See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
But for a few, the idea that a story can be told in a completely new method is what entrances them. It’s become an engrossing enough subject that people can now go to college and study the concept in an official capacity. People get into massive debates about the importance of story in games, some…
One of my favorite comments from last year’s communal exploration of the source code for Colossal Cave Adventure. Stephen Ramsay writes: I’m going to call it the “Code on a Grecian Urn” problem. Let me begin by calling attention to Nick Montfort’s wonderfully pithy note at the end of Week 1:”Hm, I don’t know. The…
Google, having failed to out-Facebook Facebook and to out-Twitter Twitter with Buzz, began a more modest attempt today to build social-networking features into its Web presence: the +1 button. —Google launches +1, a new social step | Deep Tech – CNET News.
There will never be an easier way to break this to you other than to just say it: Facebook is not your friend. It’s a business. Repeat this to yourself until it begins to sink deep within in your social-loving brain cells. “Facebook is not your friend. It’s a business.” Laws on Internet activity and…
I do still see value in teaching students how to blog, precisely because academic blogging (as practiced by academics) involves reflection, citation of sources, interaction with archived posts from the past and current posts by peers on other blogs. Blogging, as a genre, extends beyond using any one piece of software. Being an “expert” on…
Everyone makes mistakes. As a student journalist, I completely muffed the last name of a faculty member I was assigned to interview. (A few years later, I found myself working a PR job, with that guy as my supervisor. It’s a small world.) So, with the full understanding that I am the pot calling the…
Because the headline gets the name of the school wrong, it’s a little hard for me to assess this objectively. I’m glad Katie got so much space to share her experiences, and very glad this story mentions the importance of training and tech support. The story of my students reading Emerson’s Nature is a little…
Here’s a comment I left on the jacksonfish.com website. Hello. I’m a blogger who was surprised to find that your site, literacyintheclassroom.com, scrapes my RSS feed and republishes my content in order to serve up ads for astorybeforebed.com. At least three of the bloggers whose content appears on that site did not give you permission.…
Below is a screen shot, showing that the spam blog literacyintheclassroom.com has reproduced the entire content of my recent blog entry, in which I complain that literacyintheclassroom.com is a spam blog that reproduces the entire content of my site.
According to preterite, Looks like your site is being scraped by someone associated with Hillel Cooperman and the Jackson Fish Market in Seattle, who themselves are associated with the Children’s Book Council and the iPad-oriented company A Story Before Bed. Seems like a pretty rotten thing to do by a company that trumpets its positive…
The industrial age worked hard to separate “work” from “home.” Everything about the common or public schools started in the mid-nineteenth century reinforced that division: from the school bell ringing for each child at the same time of day, of each child entering school at age 6 whether they were ready or not, about sitting…
Honestly, this does not sound good. In the short term, it will only be possible to alter the “flavor text” and not the substance. Since the producers ultimately control both the game world and the TV world, and can therefore nerf a gameworld city that e TV plot needs destroyed, or buff a game world…
I’m hoping that the participants in the “Is Blogging Dead?” panel will aggregate the links to their 3-minute position statements, so that I can add them to this record. In the meanwhile, this Storify archive of the Computers and Writing tweets from session #e13 hints at what it was like to be on the backchannel…
Here are the slides for the half-day workshop I presented with my colleagues, Laura Patterson and Christine Cusick.
The North Quad Residential Complex at the University of Michigan is the ideal place for a conference on Computers and Writing. I’ll do my part to fetishize the awesome people-focused technology in this place. A team from Seton Hill University (Laura Patterson, Christine Cusick, and I) gave a workshop on teaching writing with iPads. I…
A few weeks ago, I bought an audio recording of Great Expectations from thebestaudiobooks.com. I bought it from a handheld iOS device, and so I when I received the download link by email, I didn’t download it right away. The next time I was sitting at my laptop and remembered the link, it had expired.…
[View the story “Making Writing Socially Engaging: Asking Why New Media Draws Us In” on Storify]
Bradley Dilger’s talk from this morning’s Computers and Writing town hall. Reading code means language awareness — knowing how to read code, and where to find it, but also the different forms it comes in. We think first about markup and source code, but we need to consider standards, specificiations, documentation, APIs, and other texts…
In a way, Bug Chucker also suffers from the same direction problems most were able to overcome with the original Myst. Experimentation was as vital in that as it is in Bug Chucker and the senselessness of testing is every bit as grating. You’re never sure if what you’re doing is right. End of the day, I look…
The key point here is that all sellers now get a 30% commission and Apple now wants a 30% fee, which is all of our gross margin and then some. The six largest publishers have now all adopted the agency model. These publishers account for nearly 90% of all ebooks sold. Random House was the…