I think I'm going to be able to attend this interactive fiction event at the Unversity of Maryland:

As part of our work on a project funded by the Library of Congress dedicated to Preserving Virtual Worlds (http://www.ndiipp.uiuc.edu/pca/), MITH will be hosting a table-read of the original version of ADVENTURE, recently recovered from backup tapes at Stanford University. We will read through the complete text of the game, and also (geeks that we are) have a look at its FORTRAN source code.

Today's Chronicle had an article on the Open Humanities Press. One of the board members is Stephen Greenblatt, who as MLA president wrote an influential letter on the coming crisis in scholarly publishing.

Imagine that -- unfolding in real time -- you find a perfect real-world example that, with eerie clarity, embodies almost all the concepts you've devoted yourself to teaching and studying in the past ten or so years.

Excerpt from my review of the new Persuasive Games release "Fatworld" -- an ambitious piece of "procedural rhetoric" that aims to leverage the computer game genre to deliver a series of important points.

I had high hopes. I really, really wanted to like it much better than I do.

...but REAL kid's computer would have the "design pet" button right next to the "hamster" button, and the "HP Trivia" button right next to buttons devoted to the smiley and frowny icons. So I learned from a story about The Laptop Club, a group of kids who crafted their own laptops from construction paper.

Name: Mandy
Age: 8
How often do you use a computer? Five times a week.

Verbs gush from the Blogger.com home page right into your brain stem.

Verbs, verbs, everywhere verbs! Create! Publish! Go! Post! Interact! Take a tour! Name your blog! Okay, well "Get" as they use it in "Get Feedback" is a bit lame, but it's better than "Feed!"

Most academic slide shows are dreary affairs. Our students might as well be writing "I will not think outside the box" on the blackboard 100 times.

The latest issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly features an article in which I analyze Will Crowther's original source code for "Colossal Cave Adventure," and includes dozens of photos from my recent trip through the real Colossal Cave.

The whole article is available on the Digital Humanities Quarterly website (link below). Here's the full abstract:

I gather that most people who participate in KairosNews are likely already involved in several cutting-edge new media applications in academia, but at first glance, Horizons 2007 seems a good, condensed source of information on new media trends in education. Looks like it could be very useful if you need to explain new media education concepts to colleagues who aren't quite as wired.

A stand-up comic routine that features a horribly-designed slide show.

I once gave a job talk using the same basic principle -- though not as funny. After about 8 or 10 awful slides that used the kind of dot-com hype that was at that time common online, I put up another one that read, "What have I done wrong so far?" and the students (who had been staring in shock) suddenly perked up and started contributing.

(I got the job.)