Team Twine was busy in the spring. Kendall, Lily, and I have been hard at work making some wonderful stuff for the DWRL. To help us along, we've read books and articles, held meetings and brainstorming sessions, developed our own materials and shared them with each other, facilitated Game Jams...
The New View-Master Takes on Augmented Reality; Should We Take it Into the Classroom?
We are, as others have pointed out, in the age of augmented reality. Whereas the twentieth century saw virtual reality develop in leaps and bounds, it is augmented reality that reigns supreme in the 2000s. Case in point: the View-Master. (more…)
Digital Pedagogy Showcase: Twine Games in the Writing Classroom
At the Spring Digital Pedagogy Showcase, the DWRL's Twine Game Research Group shared resources and ideas for incorporating Twine—a textual, nonlinear, game-making program—into a basic writing curriculum. (more…)
Cool Tools: Interactive Mapping with Google Fusion Tables
Today, I want to introduce a cool tool I have recently discovered: Google Fusion Tables. The basic idea is simple but powerful: the program will take any spreadsheet it is given, look for geolocation information in it, and display the individual items in the sheet on a map. (more…)
Crowd Sourcing Augmented Reality
Recently a new augmented reality app called Capsule came to my attention. It is intended to be an augmented reality social network based on location. Having an unique moment while walking somewhere in the city? Take a photo or video, put it into a capsule and drop at the location where...
Cool Tools: Podcasting with Audacity (and beyond)
At the beginning of this semester, I gave a little lab-internal introduction to audio recording and editing. Since then, a number of people have asked me to share the materials from this workshop or come to their class and get their students going on podcast projects. (more…)
Past the Littlefield Fountain: Turning Missing Statues Into Teaching Opportunities
Have you ever been planning a lesson, and the resource you're looking for isn't there? Maybe it's a YouTube video you saw that would be perfect, maybe it's just a simple handout. Either way, a missing resource can be extremely frustrating, especially if you didn't have time to check the...
Cool Tools: TimeMapper
TimeMapper is a free and open source tool for building timemaps, visualizations in which every data point is mapped to both its temporal and geographic location. (more…)
Aggregation as Activism
Digital spaces have fashioned new identities or, more accurately, given new life to extant ones. Take, for instance, the troll. In “real life,” we might call this individual a bully, but clearly the perceived anonymity of the internet allows for criticism to become a perverse art form. Artists (broadly understood) online...
Examining Code, Debugging Rhetoric
Recently, I have been receiving lots of love letters from Python, full of emotional language like the following: (more…)