See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
The NEA’s recent “Reading at Risk” report, which concludes that there has been a 10% national decline in what it calls literary reading since 1982, with the drop-off even more precipitous among younger age groups, is surely of concern to anyone who cares about the future of literature and a literate populace. While the report…
The university also will create a Web site modeled on the Apple iTunes online music site from which students can download songs and course content from faculty, including language lessons, lectures and audio books. Lisa Merschel’s Spanish class will use the iPods to listen to textbook exercises and Spanish songs. Sally Schauman plans to have…
Messages such as “HTTP 404 – File not found”, which appears when a web page is unavailable, and “invalid credit card number” on e-commerce sites, make people feel stupid when they have not done anything wrong. This scares them away from exploiting computers to their full potential, he says. But Jonathan Klein, who builds robotic…
Bill Stevenson, 79, and Sten Gerfast, 74, both retired 3M employees, were eating at the Sun Ray Shopping Center Bruegger’s Bagels when they heard a man cursing loudly on his cell phone, they said Friday. “You know, there were about 15 people in there and some children and this person, if he stood in the…
The father of the World Wide Web was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II on Friday, and said his revolutionary invention was the result of being in the right place at the right time. —A royal occasion as Web inventor is knighted (Independent)
At the start of the final exam for “Principles of Accounting I,” the team of professors who taught the popular course posted on its Web site an answer key loaded with false responses to the 30 multiple-choice questions. As some 400 students deliberated over their answers, the exam proctors sat and watched — ignoring occasionally…
Webloggers are turning a profit, sometimes unexpectedly, reports the Chicago Tribune Online. Blogs such as TalkingPointsMemo, Wonkette, and RightWingNews are securing enough advertising to turn a profit. A firm called Blogads has been connecting advertisers with bloggers and enabling them to reach an 18 to 34-year-old demographic that is dwindling from traditional media outlets. Recent…
When you think about it, the Times may have it backward. It charges $1 for the latest news in print, and offers it free over the Web, but for old material demands $3, which is three times the price of an entire newspaper. —Adam L. Penenberg —Searching for the New York Times (Wired) The NY Times…
In traditional print journalism, the imperative is to filter, then to publish. The filtering is possible because of a daily printing cycle and large editorial and production staffs. With large, capital-intensive printing presses and a prohibitively expensive distribution system, newspapers in fact require large staffs. Organized hierarchically, these staffs funnel the information out from a…
Yesterday (July 8, 2004) I took the Internet Bookmobile to Walden Pond in Concord, Mass. It was the 150th anniversary of H. D. Thoreau’s book “Walden.” The Thoreau Society had a dawn to dusk reading. After an hour of having readers print and take away free copies of “Walden,” I was asked by the Walden…
Dana Gioia, chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, writes in his preface to this report: Reading at Risk merely documents and quantifies a huge cultural transformation that most Americans have already noted — our society‘smassive shift toward electronic media for entertainment and information. — most electronic media such as television, recordings, and radio…
The first adventure game was called Adventure and ran on IBM mainframes. It became known as Colossal Caves or The Hobbit, and was influenced by Dungeons and Dragons. —Theo Clarke —The Infocom Adventure (Strategy Plus) The Hobbit? WTF? A transcription from a book, the full publication data of which is not given. See my “Colossal Cave…
We thought a lecture about game criticism was most likely a recipe for disaster. Straight off the bat, Matteo Bittanti, a teacher at the European Institute of Design, in Milan, proved us wrong. The very first thing he said was, “Hello. I am here to talk to you today about videogame criticism. Because right now,…
Unlike the film industry, where anyone can write a script and submit it to the film studios, there is no real equivalent in the game industry – they are simply not set up, in the main, for that kind of approach. A writer does not produce the “screenplay” for a game and then a studio…
I wanted to try out the effects of democratization and subversion on this process of keeping a klog, and in doing so, possibly learn ways workplace practices could one day be further affected by the force of these software systems. I also saw a visible (and documentable) clash of cultures between old and new media?perhaps…
Before you read on let me note Gmail is still the best free web mailer around, in fact you won’t find any other even playing in this league. But hey, we come to expect that from Google. Some things however we do not… —Philipp Lenssen —Looking Back on Gmail (Google Blogoscoped)
Nigeria’s agency against economic and financial crime said Monday that it had detained more than 500 suspects and seized property worth more than $US500 million from suspected fraudsters. “Presently we have over 500 suspects in custody, seized assets and recovered properties worth over $US500 million with over 100 cases at various stages of prosecution,” agency…
…being a virtual community is important for sustainability. It is worth noting that at the end of the blog author Julie‘sendeavors to cook her way through the cookbook, she stopped her blog posting. Although several participants tried to create an online group for fans of the the Julie/Julia Project to interact, it failed. The Julie/Julia…
Does this mean that future weblogs should favour image over text? To do so would be to the detriment of the medium as it is the combination of words and images presented over time that make the visual blog what it is. Yet the contributions that images can make within weblogs should not be underestimated…
This online, edited collection explores discursive, visual, social, and other communicative features of weblogs. Essays analyze and critique situated cases and examples drawn from weblogs and weblog communities. Such a project requires a multidisciplinary approach, and contributions represent perspectives from Rhetoric, Communication, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Linguistics, and Education, among others. —Into the Blogosphere