Call it the Familyhood of the Traveling Interactive Fiction Pants. Even though we all have very different needs, the games fit each of us perfectly. It is not unusual to find all three of us sitting on the sofa, exploring a world and arguing over which direction to go. Every afternoon, it’s like getting…
I have final grades, an annual report, and a video project for a publisher to finish before I unleash my inner nerd and install the latest Inform7 update. (Inform7 is a free programming language and development environment for writing command-line computer games in the spirit of Zork and Colossal Cave Adventure.) This release is a…
See, it’s funny, because poets need to suffer for their art, and people who get well-paying jobs are too isolated from their own existences to be able to write meaningfully about longing and desire and grit, right? (It’s satire, folks.) Petroleum giant Exxon Mobil is one of many Fortune 500 companies that is using innovative…
Be yourself. If have you a bad attitude, change it. People don’t want to remember you as the one who complains, the one who was sloppy, the one who wouldn’t take assignments, etc. They’ll instead want to remember you as the hard worker, the positive/smiling one, the one with the good work ethic.
Joshua Kim, Inside Higher Ed: “Google Classroom is not an LMS. It does not have a grade center, a discussion tool, an assessment engine, or a way to integrate with a Student Information System. (I think). Nobody is going to replace an existing campus LMS with Google Classroom. And yet — “
This is one of the reasons I’ve become more interested in local theater. The dropped lines, unexpected blackouts, and last-minute casting replacements are what makes it so much more engaging to me than a slick professional production. Avatar left me completely numb… yes the visuals were stunning, but I feel much more connected to fantasy…
I realized that each one of these technologies set out to help people do something but consequently grew and changed over time. Each ultimately provided a way for large groups of people to talk about and think about very difficult problems: Microsoft Office: How do we communicate about work? Photoshop: How do we create and…
The B-movie shoddiness of actors and aesthetics in Star Wars is often what critics don’t like. But even setting aside the fact that the effects charm precisely because they’re marvelously fake, there’s something original and profound in the films’ vision of time not as progress, but as a continued borrowing from the past.
I can’t wait for a TV network by and for people with disabilities. The mainstream media still doesn’t get us. Not at all. What’s worse is that the mainstream TV folks keep packaging disability as a dreadful misfortune, something to be overcome with faith or heroism or a howl of victimhood.
The links under your friend’s post got your attention. What the hyperbolic, go-for-the-gut click-baity blurb did to your lizard brain will make steaming blood gush out of your empty eye sockets. Ok, probably not, but still… [A] Facebook official made clear that the company does not apply the same fact-checking standard when offering readers related…
A blogger who had a much worse day than I did writes: Today I finished administering the sixth day of New York State Common Core assessments. I was a facilitator in a process that made my 10 year old students struggle,to the point of frustration, to complete yet another 90 minute test. I sat by…
I’m thinking of asking students in a media class next term to make a video resume. Zulic came across one applicant for a marketing job who had posted a three-minute YouTube video highlighting some of her prior work, along with her future ambitions. She got the job, beating out hundreds of others. Such video resumes…
I enjoyed the essay, but the truths it imparts are hardly confined to the coding profession. Any specialized field that looks contained, ordered, and routinized from the outside is going to look more porous, chaotic, and ephemeral from the inside. What this programmer says about Good Code is also true of Good Teaching, or Good…
“According to professor of theory of knowledge Leon Trotsky, privacy is the most fundamental report of humankind. Radiation on advocates to an orator transmits gamma rays of parsimony to implode.’’ ANY NATIVE speaker over age 5 knows that the preceding sentences are incoherent babble. But a computer essay grader, like the one Massachusetts may use…
Other signs of the digital age: we don’t say penned a novel or inked a book deal. #APStyleChat Twitter. Similar:The 19th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition Welcome to IFComp 2013, the competit…Current_EventsText Wrangler Discontinued (Free Mac Text Editor)I still miss Notepad++, a Windows tool o…Current_EventsIt started with a ride down an escalator and ended with a…
Google said Wednesday that it stopped scanning student Gmail accounts for advertising purposes after the practice was scrutinized during a recent court case. | Google Apps for Education, a free service used by more than 30 million students, teachers and administrators, offers Gmail email accounts, as well as calendars, cloud storage and document creation.Google Stops…
We could hardly stop reading just before the big final battle. And really, how could I stop reading until we found out how the battle turned out. And once the battle ended, could we stop before we found out whehter Taran finally proposes to Eilonwy? So it was a quarter past midnight when we finally…
Dear organization from my past that just sent me a scolding email for missing an “important deadline” for making your job easier: How nice that you have “arranged a deadline extension” for me so that I can “finalize this important… project by verifying [my] data.” Perhaps this is all a “critical concern” to you, but in…
I got a text message a couple days ago.. would I be available Saturday night to play a judge in a one-act play based (very loosely) on local history? Sure, why not? Similar:Why We Dug AtariGame collectors have their story, too. F…CybercultureAn open letter to Trump from the US press corpsThis is the message I’ve…
Forced Google+ integration in Google Reader and YouTube, both of which had strong communities of their own beforehand, are prime examples of how Google+ fostered hostility rather than goodwill. The time is right for Google to rethink its approach. I still like the idea of Circles as a way of controlling who sees what, but…