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Cyberculture | Education | Games | Media

Video games ‘teach dyslexic children to read’

Playing games which require children to follow fast-moving events, track moving objects and pay attention to all areas of the screen teaches them to draw meaning from written words, researchers explained.

Dr Andrea Facoetti of the University of Padua in Italy, who led the study, said: “Action video games enhance many [...]

Cyberculture | Design | Games | Media

The Joy of Text – Page 4 of 4

I’d like this article better if it weren’t divided up into four ad-generating chunks, but here’s the payoff:

It’s not all about colossal caves and twisty little passages any more. Here are a few IF highlights that show off how varied the genre can be, from card-based trips to the ‘Neath to hunts for lost [...]

Books | Culture | Cyberculture | History | Media | Modding | Writing

Len Deighton’s Bomber, the first book ever written on a word processor.

The talented and insightful scholar Matt Kirschenbaum tells a wonderful story.

Deighton stood outside his Georgian terrace home and watched as workers removed a window so that a 200-pound unit could be hoisted inside with a crane. The machine was IBM’s MTST (Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter), sold in the European market as the MT72. “Standing [...]

Culture | Current_Events | Cyberculture | Journalism | Media

40% Say Internet Best Way to Get News, 37% Say TV

The article is short, but I particularly like the links that show the wording of the questions and the survey methodology. Bear in mind that this survey does not check o see which form of news is more accurate, comprehensive, unbiased, timely, profitable, etc. The survey just asks for personal preference.

More Americans turn to [...]

Academia | Business | Culture | Cyberculture | Design | Media | Personal | Social_Software | Technology

The Incredible Shrinking Ad [The Future Web Is Mobile]

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Is higher education ready for the switch to mobile technology? It’s kinda cool to be working at a university where the Luddites are the ones who are attached to their laptops, but I’m conscious of our need to do more.

When I put a ton of work into a website for a performing arts school [...]

Academia | Cyberculture | Design | Games | History | Humanities | Media | Modding | Social_Software | Technology

Adventure Before Adventure Games: A New Look at Crowther and Woods’s Seminal Program

Lessard pushes back in useful ways against the notion that modern computer games emerged fullly-formed from the coding experiments of Will Crowther — a notion I’ve helped to promote (though of course I’m exaggerating as I present it here).

I’ll want to read through the essay again in more detail, but here is part of [...]

Aesthetics | Culture | Current_Events | Design | Government | Media | Modding | Rhetoric

Kate Upton and Ryan Gosling Explain the Sequester

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Apparently these are two famous and physically attractive celebrities who are popular enough that lots of people will wade through lots of words in order to look at pictures of them doing things that celebrities do. Which presumably does not usually include talking about the federal budget.

Kate Upton and Ryan Gosling Explain the [...]

Culture | Cyberculture | Journalism | Media | Modding | Writing

The Need for a Digital “New Journalism”

Journalism without the sourced quotes from eyewitnesses is weak. Opinions with shoehorned-in-because-the-job-description-requires-it quotes is weak journalism. But this is an interesting challenge to the traditional assumptions I have been passing along to my journalism students.

I hate useless quotes. Most often, for journalists, such quotes are the equivalent of the time-card hourly workers have [...]

Aesthetics | Books | Cyberculture | Design | Media | Modding | Technology | Usability

Kindle App Vs. iBooks. (Spoiler: They’re Virtually Identical Now!)

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I noticed with interest that Kindle now lets you highlight text in different colors. It’s also very easy now to tweet a brief quote.

Is it time to revise the blog-based pedagogy I’ve developed over the past 10 or so years, and ask students to tweet a few passages while they read them for the [...]

Current_Events | Journalism | Media

Secrets of a 60 Minutes cameraman

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They say polo ponies can run 35 mph and then stop on a dime. But how would you like to be the cameraman who’s forced to stand still, as a massive horse comes barreling at him?

That’s exactly what 60 Minutes cameramen Chris Albert and Don Lee did to film “The Sport of Kings,” a [...]