What better subject to zoom in on during the holiday season than play? I've written a lot on the subject, here, through the years but, in a way, this is Part 4 of a series I started in 2009 (here are the 2nd and 3rd parts). So now, at the turn of a new year, it’s not only a perfect time but high time to come back to the power of play. Happy holidays to all who celebrate them, happiness to those … [Read more...] about ‘Playful by Design,’ a landmark report
9 things that make viral hoaxes challenging
Remember “Blue Whale”? Almost five years ago, when I was getting to the bottom of that murky hoax, it wasn’t yet understood as one. It was being called a “suicide game,” and those two words were scaring parents around the world, literally. I was looking all over the Web for reliable sources and found my best one – still one of the world’s top experts on the subject, I believe – to be Georgi … [Read more...] about 9 things that make viral hoaxes challenging
The metaverse and the Meta part
I hadn’t read Snow Crash. So I first learned about the metaverse in 2008, right after returning from a family trip around the world and a few months before Barack Obama was elected President for the first time. I was a little disoriented coming back to America after 10 months in many other countries, especially during an election year, and it didn’t help that I was attending my very first ISTE … [Read more...] about The metaverse and the Meta part
Take-aways from the ‘Facebook Files’
What a week it has been, right? At least for those of us who follow and/or use social media. There was the naming of whistleblower Frances Haugen on “60 Minutes” Sunday night, US time; the hours-long outage of all of Facebook’s products Monday; Haugen’s testimony on Capitol Hill Tuesday, a report that hackers were offering for sale 1.5 billion people’s public data they scraped from Facebook; and … [Read more...] about Take-aways from the ‘Facebook Files’
New game to help middle schoolers be media literacy masters
It’s definitely not your typical American high school – not the one in “Agents of Influence.” But high school is the backdrop, which is smart for a media literacy videogame aimed at middle schoolers, right? Especially a sketchy, slightly dystopian fictional one like “Virginia Hall High,” in which the game is set. First, the school occupies what used to be the HQ of “the Omni-Directional … [Read more...] about New game to help middle schoolers be media literacy masters