Dennis G. Jerz

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"

Photo by Lynn Brucker, courtesy of the Cave Research Foundation.

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.

08 Jul 2006 (posted here); by Dennis G. Jerz

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

Teaching

Spring 2008

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 Compostion 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.
"Cave Gave Game," with David Thomas. Forthcoming.
"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