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"

>_

Patriotic Computer Games for America's Independence Day
This weekend, how can the kids and I spend our time better than playing:Political Machine 2008 (try explaining "special interest groups" to a seven-year-old)Liberty's Kids (1776, from the prespective of Ben Franklin's pritnting apprentice, among others)Sid Meier's Civil War Collection...

R.U.R. (2011)
There's no information in the non-subscription IMDB, but there is an entry for a movie based on Rossum's Universal Robots. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1300594/The original play was a talky social comedy mixed with a melodrama (complete with a "missing papers" plot twist), and...

NASA finds missing moon landing tapes
The grainy images of Neil Armstrong stepping onto the moon have been grist for the moon conspiracy theory mill for decades. The final loss in quality came when Nasa made its US recording of the event--the one always seen in...

Get Smarter
For a period of 2 million years, ending with the last ice age around 10,000 B.C., the Earth experienced a series of convulsive glacial events. This rapid-fire climate change meant that humans couldn't rely on consistent patterns to know which...

In 2003, I was hired to lead a brand new program in new media journalism. I'm told that it appears in the catalog as "Journalism New Media" because nobody would be able to find it if it were alphabetized under "N".

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

Fall 2008

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

Recent Scholarly Activity

• "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.)

Utterly pointless "Rainbow Hector Weblog"