See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
Community voices have always contributed to local and national papers. Citizen journalism is different. It often covers a wide territory from soliciting arts and entertainment coverage to providing the angle on the city council budget that the cub reporter might have missed. The London attacks moved the trend to a new level. Web sites from…
Media firms should be able to protect their copyrights. And without any copyright protection of digital content, they may be correct that new high quality content is likely to dry up (along with much of their business). Yet tech and electronics firms are also correct that holding back new technology, merely because it interferes with…
Self-reflection is a hallmark of many teachers’ blogs, according to the creator of weblogg-ed.com — the first stop for most teachers who want to try blogging. But thinking of them only as online journals shortchanges the medium, said Will Richardson, the nationally known lecturer on the topic who runs the site. “More and more teachers…
In some cases, a Google search of the candidate’s name turned up his or her blog. Other candidates told us about their Web site, even making sure we had the URL so we wouldn’t fail to find it. In one case, a candidate had mentioned it in the cover letter. We felt compelled to follow…
Spacewar! was conceived in 1961 by Martin Graetz, Stephen Russell, and Wayne Wiitanen. It was first realized on the PDP-1 in 1962 by Stephen Russell, Peter Samson, Dan Edwards, and Martin Graetz, together with Alan Kotok, Steve Piner, and Robert A Saunders. […] The “a”, “s”, “d”, “f” keys control one of the spaceships. The…
Fubon said that the trader was unfamiliar with new computer systems and will be fired. —Bad keystroke leads to $251 million stock buy (News.com) What kind of an interface lets a worker spend $251 million with a single keystroke? The real problem here isn’t the worker — it’s a whole inhuman mindset that expects human beings…
This page provides the usual list of links to writing resources on the Internet… but instead of trying to cover everything in a long list, I have been very selective. The “Spotlight” section features links to articles about academic writing. If you have suggstions for this page, please let me know. —Dennis G. Jerz —My…
Over the last few years, I’ve noticed that a surprisingly large number of native English speakers, who are otherwise very technically competent, seem to lack strong English skills. Mostly, this seems to manifest itself as varying degrees of poor spelling and grammar: ‘definately’ instead of ‘definitely’; ‘should of’ instead of ‘should have’; and I even…
For one thing, we overestimated academe’s interest in the humanistic study of video games. True, colleges and universities across the country are rushing pell-mell to grab a piece of the game pie, but that rush seems to be more about pipelining students into industry jobs than helping them develop critical-thinking skills. Ensuring that young people…
It just can’t be good, it has to be original and good. When I think hard about it part of me kind of wishes we hurled our bodies into the air, at times, cracking on impact, but I miss the rest of you and I am now working on keeping myself at SHU. You can…
Computers and the Internet are changing the way people read. Thus far, search engines and hyperlinks, those underlined words or phrases that when clicked take you to a new Web page, have turned the online literary voyage into a kind of U-pick island-hop. Far more is in store. Take “Hamlet.” –Gregory M. Lamb —How the…
At the same time, usability is also an ideology — the belief in a certain specialized type of human rights: The right of people to be superior to technology. If there’s a conflict between technology and people, then technology must change. The right of empowerment. Users should understand what’s happening and be capable of controlling…
We live at a peculiar juncture, one in which the record (an object) and the recombinant (a process) still, however briefly, coexist. But there seems little doubt as to the direction things are going. The recombinant is manifest in forms as diverse as Alan Moore’s graphic novel The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, machinima generated with…
Vacation June 18-25 (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Sometime this weekend, I’ll be taking the wife and kids to a cabin for a week in Amish country. Actually, that phrasing is misleading. It’s more accurate to say I’ll accompany my family to a cabin that my in-laws booked. At any rate, I’ll be offline the whole time… and…
Imagine losing all your tax records, your high school and college yearbooks, and your child’s baby pictures and videos. Now multiply such a loss across every federal agency storing terabytes of information, much of which must be preserved by law. That’s the disaster NARA is racing to prevent. It is confronting thousands of incompatible data…
“They develop both left-brain technical thinking as well as right-brain artistic thinking (skills), combined with traditional university liberal arts training,” said Scott Leutenegger, associate professor and coordinator of the game-development program. “This is going to become something that’s needed for more jobs over the next 10 to 30 years.” Schutz said the program “keeps both…
Whether you’re a newly minted blogger or a relative old-timer, you’ve been seeing more and more stories pop up every day about bloggers getting in trouble for what they post. Like all journalists and publishers, bloggers sometimes publish information that other people don’t want published. You might, for example, publish something that someone considers defamatory,…
This article is designed to help publishers and editors understand citizen journalism and how it might be incorporated into their Web sites and legacy media. We’ll look at how news organizations can employ the citizen-journalism concept, and we’ll approach it by looking at the different levels or layers available. Citizen journalism isn’t one simple concept…
Watch next week for the introduction of “wikitorials” — an online feature that will empower you to rewrite Los Angeles Times editorials. —To Our Readers (LA Times) Fascinating idea.
News sites used the event as a chance to experiment with methods of getting news out quickly. CNN.com, for example, put a scorecardlike page up ahead of the verdict, with a color-coded system in place to mark “guilty” or “not guilty,” as each juror’s specific decision was read. But rival MSNBC.com appeared to get the…