I was a sophomore in college when Star Trek: The Next Generation aired. Most of the guys in my suite watched the premiere episode, and then sampled a few after that. Then, the guy who owned the TV wanted to watch basketball instead, and after a few attempts to find a place to watch Trek,…
Today the most consistently pleasurable pursuit in my life is playing video games. Unfortunately, the least useful and financially solvent pursuit in my life is also playing video games. For instance, I woke up this morning at 8am fully intending to write this article. Instead, I played Left 4 Dead until 5pm. The rest of…
The graders working for EduMetry, based in a Virginia suburb of Washington, are concentrated in India, Singapore, and Malaysia, along with some in the United States and elsewhere. They do their work online and communicate with professors via e-mail. The company advertises that its graders hold advanced degrees and can quickly turn around assignments with…
Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age (1995) features a fantastic interactive book that educates a neglected guttersnipe, turning her into a capable, intelligent independent heroine. The iPad doesn’t quite match the vision of that book, but this video is still amazing. Similar:A fleet of drones performs a light show in Ireland for St. Patrick's Day. I can’t…
At a faculty senate meeting, the provost announced that all faculty on an annual contract will receive iPads before summer break. She asked us all to come up with a meaningful way to incorporate iPads in at least one course in the fall and one course in the spring. The iPads are not just for…
“Those big, heavy textbooks that kids go around with in their backpacks are going to be a thing of the past,” said Mary Ann Gawelek, vice president of academic affairs at Seton Hill, which is giving iPads to its 2,100 students and 300 faculty members beginning this fall. —Wired But we don’t have 300 faculty…
Jason Kottke uses standard Latin typesetting dummy text to express his opinion of the technology media’s coverage of the iPad. Hilarious! Lorem iPad dolor sit amet, consectetur Apple adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua Shenzhen. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud no multi-tasking ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip…
It’s great to see the more current interactive fiction works getting critical attention. The “text adventure” genre has come a long way from mazes and inventory puzzles; these works emphasize the literary effects that can only be generated by manipulating the player’s sense of agency. This study examines how themes, conventions and concepts in Gothic…
A pre-release critique of the tablet culture. Compared to other kinds of information that computers process today, text has an exceptionally small footprint. With the arrival of the tablet, we have crossed a critical threshold: Where text is concerned, we effectively have infinite computational resources, connectivity, and portability. For decades, futurists have dreamed of the…
Yes, it’s stunning to watch the spinning images in the table of elements ebook that comes with the iPad. But what does the brave new world of ebooks hold for educational and nonfiction authors? In order for electronic books to live up to their billing, we have to fix a system that is broken: getting permission…
What would our lives be like, in the post-newsprint world, without important cultural expressions like this? Similar:Introduction to The Skin of Our Teeth (optimistic, absurdist metatheater; Thornton Wilder,…https://youtu.be/1okt8MIVTtsAcademiaThomas Jefferson on "newspapers without government" vs "government without newspapers"Those darn founders with their darned re…CulturePeak Performance (ST:TNG Rewatch, Season Two, Episode 21) Riker and his misfit pals…
The iPad is mentioned a couple times during this feature on how wonderful Seton Hill University is. Just kidding. Seton Hill is mentioned twice about a minute into the clip (after the advertisement). Similar:Another day, another 10 square centimeters of #steampunk control panel. #blender3d #blende…AestheticsThe Great Gatsby Character Map SomethingSoSam.AestheticsEco-critical Code Studies: Reconfigurations of nature…
The digital photography course that SHU’s journalism students are supposed to take typically fills up, so that students can’t take the course until they are seniors. That rather defeats the purpose of requiring the course — I was hoping that students who take the course will be able to take photos for the student paper…
Time.com Similar:Curse you, conference proposal word limits. I’m frustrated by these accursed c…AcademiaThis Is What Summer Vacation Is For: Designing a Steampunk Airsloop with Blender 3DSummer vacation means if I am telling my…AestheticsIn May, 2002, I was blogging about… typefaces in period movies; poets Paul Dirac and Ste…In May, 2002, I was blogging about …ArtGame…
Doctorow is a do-it-yourself tech maven who hates the iPad, specifically because it makes it so easy to access online content on Apple’s terms. We don’t own the content we pay for on the iPad, and we aren’t trusted with owning the insides. The way you improve your iPad isn’t to figure out how it…
It’s a scary time. After all, people are learning to make their own iPhone apps to help their films stand out (something Who Shot Mamba by Brian Spaeth is actually doing really well.) Many filmmakers groan at the thought of learning such a complicated skill, or paying someone who has the skill a lot of…
At PAX we debuted the “How to Play Interactive Fiction” postcard. If somebody is sitting down in front of an IF game for the very first time, this card should give him or her an idea of what commands are likely to work — and what commands are *likely* to work. It’s not trying to…
I was told I needed “followers.” These were people who would sign on to receive my messages, or “tweets,” whatever those might turn out to be. I hummed a few bars from “Mockingbird Hill”–Tra-la-la, twittly-deedee–and sacrificed some of my hair at the crossroads, invoking Hermes the Communicator. He duly appeared in the form of media…
Here’s just a sampling… zecool À la Seton Hill University, chaque étudiant aura son iPad http://is.gd/b7hcR (via @willrich45) afujimura たまんないですね！ RT @Techmeme: And so it begins… Seton Hill University to give all students an iPad (@stevensande / TUAW) http://techme.me/=MFZ 24 minutes ago from EchofonIndritMaraku (Giusto per sottolineare quanto qui siamo indietro) Un iPad in regalo…
I can finally post about this. Seton Hill University will give a new Apple iPad to every full-time student in fall 2010. http://www.setonhill.edu/ipad/The word went out on the SHU campus about an important announcement. The room was packed. A familiar face appeared on stage. The wire-rimmed spectacles on the dancers were a nice touch, as…