He is currently VP of Learning Content and Instructor Experience at LinkedIn, leading the development of learning products which help every member of the global workforce learn the skills they need to achieve their professional goals. Before LinkedIn, JR was Chief Product Officer at Zapier, managing the product, design and Ux research teams developing workflow automation products. https://www.jonathanrochelle.com/official-bio (more)

Helen Branswell: *the USDA confirmed another 13 H5N1 birdflu infected herds in California today. That makes 125 herds there this week alone. (more)

Influenza A virus subtype H5N1 (A/H5N1) is a subtype of the influenza A virus, which causes influenza (flu), predominantly in birds (Avian Flu). It is enzootic (maintained in the population) in many bird populations, and also panzootic (affecting animals of many species over a wide area).[1] A/H5N1 virus can also infect mammals (including humans) that have been exposed to infected birds; in these cases, symptoms are frequently severe or fatal... In mammals, including humans, A/H5N1 influenza (whether LPAI or HPAI) is rare. Symptoms of infection vary from mild to severe, including fever, diarrhea, and cough.[5] Human infections with A/H5N1 virus have been reported in 23 countries since 1997, resulting in severe pneumonia and death in about 50% of cases.[8] Between 2003 and November 2024, the World Health Organization has recorded 948 cases of confirmed H5N1 influenza, leading to 464 deaths.[9] The true fatality rate may be lower because some cases with mild symptoms may not have been identified as H5N1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_A_virus_subtype_H5N1 (more)

Influenza A virus (IAV) is a pathogen that causes the flu in birds and some mammals, including humans.[1] It is an RNA virus whose subtypes have been isolated from wild birds. Occasionally, it is transmitted from wild to domestic birds, and this may cause severe disease, outbreaks, or human influenza pandemics... A filtered and purified influenza A vaccine for humans has been developed and many countries have stockpiled it to allow a quick administration to the population in the event of an avian influenza pandemic. In 2011, researchers reported the discovery of an antibody effective against all types of the influenza A virus... The annually updated, trivalent flu vaccine consists of hemagglutinin (HA) surface glycoprotein components from influenza H3N2, H1N1, and B influenza viruses. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza_A_virus (more)

Avian influenza, also known as avian flu or bird flu, is a disease caused by the influenza A virus, which primarily affects birds but can sometimes affect mammals including humans.[1] Wild aquatic birds are the primary host of the influenza A virus, which is enzootic (continually present) in many bird populations. (more)

Amy Bruckman and Carlos Jensen: The Mystery of the Death of MediaMOO: Seven Years of Evolution of an Online Community (MOO). Typical Tuesday evening, 1993-­1996: In the online cafe, writing teachers begin to arrive. Twenty-five teachers will spend an hour discussing how to handle inappropriate student behavior in electronic environments... (more)

works at Linden Lab; used to work at Six Apart

Mark Paschal on designing semi-private Virtual Community like a Tree House. (more)

Steven Johnson: A Machine for Thinking: How Douglas Engelbart predicted the future of computing. (Hidden Heroes) In the fall of 1945, a 20-year-old electrical technician named Douglas Engelbart arrived at an American base in the Philippines on his first assignment for the Navy (more)

Actions by Big Government (aka Government Failure) which result in symptoms often called Market Failures. Making a mess of the Free Market/Market Economy (distoring FeedBack), esp for the SmallCo vs the BigCo. Explained by Public Choice Theory? (more)

50 Years of Text Games - From Oregon Trail to A.I. Dungeon - A definitive book about the first half-century of interactive fiction. https://if50.textories.com/ (more)

Frode Hegland: Deep Literacy is required for success in the 21st century but the language and culture around it is still mostly associated with social misfits – read ‘nerds’ – or boring work. However, deep literacy is really about deep self-realisation. Deep literacy is the mindset to excel as who you really are, freed from previous conventions and able to express yourself through getting more intimate with your work through improving your skills. http://www.deep-literacy.com/ (more)

Object Oriented MUD (Multi User Dungeon) (more)

Amy Susan Bruckman (born 1965) is a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology affiliated with the School of Interactive Computing and the GVU Center. She is best known for her pioneering research in the fields of online communities and the learning sciences. In 1999, she was selected as one of MIT Technology Review's TR100 awardees, honoring 100 remarkable innovators under the age of 35. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_S._Bruckman

Andrea Forte and Amy Bruckman are presenting a paper at WikiSym about their attempt to use the Science Online Wiki in a High School Advanced Placement class (Math And Science). Students often worked in parallel during class and found that edit conflicts frequently slowed their progress... Mr. Grant likewise had difficulty grading the collaborative assignment. He found parsing page histories laborious and uninformative and had difficulty understanding how each student had contributed to the collaboration. They conclude: If wiki is to become a readily adoptable construction kit that supports Knowledge Building communities in schools, the tools need to foster collaborative practices by making it easy for students to work together and for teachers to assess collaborative work. If teachers cannot assess collaborative wiki work, then we cannot expect wiki to be adopted for Formal Education, despite the potential learning gains for students. Maybe it isn't the wiki that needs to be redesigned, but the Formal Education. (more)

see interactive fiction, adventure game, text game

A text game or text-based game is an electronic game that uses a text-based user interface, that is, the user interface employs a set of encodable characters, such as ASCII, instead of bitmap or vector graphics. All text-based games have been well documented since at least the 1960s, when teleprinters were interlaced with mainframe computers as a form of input, where the output was printed on paper. With that, notable titles were developed for those computers using the sprinter in the 1960s and 1970s and more numerous game titles have been developed for other video terminals since at least the mid-1970s, having reached their peak popularity in that decade and the 1980s, and continued as early online games into the mid-1990s. Although generally replaced in favor of video games that use non-textual graphics, text-based games continue to be written by independent developers. They have been the basis of instigating genres of video gaming, especially adventure games and role-playing games. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Text-based_game

An adventure game is a video game genre in which the player assumes the role of a protagonist in an interactive story driven by exploration and/or puzzle-solving.[1] The genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based media, literature and film, encompassing a wide variety of literary genres. Many adventure games (text and graphic) are designed for a single player, since this emphasis on story and character makes multiplayer design difficult.[2] Colossal Cave Adventure is identified[3] as the first such adventure game, first released in 1976, while other notable adventure game series include Zork, King's Quest, The Secret of Monkey Island, and Myst. Adventure games were initially developed in the 1970s and early 1980s as text-based interactive stories, using text parsers to translate the player's commands into actions. As personal computers became more powerful with better graphics, the graphic adventure-game format became popular, initially by augmenting player's text commands with graphics, but soon moving towards point-and-click interfaces. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_game

ConceptNet is a semantic network based on the information in the OMCS database. ConceptNet is expressed as a directed graph whose nodes are concepts, and whose edges are assertions of common sense about these concepts. Concepts represent sets of closely related natural language phrases, which could be noun phrases, verb phrases, adjective phrases, or clauses.[5] ConceptNet is created from the natural-language assertions in OMCS by matching them against patterns using a shallow parser... The information in ConceptNet can be used as a basis for machine learning algorithms. One representation, called AnalogySpace, uses singular value decomposition to generalize and represent patterns in the knowledge in ConceptNet, in a way that can be used in AI applications. Its creators distribute a Python machine learning toolkit called Divisi for performing machine learning based on text corpora, structured knowledge bases such as ConceptNet, and combinations of the two. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Mind_Common_Sense#ConceptNet (more)

Dr. Greg Wilson is a programmer, author, and educator based in Toronto. He co-founded and and was the first Executive Director of Software Carpentry, which has taught basic software skills to tens of thousands of researchers worldwide, and has authored or edited over a dozen books, including Beautiful Code, Making Software, The Architecture of Open Source Applications, Teaching Tech Together, and most recently Software Design by Example in JavaScript and Software Design by Example in Python. Greg is a member of the Python Software Foundation and a recipient of ACM SIGSOFT’s Influential Educator of the Year award, and currently works as a software engineering manager at Plotly. https://third-bit.com/