See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
It seems YouTube will soon discontinue the text-based “annotation” feature that made interactive videos like this possible. Similar:NASA Just Found a Lost SpacecraftIf movies about space have taught us any…Current_EventsTelevision is Now the Second Screen for Kids with TabletsOf course, not all kids have tablets, an…CultureA.I. 'Completes' Keith Haring's Intentionally Unfinished Painting After learning of…
While my students are out of the room making a video, I’m quickly marking the homework that was due today. When we reconvene we’ll discuss both assignments, and then it’s on to the next task. Similar:Digital literacy is different from print literacy. How do we balance the trade-off?My job includes teaching students to rea…AcademiaA WWII…
I’m having my students play Adam Cadre’s text-only, command-line interactive fiction game “9:05.” Over heard, from a student playing the early part of the game with a peer: “Did we just kill someone? We did something bad!” Similar:Motivation Amid Crisis (Autotrophic Bat)As part of an independent study project,…BooksThe Key To Better Work? E-mail Less, Flow…
More than half of the hostile responses to The Last Jedi, episode eight of the Star Wars saga, were politically motivated trolling or the result of non-human bot activity, according to an academic paper published by a US digital media expert. Morten Bay, a research fellow at the University of Southern California (USC), analysed Twitter activity about the…
I was surprised to see how closely happiness maps to non-phone activities, and unhappiness maps to phone-related activities. The author notes that this is a study of correlation, not causation. When I went through moody phases as a teen, I wrote, or worked, or did theater, or church youth group activities. When I was busy,…
Facebook cares more about scalability—that is, the ability to serve billions of users with a minimum of human labor—than it does about making the right call in every case. It would rather get lots of things wrong, but do it with a veneer of consistency and neutrality, than entertain nuance or exercise human judgment. (It…
My job includes teaching students to read long, complex texts (novels, play scripts, and academic texts.) My job also includes asking students to write researched essays that are longer documents than many of them at first seem comfortable reading. Years after they graduate, students often thank me for what I’ve taught them, and say the…
The good news is that there are fewer Americans think vaccination is a government conspiracy than your social media stream makes it appear that there are. The bad news is that somewhere out there is an organization that believes it will benefit from you believing that more people doubt vaccinations than really do. “The vast…
I still use blogs.setonhill.edu, which I started in 2003. Not for every class, but for most of my discussion-heavy in-person classes. Weblogs@Harvard, as it was then known, was considered pioneering. Facebook didn’t yet exist. Social media was in its infancy. And starting a blog usually required some knowledge of code. Harvard’s blogging platform, now known…
Young men are more than twice as likely than the general public to say they changed their mind on an issue because of social media. Americans who identify as Democrats, black, or Hispanic are also more likely than the general public to report change their minds because of social media. The survey seems to have…
Because what he never managed to grok then was that the company he created was destined to become a template for all of humanity, the digital reflection of masses of people across the globe. Including — and especially — the bad ones. Was it because he was a computer major who left college early and…
Here’s a thought… nothing you can write can possibly encourage me to click through 40 separate chunks of text. Bye. Similar:McCain's 2008 Concession Speech: Republicans interrupt their candidate's concession speech…That moment during McCain’s concession s…CultureOn this date in 1999 I first added a date to the list of web links I had been curating. (T…On…
After I read Mark Sample’s blog post “What about Blogging Keeps Me from Blogging,” I tried to post a comment lamenting that I miss blog comments. I ran into these fun problems. Similar:Why I Resist Web Redesigns (And Maybe You Do, Too)Words many of us never want to hear: “It…AestheticsSo Long Blogging. Hello—Yep, We're…
Verrit, like Snopes, Politifact, and a host of other fact-checking sites, reflect fundamental misunderstandings about how information circulates online, what function political information plays in social contexts, and how and why people change their political opinions. Fact-checking is in many ways a response to the rapidly changing norms and practices of journalism, news gathering, and…
On this date in 1999, I first dated an entry in the collection of web links I had been curating since at least that January. Similar:Should the AP Really Have Fired This Pulitzer-Prize War Photographer?The original shot caught a Syrian rebel …AestheticsAnother 10sq cm of background details for a #steampunk project. #blender3d #blender3dart #…AestheticsReflections on…
10 points to CNN’s Oliver Darcy for working both “when asked about” and “this reporter” into a news story that was not written by a supporting character in a 1940s gangster flick. When asked by this reporter how the company could claim it was serious about tackling the problem of misinformation online while simultaneously allowing…
Journalism matters. Educated citizens who understand and appreciate the role of the free press in a democracy are a threat to authoritarian figures who benefit by sowing mistrust. It’s perfectly reasonable to point out errors and bias in specific news stories. (News organizations love reporting about when their competitors get a story wrong, and journalists…
For my summer project, teaching myself the Unity Game Engine, I’m updating the texture atlas I created for control consoles for the flagship of the steampunk bedtime stories I used to tell my kids. My designs are now a lot less blocky and more visually interesting. When I showed the girl, she was impressed. Then…
One of the benefits of working at Seton Hill is they provide me with a MacBook Air and an iPad. I turn them in every few years for an upgrade. The computer the kids use for gaming is a Mac Mini that I bought in 2011, with a virtual machine that runs Windows. It has served…
“Parents normally set these rules to promote their children’s scholastic development and to make sure that they invest enough time in schoolwork. But that evidently can also backfire,” commented Hargittai. But why exactly? The study can’t say definitively, but I emailed Hargattai to see what hypotheses she might have. “One possibility would be that such…