See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
Google said Wednesday that it stopped scanning student Gmail accounts for advertising purposes after the practice was scrutinized during a recent court case. | Google Apps for Education, a free service used by more than 30 million students, teachers and administrators, offers Gmail email accounts, as well as calendars, cloud storage and document creation.Google Stops…
Forced Google+ integration in Google Reader and YouTube, both of which had strong communities of their own beforehand, are prime examples of how Google+ fostered hostility rather than goodwill. The time is right for Google to rethink its approach. I still like the idea of Circles as a way of controlling who sees what, but…
“After 112 years as The Daily Emerald, they saw the tidal wave of change,” he said. “They re-branded themselves from a daily student newspaper into a multiplatform student media company.” It was not financial worries alone that prompted Ryan Frank, its publisher, to announce the decision in 2012 to print two instead of five days…
The iPad market is saturated. Tablets are gadgets for a largish, elite niche. So, as a technology, the iPad adoption curve might look more like a bicycle’s than a mobile phone’s. Some people have and love them, but not everyone needs one. Tablets are “tweeners,” not as robust as a computer nor as convenient as…
Someone is regretting this PR move. The official @NYPDnews Twitter account made an attempt at social media outreach today only to get promptly torn to shreds by users resisting the PR push. Hijacked hashtags are a common Twitter phenomenon, but tend to be played more for giggles (“trolling,” some call it) than to make a…
It’s one thing to be able use a service like Facebook or Instagram, and to use it well; it’s quite another thing to code a web page by hand, tweak a CSS file, or design the navigation for a large website. While I don’t expect my English students to be professional programmers, I do aim…
Grail to the Thief stars a thief from the future named Hank Krang, who “recently had a self-aware time machine called the Time Excursion Digital Interface, or TEDI, fall into his lap after a poker game. He has decided to use this technology to go throughout time, stealing priceless artifacts.” His first destination? Arthurian times,…
I am not a fan of Adobe Flash, which is a closed, proprietary system that requires your users to install a specific, resource-intensive player. Don’t build your business on someone else’s property. Long live HTML5. Cassette tapes, 8-tracks, and … Flash. All three of these mediums need a player to work, and all three mediums…
“We have about 850 graduates, and we have a professional photographer snapping their picture when they shake my hand and get their diploma,” said Ronald Machtley, the president of Bryant. “I don’t think their mom and dad and grandma want to get a picture of them holding up their cellphone.” —Go Forth and Conquer, but…
Interesting social science approach to how university faculty spend their time. [O]n a recent trip abroad when an immigration officer asked how I could afford to be away from work for a month. I said simply that we were on winter break and the officer jokingly lamented about going into the wrong profession. I didn’t…
The brain was not designed for reading. There are no genes for reading like there are for language or vision. But spurred by the emergence of Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Phoenician alphabet, Chinese paper and, finally, the Gutenberg press, the brain has adapted to read. Before the Internet, the brain read mostly in linear ways…
“It’s not a game I made for other people,” he says. “I made it for myself.” That might be the creative creed for a new generation of independent video games and game makers that has sprung up in the past five years or so. Unlike the makers of mainstream blockbuster games — slick packages produced…
What sex was for the Puritans, technology has become for us. We’ve focussed our collective anxiety on digital excess, and reconnecting with the “real” world around us represents one effort to control it. | And yet the “real” world, like the “real” America, is an insidious idea. It suggests that the selves we are online…
The real concern here is that the little guys—the Pies ‘n’ Thighs, the charitable causes, the artists and merchants trying to scrape by with the help of their Facebook fans—will find that they can’t reach even the users who really do want to see their updates. So far, the data suggest that they’re being spared…
I turned off the extra screen on my desktop computer. At first, the smaller workspace felt punishingly cramped. But after a few days of adjusting to the new set-up, an unusual serenity invaded my normally harried workday. With a single screen that couldn’t accommodate too many simultaneous stimuli, a screen just large enough for a…
They don’t even seem to want to watch Frozen. Instead they are playing Animal Jam.
Teacher Jen Marten responds to Google’s latest educational initiative: Do you know what Accelerated Reader and programs like it are doing to readers these days? I’ve heard of teachers being reprimanded for not leveling all their classroom books. I know of school libraries where children have to show the librarian a card with their reading…
Good advice from Raph Koster to someone who wants to break into the game design business. The advice goes for writers, performers, and anyone creative. The way to better your chances at landing a creative job is to create. See, the filter here that many employers will use is “motivation.” Games are hot now, and…
A digital story is essentially any combination of a spoken narrative and a number of visuals, perhaps with a soundtrack – along with new technologies to edit and share the story. Although the concept of digital storytelling is closely linked to the use of new technology, we shouldn’t forget that it is always the story…
However there’s a particularly sad tale tied up in Versu’s fate (literally) and it’s why you won’t find me applauding this clean up any time soon. Versu was co-developed by acclaimed interactive fiction writer Emily Short, and for over a year most of the stories she’s made have been strictly for Versu. The unfortunate result…