Jason Scott (who has produced a documentary on BBS culture and is working on one now on interactive fiction) offers a thoughtful analysis of an Atari forum thread that went awry. The problem with a “what do you think about this”, or the hardest portion, is listening to what people say and then waiting until…
Andy Baio offers some forensic digital journalism: From an anonymous source close to the company, I’ve found myself in possession of the “Infocom Drive” — a complete backup of Infocom’s shared network drive from 1989. This is one of the most amazing archives I’ve ever seen, a treasure chest documenting the rise and fall of…
Wired: An enterprising photographer, Eadweard Muybridge, captured a series of snapshots — a filmstrip — of a horse trotting and definitively settled the question in the affirmative. You can see the horse in-motion and check out the geeky tech from this magazine piece on high speed photography. Fast forward 130 years and we can now…
Inside Higher Ed: 1998 was the last time that John Gallaugher, an associate professor of information systems at Boston College’s Carroll School of Management, used a traditional print textbook. He assigned it to his graduate-level introductory course in information systems. The book cost about $150. He also assigned supplemental reading — trade press articles, online…
An article about an entrepreneur who stretches the definition of “book” (International Herald Tribune): Parker has generated more than 200,000 books, as an advanced search on Amazon.com under his publishing company shows, making him, in his own words, “the most published author in the history of the planet.” And he makes money doing it. Among…
This game sounds great. Created by a 14-year-old, says Wired. With Elementeo, we inject fun into education! Welcome to the Elementeo game! In this action-packed game, two or more players wage a chemical war with just one goal in mind – destroy their opponent’s electrons to zero! Armed with their arsenal of elements, compounds, and…
The WashPo ruminates on the social significance of the activities of the brain-eating collegiate undead. The 2005 inaugural Zombies game drew about 70 Goucher students. Since then, as many as 200 have played, making it one of the most popular student activities — even though it’s not an official student activity — among the school’s…
My ten-year-old has wanted to be a scientist since he was four, but he’s bored by math. Paul Lockhart (PDF) helps me understand why. But what do I do now? The difference between math and the other arts, such as music and painting, is that our culture does not recognize it as such. Everyone understands…
My former student Mike Rubino makes a good point about the encrustation of social networking icons that are clogging up the interfaces of content-rich websites. Now, instead of a website having the normal “E-mail this article”; “Print this article”; and the occasional “Digg this article” link, it’s got a slew of other services. You have…
Yesterday was my daughter’s sixth birthday. My wife told me that there was a horrific meltdown at the store when the ice cream cake they picked up did not match the picture in the catalog. Screams, tears, and a half hour of sobbing. Last night, I told my daughter the story of The Birthday Party…
For a second, I really wanted this to be true. Great satire from The Onion. According to Mead’s website, the ruling lines in the grad-school-ruled notebooks will be placed 3.55 millimeters apart, making them “infinitely more practical” for postgraduate work than the 7.1 millimeter college-ruled notebooks. In addition, the standard 1.5-inch top margin normally provided…
The abstract from a psychology conference presentation that argues World of Warcraft lowers the anger levels of players is getting a lot of attention online. The term “sex” (which appears in the title paired with “violence”) seems to mean “gender” in the abstract, so the title may be a bit misleading. I haven’t heard from…
My Intro to Literary Study students read Lynn Truss’s Eats, Shoots and Leaves while I was away at a conference for most of last week. They really seem to enjoy this book. Early on this term, I noticed a critical mass of students who try to make their blog a place to practice writing for…
Someone is going to use this incident as evidence to support the claim that social networking websites are dangerous. Lindsay’s father said the teens attacked her to make a video that might become popular on YouTube, the video-sharing Web site. But the mother of one of the girls arrested said Lindsay had provoked the other…
I’m always a bit nervous about reading any news article with “said to consider” or “possibly” or “just might gonna be” in the headline, but the NYT reports: Over the last decade, CNN has held on-again, off-again talks with both ABC News and CBS News about various joint ventures but during the last several months,…
I’m not a student. I found your web page while looking for a certain use of slashes. I thought maybe you might know something about it. In the legal field, we sometimes use slashes to indicate that there is nothing following the text when there is extra space at the end of a page. An…
Last year, I enjoyed reading In the Clickstream, a speculative blog-based thinkpiece from Mike Edwards, who teaches composition at the U.S. Military Academy. With Mike, I participated in a workshop at the 4Cs, where I got to meet two majors who are also composition instructors. Both my brother and sister work for defense contractors, and…
The Smoking Gun has this snarky story… I’ve changed the inline links so that they point to The Smoking Gun, rather than to the photos the article mentions about): A Pittsburgh couple is suing Google for invasion of privacy, claiming that the web giant’s popular “Street View” mapping feature has made a photo of their…
A good analysis from Cory Doctorow: Imagine how creepy it would be to wander into a co-worker’s cubicle and discover the wall covered with tiny photos of everyone in the office, ranked by “friend” and “foe,” with the top eight friends elevated to a small shrine decorated with Post-It roses and hearts. And yet, there’s…
The Conference on College Composition and Communication is the big annual meeting of college writing instructors. One often encounters technical writing instructors, social scientists, ethnographers, and new media innovators (we had Larry Lessig give a featured address a few years ago), as well as traditional essayists and grammar mavens. It’s the kind of place where…