We looked at every story we geotargeted during the months of July, August, and September 2012, focusing on the ones that the localized NPR Facebook following liked, shared, and commented on at a high rate. From this group of successful stories, we identified similarities which allowed us to create nine distinct content categories. We…
The Irish have a weakness for puns, and this is as evident in the Book of Kells as it is in Finnegans Wake, although in the former the puns are for the most part visual, for no monk would think to tamper with the Gospel texts…. Thus on the recto of folio 180, a line of…
The Hobbit stood out from the adventure games of the day in three ways, the first of which was its use of graphics. Many scenes in the game included a colour image that may have drawn at painfully slow speed but still offered a far richer experience than the text-only adventures of the day. The second…
Current US law extends copyright protection for 70 years after the date of the author’s death. (Corporate “works-for-hire” are copyrighted for 95 years after publication.) But prior to the 1976 Copyright Act (which became effective in 1978), the maximum copyright term was 56 years (an initial term of 28 years, renewable for another 28 years). Under those…
I asked my 10yo why she was moping. “Because I don’t want to be a dancing mushroom,” she said, in a tone that added an unspoken “duh!” Like most of her theater friends, she is on pins and needles, waiting for Stage Right to announce the cast list for next month’s production of Annie “What…
My favorite story comes from the week I held my office hours in the Brother Gorch Pool Hall. Named for the Congregation of the Holy Cross monk who spent decades in charge of our student center and sometimes played pool with students, it was the perfect location for office hours the week we discussed William…
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The 18th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition has ended. Congratulations to Marco Innocenti, whose “Andromeda Apocalypse” took first place! The top three games were: Andromeda Apocalypse, by Marco Innocenti Eurydice, by Anonymous Guilded Youth, by Jim Munroe The winners of the Miss Congeniality contest were: Guilded Youth, by Jim Munroe Escape From Summerland, by Joey Jones…
Wonderful story! I still remember that chilly December day, sitting in science class. I’d finished a worksheet early and decided to get a TIME for Kids magazine off of Mrs. Estevez’s bookshelf. It was the 2008 Invention Issue, but that wasn’t the only thing that caught my eye. In the magazine, there was an article…
It’s not surprising, then, that being a woman in geek culture was for a long time a profoundly gender-deviant act. “Girl” and “geek” were a zero-sum dichotomy: to claim space in one, you had to relinquish equivalent claim to the other. Recently, though, there’s been a dramatic change: a sudden surge not only in the…
A handful of vignettes communicating the point that mobile use of the Web is on the rise. It’s a challenge to teach students everything that will truly benefit them in a changing world, so for now all I can do is touch on how to use CSS to deliver different versions of a website for…
Have I mentioned lately that I have some really awesome students? Here’s a narrated screencast, presenting a progress report on a term project that involves programming in Inform 7 to create a text-adventure game designed to teach student journalists how to cover a campus event. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKxPi3L6aDs This is what a 21st-century English major can do,…
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It’s a prototypical Silicon Valley ethos, with one exception: The Khan Academy, which features 3,400 short instructional videos along with interactive quizzes and tools for teachers to chart student progress, is a nonprofit, boasting a mission of “a free world-class education for anyone anywhere.” There is no employee equity; there will be no IPO;…
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On the mobile version of my WordPress website, I made the subtlest stylesheet tweaks — adjusting the date text a few pixels to the right to align with the title text, resizing the comment box so that it fits on the screen, adjusting the whitespace ever so slightly. Most of the world will never notice…
Whether you are trying to raise money for your business or just want to perfect your business strategy, a solid elevator pitch is an essential tool for achieving your goals. An elevator pitch can be delivered either verbally, ideally in 60 seconds or less, or as a one-page overview of your business. Think of the…
I don’t text message much. As my kids (age 10 and 14) have become more socially active, and as I find myself volunteering and mentoring for their activities and coordinating with the parents of their peers, I find myself texting more. But it’s not my preferred medium. In countries around the world, text-message traffic has…