The role of play

These games aren’t much fun to play, even if you are a Bush supporter. Nevertheless, it’s significant that a major political party now sees games as a useful campaigning tool. Presumably, the RNC thinks Tax Invaders will get Bush’s economic policy across to “the kids”. But it’s hard to say for certain because, so far,…

WordPress

WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. What a mouthful. More simply, WordPress is what you use when you want to work with your software, not fight it. —WordPress Well, that’s enough MT freakout for today. Still waiting to hear back form SixApart.

Remix etc.

Here‘sthe dilemma and confusion. Asking students to conform to a print based logic in an electronic world is not teaching anyone to think on one‘sown. Indeed, this kind of pedagogy translates into a continual academic stubbornness, a refusal to recognize the communication shifts we have experienced and are experiencing currently. Telling students to write according…

Blog Outage Coming (Really)

Last night I got word from our ISP that blogs.setonhill.edu will be down sometime this weekend. The reason is that the physical machine on which our blogs reside is being transferred from one owner to the other. The new owner plans to continue service as usual, so if all goes well, your blogging pleasures will…

Game Theories

He began calculating frantically. He gathered data on 616 auctions, observing how much each item sold for in U.S. dollars. When he averaged the results, he was stunned to discover that the EverQuest platinum piece was worth about one cent U.S. — higher than the Japanese yen or the Italian lira. With that information, he…

Show me the money!

MT has become crippleware, and *expensive* crippleware! No one is happy about it, and I only wonder what Six Apart were thinking when they did this. […] I find it difficult to believe that Six Apart have done this … after the history of offering a fully featured free version, I suspected that they may…

Google to sell banner ads

Search giant Google plans for the first time to sell ads that include images, a surprise reversal for a company that has won regard for its pioneering use of text-only marketing pitches and for keeping its home page religiously free of banner advertising. —Google to sell banner ads (ZD Net) I’m still waiting to hear back…

CCCC Waves and Ripples

I’m such an important blogger that I don’t have to give you any reason as I urge, even command, you to visit this link. [W]hen famous A-listers write those self-satisfied one-line posts, they aren’t really blogging well. Instead, they are just spending the social capital they’ve already accumulated. They accumulated that social capital by first…

Blogging since 1999

Blogging since 1999 (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) It occurrs to me that it was shortly after I turned in my final grades in Spring, 1999 — six five years ago — that I started tinkering with the table of contents page for my collection of online handouts. I thought that, instead of just posting links to the…

Pattern Recognition: F:F:F must have very low traffic.

Pattern Recognition: F:F:F must have very low traffic. (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) It just occurred to me that for someone who’s supposedly a core member of the online group F:F:F, Cayce Pollard doesn’t really spend that much time reading or posting. I’ve spent most of this academic year away from the newsgroup rec.arts.int-fiction, and as I finished…

The Photos

I was a soldier. I was a sergeant, who taught five-hour training sessions on the Geneva Convention and the Laws of War. And I’m disgusted, and I hope you’ll let me tell you why. The two soldiers in the photographs, as well as the others you may have seen in more recent pictures, will be…

Education Arcade, day 1

Henry shared the media that influenced him, including films like Operation Frontal Lobe and Isaasc Asimov sci-fi novels. He agued that every other pop culture medium has been involved in education, and games need to catch up. Even Hollywood markets films with education guides (e.g. The Alamo, which has one available on the official website).…

The Benefits of Eavesdropping

I listen in part because I am intrigued and seduced by what I don’t know: by the Greek tragedies I will never have time to read, by the symphonies I will never have time to appreciate, by the questions I will never have enough philosophical training to ask or understand in their richest contexts. Like…

Esteemed journalist lectures on ethics

He added that a difference exists between journalism and propaganda. As he addressed some of the hard hits journalism has taken in the field of ethics, Carroll noted that anyone could be a journalist because, unlike other fields, journalism had no qualification tests, boards to censure misconduct or a universally accepted set of standards. However,…

Pursuing Marketing Buzz

The truth about the campaign, which Mini USA and Crispin Porter call “interactive fiction,” is to be finally revealed this month. Wall posters are to go up in big cities like Los Angeles and New York, featuring the Mini Cooper logo above images of the “motorbots.” Those images will also turn up on the brand’s…