betajames

Fallout 3 is exceptionally rich in this kind of storytelling, though it's worth pointing out that environmental storytelling is almost always backstory-telling: it's about what has happened here, not about what is happening or might happen in the future.

That works for Fallout 3 because, in apocalyptic wastelands, most of the present is about the past, so that's all right. And it goes together well with the player-controlled pacing of the main plot, because it means that there is also player-controlled pacing of exposition. It's as though when you had Moby Dick assigned to you in high school, you were allowed to do the chapters on whaling as an interactive diorama sequence, and you got to skip the encyclopedic chapter on ambergris entirely.

Among respondents to the Babson survey, YouTube was the preferred tool for teaching, with more than a fifth of professors using material from the video-sharing community in class. (Less than five percent said they use Twitter to transmit information to students.) Facebook and LinkedIn, meanwhile, were the most popular tools for communicating with colleagues. About ten percent of all respondents instructed students to create content within a social media community — such as contributing to a blog or posting a video — as part of an assignment.

On one level of the story, it's almost a metaphor for what's happening to him, that he's struggling to create his work, and the difficulties he's facing. And naturally as a writer, to me it is familiar and something that I know a lot about. It felt like a very good way to bring additional depth into Alan Wake's story...

1. I was also able to demonstrate the potential of Twitter for learning:

• for keeping up to date with colleagues and industry news
• for problem solving
• for serendipitous learning
• for resource and file sharing - and as an example of how partiicipants were quick and willing to  contribute to the event, Jon Ingham @joningham quickly shared with us, in a tweet, some pictures he had taken on his iPhone - see the one at the top of this posting of me sitting near the screen, and the one below, which shows a few of the participants in the informal table-less setting (Note: 2 were using laptops and 2 were using phones to tweet)
• for synchronous learning - we were actually doing a form of that ourselves, but I also cited the example of #lrnchat
• for micro-learning - as in my 140university example
• for polling and feedback
• for group tweeting
• as well as alternatives to Twitter in the workplace

I often hear people talking about Facebook as though they were some sort of monopoly or public trust. Well, they aren't. They owe us nothing. They can do whatever they want, within the bounds of the laws. (And keep in mind, even those criteria are pretty murky when it comes to social networking.) But that doesn't mean we have to actually put up with them.

What gets me the most isn’t so much that Facebook’s developed a monopoly in this market.  As I said, that’s pretty much a given, and user privacy issues aside Facebook’s got a good product to offer.  What irks me is the way Facebook’s gone about establishing itself through what I see as anticompetitive practices, specifically, prohibiting users from using their username and password to log in to other websites or services.

Facebook, used to be fun and cool, but a large part of what I have to do on Facebook now is adapt to their changes on their terms. This is unacceptable to me, especially when I don’t see the website adding significant benefits.

You have to give it to the Ayn Rand Institute: They have figured out how to keep their author’s works alive. Are there any other such programs? None that I could find. Recently, Scholastic launched an initiative that promotes free books for kids through a Facebook campaign, where the books go to K.I.D.S., or Kids In Distressed Situations. But this and other similar worthy endeavors do not help public school teachers. And as kids become teens, programs become scarcer: It's easier to raise money for children’s books than it is for high school texts.

Meanwhile, many high school English teachers are forced to scrounge through the school’s storage room year after year to find 30 copies of To Kill A Mockingbird. Or they get the Rand novels.

Q: Didn’t you once run in the Paris Marathon?
Joe: Yep. I ran three of them.
Q: Correct me if I’m wrong but is it also true that you never trained for any of them?
Joe: You shouldn’t really ask me about my training regime, you know.
Q: Why?
Joe: Because it’s not good and I wouldn’t want people to copy it.

Q: Don’t make me beat it out of you.
Joe: Okay, you want it, here it is. Drink 10 pints of beer the night before the race. Ya got that? And don’t run a single step at least four weeks before the race.
Q: No running at all?
Joe: No, none at all. And don’t forget the 10 pints of beer the night before. But make sure you put a warning in this article, “Do not try this at home.” I mean, it works for me and Hunter Thompson but it might not work for others. I can only tell you what I do.