jerz.setonhill.edu | blogs.setonhill.edu

Associate Professor
English --  New Media Journalism
Seton Hill University, Greensburg, Pennsylvania

You are in a large room, with a passage to the south, a passage to the west, and a wall of broken rock to the east. There is a large "Y2" on a rock in the room's center. --"Colossal Cave Adventure"

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The Superbowl, Technology, and the Police State (1984-2010)
There's a dissertation in here. All I have the energy to do today is imply a connection.Using a police state to market technology in 1984: Using a police state to market technology in 2010:...

Social Media and Young Adults -- Pew
None of this is a surprise to me, but I'm glad to have statistics to back up my impressions. A very small handful of students whose first introduction to online social networking was the SHU blogosphere, before blogs went really...

Google's Super Bowl Ad: A Romance in Search
I didn't watch the game, but I did catch the buzz about this ad. Yes, I did tear up. (Wired has details.)...

The great global warming collapse
It is dangerous to use local weather events (such as a heavy or light winter) to make judgments about global climate.With that caveat, I'm blogging the following because I've noted a shift in the online discussion about "global warming," or...

Jerz's Literacy Weblog
Since the spring of 1999, I have annotated web links on technology, humanities, cyberculture, journalism, academia, and everything else that makes my heart go thumpety-thump.

New Media Journalism @ Seton Hill University
The main portal for the blogging community at Seton Hill University. Any student, faculty, or staff member can get a free blog here.

Online Resource Room
A large collection of instructional handouts, covering academic writing, electronic text, and technical writing. Popular pages include the MLA-style Bibliography Builder, and handouts on blurbs, e-mail, and usability testing.

Interactive Fiction
Interactive fiction requires the text-analysis skills of a literary scholar and the relentless puzzle-solving drive of a computer hacker. People tend to love it or hate it. Those who hate it sometimes say it makes them think too much.

Other Major Resources

• York Corpus Christi Pageant Simulator
• (R.U.R.) Rossum's Universal Robots

• LA100: Basic Composition
• EL200: Media Lab & advising Setonian
• EL236: Writing for the Internet
  
• EL405: New Media Projects
  
• Teaching Archive
  

• Jerome McDonough, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Doug Reside, Neil Fraistat, Kari Kraus, Rachel Donahue, Dennis Jerz, Henry Lowood, Megan Winget. "Preserving Virtual Worlds: Models & Community." Digital Humanities, University of Maryland, 2009.
  
• "Teacher Tapestries: Reflections on Teaching Blogging Over a Decade" College English Association, Pittsburgh, 2009.
• "Thinking Inside the Box: Free and Open Source Alternatives to CMS" Presentation for the workshop "Course Management Systems: A Viable Reality in the Composition Classroom" Conference on College Composition and Communication 2008.
• "Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther's Original 'Adventure' in Code and in Kentucky" Digital Humanities Quarterly, 2007.
• "When Student Experts Remix the Discipline: New Media in the Composition Classroom" Panel co-chair, Conference on College Composition and Communication 2007.
• "Emerging Social Software." Special interest group chair, Conference on College Composition and Communication 2007.
• "Assessing Google as Teaching & Research Tool." Teaching & Learning Seminar, Seton Hill University. January 2005.
• "Football Slouches Toward a Former Women's College." Inside Higher Ed. January 2005.
• "The Bane of the President's Existence." Lore: An E-Journal for Teachers of Writing. [Digressions: Reflections on Teaching -- Academic Blogging.] January 2005.
• Professional biography (C.V.)