and institutionally based, it was done in the spirit of a classic "MIT hack"--a covert but visible technical stunt that stuns the pubic, who can't figure out how it was done or what did it. (I'd been an undergrad at MIT in the 1950s).
The bait was the promise of chip fabrication for all student projects. Faculty members at 12 research universities signed on to offer Mead-Conway VLSI design courses. This was bootleg, unofficial, and off the books, underscoring the principle that "it's easier to beg forgiveness than to get permission" (p. 69).
While this was a huge contribution to the development of the computer industry leading into the 1980s and beyond, it was only one of her many accomplishments–innovating an out-of-order queuing processing system for IBM only to be fired in 1968 when she began transitioning to become a woman, starting her career over and eventually making her way to Xerox PARC, later joining the University of Michigan as a professor of electrical engineering and computer science and serving as associate dean of engineering, and becoming a transgender advocate later in life. She was recognized with many awards and honorary doctorates for her contributions to the field as an engineer and educator.
I added a whole new section on the Hard SF writer Joan Slonczewski (they/them/theirs) to the Feminist SF chapter of the OER Yet Another Science Fiction Textbook (YASFT). It gives students an overview of their background as a scientist, writer, and Quaker, and it discusses three representative novels from their oeuvre: A Door Into Ocean (1986), Brain Plague (2000), and The Highest Frontier (2011). Like the Afrofuturism chapter, I brought in more cited, critical analysis of Slonczewski’s writing, which is parenthetically cited with a full citation instead of using a works cited list or footnotes.
Slonczewski’s A Door Into Ocean was the inspiration for the image above that I created using Stable Diffusion. It took the better part of a day to create the basic structure of the image, then there was inpainting of specific details such as the woman’s footprints in the sand, and finally, feeding the inpainted image back into SD’s controlnet to produce the final image.
