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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
Below is a screen shot, showing that the spam blog literacyintheclassroom.com has reproduced the entire content of my recent blog entry, in which I complain that literacyintheclassroom.com is a spam blog that reproduces the entire content of my site. Similar:My 11yo, of the opening chapters of a YA novel with an orphan heroineMy 11yo,…
According to preterite, Looks like your site is being scraped by someone associated with Hillel Cooperman and the Jackson Fish Market in Seattle, who themselves are associated with the Children’s Book Council and the iPad-oriented company A Story Before Bed. Seems like a pretty rotten thing to do by a company that trumpets its positive…
A blog called “literacyintheclassroom.com” seems to be scraping the full content of my blog and republishing on their site. If this post shows up on literacyintheclassroom, we can assume a bot is mindlessly reposting whatever it finds on my site, which seriously calls into question what real value literacyintheclassroom offers. If this post does not…
A year after our first usability study of iPad apps, it’s nice to see that iPad user interfaces have become decidedly less wacky. It’s even better to see good uptake of several of our recommendations from last year, including apps with: back buttons, broader use of search, homepages, and direct access to articles by touching…
The industrial age worked hard to separate “work” from “home.” Everything about the common or public schools started in the mid-nineteenth century reinforced that division: from the school bell ringing for each child at the same time of day, of each child entering school at age 6 whether they were ready or not, about sitting…
I’m using the Atahualpa Theme with WPTouch Pro. When I view pages with my iPad, I get a strange double image. Similar:Exploring Myst's Brave New World”We wanted a true persistent world. If y…CybercultureIn November 2001 I was blogging aboutIn November 2001, I was blogging about …AmusingPythagorean Theorem Found On Clay Tablet 1,000 Years Older Than…
Having the same problem with my iPod Touch. divinenanny Member May 22, 2011, 1:13 PM Using WordPress for iOS on an iPhone 4 with iOS 4.3.3 I update posts written on my own WordPress install with pictures taken with the iphone. I open a post, and pick an image from the photo albums to attach…
Honestly, this does not sound good. In the short term, it will only be possible to alter the “flavor text” and not the substance. Since the producers ultimately control both the game world and the TV world, and can therefore nerf a gameworld city that e TV plot needs destroyed, or buff a game world…
I’m hoping that the participants in the “Is Blogging Dead?” panel will aggregate the links to their 3-minute position statements, so that I can add them to this record. In the meanwhile, this Storify archive of the Computers and Writing tweets from session #e13 hints at what it was like to be on the backchannel…
Here are the slides for the half-day workshop I presented with my colleagues, Laura Patterson and Christine Cusick. Similar:Started Making a Journalism Game in TwineFor a long time, I’ve thought about crea…GamesGame Criticism, Why We Need It, and Why Reviews Aren't ItGreg Costikyan on Play This Thing! A re…AcademiaTrump Is Making Journalism Great AgainLong gone…
The North Quad Residential Complex at the University of Michigan is the ideal place for a conference on Computers and Writing. I’ll do my part to fetishize the awesome people-focused technology in this place. A team from Seton Hill University (Laura Patterson, Christine Cusick, and I) gave a workshop on teaching writing with iPads. I…