See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
Robin Burkinshaw has finished Alice and Kev, an interesting exercise in computer-assisted storytelling, using screen shots from The Sims 3 to tell the story of a homeless father and daughter. Originally the story was told serially, with a few posts a week; then there were a few very long gaps, but the story is finished…
The AP recently raised eyebrows last year when it announced its intent to charge bloggers who quote from an AP story, and again more recently when it announced vague plans to track the spread of AP stories through secret embedded codes. The AP’s position is that if search engines are making money delivering customers to…
Course management systems (CMSs), used throughout colleges and universities for presenting online or technology-enhanced classes, are not pedagogically neutral shells for course content. They influence pedagogy by presenting default formats designed to guide the instructor toward creating a course in a certain way. This is particularly true of integrated systems (such as Blackboard/WebCT), but is…
Though moribund today, for decades Usenet was the paper of record for the online world, and its hundreds of millions of “newsgroup” postings chronicle everything from the birth of the web to the rise of Microsoft, as well as more trivial matters. In February 2001, Google rescued that history when it acquired the New York-based…
Walkthrough pifieErrol Download this MP3 Directly
On Wednesday, a federal district court in Los Angeles dismissed Brown’s claim against Electronic Arts for the use of his image in its Madden NFL series. Judge Florence Marie-Cooper essentially found that video games are “expressive works, akin to an expressive painting that depicts celebrity athletes of past and present in a realistic sporting environment.”…
I’ve been a journalist for 27 years, and I love that romantic old notion of the newsroom as much as the next guy. But I recently canceled my two morning papers–The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal–because I got tired of carrying them from the front porch to the recycling bin, sometimes without…
Our students are transcendentalists, but they don’t know it. Speaking metaphorically, Thoreau writes “I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.” Rather than treating children as wild creatures that needed to be tamed and civilized, Thoreau seesorder and meaning in nature, which is threatened, worn down, and buried by civilization.…
When the University announced its Kindle e-reader pilot program last May, administrators seemed cautiously optimistic that the e-readers would both be sustainable and serve as a valuable academic tool. But less than two weeks after 50 students received the free Kindle DX e-readers, many of them said they were dissatisfied and uncomfortable with the devices.…
Videogames may be economically formidable, but they remain a byword for crass, shallow thrills. A game, it’s understood, can look spectacular, but it will have little to offer its audience in the way of values, insights or craftsmanship. It’s a curious and increasingly untenable situation, given that, to the increasingly large percentage of the population…
Okay, I admit it, being known as the academic expert on a singe indie computer game from the 1970s is something like saying “I’m the handsomest one-eyed pirate on this particular ship, today,” which might well be true, but doesn’t exactly mean very much. Still, I’m thrilled that I could be part of Jason Scott’s…
In all media that boasts your byline remain impartial, and don’t do anything stupid. But is it in the best interests of the paper? Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander points out the the Post (along with just about every other mainstream publication) has at times come under fire for being partisan. These guidelines aim to…
Dear MR BAGGINS, Fellow Conspirator, I am Thorin Oakenshield, descendant of Thrain the Old and grandson of Thror who was King under the Mountain. I am writing you to discuss our plans, our ways, means, policy and devices for rescuing our treasure from the dragon Smaug. — Stephen Granade riffs on the Nigerian e-mail scam…
I believe that the underlying facts about the Wikipedia phenomenon — that the general public is actually intelligent, interested in sharing knowledge, interested in getting the facts straight — are so shocking to most old media people that it is literally impossible for them to report on Wikipedia without following a storyline that goes something…
Yes, I interact with students via e-mail and the Web. And computers can be great for teaching when it’s difficult or impossible for students to get to a brick-and-mortar classroom. But for me, teaching involves f2f (there, you see, I’ve gone and used a computer term in a sentence). I want to listen to students…
Silly headline, from a University of Washington press release. Second, fourth and sixth grade children with and without handwriting disabilities were able to write more and faster when using a pen than a keyboard to compose essays, according to new research. The study, headed by Virginia Berninger, a University of Washington professor of educational psychology…
[F]our-year degrees typically require two luxuries Solvig didn’t have: years of time out of the workforce, and a great deal of money. Luckily for Solvig, there were new options available. She went online looking for something that fit her wallet and her time horizon, and an ad caught her eye: a company called StraighterLine was…
Google’s FastFlip is the newest media toy. The service is meant to duplicate the look and feel of perusing a printed publication. The stories are displayed on electronic pages that can be quickly scrolled through by clicking on large arrows on the side instead of a standard Web link that requires waiting several seconds for…
In his Inside Higher Ed blog, Joshua Kim writes: A transformative step that learning technologists can participate in proposing, pushing, guiding, leading, managing and maintaining would be providing a campus-wide blogging platform and institutional aggregation site. Here are some guidelines for what this could look like… Here is the text of a comment I posted:…
U.S. citizens will soon be able to log in to government websites using their Google account, or the URL of their Yahoo profile. It’s a significant embrace of the open and emerging tech standards the Obama administration promised. —Wired