In an exploratory, ungraded in-class activity yesterday, I introduced students in my upper-level English seminar to code. Yes, there was some coercion, given the realities of the education system, and some students may have preferred a lecture or more structured format, but I tried to invoke community and play. How successful was I? Too early…
The number and scale of the apparently unexamined assumptions in this comment gave me pause. This coding business baffles me. I recently tried out an online how to code course and lost the will to live after lesson 3. Surely it is not beyond the wit of IT technicians to invent a programme which translates…
With rare exceptions, schools currently treat the digital revolution as if it never happened. Computers, more often than not, still sit in dedicated rooms, accessible only with adult supervision. … When students step out the door of the institution called school today, they step into a learning environment … in which one is free to…
I just found out that Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) is rejecting my new manifesto Stop Stealing Dreams and won’t carry it in their store because inside the manifesto are links to buy the books I mention in the bibliography. Quoting here from their note to me, rejecting the book: “Multiple links to Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) store.…
Atari’s Pong Indie Developer Challenge seeks to get all entrants to give away game ideas to Atari that Atari can then exploit, and the entrant relinquishes all further interest in the idea. Atari then selects 20 “semi-finalists” to put months of work into building out their ideas into playable versions that Atari has full ownership…
Visitors using personal computers spent an average of about three minutes a month on Google+ between September and January, versus six to seven hours on Facebook each month over the same period, according to comScore, which didn’t have data on mobile usage. via The Mounting Minuses at Google+ – WSJ.com. Similar:The Internet Is RottingI do…
It’s tempting to leave the story there, and to let the hypernovel, or whatever you want to call it, become part of the technological imagination of the past, like the flying car. But I believe that the promise of hypertext fiction is worth pursuing, even now, or maybe especially now. On the one hand, e-books…
“Hypertext.” When I was a college student, I was obsessed with the idea that, some day, we would all be creating and consuming information— not just information, but literature—via portable devices like cell phones, when the hyperlink might become as central to reading and writing as the sentence. Since then, that day has come and gone. There…
Yesterday, I sketched a chair I found at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art’s “The Art of Seating” exhibit. I had a spare hour, and threw together this Blender 3D model, and let the simulation render overnight. I only sketched it from one angle, so it’s fair to say this rendering is inspired by the…
And it’s easier to avoid what is, to many, a very painful truth: Going offline is no longer a realistic option. Sure, we can unplug for an hour, a day, or even a week, but it’s not like you can permanently shut off the challenges of our online existence. The offline world is now utterly…
After my daughter’s theater workshop, I took her up the street for a leisurely tour of the Westmoreland Museum of American Art‘s current exhibit, “The Art of Seating: 200 Years of American Design.” Most chairs encountered throughout the day define themselves fairly simply – a place at the family table, a comfortable spot with a…
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” “At a time like this that’s all you can think to say?” “Nonsense. You’re only saying that because no one ever has.” —McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: List: Lines from The Princess Bride that Double as Comments on Freshman Composition Papers..…
The street artist Shepard Fairey, whose “Hope” campaign poster of Barack Obama became an enduring symbol of his last presidential campaign, pleaded guilty Friday to a charge stemming from his misconduct in trying to bolster claims in a lawsuit over which photograph had been used as a basis for the poster. Shepard Fairey Pleads Guilty Over…
An interesting thing to read when I find myself awake in the middle of the night. In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech published a seminal paper, drawn from 16 years of research, revealing a wealth of historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct chunks. His book At Day’s Close: Night…
via Brain-Dead Teen, Only Capable Of Rolling Eyes And Texting, To Be Euthanized – YouTube. Similar:The Future of College Is Facebook Meme GroupsInteresting to see how large groups of c…AcademiaThe Case for Breaking Up With Your ParentsI already felt fairly independent from m…AcademiaAmazing McDonald's "Maestro Burger" CommercialJaw-dropping. So creative and joyful. …AestheticsRichard Halloran / Owns…
A longer-than-usual introduction to a reading assignment in my “Media and Culture” class turned into a useful opportunity to reflect. We are all busy people; yet somehow, many people who say they are too busy to take on another task spend hours reading, interpreting, and debating Harry Potter; some post stop-motion Lego spoofs; some do…
Dolores Hart kissed Elvis Presley in her first film, starred in nine more movies within six years, and then gave it all up to become a nun. On Sunday, she returns to Hollywood to attend the Academy Awards, where a new film about her is up for best documentary short. via Dolores Hart, who kissed Elvis…
When the Kindle contract for one of the country’s largest book distributors, the Independent Publishers Group, came up for renewal, Amazon saw a chance to gain some ground at I.P.G.’s expense. “They decided they wanted me to change my terms,” said Mark Suchomel, president of the Chicago-based I.P.G. “It wasn’t reasonable. There’s only so far…
Useless code and comments in code—these are the zombie figures of software. They serve no purpose in a program’s execution, but they exude what Mark Marino calls extra-functional significance. They have meaning beyond the program. They speak not to the machine or the compiler, but to a different audience, another reader. In software development, that…
There are of course emotional consequences for becoming married. Lines 1167-1172: if( age >= 0.85 ) { dieSpouse(); } if( age >= 0.95 ) { diePlayer(); } This is the most famous, emotionally manipulative part of Passage. Those six lines are basically the reason we study this game at all. —Poking around in Passage |…