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—Technorati’s Speech Bubble Icon (Technorati) What Technorati used to call its “Link Cosmos” appears to have been replaced by “Web Conversations.”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…
“It signals our intention to take Doctor Who into the 21st century, as well as retaining its core traditional values – to be surprising, edgy and eccentric.” —Jane Tranter, BBC Controller of Drama Commissioning, —[Christopher] Eccleston is new Doctor Who (BBC) Similar:Joe Turner's Come and Gone (August Wilson's Century Cycle, 2 of 10)August Wilson’s Century Cycle…
“Miller belongs to the generation that was politicised by the failure of capitalism to deliver on its promises, and disillusioned by the failure of Communism to provide a morally viable alternative. Unlike many members of that generation, he did not scuttle into the conservative camp, but tried to rescue the idea of justice from the…
Your worst nightmare has come true. (Or maybe your fondest wish – if you are a sick little puppy.) The dead no longer stay dead. Zombies are taking over the planet. So what do you do? Give up and become a shishkabob for one of the ever growing ranks of the undead? Not on your…
This paper examines metablogging in terms of Dawkins’s concept of the “meme” and Reddy’s critique of the “conduit” metaphor for communication…. The language of metablogging uses metaphors that emphasize communality and proximity, and thus offers an alternative to the social risks Reddy associates with the conduit metaphor. —Dennis G. Jerz —(Meme)X Marks the Spot: Theorizing…
If you’re an academic who blogs, what prompted you to start blogging? And what keeps you going? What do you try to do in your blog? Does your blog have any relationship to your scholarship? If you’re an academic who just reads blogs, do you intend to start your own blog sometime? If yes, what…
Very Tired on a Friday Afternoon. But it’s a good tired. I just heard that my proposal, “Moveable Types of Information Literacy: Emerging Electronic Genres and the Deconstruction of Peer Review,” has been accepted for the Georgia Conference on Information Literacy this coming October. Seton Hill University featured “information literacy” in a faculty seminar at…
Formerly viewed as a marginal activity restricted to the technically savvy, blogging is slowly becoming more of a mainstream phenomenon on the Internet. Thanks to much media hype and some high profile blog sites, these online journals have captured the public‘simagination. As novice authors plunge into the thrilling world of blog publishing, they soon realize…
—Graphical User Interface Gallery Guidebook (Politechnika Szczecinska, Akademickie Centrum Informatyiki) Here’s part of a screen capture, showing the development of the “file manager” icon in Windows, from the original release to today. (On the site, clicking the icon takes you to another page that has screen captures of the interfaces for the various applications.) The development…
Good voice acting can’t save a bad game, but talented actors can imbue a game script with genuine emotional freight. Some of the best in-game voice work is not the long bits of dialogue in boring cut-scenes, but tiny, subtle bits of atmosphere. In Tomb Raider, Lara Croft’s quiet, voluptuous moans as she hurled herself…
GREETINGS. MY BROTHER, THE LEADER OF A FOREIGN NATION, WAS RECENTLY DEPOSED BY A VIOLENT COUP THAT DESTROYED ALL KEYBOARDS CAPABLE OF PRODUCING LOWERCASE LETTERS… GREETINGS. I AM NOT THE BROTHER OF A RECENTLY DEPOSED LEADER OF A FOREIGN NATION WHERE KEYBOARDS DONT HAVE LOWERCASE LETTERS. I AM INSTEAD SOMEONE WHOSE WEBLOG HAS RECENTLY BEEN…
The group’s volunteers pose as kids, and when an adult hits on them, they publish the person’s picture, phone numbers and e-mail address on the site so the group’s supporters can hound the person by phone and e-mail. Perverted Justice has made more than 600 such busts since it was formed in July 2002, and…
Well. Those Brits do have some different standards. I just can’t see that happening here. At least not any newsroom I’ve worked in. You might find yourself all over Romenesko in the morning. I seem to remember a pretty big stink over the Post-Dispatch’s disappearing Coke can and National Geographic’s magical moving pyramids. It’s not…
[T]he main thing that’s hard to do in IF is build a story where there’s a lot of internal character development as opposed to external action. There are some ways to approach it, but they’re all challenging, and there aren’t very many examples of IF where people have done it successfully before. Whereas if you’re…
It is still dark when I get up, the suitcase carefully packed the day before. I will be away almost a month, the preparations have been exstensive, at work and home. The little plane takes off, and carries me into dawn. —Transit – but going where? (Thinking with My Fingers) A lovely, haunting little travelblog from…