See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
Pretty awesome, focused use of Inform 7. (I’m generally content just to let my students explore, trusting through experience that they will learn from testing each other’s games and asking me specific questions realated to the stories they are creating, such as, “So how do I make it so you can’t enter the TARDIS without…
Comic Sans is a typeface, not a font. I therefore choose to interpret this song as parody, in which case this video is awesome. “Comic Sans is the best font in the world / If you want your designs to look like they’re done by little girls.”
This is why I require my “new media journalism” students to do more than simply write stories — they must know how to edit, create multimedia, and work on team projects. See other sobering charts, via Business Insider.
When you click “like” for a cause in Facebook, you may be helping scammers make money. People buy and sell fan pages. That “like” that you clicked gives whoever owns the page more access to your Facebook feed; the more feeds the page can access, the more money it’s worth. Structure of a Facebook scam…
The honeymoon with MOOCs is over. The reality check has finally arrived which was inevitable. MOOCs will not solve all the woes of higher education. It is unfortunate it had to be a class on how to design an online course; it was the Fundamentals of Online Education: Planning and Application [FOE] offered through Coursera…
I’ll blog pretty much anything that has to do with Inform 7. Text-based games, or interactive fiction, have continued to evolve since the days of Zork. Many works can be powerful for play in the classroom: Emily Short’s “interactive epistolary” First Draft of the Revolution, Andrew Plotkin’s physics-grounded Dual Transform, Peter Nepstad’s historically grounded 1893: A…
The web also creates the illusion that all information is available and accessible to anyone at any time. This common view represses the real disparities of access in our world and also undermines the need for educational experts. After all, if you can get all knowledge from Wikipedia or a Google search, why do you…
Apple, Google and Microsoft have very different design aesthetics. Almost Flat Design | Matthew Moore Design.
This sounds like something from a Dilbert comic. An employee pays a Chinese worker a fraction of his own salary to do his work for him, and spends the day goofing around at the office. Employee profile –mid-40’s software developer versed in C, C++, perl, java, Ruby, php, python, etc. Relatively long tenure with the…
Frequent smartphone use imposes significant psychological costs on the user, and negatively impacts our personal and professional lives. —Daniel Gulati – Harvard Business Review.
While blogs still exist as convenient ways for authors to compile and archive their writing over time, commenting has long been driven (by spammers) into other social media, like Twitter and Facebook. What follows is an interesting snapshot of the Cyberculture change, as it was happening. What really changed between 2005 and 2009 was that…
In one version of Hawking’s eulogistic story, we praise the smartest person in the world, the brilliant physicist, one of the greatest cosmologists of our time. He fits perfectly well with our conception of how science and its heroes work: To be a genius all one needs is a powerful – a “beautiful” – mind.…
Kim asked on Twitter: “Is there a canon for digital narratives / interactive stories / hypertext literature yet? A list of accepted classics and forms?” What followed was a lot of us going “we don’t know”. And I wasn’t exactly helpful, by pointing out that those three things are (in some ways) completely different. But.…
The WordPress extension Jetpack provided me with thus chart, showing a million hits to an instructional web page (on formatting a paper in MLA style) stretched out over about 16 months. The weekly traffic peaks on Mondays and bottoms out on Fridays (with a sharp spike late Sunday, stretching past midnight, thus puffing up the…
I just noticed a mild traffic spike over the past few days, and after a little digging, learned a page on my blog is currently first out of 2 billion hits for something I blogged about in July. A different, related search returns the same page first out of 2.4 billion hits. Thanks to traffic…
Someone’s put a lot of time into ensuring the games play exceptionally well on mobile. The on-screen keyboard is a necessary evil, one that’s ameliorated by a great little auto-complete feature. It’s context-sensitive, so if you want to whip something from your inventory out in a pinch, the game will probably predict it by the…
My high school experience was very analog. I had been word-processing most of my school papers and doing some recreational coding/hacking since I was in middle school (around 1982), but didn’t start using email until I went to college (1986), and then only sparingly until I left the country for grad school. So it was…
Yes, the NYT multimedia “Snow Fall” was wonderful, and my new media colleagues are excited by it. But it took 11 staff members 6 months to publish. Is this really what new media journalists should emulate? How can I scale this down to the classroom? The future of journalism is about speed, volume, rough and…
The New York Times debuted a new multimedia feature Thursday so beautiful it has a lot of people wondering — especially those inside the New York Times — if the mainstream media is about to forgo words and pictures for a whole lot more. Unlike a standard words-on-page article that doesn’t diverge too much from print in the design department,…