See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
What made the early Internet so very threatening to the mainstream media was not just the new opinions being expressed, but the fact that people were spending hours of their lives doing something that didn’t involve production or consumption in the traditional market sense. Families with Internet connections were watching an average of nine hours…
The floppy disk has several replacements, including writeable compact discs and keychain flash memory devices. Both can hold much more data and are less likely to break. Even so, floppies have been around since the late 1970s. People are used to them. They were the oldest form of removable storage still around. —Mark Neisse —Floppy…
Thirty-five years after computer scientists at UCLA linked two bulky computers using a 15-foot gray cable, testing a new way for exchanging data over networks, what would ultimately become the Internet remains a work in progress. —Anick Jesdanun —Web Turns 35, but Still Work in Progress (AP/My Way)
It’s not the online version of an established, well-researched traditional encyclopedia. Instead, Wikipedia is a do-it-yourself encyclopedia, without any credentials. “As a high school librarian, part of my job is to help my students develop critical thinking skills,” Stagnitta wrote. “One of these skills is to evaluate the authority of any information source. The Wikipedia…
But now, the reality of exchange rates and international income gaps has spawned a virtual version of the real-world relationship between rich and poor countries. While players in wealthier countries casually drop hundreds of dollars to buy their way into better positions in the games — or out of tedious parts of the games —…
Insensitive computer programmers with little knowledge of geography have cost the giant Microsoft company hundreds of millions of dollars in lost business and led hapless company employees to be arrested by offended governments. —Paul Brown —Microsoft pays dear for insults through ignorance (Guardian Unlimited)
A Web Analytics Information Explosion See your website visitors as animated characters in a virtual city Watch visitors move from page to page and interact with your site See buses (search engines) deliver new visitors to buildings Pull up detailed ‘Passports’ on any visitor Replay website traffic from any date or time View dozens of…
A major change over the years has been a declining emphasis on using search to identify good sites as such. Rather than hunt for sites to explore and use in depth, users now hunt for specific answers. The Web as a whole has thus become one agglomerated resource for people who use search engines to…
Blobjects are blob-shaped objects, because of NURBS and meshes and splines and injection molding and CAD-CAM. They’re highly curvilinear consumer items designed on workstations, and then they’re generally blasted into being in a burst of injection-molded goo. Blobjects are the period objects of our time. They are the physical products that the digital revolution brought…
In an effort to educate the nation’s neediest children on nutrition, a new project uses the familiar medium of video games to broadcast its message. The Fantastic Food Challenge, a package of four computer games, is designed to teach people who get nutrition aid such as federal food stamps how to make better use of…
Effective with this sentence, Wired News will no longer capitalize the “I” in internet. At the same time, Web becomes web and Net becomes net. Why? The simple answer is because there is no earthly reason to capitalize any of these words. Actually, there never was. —Tony Long —It’s Just the ‘internet’ Now (Wired) Thank…
The books are written by a small stable of independent authors, who receive 50 percent royalties, a rate unheard of in traditional publishing. Edited collaboratively over the Net, the books are published “within moments of going to press” as small, downloadable PDF files. Costing $5 or $10, the books come with free updates for readers…
To those who roll their eyes at retro gamers, I say, “What is really so great about the games you are playing?” Is there really that much difference between Soul Calibur II and International Karate? We are still mashing buttons and kicking people in the groin. Why did your game take years to produce? I…
Schmexas Hold-em Schmipitor (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Grrr…. On blogs.setonhill.edu, over 400 comment spams for some gambling game I’ve never played and some drug I’ve never heard of. Thank goodness for MT-Blacklist.
A movie trailer for Halo 2 that flashed “www.ilovebees.com” for a split second led the curious to a beekeeping site that seemed to have been hijacked by a sentient virus. Puzzles at the site are so intricate that they must be solved by people working together at ARG sites like www.unfiction.com. For example, sets of…
I know I’m not alone in committing identity theft against my imaginary selves. Since no studies exist, I took an informal poll involving 50 friends and colleagues and, although I admit it’s not very scientific, it was revealing. More than half of respondents admitted they invent some or all of the information they provide to…
Now teens and twenty-somethings generally do not set a fixed time and place for a meeting. Rather, they initially agree on a general time and place (Shibuya, Saturday late afternoon), and exchange approximately 5 to 15 messages that progressively narrow in on a precise time and place, two or more points eventually converging in a…
We knew modern memory cards were durable, but had no idea they would be quite so tough… They were dipped into cola, put through a washing machine, dunked in coffee, trampled by a skateboard, run over by a child’s toy car and given to a six-year-old boy to destroy. Perhaps surprisingly, all the cards survived…
Vacation Blog Pause (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) I’ll be on a little family vacation until August 1. My access to the Internet will be sporadic at best. Feel free to chat among yourselves while I am away. And enjoy the postings from “buup114” and the other spam that will doubtless collect in my absence.
Traditional Methods are Tools, Too (PILOT Reflections) One often hears that computers and other online instruction methods are only tools, and that they should complement, rather than replace, traditional methods of instruction. But aren’t traditional instructional approaches also tools? I just finished a week of teaching a Vacation Bible School, and I absolutely love sitting on…