BuzzLion for Week of September 25

Let's start this week's BuzzLion with Brad Kozlek, TLT programming manager, who has had something eating at him ever since Jim Groom from the University of Mary Washington spoke here Sept. 20. 

"It has been one week since Jim Groom paid us a visit at Penn State, and something has been gnawing at me ever since. I am afraid we might be close to missing the boat with empowering students to think creatively with the web."

Next, Zac Zidik, TLT multimedia specialist, has a series of posts on the new FLAG game engine editor and how it helps him develop educational games. You can read his thoughts on it in post number 1 (you can find the rest in his blog's archives). 

"The FLAG Game Engine is being created on top of the Flash platform to help unify and speed up development time for creating games. The follow blog entries are an attempt to describe the features that I have built into the engine."

The Bloomsburg flood disaster this month has been raising questions in the mind of Cole Camplese, TLT senior director. He has questioned the coverage of the flood, and how stories of people's hardships in Bloomburg are not being told. This week, he wonders about people in the surrounding towns. 

"So now I begin to wonder who is serving a town as small as Catawissa, PA? And what about Orangeville, Benton, and Millville, PA? These are all towns with homes, churches, schools, businesses, and people. These are all towns I rode my bike to when I was growing up. Who is responsible for exposing their stories? Who is collecting them?"

Dave Stong, TLT graphic artist, uses a lot of technology in his job and creates some amazing graphics with it. But he hasn't stopped drawing. This week, he muses on drawing techniques in this technological world in his latest post. 

"I've been thinking a lot about the proficient use of my drawing tools. To be what I call proficient seems to require a life-long commitment to not only mastering the tools, but to intuitively making deeply complex value judgements about the work. Less of a commitment and you can still do good work and still get good jobs. The difference may be visible not as one might expect—when there's unlimited time to produce something jaw dropping—but more when time is short, pressure is high, and excellent value judgements are needed to produce something justusable in the short amount of time available. That sort of work gets you through the day, but it doesn't get you through the night."

That's all for this week's BuzzLion. Thanks for reading!