I Demand Justice-Themed TV Dramas

We need a return to the core values of social responsibility. We must unite our voices and demand that society’s wrongs be righted, before our priorities as a people are forgotten forever. I speak of nothing less than the need for justice, and I demand justice-themed TV action-adventure dramas–not two seasons from now, not three…

Walt Disney: man or mouse?

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, for instance, Disney was inundated with letters from outraged parents who felt that Snow White’s flight through the woods or Pinocchio’s excursion on Pleasure Island or the devil in “Fantasia” or Bambi’s mother’s death were all too real and terrifying and hardly a gloss. Disney would typically respond…

Person of the Year: You

It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the…

Bibliographia Literaria (1817)

In this idea originated the plan of the ‘Lyrical Ballads’; in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination…

"Vote with Your Feet" Discusison

“Vote with Your Feet” Discusison I was reading a forum in the Chronicle of Higher Education, in which a poster asked for tips on teaching long night classes. I came across a reference to a “‘vote with your feet’ discussion.” I’d never heard the term before, but I gather it means you say “Everyone who…

Final Presentation Gallery

“New Media Projects” introduces students [all English majors in this section, though it’s not restricted as such] to Inform 7, The Games Factory 2, Flash, Blender 3D, and Hammer. All students completed short projects in each medium, and selected tools to use for a midterm and a final project. Students kept a development journal on…

Call that a knife?

Just as you can’t be too rich or too thin, I’d always thought, so you can’t have too many tools on your Swiss Army knife – but that was before I took delivery of the new Giant Swiss Army knife. Grotesque, if superbly engineered, the Giant weighs nearly a kilogram and features 85 devices in…

Pa. teen fatally shoots self at school

Parents trickled to the school later Tuesday morning to pick up their children. Nearly three months ago, a 10th-grader at the same school, just outside Philadelphia, was arrested for allegedly bringing in a loaded gun. The boy showed the gun to another student, and word soon trickled to a teacher and then a security officer,…

Fooled by Cybermum!

I can never resist a challenge and this one, posed by a mischievous friend, was a humdinger: could I befriend one of my own children on one of those ‘social networking’ websites for teenagers without being caught out? Could I make a convincing youngster and engage my son in online conversations? While it was an…

School shuns tech, teaches fountain pen

There is no clacking of keyboards in most classrooms at the Mary Erskine and Stewart’s Melville Junior School, although there is a full range of facilities for computer lessons and technology isn’t being ignored. But the private school’s principal believes the old-fashioned pens have helped boost the academic performance and self-esteem of his 1,200 pupils.…

Slouching Towards Bedlam

*clunk* The rotating tin cylinder within the phonograph vibrates slightly as a brass needle scrapes against it. The sound of a throat being cleared emerges from the machine’s hornshell speaker, followed by a thin, haunting voice. “March the 16th.” A deep, shaky breath. “I dread to say it, but I believe I am going mad.…

Gadgets Built to Fail

Someday, much sooner than you’d like, that shiny new toy you just bought will break. When it happens, you’ll swear, you’ll cry — then you’ll sigh and open your wallet.–Kris Wagner —Gadgets Built to Fail (Wired) “They time them so when you finally paid for them, they’re used up.” — Willy Loman, Death of a Salesman