See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
Tips Using blurbs with headlines rather than headlines-only seems to help disperse interest throughout a homepage (down the page). Recognize that a list of headlines-only high on the page might not get people to look as much on lower portions of the page. The use of blurbs does not appear to affect the number of…
You’ve heard of “Myst,” “Quake” and “Tomb Raider,” but how many people remember “Obsidian,” “Grim Fandango” and “Under A Killing Moon?” —Gene Emery —A Visit to the Museum of Underappreciated Games (Yahoo|Reuters (will expire)) One presumes this museum is somewhere near The Island of Misfit Toys. Of course, there is also The Underdogs, a site devoted…
According to an e-mail sent today to Harvard students, Google will collaborate with Harvard’s libraries on a pilot project to digitize a substantial number of the 15 million volumes held in the University’s extensive library system, which is second only to the Library of Congress in the number of volumes it contains. Google will provide…
During the fall semester of 2004, I drew from my previous experiences in Writing for the Web with Dr. Jerz from the Fall 2003 semester. The class has changed, and so has my perception of what writing for an internet audience entails. This section assesses what I have learned working with the class, as both…
“When I told my daughter that I was going to a presentation on blogs, she said ‘NO! You can’t do blogs in schools! Blogs are OURS!’” —Barriers to Entry (Weblogg-Ed) While I still encounter many students who have never heard the word “weblog” before I introduce it in class, I’ve been increasingly encountering students who already…
Blogging is good. So is school. This we know. And when you put them together, they create something even better. This is the main point in Terra Williams and Charles Lowe’s article, Moving to the Public: Weblogs in the Writing Classroom. The article makes the argument that blogging can be an effective classroom tool. I…
On other occasions, students have surfed the Net during class and found Web sites that supplement the discussion – though Jones also jokes that he’s never had his students’ undivided attention thanks to the laptops, cell phones and other gizmos they carry. “There is a real power there, a kind of technological power. But also…
Young people may know that just because information is plentiful online doesn’t mean it’s reliable, yet their perceptions of what’s trustworthy frequently differ from their elders’ – sparking a larger debate about what constitutes truth in the Internet age. Georgia Tech professor Amy Bruckman tried to force students to leave their computers by requiring at…
Collier has never met most of his guild mates in person, but he knows two of them very well. They are his roommates, Adam Traum and Owen Nelson, both buddies he met in art school in Florida a few years back who are now his compadres in the real and virtual worlds. In real life,…
From a sample of 175,000 15-year-old students in 31 countries, researchers at the University of Munich announced in November that performance in math and reading had suffered significantly among students who have more than one computer at home. And while students seemed to benefit from limited use of computers at school, those who used them…
For a librarian who has even a modest sense of either posterity or professional responsibility, entertaining any thoughts about a decline in the importance of books is painful. After all, books are how we speak to one another across generations, and one of the ways we can subvert the limitations of culture, class, gender, and…
In the universal, ritualistic adulation, it was no surprise that Google’s latest service received publicity that was as wide as it was shallow. The blogorrhea and avalanche of e-mail was as if a free, magical cure for cancer had been announced by the National Institutes of Health. I like and use Google a lot, but…
The Sims 2 now has a patch that fixes a few bugs. If only real life was debuggable like this. Here’s a few highlights: Fixes a problem with Sims’ jobs not functioning properly when 3 or more Sims go to work in a helicopter. Visitors will no longer kidnap a baby or toddler by leaving…
—MSN Spaces = soylent green (BoingBoing) A good introduction to the online reaction to MSN Spaces, Microsoft’s new blogging service. Note particularly the terms of service that says anything you post using the service becomes a product that MSN can sell without reimbursing you.
Lycos Europe has shut down its screensaver, makelovenotspam, which delighted many Internet users with the opportunity to flood spammers’ Web sites with junk e-mail. ISPs and anti-virus developers objected to the tactic, and at least one spammer found a way to turn the tables…. One Web site reportedly spammed by the screensaver simply forwarded its…
How indulgent is World of Warcraft? The game actually rewards you for not playing it. If you log out of the game in an inn, you get double experience for a while when you return later. According to the documentation, staying away from the game for a week should give you about a level and…
—Subjects > News > Colleges and Universities (Alexa) The web indexing service Alexa rates my academic site (jerz.setonhill.edu) as the fifth most popular in the “News > Colleges and Universities” category. Then again, there are only five sites in that category… so “Alexa puts my site in last place” is another way of looking at the…
A spokesman for the Oxford University Press said that the word was now being put into other dictionaries for children and learners, reflecting its mainstream use. “I think it was the word of last year rather than this year,” he said. “Now we’re getting words that derive from it such as ‘blogosphere’ and so on,”…
Internet portal Lycos has made a screensaver that endlessly requests data from sites that sell the goods and services mentioned in spam e-mail. Lycos hopes will it make the monthly bandwidth bills of spammers soar by keeping their servers running flat out. —Screensaver tackles spam websites (BBC) A very interesting strategy.
Through a new effort, Wikinews, members of the open-source community who write and edit Wikipedia’s encyclopedia entries are encouraged to test their skills as journalists. The news site follows a similar set of rules as the encyclopedia, which allows anyone to edit and post corrections to entries, so long as each change is recorded.–Joanna Glasner…