Lessons Learned in Playful Game Design – ProfHacker – The Chronicle of Higher Education

Lessons Learned in Playful Game Design – ProfHacker – The Chronicle of Higher Education. Similar:100 Careers for English MajorsAnyone with an English degree will tell …AcademiaKitchen utensils for my steampunk villain's hideout. #Blender3D. There’s nothing particularly steampu…AestheticsThe dangers of 'character education' in universitiesAs the authors depressingly note, “the U…AcademiaDefiant (#StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch, Season 3, Episode…

“Code on a Grecian Urn”: Humanists attempt to articulate the cultural value of programming

One of my favorite comments from last year’s communal exploration of the source code for Colossal Cave Adventure. Stephen Ramsay writes: I’m going to call it the “Code on a Grecian Urn” problem. Let me begin by calling attention to Nick Montfort’s wonderfully pithy note at the end of Week 1:”Hm, I don’t know. The…

Pope’s Remarks Recall the Nazi War on Christ

An article that addresses some under-examined stereotypes (smears?), while also pointing out some thoughtful alternatives. The Catholic Church, for example, has often been attacked as doing too little to help the Jews during the Holocaust. Yet on July 19, 1933, the Catholic periodical America published a strong article condemning Nazi persecution of the Jews. Dark…

Bank of America Gets Pad Locked After Homeowner Forecloses On It | digtriad.com

Have you heard the one about a homeowner foreclosing on a bank? via Bank of America Gets Pad Locked After Homeowner Forecloses On It Similar:In Pittsburgh, science gets playfulImagine: sharing a secret with a friend …Aesthetics'The Meatball: Not a Funny Rhyme' says Peter Jerz, age 5-3/4; or, Child Traumatized by 'On…I went into the office…

USDA’s MyPlate – Home page

I have mostly a good first impression of the website touting MyPlate, the USDA’s replacement for the food pyramid. It wasn’t entirely clear that the items on the plate were clickable — probably because the graphic treatment of the plate resembles a button, and my brain said to me, “Oh, that’s a plate, how cute”…

Google launches +1, a new social step | Deep Tech – CNET News

Google, having failed to out-Facebook Facebook and to out-Twitter Twitter with Buzz, began a more modest attempt today to build social-networking features into its Web presence: the +1 button. —Google launches +1, a new social step | Deep Tech – CNET News. Similar:How Mickey Mouse Evades the Public DomainI get my fill of Disney pretty…

WHO: Cell phone use can increase possible cancer risk – CNN.com

Neurosurgeon and CNN chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta says Tuesday’s announcement, “dealt a blow to those who have long said, ‘There is no possible mechanism for cell phones to cause cancer.’ By classifying cell phones as a possible carcinogen, they also seem to be tacitly admitting a mechanism could exist.” Manufacturers of many popular…

The Nature of E.B. White – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education

During my research into the inspirations for and the writing of Charlotte’s Web, which took me back to White’s early childhood, I was intrigued by many aspects of his personality: his anxieties and hypochondria, his passionate defense of free speech and civil liberties, his one-man campaign for world government. But nothing else about him caught…

Facebook, Twitter Aren’t Responsible For Your Online Behavior – Techland – TIME.com

There will never be an easier way to break this to you other than to just say it: Facebook is not your friend. It’s a business. Repeat this to yourself until it begins to sink deep within in your social-loving brain cells. “Facebook is not your friend. It’s a business.” Laws on Internet activity and…

Why I Will Never, Ever Hire A “Social Media Expert”

I do still see value in teaching students how to blog, precisely because academic blogging (as practiced by academics) involves reflection, citation of sources, interaction with archived posts from the past and current posts by peers on other blogs. Blogging, as a genre, extends beyond using any one piece of software. Being an “expert” on…

What are Your English Students Reading Right Now? | Learning by the Book

An interesting snapshot of what books some profs are teaching in thier lit classes, and why. I freely admit that the literary canon could still use some work, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t celebrate the progress that’s already been made. For this project, I e-mailed a litany of professors in both English and some…

Soldier surprises daughter with reunion at school

Students who are learning news writing for the first time sometimes overuse phrases like “so-and-so told reporters” or “when asked about X, so-and-so said…” Readers only encounter those phrases in journalism, so when students are new to news writing, they tend to reach for these phrases (and similar ones such as using “this reporter” as…

The Shifting Media Landscape: Intelligent Gaming And Dumbed Down Films – PSFK

Portal 2 is essentially a demented series of puzzles – like being stuck inside a physics-based logic problem designed by the Python team; LA Noire is a trad adventure game. Adventure games used to be as close as gaming got to fiction. They started out as interactive text-based shaggy dog stories (a prime example being…

Post Gazette Corrects Headline of Seton Hill iPad Followup

Everyone makes mistakes. As a student journalist, I completely muffed the last name of a faculty member I was assigned to interview. (A few years later, I found myself working a PR job, with that guy as my supervisor. It’s a small world.) So, with the full understanding that I am the pot calling the…

Overusing the Em Dash (Slate)

The problem with the dash—as you may have noticed!—is that it discourages truly efficient writing. It also—and this might be its worst sin—disrupts the flow of a sentence. Don’t you find it annoying—and you can tell me if you do, I won’t be hurt—when a writer inserts a thought into the midst of another one…

For Seton Hall Hill students and professors, iPads open new paths

Because the headline gets the name of the school wrong, it’s a little hard for me to assess this objectively. I’m glad Katie got so much space to share her experiences, and very glad this story mentions the importance of training and tech support. The story of my students reading Emerson’s Nature is a little…

NASA’s Spirit Rover Completes Mission on Mars

If by “completes mission” you mean “makes us all sad by dying,” well, okay. It is not scientific or logical that I am sad because a cool little robot is dead on another planet, but it is human. This press release from NASA suggests that PR professionals are also apparently living on another planet, where…

Working Towards a Resolution

Looks like all the content has been removed from literacyintheclassroom.com. This is good news for the other bloggers, who, like me, had no idea that entire blog posts were being republished by jacksonfish.com in order to support an ad for astorybeforebed.com. I am waiting to see whether jacksonfish.com actually publishes the comment that I left…

Dear Jacksonfish.com: Please contact me to discuss your plans for compensating me for this use of my intellectual property.

Here’s a comment I left on the jacksonfish.com website. Hello. I’m a blogger who was surprised to find that your site, literacyintheclassroom.com, scrapes my RSS feed and republishes my content in order to serve up ads for astorybeforebed.com. At least three of the bloggers whose content appears on that site did not give you permission.…

‘Tears in Space Don’t Run Down Your Face’ : Discovery News

That line sounds like the title of a great blues song. The second verse isn’t quite so poetic. “Tears in space don’t run down your face,” he said, according to lead spacewalk officer Allison Bollinger who described the problem Feustel encountered when out on the spacewalk with astronaut Mike Fincke. “They actually kind of conglomerate…