I‘m looking at a dead pigeon laying on the sidewalk, headless, and I wonder: ?What am I doing here?? —David ThomasDo You Know the Way to San Jose (Buzzcut) So begins David’s coverage of the Game Developer’s Conference, where the most interesting-sounding panel seems to be on “serious games“. I can’t seem to figure out how…
Mike Vitia Blogs the 4Cs (Vitia) Mike Vitia has a good series of blog entries covering several sessions at the 4Cs, including the great panel by Terra, Charlie, and Clancy, of which Mike had this provocative, if vague, observation: “Most of us know that the theories of Landow and Negroponte lie broken and useless: how, then,…
Departures and Arrivials in the Blogosphere The Invisible Adjunct says goodbye. Noam Chomsky says hello. Two links that rocked my world on a Sunday evening, courtesy of CultureCat. Similar:‘One of the great American stories’: the incredible life of playwright August WilsonThe host was Bill Moyers, former White H…BooksWhen a Textbook Plagiarizes Your Student's WorkIn a…
Individuals and groups need to remain vigilant in finding and naming bad science and bad therapy. Our guide isn’t Foucault, but Aristotle, who saw virtue in the mean behavior. No one wants to live in a world in which there is a deficiency of social control. Bad guys need jails. Drug addicts and the mentally…
Of course, the notion that these Web sites have to “count” toward tenure and promotion is one that most directly pertains to a relatively small audience: tenure-track faculty members, particularly those seeking tenure, promotion, or other institutional recognition. These Web sites have value (and thus “count”) for an audience that is much larger than this,…
Andre Torrez has found a way to use some new technology to get in touch with an old friend. He’s been spending a lot of his down time — in airports and waiting for friends — playing old-school Infocom interactive text games like Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. —Daniel Terdiman —Bots Open Door to Gaming…
Remediate The Alamo!Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) I had the pleasure this afternoon of playing hooky from the 4Cs, and accompanying two Canadians on a visit to The Alamo. My wife and I had visited San Antonio (among other Texas cites) during our low-budget honeymoon (10 years ago this July), and I really wished I could have…
My “Computer Connection” section (in a distant corner of the main exhibition hall) was more interactive than I had expected, so I didn’t get to cover all my material — notably this list of “good practices” for using blogs in the classroom. Since a “real” weblog is a license to write whatever and whenever you…
[Grr… the Word file that has my abstract in it won’t open on this public terminal on the convention floor. I’m retyping this from my lecture notes.] When a curricular weblog program was made available to all students, faculty and staff at a small liberal arts university, the students, expected to blog as part of…
Sarah Jane Sloane, “Blog is My Co-Pilot: Blogs in a Graduate Classroom.” Cynthia Cox, “Blogging and the First-Year Composition Classroom” Bonne Smith, “All Along the Blogwatch Tower” Lisa Langstraat, respondent: “In Blog We Trust”Teaching the Blog (CCCC 2004) I wasn’t able to meet Sarah Jane Sloan, whose dissertation on interactive fiction, Interactive Fiction, Virtual Realities, and…
A mattress and box springs stacked near a curb catch the professor’s eye. There is some scrap metal on top of the mattress, along with a few sticks of discarded lumber. He reaches into his pocket and retrieves the small, round magnet attached to his key chain. “This,” he says, “is a scrounger’s most important…
As you’ve probably noticed, the look of this page has been updated. What do you think of the new look? (Please leave your opinion in the comments for this entry. For reference, here’s the old look.) Put a +2, +1, 0, -1, or -2 at top of your comment indicating how you feel. FYI This…
One problem with our effort to sanitize the language of all that might offend is that it leads to lunatic results. Just ask the music reviewer at the Los Angeles Times. Last month he reviewed an opera by Richard Strauss, which he described as “a glorious and goofy pro-life paean.” A diligent copy editor replaced…
If you have an AOL Instant Messenger account, send an IM to InfocomBot or InfocomBot2. I set up an automated bot to play classic Infocom text adventure games from your favorite IM client, T-Mobile Sidekick, or any other device that connects to AIM. It supports “save” and “restore” commands, so you don’t need to lose…
Dennis Jerz, professor at Seton Hill University presented a paper on the history of Adventure, which I believe is acknowledged as the first text-based computer adventure game. I found many concrete suggestions in Jerz’s presentation for those of us looking to develop software to teach expert bodies of knowledge. —Modelling and scaffolding expert thinking (The…
—Technorati’s Speech Bubble Icon (Technorati) What Technorati used to call its “Link Cosmos” appears to have been replaced by “Web Conversations.” The speech bubble icon that calls up a list of inboud links referencing a particular website is now part of the Technorati logo. Much less new-agey, much more down-to-earth. I haven’t time to investigate that…
“Every age tries to communicate the message of Jesus in the idiom of that time period and culture… There is a spiritual hunger in our culture, and [Gibson] is tapping into it and speaking to the culture in a way that it can hear. And I think the genre of our culture is violence.” —Fran…
English teacher Tom McHale sets down his cup of coffee and boots up the computer at his classroom desk. It‘s6:50 in the morning. After logging in, he opens up his personal page on the school Intrablog. There, he does a quick scan of the New York Times front page headlines and clicks through one of…
No assembly lines. No wireless Internet service or lattes Most work was done with hand or horses. Unlike modern ?death march? projects, 27 people actually died in the course of engineering the Brooklyn bridge. Modern web developer Washington Roebling’s team 3 week / month release cycle 14 year release cycle Electricity Horses Coffee, doughnuts and…
“Mixed in with the usual stuff about CIA mind-control beams, talking dogs, and monkey-people, I heard him mention beta decay, instantons, density matrix, and subspaces of n-dimensional Riemannian manifolds,” Willard said. “I’m not sure where he got it, but he definitely seems to have had extensive schooling in theoretical physics. Man, what could’ve happened to…