Vintage TV News Coverage of Pac-Man
Vintage TV news coverage of Pac-Man.
All the world’s an app
A review of three books — The App Generation, Status Update, and It’s Complicated — that explore and critique the function of social media in our lives. I used to ask the internet everything. I started young. In the late 1980s, my family got its first modem. My father was a computer scientist, and he…
We Got A Look Inside The 45-Day Planning Process That Goes Into Creating A Single Corporate Tweet
The professionals don’t always spend 45 days designing a single tweet, but this one got just two favorites. Shortly after, Lindsay met with a copywriter and graphic designer to brainstorm tweet ideas for the next month. It was then that the copywriter suggested a tweet centered around the idea that Camembert, a French cheese popular…
Amazon’s Tactics Confirm Its Critics’ Worst Suspicions
This week, as part of a contract dispute with the publisher Hachette, we’re seeing Amazon behaving at its worst. The company’s willingness to nakedly flex its anticompetitive muscle gives new cause for concern to anyone who cares about books — authors, publishers, but mainly customers. Here’s the back story: In an effort to exert pressure…
Facebook, Now You Remind Me of a Half-Drunk Cocktail Party Schmoozer
Last week, Facebook asked me what sportsing teams I cared about (and helpfully supplied me with a list of the teams I’d be statistically most likely to favor if I had any interest in sportsing). Now Facebook is asking me what TV shows I’ve  watched. Well, yes, I’ve watched episodes of each of these shows, but I…
Star Wars: TIE Fighter 20th Anniversary Retrospective
In the Star Wars films, the empire is evil to the core. But TIE Fighter let you see the empire from a new perspective. The game didn’t make you feel like a bad person doing bad things, but like a pilot who might reasonably have believed that what he was doing was in the galaxy’s…
Facebook’s Mike Hudack rants about the media: Why won’t anybody do something about these shallow viral stories?
When a Facebook executive whines about all these shallow viral links clogging our feeds, Slate’s Jordan Wiessmann clicks him a new one. If only we, the American people, could summon a champion. Someone who could, with the change of a single algorithm, turn the entire media ecosystem on its head. But who? –Jordan Weissmann, Slate.
Effects of Internet use on the adolescent brain: despite popular claims, experimental evidence remains scarce
Big difference between the clickbaity verson on BoingBoing (“Everything you know about teenage brains is bullshit“) and the dry, academic version on cell.com: [C]urrent evidence suggests that typical Internet activities do not impair social development during adolescence. | Both adolescents and adults are now using the Internet more than ever. Evidence increasingly suggests that time…
Blogging is NOT Analog Writing in Digital Spaces
Blogging in education is about quality and authentic writing in digital spaces with a global audience, while observing digital citizenship responsibilities and rights, as on documents, reflects, organizes and makes one’s learning and thinking visible and searchable! Blogging is not analog writing in digital spaces. Blogging is not an activity, but a process. The process…
I Made Cheerful Maze Game in Scratch
Well, it’s cheerful unless you touch something red, in which case you DIE.
Microsoft Research Launches Code Hunt Game to Teach Programming
Another item for the “when I’m finished with my current to-do list” list. Instead of presenting you with a problem and comparing your solution to a set of fixed test cases, Code Hunt presents an empty slate and a set of constantly changing test cases. It thus teaches coding as a side consequence of solving…
How Are Websites Made?
This one chart is actually the punch line… click through for the full effect. —I Love Charts.
Why do so many small US newsrooms shun innovation? “The goat must be fed.”
We started this report to assess the use of digital tools and provide a road map for the work of the Reporters’ Lab at Duke University’s DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy. Along the way, we discovered that despite all the hype we’ve heard in the past five or 10 years, there is still…
Times photo staffer’s invention: the streaming backpack
“From a photographer’s perspective it makes our photography process more similar to the days of film, where you went out you did your assignment, dropped off your roll of film, and went off to do another assignment. Now you download your cards, color correct and caption it. It takes away from the creative process of…
Rediscovering Infocom Games With My Kids
Call it the Familyhood of the Traveling Interactive Fiction Pants. Even though we all have very different needs, the games fit each of us perfectly. It is not unusual to find all three of us sitting on the sofa, exploring a world and arguing over which direction to go. Every afternoon, it’s like getting…
Text Adventure Geeks Rejoice: Major Inform7 Update
I have final grades, an annual report, and a video project for a publisher to finish before I unleash my inner nerd and install the latest Inform7 update. (Inform7 is a free programming language and development environment for writing command-line computer games in the spirit of Zork and Colossal Cave Adventure.) This release is a…
The Google Classroom Tease
Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed: “Google Classroom is not an LMS. It does not have a grade center, a discussion tool, an assessment engine, or a way to integrate with a Student Information System. (I think). Nobody is going to replace an existing campus LMS with Google Classroom. And yet — “
Has life in the age of casual magic made moviegoers numb to the amazing?
This is one of the reasons I’ve become more interested in local theater. The dropped lines, unexpected blackouts, and last-minute casting replacements are what makes it so much more engaging to me than a slick professional production. Avatar left me completely numb… yes the visuals were stunning, but I feel much more connected to fantasy…
The Great Works of Software
I realized that each one of these technologies set out to help people do something but consequently grew and changed over time. Each ultimately provided a way for large groups of people to talk about and think about very difficult problems: Microsoft Office: How do we communicate about work? Photoshop: How do we create and…
Star Wars’ Original, Scum-Caked Brilliance
The B-movie shoddiness of actors and aesthetics in Star Wars is often what critics don’t like. But even setting aside the fact that the effects charm precisely because they’re marvelously fake, there’s something original and profound in the films’ vision of time not as progress, but as a continued borrowing from the past.