Hedge your bets

Substantially fewer films will be produced over the next year or two. And a significant portion of the production costs of the reduced slate will be borne by hedge funds and other investment groups. Talk to the corporate hierarchs and you quickly elicit the thinking behind this pullback: Too many movies have been crammed into…

Bridging the Composition Divide: Blog Pedagogy and the Potential for Agonistic Classrooms

Without deliberately planned, consciously modeled classroom use, it is understandable that students might fall back on their understanding of the blogs as an electronic version of the print-journal, a genre without interactive or collaborative potential. However, we contend blogs can impact the writing classroom effectively, if their integration and function are clearly structured and articulated.…

Please Stop Honking

Dear fellow resident of my Pittsburgh area neighborhood, I rejoice in the knowledge that you are apparently pleased with the performance of the football team that serves our geographical area. By all means, feel free to celebrate. Have another beer or something. But please take your black-and-gold-mitten-clad hand off your car horn so I can…

A Heavenly Legacy

It has been twenty years since Christa McAuliffe reached for the stars. Her launch into the sky on the space shuttle, Challenger, literally became what she had previously anticipated as being, “The Ultimate Field Trip.” What truly prophetic words they were. —A Heavenly Legacy (Reeves Library) A good overview of the legacy of Christa McAuliffe.

Comments Turned Off

But there are things that we said we would not allow, including personal attacks, the use of profanity and hate speech. Because a significant number of folks who have posted in this blog have refused to follow any of those relatively simple rules, we’ve decided not to allow comments for the time being. It’s a…

Screening the Latest Bestseller

The result is a display that looks far more like ordinary paper than a liquid crystal display, because the pixels reflect ambient light rather than transmit light from behind. There’s no flicker, because the pixels are completely static (in an LCD or a cathode-ray tube display, by contrast, pixels need to be “refreshed” 60 times…

German firm bans office whingers

It is a small firm, which employs 16 people. But there is something that distinguishes Nutzwerk from other companies. Employees can be fired if they are caught complaining in the office. It may sound absurd, but employees have a clause in their contracts which states: “moaning and whinging at Nutzwerk is forbidden… except when accompanied…

Iraqi Invasion: A Text Misadventure

Revision 88 / Serial number 54892 Oval Office You are standing inside a White House, having just been elected to the presidency of the United States. You knew Scalia would pull through for you. There is a large desk here, along with a few chairs and couches. The presidential seal is in the middle of…

Benjamin Franklin Unmasked

Franklin believed men were equal, in a certain way, but he was consistently reluctant to endorse Thomas Jefferson’s notion of human equality, informed by John Locke, that all men are equal in a state of nature, and he rejected the idea that all men are equally loved in the eyes of God. It was manifestly…

The Carnival of Homeschooling: week 3

— The Carnival of Homeschooling: week 3 (Why Homeschool) Parents’ reasons for home schooling are as varied as their children. A post I wrote about video games is part of this carnival. In the blogosphere, a “carnival” is a collection of links, usually contributed by participants, and then publicized on the blogs of those participants. Usually…