We need to play with media to become more effective communicators. This book was written to inspire and empower you, as a creative person, to expand your personal senses of digital literacy and digital agency as a multimedia communicator. As you learn to play with digital text, images, audio and video, you will communicate more creatively and flexibly with a wider variety of options. Although written primarily for educators, anyone who is interested in learning more about digital communication will learn something new from this book. As children, we learn to progressively make sense of our confusing world through play. The same dynamics apply to us as adults communicating with new and different media forms.

This thought-provoking, fascinating and highly informative text offers both a vivid account of a group of young readers coming to terms with texts and a radical perspective on the growth of a generation of young readers.

Playing Real: Mimesis, Media, and Mischief explores the integration and interaction of mimetic theatricality and representational media in twentieth- and twenty‐first-century performance. It brings together carefully chosen sites of performance—including live broadcasts of theatrical productions, reality television, and alternate-reality gaming—in which mediatization and mimesis compete and collude to represent the real to audiences. Lindsay Brandon Hunter reads such performances as forcing confrontation between notions of authenticity, sincerity, and spontaneity and their various others: the fake, the feigned, the staged, or the rehearsed. Each site examined in Playing Real purports to show audiences something real—real theater, real housewives, real alternative scenarios—which is simultaneously visible as overtly constructed, adulterated by artifice and artificiality. The integration of mediatization and theatricality in these performances, Hunter argues, exploits the proclivities of both to conjure the real even as they risk corrupting the perception of authenticity by imbricating it with artifice and overt manipulation. Although the performances analyzed obscure boundaries separating actual from virtual, genuine from artificial, and truth from fiction, Hunter rejects the notion that these productions imperil the “real.” She insists on uncertainty as a fertile site for productive and pleasurable mischief—including relationships to realness and authenticity among both audience and participants.

Discusses how to install, run, and configure Windows XP for both the home and office, explaining how to connect to the Internet, design a LAN, and share drives and printers, and includes tips and troubleshooting techniques.

"Raymond Chen is the original raconteur of Windows." --Scott Hanselman, ComputerZen.com "Raymond has been at Microsoft for many years and has seen many nuances of Windows that others could only ever hope to get a glimpse of. With this book, Raymond shares his knowledge, experience, and anecdotal stories, allowing all of us to get a better understanding of the operating system that affects millions of people every day. This book has something for everyone, is a casual read, and I highly recommend it!" --Jeffrey Richter, Author/Consultant, Cofounder of Wintellect "Very interesting read. Raymond tells the inside story of why Windows is the way it is." --Eric Gunnerson, Program Manager, Microsoft Corporation "Absolutely essential reading for understanding the history of Windows, its intricacies and quirks, and why they came about." --Matt Pietrek, MSDN Magazine's Under the Hood Columnist "Raymond Chen has become something of a legend in the software industry, and in this book you'll discover why. From his high-level reminiscences on the design of the Windows Start button to his low-level discussions of GlobalAlloc that only your inner-geek could love, The Old New Thing is a captivating collection of anecdotes that will help you to truly appreciate the difficulty inherent in designing and writing quality software." --Stephen Toub, Technical Editor, MSDN Magazine Why does Windows work the way it does? Why is Shut Down on the Start menu? (And why is there a Start button, anyway?) How can I tap into the dialog loop? Why does the GetWindowText function behave so strangely? Why are registry files called "hives"? Many of Windows' quirks have perfectly logical explanations, rooted in history. Understand them, and you'll be more productive and a lot less frustrated. Raymond Chen--who's spent more than a decade on Microsoft's Windows development team--reveals the "hidden Windows" you need to know. Chen's engaging style, deep insight, and thoughtful humor have made him one of the world's premier technology bloggers. Here he brings together behind-the-scenes explanations, invaluable technical advice, and illuminating anecdotes that bring Windows to life--and help you make the most of it. A few of the things you'll find inside: What vending machines can teach you about effective user interfaces A deeper understanding of window and dialog management Why performance optimization can be so counterintuitive A peek at the underbelly of COM objects and the Visual C++ compiler Key details about backwards compatibility--what Windows does and why Windows program security holes most developers don't know about How to make your program a better Windows citizen

Game designers, authors, artists, and scholars discuss how roles are played and how stories are created in role-playing games, board games, computer games, interactive fictions, massively multiplayer games, improvisational theater, and other "playable media." Games and other playable forms, from interactive fictions to improvisational theater, involve role playing and story—something played and something told. In Second Person, game designers, authors, artists, and scholars examine the different ways in which these two elements work together in tabletop role-playing games (RPGs), computer games, board games, card games, electronic literature, political simulations, locative media, massively multiplayer games, and other forms that invite and structure play. Second Person—so called because in these games and playable media it is "you" who plays the roles, "you" for whom the story is being told—first considers tabletop games ranging from Dungeons & Dragons and other RPGs with an explicit social component to Kim Newman's Choose Your Own Adventure-style novel Life's Lottery and its more traditional author-reader interaction. Contributors then examine computer-based playable structures that are designed for solo interaction—for the singular "you"—including the mainstream hit Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and the genre-defining independent production Façade. Finally, contributors look at the intersection of the social spaces of play and the real world, considering, among other topics, the virtual communities of such Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) as World of Warcraft and the political uses of digital gaming and role-playing techniques (as in The Howard Dean for Iowa Game, the first U.S. presidential campaign game). In engaging essays that range in tone from the informal to the technical, these writers offer a variety of approaches for the examination of an emerging field that includes works as diverse as George R.R. Martin's Wild Cards series and the classic Infocom game Planetfall. Appendixes contain three fully-playable tabletop RPGs that demonstrate some of the variations possible in the form.

(Book). Get Media Airplay is one media master's perspective on learning how to expose demos using creative media resources. You've got your CDs manufactured, but what's next? How do you get your songs on the radio, video channels, or playing at events? Get Media Airplay explores all aspects of selling talent by taking action structuring innovative audience awareness in the media industries.