About

Melanie McBride is a researcher at Ryerson University’s Experiential Design and Gaming Environments (EDGE) lab. See her About page for more information.
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Books: Media Meltdown – A Graphic Guide Adventure (in media literacy!)

By Melanie, on September 27th, 2009

As a media producer, educator and outspoken advocate of emergent media pedagogy (social and participatory media, Remix culture, Open Source publishing and production, Creative Commons open licensing and citizen media in all forms), I’m delighted to announce the launch of my (full disclosure) partner, author, Liam O’Donnell‘s newest graphic novel, Media Meltdown. While I [...]

Privacy is a digital literacy – and a right

By Melanie, on July 23rd, 2009

“Every gram – sorry, byte – of personal information these feckless data-packrats collect on us should be as carefully accounted for as our weapons-grade radioisotopes, because once the seals have cracked, there is no going back.” – Cory Doctorow

Every day, all around the world, people are sharing enormous amounts of personal information and data [...]

[image gallery] Beyond blocking: Schools v. the internet

By Melanie, on April 4th, 2009

I recently crowdsourced my Twitter network for their perspectives on internet blocking in schools. The above flash slideshow is a collection of their responses. A gallery of the individual tweets is here.

Taking part: There are several ways you can contribute and collaborate to this evolving discussion:

Twitter: If you wish to contribute your [...]

Writing for the Web2.0: Usability is still king

By Melanie, on February 6th, 2009

Since graduating with an English literature degree ten years ago, I’ve made a good part of my living writing web and interactive content. Much of what I learned comes from online journalism practices, web usability via Nielsen and the web style guides I’ve worked with on various projects.

Last year, I put all the [...]

Web marketing, analytics and metrics for online publishers

By Melanie, on February 4th, 2009

The Google doc above is a very basic Google docs presentation I created to show to my classes and clients. It’s essentially a point form overview of the basic considerations for marketing an online publication – whether it’s a blog or large scale magazine. Remarkably, many publications that have a strong print strategy still [...]

Social media scorecard: How social is your site?

By Melanie, on April 1st, 2008

I created the following scorecard for small publications and organisations in order to help them assess the absence or presence of social media on their site. Here are the questions. You can dowload the scorecard to calculate the results social_media_scorecard [PDF]

1. How social is your site? Rate your site features following social media (2 [...]