Gameplay in Cow Clicker is insultingly simple — Bogost has described it as “Facebook games distilled to their essence.” Users obtain a cow on which they can click every six hours, and every time they click, they earn more opportunities to click their cow or their friends’ cows. Users can buy custom “premium” cows or…
I’m very happy with yesterday’s update of the Kindle app, which added an inline dictionary. Now I am seriously considering it for assigning class texts. I do wish that the Kindle offered a few more things. The ability to tag or otherwise sort comments, and email just one set of tagged comments (so I could…
This generation doesn’t make phone calls, because everyone is in constant, lightweight contact in so many other ways: texting, chatting, and social-network messaging. And we don’t just have more options than we used to. We have better ones: These new forms of communication have exposed the fact that the voice call is badly designed. It…
(A transcription of the text and scans of photos from a 1972 magazine article about the legendary space combat computer game. Stewart Brand, Rolling Stone.) October, 1972, 8 PM, at Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) Laboratory, moonlit and remote in the foothills above Palo Alto, California. Two dozen of us are jammed in a semi-dark console…
Schedule deadlines as specific tasks, not the ends of phases. Rather than “Content will be completed by 4 April 2010,” state “Review the content over lunch on 4 April 2010.” This ties the deadline to an event at which results must be shown. Mini-deadlines tied to specific events are more powerful than general statements. Making…
The other day I was searching Amazon for a digital edition of the poems of Emily Dickinson, and was pleased to find a digital edition for a few bucks. I know that Project Gutenberg has a decent edition of the original publication of the version her family first published, but the first publication changed her…
If you are [in marketing], Twitter apparently looks like a heaven where brands and people interact constantly, the same way tweeters interact with other people. And every time brands and people interact with each other represents an opportunity to reinforce messaging about that brand. Our tires are safe! Our oil rigs don’t leak! […] However,…
Some college campuses will start seeing fewer students coming to class with a pen and paper — and more carrying iPads. At Seton Hill University, in Greensburg, Pa., every fulltime student, no matter what year they are, will be receiving an Apple iPad when they return to campus this fall. The iPad will be used…
Someone that I knew when we were high school students just e-mailed me to say she had been given an assignment to get a blog started up by the end of September, and she asked for links and reading suggestions so she could understand the basics. English is not her first language, and with a…
Researchers also asked students questions about websites they chose. After using Google to get to a website, this interaction occurred between a researcher and a study participant: Researcher: “What is this website?” Student: “Oh, I don’t know. The first thing that came up.” “Search engine rankings seem extremely important,” Hargittai said. “We found that a…
We use the metaphor of a ladder to show this, with the rungs at the higher end of the ladder indicating a higher level of participation. —Forrester Similar:What Causes the Smell of New & Old Books?Generally, it is the chemical breakdown …Aesthetics'History has treated her badly': Hamnet and the 400-year-old mystery around Shakespeare's …Anyone seen…
Director Peter Berg is expected to soon begin shooting the live-action tentpole based on Hasbro’s naval combat board game. —Variety Boggle. Trouble. Sorry. Similar:Futuristic Acrylic Chair (Blender 3D Animation)Yesterday, I sketched a chair I found at…AestheticsYour Brain on ShakespeareAmusingLego TimelineThe Lego brick system was patented 50 ye…AestheticsNo, Dr. Seuss is not being "banned" or "censored"…
Just a small item. The iPad is about to have its academic chops put to the test this fall in a number of programs around the country. Colleges and universities are looking to adopt the iPad as a collaborative tool, a standardized mobile device to integrate into curriculums, and, in some cases, even a cost-saving…
Good students all, the class was a seminar on “Designing for Effective Change” for the Honors Program, but lacking experience in this sort of approach to instruction, the students wrote to their conception of what I wanted to hear from them. I can’t imagine a more constipated mindset for producing interesting prose. For this class…
The Blender Foundation has announced its release of version 2.53 beta. Blender is a free, open-source 3D animation and game design package. I’ve taught it in the past in my New Media Projects course, but no student has ever chosen a Blender creation for a term project, and some of my textually-minded English majors have…
No, the awesome mascot-based space platformer you cheerily sketched on graph paper when you were supposed to be focused on math homework is not going straight to production. No, in fact, there are not a million page views at the ready for your exhaustive essay on the themes of Silent Hill 2. You will probably…
There is a documentary film on text adventures here. Paths lead off in all directions.>get GET LAMP Similar:Gambit Part 1 (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season 7, Episode 4) Artifact Raiders Raid Artifact…Rewatching ST:TNG I didn’t for a minu…MediaHistorians Admit To Inventing Ancient GreeksI knew it! Busted!! “One night someone …AcademiaFacebook Puts a Downer on UpworthyFacebook Inc.…
How very apt… the answer comes in the form of a flowchart. (10000words.net) Similar:Writing Computer Games with InklewriterIf brass lanterns or slathering-fanged g…CybercultureA trend story about millennials, by The New York Times“When it comes down to it, life is reall…AmusingIn December 1999, I Was Blogging About Joseph Heller, E-Journalism, and Travel WritingIn December 1999, I…
Still reading? You’re probably in a dwindling minority. But no matter: a literary revolution is at hand. First we had slow food, then slow travel. Now, those campaigns are joined by a slow-reading movement – a disparate bunch of academics and intellectuals who want us to take our time while reading, and re-reading. They ask…
Like all of O’Connor’s work, the meaning of a sentence like that expands over time like a sponge. Mystery and Manners is packed with them. It contains talks about the act of writing, about teaching, about the art of raising peacocks, about the South, and Catholicism. But what I value most when I read these…