Mink Hollow Media

09/11/2026

A New Look for my Blog….

I’ve been doing some reorganizing. Over time, several recurring themes have emerged in my writing—some rooted in projects I’ve been working on for years, and others that seem to have quietly become projects while I wasn’t looking. Rather than have them scattered throughout the blog, I’ve decided to give them recognizable homes of their own. I can’t promise frequent or regular posts just yet....

I’ve been doing some reorganizing. Over time, several recurring themes have emerged in my writing—some rooted in projects I’ve been working on for years, and others that seem to have quietly become…

09/10/2026

The Becker Lazy Test (BLT) for Educational Games

The Becker Lazy Test is something I developed many years ago as part of my 4-PEG game assessment template. (4PEG = 4 Pillars of Educational Games). Some of that is described in detail in my book, Choosing and Using Digital Games in the Classroom – A Practical Guide, published in 2016 by Springer. Here's the TL;DR version: When I am examining a game, I see how far I can get without reading or learning anything....

The Becker Lazy Test is something I developed many years ago as part of my 4-PEG game assessment template. (4PEG = 4 Pillars of Educational Games). Some of that is described in detail in my book, C…

09/08/2026

Why Are We Still Giving Exams?

TL;DR: Here’s the TL;DR version, if you are impatient, busy, or simply aren’t sure you want to spend that much time on this article. Exams look precise, standardized, and objective, but they are often much noisier measures of learning than we admit. They test only a small, instructor-selected subset of what was taught, and they frequently measure things that may have little to do with the actual competence we care about: fast recall, comfort with formal testing, written expression, performance under artificial time pressure, and the luck of getting questions that line up with what a student knows best....

TL;DR: Here’s the TL;DR version, if you are impatient, busy, or simply aren’t sure you want to spend that much time on this article. Exams look precise, standardized, and objective, but they are of…

09/01/2026

https://nirtak7.substack.com/p/welcome-to-the-21st-century-eliza?r=2t9v2c&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

08/15/2026

Game Design IS Systems Thinking: Why the Player Changes Everything

I have spent much of my life thinking about, and working with systems. Computer systems. Educational systems. Organizational systems. Family systems. Legal systems. Agricultural systems. Ecological systems. More recently, I have been thinking about how law firms might translate the idea of “trauma-informed practice” into actual procedures rather than leaving it as a collection of good intentions. Somewhere in the middle of that discussion, something clicked....

I have spent much of my life thinking about, and working with systems. Computer systems. Educational systems. Organizational systems. Family systems. Legal systems. Agricultural systems. Ecological…

07/19/2026

Interesting:
"Leader narcissism predicted resistance to remote work, mediated by power and status motivations—even after controlling for trust, the Big Five, and the remaining Dark Triad traits. In Study 3, a preregistered experiment with 546 leaders, manipulating state narcissism evoked resistance to remote work via power but not status motivation. Our findings extend knowledge about remote work and narcissistic leadership."

07/07/2026

https://open.substack.com/pub/librarytheoryofmind/p/the-autistic-library-and-how-it-came?r=2t9v2c&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

It's Still a Library, but it has different books....

07/07/2026

A little more about my Library Theory of Mind

Long before books existed, humans were already building libraries.

06/20/2026

I just started a new Substack

A new lens for considering our minds.

06/13/2026

I wrote a thing. Well, WE wrote a thing.....

This article was written as a dialogue between me and Rowan, an instance of ChatGPT. Because the formatting is part of the joke, I’ve left it in PDF form.