An Academic Conference Where YOU are the Hero: Interactive Fiction in Print and Online

I wish I had known about this in advance! VuPop. Similar:Two Steps Down the Interactive Fiction RoadWonderfully detailed analysis of two gro…AestheticsT. S. Eliot and his Jellicle CatsLike Caryn Thurman, I came to Cats (the …CultureBoston Herald Guild Members Boycotting Twitter After Reporter SuspendedMembers of the Herald’s editorial guild …Current_EventsDaughter Carolyn plays Cherry in Prime Stage's…

Criminal Code: Procedural Logic and Rhetorical Excess in Videogames

Great example of the application of well-established humanities critical processes to the analysis of a technological artifact. Of all the possible options in the real world — increasing funding for education, reducing overcrowded housing, building mixed use developments, creating employment opportunities, and so on — it’s the presence of the police that lowers crime in…

Office Hours Are Obsolete

I have nothing against holding office hours. If no students show up, I just use the time to answer emails or check my gradebook and reach out to students who are falling behind. My office is also in a somewhat out-of-the-way place — at least, so students tell me. A colleague ends the first day…

Astronauts cloaked Klingon space patch: Star Trek-inspired emblem revealed

The current commander of the International Space Station initially designed a mission badge that paid homage to Klingons. Too bad that design didn’t fly. Swanson, who currently is commander of the International Space Station, collaborated with his daughter to create an insignia for the outpost’s Expedition 40 crew. What he and his fellow astronauts and…

Digital Storytelling: Empower the Multimodal Writing Classroom with Scratch

How can the busy writing teacher interested in new media storytelling deepen the pedagogical value of multimodality in the classroom — especially for students with limited programming experience? Students who learn to design, code, revise, and publish multimodal texts are empowered by their encounters with technology, and can be more critical of the interfaces they…

Even in the U.S., Chinese Students May Have Tiananmen ‘Amnesia’

But now that he was at college in America, someone had mentioned Tiananmen, a friend. And he went online, to YouTube and Google, and pulled up videos and photographs from 25 years earlier, images not easily accessible behind China’s Great Firewall, as its Internet-censoring regime is called. He kept looking at one, he said, “the…

It’s alive! What NPR learned from turning its @nprnews Twitter account from a bot into a human

My student journalists tell me they learn a lot from assignments that involve livetweeting events. It’s encouraging when students ramp up the social media work on their own, outside of classroom assignments, as part of their work for The Setonian Online. This article offers a helpful reminder that even the pros have to experiment in…

Vintage TV News Coverage of Pac-Man

Vintage TV news coverage of Pac-Man. Similar:A Brief Tour of the Digital Delights of the Folger Shakespeare LibraryBut luckily for you, one does not need t…CybercultureMemorizer (Memorization Tool)A Midsummer castmate shared a link to th…CybercultureIs Google Making Us Stupid?Nicholas Carr, in The Atlantic: As the …BooksMemory of Wrestler Yukon Eric”The year is around 1952, the dead of…