See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
Seton Hill English major Theresa Conley describes capturing poetry inspiration with her iPad, and my colleague Laura Patterson describes how she uses the iPad to help students plan their writing. From a collection of clips on the website iPad on the HIll.
Recently I noticed a cluster of student blogs on interactive fiction. Interactive Fiction: Literature or Not? My Experiences with Interactive Fiction IF Can Be Quite the Process
Must… mark papers… must resist downloading Blender 2.55. The Blender Foundation and online developer community is proud to present Blender 2.55 Beta. This release is the third official beta release of the Blender 2.5 series, representing the culmination of many years of redesign and development work. This version is called a “Beta” because it’s now…
I’ve been waiting quite a while to be able to blog this campus newspaper story about Jason Scott’s visit to Seton Hill. Unlike today’s traditional videogames, which are jam-packed with high-resolution graphics, text adventure games force players to utilize their imaginations. Also known as interactive fiction, these were the precursors for some of the most…
Posted to Kickstarter at midnight. Not quite 8 hours later, Andrew Plotkin was already halfway there. His pitch has great production values, which I’m sure is part of what has inspired so much confidence.
Urlesque
On November 1st, my longtime favorite RSS reader website, Bloglines.com, will be kaput. It’s being put down by its corporate master, Ask.com. You know, that other search engine that no one uses. The one that used to be Ask Jeeves, with that happy little butler…. Flash back a year ago: my good friend over at…
This entry comes from a podcast sponsored by a Lutheran ministry group. At about 11 minutes in, the presenters discuss a handout that was originally submitted by a student, but that I have continued to maintain over the years. What kind of e-mailer are you? – Is your electronic correspondence short and to the point,…
I bought far more eBooks on impulse when they were all $9.99. When they break above $10, I have to think before I buy, and I buy less often. The skirmish over prices is possible because of deals that publishers negotiated with Amazon this year that allowed the publishers to set their own prices on…
Documentary filmmaker Jason Scott will present GET LAMP, a documentary on word-driven computer games, at Seton Hill University, 7-10pm Tuesday (Oct 5). Scott is a digital entrepreneur with a Twitter account devoted to his cat Sockington (with nearly 1.5 million followers). He regularly gives convention speeches on such topics as Wikipedia and digital archiving. GET…
Like the labor-activist plays of the 1930s, where characters never face any problems that can’t be fixed by joining the Communist Party (or, at least, a union), Wired knows of no problem that can’t be solved by a geeky application of technology. Students in Seton Hill’s New Media Journalism program are doing pretty well on…
OpenOffice.org is (was?) an amazing, free alternative to Microsoft Office, that was originally developed by Sun Microsystems. If the geeky details don’t excite you, what all this means is that instead of being a corporation’s neglected project, the legal groundwork is being set so that enthusiastic volunteers can develop the project according to the needs…
Google News made its debut on September 22, 2002, after several months of experiments with ranking and organizing technology by Krishna Bharat, who was working on Google Product Search at the time of the attacks on New York and Washington, D.C., on September 11, 2001. A self-described “news junkie,” Bharat found it difficult in the…
There’s already plenty of redirect overhead in places where you don’t really think about it. For example: Every time you click on a search result in Google or Bing there’s an intermediate step via Google’s servers (or Bing’s) before you’re redirected to the real target site. Every time you click on a Feedburner RSS headline…
Part of the take-home message, that applies equally to my own children and the college students I’m teaching right now. Before you can master a device, program or invention, it will be superseded; you will always be a beginner. Get good at it. Be suspicious of any technology that requires walls. If you can fix…
Still, the provost says that even if only a slim percentage of students actually renounce Facebook and Twitter for the week, the project will have been a success, if only because of the conversations it has started. The university never expected full abstinence from students, Darr says, nor was it trying to conduct a scientific…
In short, instead of replacing traditional news platforms, Americans are increasingly integrating new technologies into their news consumption habits. More than a third (36%) of Americans say they got news from both digital and traditional sources yesterday, just shy of the number who relied solely on traditional sources (39%). Only 9% of Americans got news…
Awful, awful Apple TV ads.
Anytime you post online, you publish. Anything you say or do that might be posted by someone else reflects upon that brand that you’ll be working so hard to build. Don’t undercut your hard work with moments of Facebook foolishness. Nor should you stop reporting when you surf for fun online. Stories can emerge from…
It wasn’t just the blog, but the fact that the student was entrepreneurial and dedicated. In the end, the blog honed a lot of my online skills and was an excellent precursor to the professional world. Additionally, because I was covering the very school I was attending, the blog served as a bridge from my…