This class is unique in many ways, the most prominent is that students learn how to create new media resources for education. As Gee noted, “When people learn to play video games, they are learning a new literacy” (2003, p. 16). In this course students must develop an instructional game where all game elements are…
Reflections on Keys for Writers (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) I’m paging through Ann Raimes’s Keys for Writers, which I used to use when I taught freshman comp at my previous job, and which I’m coming back to in the fall as Seton Hill offers a new “Basic Composition” course for the first time. (Our freshman writing offering…
When a young St. Paul boy got to pick the theme for his third birthday party, he didn’t pick Nemo or the Wiggles or Dora the Explorer. He didn’t even pick his favorite sports team. Henry Schally picked “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer”. His mother, Jennifer Schally, designed party hats complete with pictures of the…
Teenagers, in particular, provide a moving target for Internet researchers, remarks psychologist Kaveri Subrahmanyam of California State University in Los Angeles. “By the time you publish research on one type of Internet use, such as blogging, teenagers have moved on to something new, such as myspace,” she says, with a resigned chuckle. —Bruce Bower —Growing…
Keillor’s humor has always been a bit of a puzzle: What is its irony/sincerity ratio? Is he mocking Midwesterners or mocking the rest of us via Midwesterners? In 1985, when Time magazine called Keillor the funniest man in America, Bill Cosby reportedly said, “That’s true if you’re a pilgrim.” A decade later, a cartoon version…
A 14-year-old girl who says she was sexually assaulted by another user of MySpace.com sued the social networking Web site Monday, claiming it does not take sufficient steps to protect underage members. —Girl, 14, Sues MySpace.com Alleging Assault (AP|MyWay) Similar:Two classes will turn in final revisions at midnight Sunday, and final multimedia project…Still plenty of work…
“The number of term papers assigned over the years has decreased significantly,” said Herman Clay, director of history and social sciences at Los Angeles Unified School District. Instead, Los Angeles teachers are assigning more in-class written exams, oral reports with visual aids and PowerPoint presentations, said Clay, a former principal of Van Nuys High School.…
In mid-May, the difference between the student summer and the professor summer seemed vast to me. One approaches the student summer the way Evel Knievel approaches a line of Ford Mustangs — a burst of frenzied acceleration as one heads up the ramp of stress and procrastination, a brief moment of giddy release as one…
DUBLIN — Professor Hanlon O’Faolin, once called “mad” at the Royal Irish Academy for attempting to reanimate the traditional body of Celtic folktales with the power of elcectic multilingual puns, is readying his apoplectic Bloomsday Device for activation on June 16. “Yes! Yes, they laughed at me yes but now yes I will make them…
The whole idea of episodic stories was born in the 19th century when the printing press made cheap magazines possible. Writers like Charles Dickens hit upon the idea of delivering a big story in weekly chunks, each with a cliffhanger to keep the audience in anticipation. (The cliffhanger is essentially a technological invention — a…
Perched on the edge of a white grand piano and decked out in a full-length evening gown, the former CBS and CNN anchorwoman [Connie Chung] warbled a farewell song that put down Dan Rather (with whom she co-anchored the CBS news in the early 1990s), her husband and cable TV – all at the same…
Hollywood knows that it needs new ideas. The games industry doesn’t know. Hollywood goes out of its way to provide itself with a seed stock of new talent and ideas, the games industry doesn’t. Hollywood spends an enormous amount of money supporting colleges and universities, and training programs at those settings. The games industry does…
—Weblog: een doe-het-zelf medium — Chronologische ordening in de informatiechaos? I’m assuming the language of this site is Dutch. At the bottom is a list of over 100 early articles about blogging, most of them popular (rather than academic) and most of them in English. Just blogging it for future reference. Lots to learn here.…
Do you have what it takes to create a LiveJournal? Well, ask yourself this question: Are you able to put words together? Not in complete, grammatical sentences, mind you. Are you able to take a word and another word and place them one after each other? Then you’re set! —Lore Sjöberg —You and Your LiveJournal…
Mr. Wales said that he gets about 10 e-mail messages a week from students who complain that Wikipedia has gotten them into academic hot water. “They say, “Please help me. I got an F on my paper because I cited Wikipedia’” and the information turned out to be wrong, he says. But he said he…
Curious about the candidate, Ms. Homayoun went to her page on Facebook. She found explicit photographs and commentary about the student’s sexual escapades, drinking and pot smoking, including testimonials from friends. Among the pictures were shots of the young woman passed out after drinking. “I was just shocked by the amount of stuff that she…
What McGuirk said he’d rather see is administrators using Facebook to get students thinking about how they want to craft their public persona. One picture McGuirk displayed was from the profile of a Fitchburg student pointing a gun at another person. The gun turned out to be a water gun, but McGuirk said he had…
This image, modified from John Speed’s map of Yorkshire, England shows the walled city of York — the site of the brilliant annual spectacle known to its medieval performers and spectators as the “Corpus Christi Play”. Dozens of short plays, mounted on pageant wagons, began with a performance at the Trinity Priory (red dot, lower…
Vaporizing VR Hardware (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Last year, my brother-in-law asked me what I would do with a bunch of virtual reality gear his employer had packed in crates in a warehouse. VR headsets, sensors, software to get them working together, and computers to run them all — enough to fill “a big closet.” I started…
Programming games is an activity. A programming language is a kind of thing. Inform 7 is a kind of programming language. It is either the single-most important advance in interactive fiction in a decade, or an interesting idea doomed to fail. —Liza Daily —Natural Language Game Programming with Inform 7 (OnLamp.com) I’ve been teaching myself Inform…