Brenda Laurel’s Purple Moon computer games aimed for the tween girl market. Her book Utopian Entrepreneur is excellent — I’ll certainly use it in an upcoming media course at Seton Hill. Here’s a choice quote from the Stanford talk: 1. We covered a truck in pink fuzzy material. Boys didn’t go for it. Pink fuzzy…
“Today, students who come to a campus with Spider-Man on their minds may have trouble believing it, but they share the superhero with middle-aged professors. For, in our scholarly lives, many of us are not just harking back to distant memories of the Marvel comics of our childhoods, but creating a new scholarship on the…
“A high school teacher could be out of a job in a dispute over a personal web site he created before he was hired by a western Pennsylvania school district…The Grove City Area School District placed music teacher and assistant band director Dan Konnen, 24, of Hermitage, Pa., on an unpaid suspension in March when…
—Open Anarchy or Closed Dictatorship: Methods of Producing Collaborative Teaching Texts (KairosNews) I won’t be blogging much today, not only because of exams, but because I’ll be contributing instead to this online conference session. Update: Will writes, “I’m greatly amused that you wrote ‘I won’t be blogging much today…’ on your weblog. Notice that it’s the…
Sheila Webber blogs thus: “Lowe, who teaches in the Media Department of Thames Valley University, describes how he simulates a breaking news story by using email, audio and video tapes. The students have to put together a story and reflect on the experience. Variations on the exercise, including using the internet to search for background…
The too-stupid-to-be-true-iLoo turns out not to be a hoax after all: “We jumped the gun basically yesterday in confirming that it was a hoax, and in fact it was not,” said Lisa Gurry, MSN group product manager. “Definitely, we’re going to be taking a good look at our communication processes internally.” It’s a public relations…
“When lawmakers and companies fight spam, they’re not up against teenage hobbyists and pranksters. They face thousands of pros like Shiels, who have high-tech tools and an immense network of knowledge that is difficult to overcome.” Jeffrey Kosseff —Confessions of a Former SpammerOregon Live)
“Every once in a while, in order to remind myself of the quality of information typically reported, I trace down the source of a particularly ridiculous story. The ‘Klingon Language Interpreter’ myth, which is spawning now, provides an amusing case study of the process of pack journalism.” Seth Finklestein —Klingon Language Interpreter Story DebunkedKuro5hin) See…
“grandtextauto is about computer mediated and computer generated works of many forms, including interactive fiction, net.art, electronic poetry, interactive drama, hypertext fiction, computer games of all sorts, and shared virtual environments. The discussion, by people who all work as both theorists and developers in these forms, considers questions of authorship, design, and technology, as well…
“But I still feel sorry for Blair Hornstine. Because all the hard work and courage it took to get where she is will forever be eclipsed by what she’s come to represent: A system that’s gone so far to level the playing field that it’s created a culture of entitlement instead of gratitude.|A society that…
“His tools of deceit were a cellphone and a laptop computer — which allowed him to blur his true whereabouts — as well as round-the-clock access to databases of news articles from which he stole.” —Times Reporter Who Resigned Leaves Long Trail of DeceptionNY Times) Jayson Blair demonstrated talent that many junior high schoolers are…
“Google is to create a search tool specifically for weblogs, most likely giving material generated by the self-publishing tools its own tab….” Andrew Orlowski trolls bloggers by taking a tidbit from a Reuters article from last Monday and gleefully spinning another anti-weblogging story. —Register to Fix Orlowski Noise Problem? (Register) Under the subheading “Unearned Reputations,”…
“After many painful review meetings, and hearing advice from seasoned designers, I learned the right way to present ideas – you have to show the other candidates in order to help support the good ones. I began the habit of presenting three to seven different ideas, culling from my total set of ideas the ones…
“Western medicine is a war against disease, and the immune response is the first line of defence…. A world of molecules and cells becomes a battlefield, complete with alerts, invaders, recruitment and mobilisation, search-and-destroy missions and natural-born killers…. Medical school textbooks and immunologists’ research papers are imbued with the same ideas. They are so central…
“Six key factors have led to children watching less Saturday morning cartoons: more recreational sports, the introduction of cable and satellite TV, the Internet and video games, a poorer quality of animation, and a greater emphasis on family time.” *Gerard Raiti* —The Disappearance of Saturday Morning (Animation World Magazine) An excellent paper, written by an undergraduate…
“Police found another away message on Lucien’s account on March 20 that also said he could provide alcohol. Part of the text of the message read: ‘U wanna drink?… U tell me what u want, gimme the cash, and I’ll get you the bottles like lickety split, yo.’ The message included his room number, police…
“The reporter interviewed someone from ‘fedayeen saddam’ he said that he is in Mosul to ‘kill the Americans and kill anybody who does not fight the Americans’, there in one short sentence you have the whole situation in Basra, and most probably many Iraqi cities, explained.” Salaam Pax is back, with a backlog of blogs…
“Writing requires quiet and reflection, and that’s something that quite scares most people anymore. They’ll do almost anything to avoid being alone with their own thoughts. | It also takes a familiarity, a facility, with the written language which many people lack because they’ve never learned to read very well, if at all…. I’ve had…
“Myst is not a novel or a feature film, it is instead a different sort of creation whose nearest non-electronic relative may be diorama. Any approach to this work must take account of this fundamental difference from familiar forms. World matters more here than characters or conflict, and in Myst the world is suffused with,…
“No doubt the English language, which survived “groovy,” is sturdy enough to withstand this. | But are the kids? | If they don’t learn how to use the written word to communicate the kind of complex concepts that the colonists wanted to convey to King George, they may well find themselves speechless when the course…