You are here: Home / Contact / Technology

How World Of Warcraft Cultivates Leadership Skills

May 1, 2010 By Thomas A. Shakely Leave a Comment

Byron Reeves, who is a professor at Stanford and co-founder of Human Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research Institute (HStar), makes a rather contrarian point in arguing that certain video games teach people how to embrace leadership roles:

This notion struck me mainly because of his comment about the different roles players are required to take on in order for their clan to win (i.e. – some are warriors, some are priests, etc.). This gets to a point too seldom stressed: success requires not only leadership, but also followership.

In other words, “leadership” means sometimes you will lead, and other times you will follow. John Mayer isn’t great because we all want to be him (though a lot of us do want to be him), but because we recognize his immense talent and are willing to follow him. Rock star and groupie both win.

We each have a role to play in every scenario, and if Warcraft is teaching that, all the better.

Filed Under: Technology

Archbishop Wood's Newspapers, Digitized

May 29, 2008 By Thomas A. Shakely 2 Comments

As a high schooler at Archbishop Wood in Warminster, Pa I was involved with the school newspaper, The Viking Voice. I wrote stories, edited copy, learned to digitally paginate using QuarkXPress and eventually served as editor-in-chief during my senior year (2004-5). It was an immensely worthwhile pursuit and the experience I gained in high school was a key to my landing an internship at The Philadelphia Bulletin in 2006.

Archbishop Wood, though, has and will hold a unique place in my heart not only because of my time spent there as a student but also because five members of my family — aunts, uncles and my mother — all attended the school during the 1970s and 1980s.

During my senior year, Mr. Kleinschmidt, the school’s tech guru, discovered archived copies of the newspaper dating back to the 1960s that had been tucked away in a storage closet, and offered the papers for us to keep in the newspaper office.

Thanks in large part to the urging of my grandmother and a few others, I made it a goal of mine to eventually digitize those newspapers to preserve them for both past and future generations at Archbishop Wood. I’ve closely worked with the Snyder family — Eric, Chris and their father, Robert — to digitize the archives and thereby protect them for posterity.

The Snyders have been fantastic in their willingness to donate their time and energies to physically scanning in each of these newspapers, and it’s due to their efforts that I can now finally make available these archives in digital form.

The newspaper archives date back as far as 1965 (the school opened the previous year) and include both divisions of the school prior to the merging of the boys and girls into Archbishop Wood High School at the tail end of the 1980s.

Crossroads (Archbishop Wood High School for Boys)

Wood Winds (Archbishop Wood High School for Girls)

Special Issues (Pre-Merger Period)

The Viking Voice (Archbishop Wood Catholic High School)

Filed Under: Education, Technology Tagged With: Archbishop Wood