Ken's Lecture + Novel Contest

Ken Perlin

The New Media Center we visited in the Gallatin building was yet ANOTHER amazing facet of NYU which I had not been previously exposed to. I take classes in Gallatin every semester and I had no idea there was a lab on the 12th floor of the building. Incredible. This seems to be a repetitive motif in my blogging, but I am still frustrated with the segregation between schools and departments within NYU and our lack of exposure to them as students. But I digress...

I think I can safely say that Ken impressed every student in the class. Ken's involvement in everything from Microsoft to Disney amazed me and gave me a sense of pride for our resources at NYU. Ken's talk was accessible and entertaining and I appreciate the time he took to visually narrate his process as a computer scientist. His step by step analysis of the creation process made it easy to grasp.

I really liked hearing about Ken's involvement in the Game Center for Learning. One of the client's we work with at Brew is Grockit a startup currently in Beta that implements online gaming into standardized test prep. Although Grockit has an older target audience, the principles behind the site are the same. Check it out here: http://grockit.com/

Novel Contest

I wish I was driven enough to attempt to complete something like this. Although writing a novel a month seems daunting for me personally, I think it's a really cool concept to engage the public with. Ken's co-authorship of a novel makes the task seem (slightly) less labor-intensive but I think in order to accomplish something like that, someone would need to be exceptionally linguistically gifted (which I am not).

Ken stressed that the writing that is produced from the contest isn't supposed to be mind blowing, it's the process that's important. This constant narrative and persistence reminds me of Ken's insistence on writing for his blog every day, something which I also, personally, know I wouldn't enjoy. Even as a kid, I never kept a journal and for me, the writing always ended up being too forced.

What does interest me is this continuous narrative that is less edited and sculpted but more stream of conscious-esque. Already with the advent of social media, a new fabric of narrative seems to be emerging from the web and I think this contest is in response to that, so I'm eager to see how the contest pans out.