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"

>_

PAX East 2010
One of the many interactive fiction events at this now-even-more-awesome event that I cannot attend. The current plan: the main GET LAMP episode at 9:30, followed by a panel on stage of people interviewed for the film, and then some...

Family cashing in on 'David After Dentist'
The viral clip has been viewed almost 54 million times and gave rise to the catchphrase, "Is this real life?" It was the second most-watched video of 2009, according to YouTube, trailing only Susan Boyle's appearance on "Britain's Got Talent."It's...

Turning Green With Literacy
By the early sixth century, Western Europe had become largely illiterate, its teachers dead, its students on the run, its libraries turned into kindling. Ireland, however, had just settled down, thanks to a tough old bird named Patrick, a Roman...

Day of Digital Humanities
This wordle was composed from word frequencies in definitions of "Digital Humanities," submitted by participants in Day in the Life of the Digital Humanities 2010.About all we can conclude is that the participants know how to repeat the phrase "Digital...

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.)