December 2003 Archive Page

I went into the office for about an hour and a half tonight. When I came back, my wife was writing busily at the kitchen table. "I've got a blog entry for you," she said. This is rather momentous -- she has very little interest in cyberculture. But here's what she wrote. (Let this be a warning to other couples who start a family when they are both English Ph.D. students.)

It is dangerous to sing children's songs at dinnertime.

Carolyn, at 20 months, satisfied with any song, happily repeats the last word of any line like a sweet echo. Peter, on the other hand...

First I try "Found a Peanut," but Peter asks too many theological questions ("Why did he kick the angel?") so I say nevermind, here's a better song, and sing "On Top of Spaghetti."

On top of Spaghetti
All covered with cheese
I lost my poor meatball
When I had to sneeze.
It rolled off the table
And onto the floor
And then my poor meatball
Rolled out of the door.
It rolled off the front porch
And under a bush
And then my poor meatball
Was nothing but mush.

Peter has been growing red in the face and teary-eyed. I stop singing. "Are you crying about that meatball?" I ask. He nods.

I try to explain that the song is supposed to amuse children, not to make them sad.

"I just can't stop thinking and thinking about that poor meatball," he says, tears rolling from his pinched, squinting eyes. "I've been thinking about it for an hour. Is an hour 60 minutes?"

"Yes."

"For who would want to eat it when it's mush under a bush?"

"Ants?" I suggest. "Or maybe a dog will find it."

"And another thing... they should close the front door. Then the meatball would just bounce on it and roll back to him."

"Good point."

"Or maybe he should remember to cover his mouth when he sneezes."

Peter seems to be regaining his composure, but a few minutes later, he bursts into full crying. I kiss his red face and try to think of other ways to soften his horror at the meatball's hard fate. [Mushy fate. -- DGJ] Maybe the boy was dawdling, and the meatball sat on his plate too long, and wouldn't taste good anymore anyway. He doesn't seem convinced. I encourage Peter to finish his pizza (he's been dawdling for over an hour), because pizza is Italian food, just like meatballs & spaghetti, and the meatball might be glad he ate Italian food.

Finally I tell him we'll write down how he feels and put it on the Internet, so that everyone knows it's not a good song to sing. This is all that will console Peter, and help him feel he's set things right.

"But you'll never be able to distract me from that meatball."

Indeed, a few minutes later, he again bursts into full crying, wailing, "Oh! If only that boy dived on the floor and saved the meatball!"

I put on The Wiggles to distract Peter, who still asks, "Are you writing yet?" while I try to clear the table. "You write down the words and put it on the Internet!"

As I write, he comments that it should have been a cancer cell, not a meatball.

"What would a cancer cell have been doing on top of spaghetti?" I ask.

He shrugs. "Probably putting germs on it."

A little while later, he supplies the title ("The Meatball: Not a Funny Rhyme") and composes the following song for parents to sing instead:

"Lucky Meatball"

There was a meatball all covered in cheese.
His father went to close the front door
And said if you sneeze, please sneeze at the floor.
The meatball was poked on a fork
The cheese fell onto the spaghetti
When the ball went up, it went into a mouth and got chewed by teeth.
The cheese was on the first noodle that the boy scooped up.
The meatball got digested into crumbs.
And the boy brushed his teeth.
He said his prayers and went to bed.

Peter is in bed now while I am typing this. "The song about the meatball... do you think it's funny?" he just called out.

"I don't know," I said. "What do you think?"

"I don't think it's funny," he said, his voice trembling. "I think it's sad. The meatball had nourishment for him."

Here you go, Internet... make things right for a little boy.

The inventor of the world wide web, Tim Berners-Lee, has been awarded a knighthood for his pioneering work. --Web's Inventor Gets a Knighthood (BBC)

Definitely one of the good guys. If he had tried to keep control over his invention, of course it wouldn't have worked, since the web depends upon the contributions of thousands and millions of user-authors.

Patrice Moore, 43, had apparently been standing up when the books, catalogs, mail and newspapers swamped him on Saturday. Firefighters and neighbors rescued Moore on Monday afternoon and he was hospitalized in stable condition Tuesday morning with leg injuries. --Man Trapped Under Mountain of Books, Papers (CNN/AP)

Note to self: find a sturdy box and insert all the papers students didn't pick up last term. Mark box for recycling at the end of next term. Reuse same box at end of next term, so a mound doesn't start to grow. (What to do with all the abandoned 3-ring binders?)

--WebWord Returning Soon! (WebWord)

John S. Rhodes, whose WebWord.com has been down for several months, is planning to bring it back early in 2004. Hurrah!

I thought I was busy as a graduate student, and I was.... As long as I showed up at the right place -- the library, the classroom, the data-entry warehouse -- I got through. Being a faculty member lumps the hours and the tasks all together, and there is little immediate feedback on what's important to complete. Yes, you have to prepare for class, but how well? No, you don't have to write the article right away; there's no deadline on it. As for skipping the weekly meeting of a pointless committee well, who really knows it will matter? | Managing time as an assistant professor is something for which few new faculty members are fully prepared, but it's crucial to your long-term success. -- Lee Tobin McClain --Lessons in Time Management (Chronicle)

Note to self: print out this article and read it a week or two before every semester.

I tend to over-prepare for workshop classes, often coming in with stacks of handouts that I never pass out and overheads that I never use.

Teaching a literature course requires much less prep time on a week-to-week basis (reading a dozen short poems or a hundred pages in a novel) than teaching a writing course (where you have to mark student exercises, checking their revisions against what you wrote in the margins of their earlier drafts, taking note of recurring problems and constructing new handouts for next week or next year, etc.). As long as I've refreshed my memory on the assigned texts, I can "wing it" and lead a pretty good discussion of readings in a literature class. A few students did request more structure when discussing readings in my journalism and "Seminar in Thinking in Writing" class, so I'll have to keep that in mind as I plan my courses. (I haven't had the formal meeting to discuss official course evaluations with my division chair -- I'm referring now to what I learned from short end-of-term reflection papers.)

I've got a five-column spreadsheet, on which I'm listing all the assigned readings and due dates for the four courses I'm teaching and the production schedule of The Setonian. I should probably add a sixth column and add my research/professional goals.

And by the way, I started blogging this article before I noticed who wrote it! (Lee's office is two doors down from mine.)

--Blogging Changing Journalism (New Media Journalism @ Seton Hill University)

A small number of my students noted in their end-of-term reflection that they weren't all that comfortable with blogging because they expected a course in traditional journalism, not all this cyberspace stuff...

Roland Barthes famously announced the death of the author. This weekend, as thousands of professors and their apprentices mill about the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association in San Diego, one might ask: Has theory succumbed to the same fate? ... [T]heory's promised political liberation never happened. Cultural theory, he argues, instead mutated into a free-for-all, where students now use Derrida to deconstruct ''Friends,'' not to change the world - an outcome he calls ''politically catastrophic.'' --Matthew Price reviews Terry Eagelton's After Theory --The self-critic: The man who praised literary theory to thousands of students now wants them to bury it (The Boston Globe)

Hmm... if people really are using theory to critique "Friends," does that not mean that critical thinking and deconstruction as a skill has penetrated enough people's lives that theory has escaped the hallowed halls of academe and the dusty stacks of the library? And if so, is that a good thing? Eagelton is frustrated that graduate students who have the world-changing potential of Marxism at their fingertips are frittering their time away with playful language games, instead of doing something; they analyze the erotic body, but ignore the famished body.

I have always had difficulty with the moral relativism that reigned in my graduate seminars. In two short weeks I'll start teaching a course on "Media Aesthetics," so I'll be wrestling with such issues ("What is beautiful? What is good?") on a regular basis. (I've blogged about Richard Rorty's pragmatism before.) Aestheticism has its own set of problems, but a dogmatic devotion to literary theory can be just as isolating.

'The fakir drew from under his knee a ball of grey twine. Taking the loose end between his teeth, he, with a quick upward motion, tossed the ball into the air. Instead of coming back to him, it kept on going up and up until out of sight and there remained only the long swaying end... [A] boy about six-years-old... walked over to the twine and began climbing up it... the boy disappeared when he had reached a point 30 or 40ft from the ground... a moment later, the twine disappeared.'

This purported to be an eye-witness account of the trick given by a couple of American travellers returning from the mysterious Orient. Within a few months, however, the editor of the Tribune was forced to come clean and admit that not only was the account bogus but that the travellers did not even exist.

Too late. -- Michael Holland reviews Peter Lamont's The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick --Give 'em Enough Rope (Guardian)

The Return of the King (but only after 25 minutes of infernal movie trailers)Jerz's LIteracy Weblog)

My parents came to visit for a few days, so Leigh and I skipped out to see The Return of the King at a matinee. (We saw The Two Towers separately last year.) (*Spoilers*)

Of course any cuts are painful; and I was particularly sad not to see Christopher Lee and Brad Dourif in this one (they play Saruman and Wormtongue; I knew their scene had been filmed but cut). For TTT, I was a little annoyed that Faramir (the "good" brother of Boromir) was made to take the hobbits away from their mission, but I didn't notice any similar damage in this movie.

The aerial shot showing the singal fires leading from Minas Tirith to where Aragorn sits gloomily on Theoden's front porch was stunning. During the battle at Minas Tirith, when Legolas is swinging around one of the huge elephant creatures, I couldn't help but think of Luke Skywalker and the Imperial Walker, but the comic value of Legolas dismounting from the trunk and landing right in front of Gimli was well done. (I thought some of the Gimli humor in The Two Towers was excessive.)

I don't get out to see movies much... we bought a ticket for the 11:45 showing, but it was 12:10 when the movie actually started. Twenty-five minutes of trailers? For a movie that was already three hours long? I found it infuriating.

But what can I do? I'm not exactly a regular movie-goer... other than a family outing to Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie, the only movies I've seen in the past few years have been Star Wars and Lord of the Rings.

--Virtual Punchcard Server (Facade.com)

I found this and a great Tongue Twister Database (if by "database" you mean "long list") via J-Walk Weblog.

PETA: Mad Cow with a Side of Green OnionsJerz's Literacy Weblog)

I notice that PETA has lost no time in capitalizing on the mad cow disease to advocate its vegetarian position... but I don't recall PETA having much to say about the green onion scare! (Google turns up plenty of PETA recipies that use green onions, though).

Inspired by a post on Sugarpacket.

Sites are getting better at using minimalist design, maintaining archives, and offering comprehensive services. However, these advances entail their own usability problems, as several prominent mistakes from 2003 show. --Jakob Nielsen --Top Ten Web Design Mistakes of 2003 (Alertbox)

Usually Nielsen's blurbs are more informative... the "summary" on his site reads more like a marketing tease. To give you a sense of what the page is like, I'll have to collect the first 5 subheadings: "1. Unclear Statement of Purpopse," "2. New URLs for Archived Content," "3. Undated Content," "4. Small Thumbnail Images of Big, Detailed Photos," and "5. Overly detailed ALT Text."

Since archived content, thumbnails and alt text (that's the descriptive text that sometimes pops up near your mouse pointer, usually in a yellow box) are all good things, Nielsen's observations are helpful for those who have implemented these good things in a less-than-optimal way. Observations six through nine are about information architecture, and thus not something my own students are likely to need; while the last item (warning designers about pages that link to themselves) is very relevant to my teaching of newbie web authors.

His full-time job is to keep software-loving scientists and engineers from burying their "whats" in their "hows." It's not easy, because PowerPoint's "hows" get more numerous and distracting with each new release. MORE, the original presentation software, was a 300k program that turned outlines into "bullet charts," its two-word noun for slides. The latest versions of PowerPoint want 10 megs of RAM and come with 25 megs worth of files. Nearly all of it is about "how" rather than "what." --Doc Searles --It's the Story, Stupid: Don't Let Presentation Software Keep You from Getting Your Story Across (Doc Searles)

From 1998, but very appropriate in light of all the PowerPoint links I've recently come across. Near the bottom I found this gem: "Edit aggressively. Less is more. Create a market for your next presentation by leaving the sequel out of this one." Of course, that assumes the speaker wants to present.

Hmm... much of the best advice on giving presentations doesn't address the needs of students, who aren't experts in the subjects they are asked to present on, and who are often not particularly interested in the course. I suppose from a marketing perspective that's not an audience that will pay for a book of presentation tips... but still, I'm interested in anything that will make canned presentations more bearable and educational for the other 29 students in the class (at least some of whom may, possibly, be interested...)

Found this one via Scott Adams (the Arkansas Tech University faculty member -- neither the cartoonist nor the programmer).

Some legal experts said that posting documents detailing the criminal charges against the 45-year-old entertainer was a breakthrough for public access. Others countered that it would undermine the spirit of the law and court proceedings, creating even more of a circus-like atmosphere. --Sue Zeidler --Jackson Web Site Unites, Divides Legal Profession (Yahoo/Reuters)

I've blogged about Jackson's defense website, so it seems only fair to link to this article, which mentions the prosecution's site and also comments on the trend towards online access to legal documents.

I can also bake JUST as much as I like. OK, so I like baking a little more than strictly needed, and who really needs seven types of cookies these days, but it's fun! And some traditions, like the ginger-bread house, have become too important to ignore. --Torill Mortensen --Christmas Eve (Thinking with My Fingers)

Simply reading Torill's Christmas preparations makes me exhausted! But the food sure looks good.

He wrote his plays in longhand. He took his time. He followed the news; he was politically brave. He wrote of the self and also of the world. He wrote for the stage and also for publication. He was theatrical; he was dialectical. He cultivated a public image; a small crowd of remarkable people intersected with the largely antisocial playwright: Emma Goldman, John Reed, Robert Edmond Jones, Paul Robeson, George Jean Nathan, Sean O?Casey, Hart Crane and, unhappily for O?Neill, Charlie Chaplin, who married his daughter. He made friends with a few important critics. He married someone who believed in his work. Winning big prizes did not protect him from savage assault. He argued with God. He hid from the world. He exhorted himself to write better, dig deeper, and he did. --Tony Kushner --The Genius of O'Neill (Times Literary Supplement)

Here's another good quote: "I can make no claim for O’Neill as one of the great writers, only as one of the greatest playwrights; for these two things, writing and playwriting, are not the same, and O’Neill’s work makes that clearer than any other’s." (Kushner is the author of "Angels in America.")

"Embedded," as in the reporters assigned to accompany military units during the war, beat out "blog" and "SARS (news - web sites)" as the top word of 2003, Web site yourDictionary.com (http://www.yourdictionary.com) said...."Shock-and-awe," the phrase the U.S. military used to describe the type of campaign it would wage in Iraq, topped other Iraq-related terms like "rush to war," "weapons of mass destruction" and "spider-hole" as the top phrase of 2003. --Web Site Picks Year's Most Deeply Embedded Word (Reuters/Yahoo)

Interesting... but should "spider-hole" really count as a phrase? I'd call that a single hyphenated word. If it remains in use, it may very well eventually drop the hyphen and turn into "spiderhole". I don't think a dictionary of the future will contain the word "shockandawe" or "rushtowar", so "spider-hole" seems to be in a different class here.

Feeling Like a Dad at ChristmasJerz's Literacy Weblog)

Last night, Peter sang in the children's choir for Christmas Eve mass. I nodded and smiled poudly at him whenever he caught my eye. His baby sister Carolyn spotted him after about twenty minutes, and kept shouting "Peter! Peter" and clapping and going "Yay!" whenever the choir finished a song. Since we were sitting near the choir, amongst a crowd of other proud parents wanting to sit near their children, her antics were mostly met with tolerant smiles.

At one point, in the middle of a solemn part of the service, I saw Peter rubbing his eyes, blinking back horrified tears. I "excused me" my way through the crowded church and between the rows of children to ask Peter what was wrong... he had dropped his songsheet, the one the choir director had given him at the first rehearsal, and told him to hold onto. An older boy who had memorized the songs agreed to let Peter have his songsheet, and disaster was averted. After the service, the father of another child in the choir recognized me as the one who had swooped in to save a crying child. "You were a good dad today," he said.

The other day, choir rehearsal was cancelled because (according to one of the many SUV-driving women who were moving through the parking lot at the time) choir director/organist's mother died. Peter felt very sad. so I suggested he draw a card for her. ("It's supposed to be heart," he said, handing me a vaguely circular design.) We left the card on the organ.

I got up early this morning because Santa never seems to have time to stick around and assemble all the toys he brought.

No time for serious blogging today, just a few little observations I wanted to jot down. I hope you're having a pleasant holiday, yourself!

He was reading from a university mission statement and other material on its website.

"To provide outcome-related research and consultancy services that address real-world issues" - shrieks of laughter. The university's "approach to quality management is underpinned by a strong commitment to continuous improvement and a whole-of-organisation framework" - uproar in the room.

The university in question was RMIT but it could have been any of them. Go to your website and read the language, Watson urged guests at a recent Deans of Education dinner. That made people laugh even more.

--James Button reviews Don Watson's Death Sentence --Fighting the death sentence (The Age)

The article and the book being reviewed are very Austrailian. The other day, I couldn't find this book in the US Amazon.com database. Thanks for the suggestion, Jim.

Bureau of Labor Statistics data indicates that, as of Nov. 30, women represent 50.6 percent of the 48 million employees in management, professional and related occupations. --More U.S. Women Crack Glass Ceiling (Washington Times/UPI)

Women are much more likely to go to college than men; they tend to study harder, get higher grades, have fewer drug problems, are more likely to seek help from their professors, etc.

I'm blogging this in part so I can find it again the next time I get a freshman paper with a thesis that goes something like, "This one literary work, in which a female character faces oppression, proves that all women are oppressed in every possible way, and because that sucks, sexual discrimination should therefore be stopped immediately."

Some people may say "It's about time men got a taste of what it's like," but that's hardly fair to the generation of boys who are growing up in a very different world from the one their grandfathers and great-grandfathers ruled -- a new world which many of their fathers helped bring about.

My parents had a fairly traditional division of labor until my early teens, when my father's neck injury forced him to retire on disability and my mother went back to work.

My wife stays home with the children full-time, and she is home-schooling Peter in kindergarten this year. Because she breast-fed she did the vast majority of the late-night baby-walking; she also does the the children's laundry (which includes deciding what they are going to wear each day, apparently because I have no sense of style, which I won't deny). So that's all fairly traditional in terms of gender roles, but I do all the dishes (we tell the baby not to play with the dishwasher because it is "daddy's") and give all the baths, and when I am not at work I make about half the meals and do nearly all the diapers. Leigh does do all the bills, but she generally does that sort of paperwork in the evenings while I'm getting the children ready for bed. It also means she controls the finances, which is fine with me; it's a bit embarassing having to ask her for cash so I can buy my $1.80 plate of salad in the cafeteria a few times a week -- at least Nora Helmer and Lucy Ricardo got allowances. (But if I'd been interested in money I'd have never been an English major in the first place.)

Anyway, I've blogged on boys in school before.

I love the 10 minute presentation. You have enough time to get your points across to the audience without boring them. There is enough time, but it concentrates your mind on cutting out the waffle and making it snappy. Remember nobody ever complained about a presentation being too short. --Jonty Pearce --Ten Minute Presentations (Presentation Helper)

Site suggested via an e-mail from Jonty Pearce. Some great tips on Jonty's site, though I notice with its references to testosterone and advice about bringing a spare tie, the advice isn't exactly gender-netural. The site is focused on business speeches and has some tips on social speeches (particularly those at weddings), but none of the resources seem focused on academic presentations, in which the presenter is being forced, as part of an educational experience, to present on a topic that may be brand new to the presenter, to a mixed audience of mostly peers (who need to be entertained and, one hopes, at least somewhat enlightened) and one expert (the instructor, who already knows the subject matter, and who must needs to be convinced you did your homework).

I showed my freshman comp class a video and then asked them to speak for four minutes about the video, as a dry run for a later six-minute presentation. A few students over-prepared and read from papers (zzzzzz), but most students were underprepared, tried to "wing it", and ended up finishing a minute or two early. They all did much better for their six-minute presentation, but even then, my main goal was to just to expose them to the amount of preparation a speech requires. Next term we'll spend a lot more time on the genre of oral presentations.

Hmm... I really ought to add a "Rhetoric" category to my blog.

While many of my students are getting the hang of this, just as many aren't. I'm sure it's that some are simply more motivated than others, some feel more comfortable writing for an audience, others are more passionate about their topics, and some are just more confident in their abilities in general. But what those of us using Web logs are trying to articulate now are the strategies that will help students make the most of their blogging efforts while at the same time envision the ways in which they might be included in the curriculum. --Will R. --More Thinking on Student Blogging (Weblogg-Ed)

Same color palette: greens, blues, and reds on a synthetic base of white. Same kinds of curves and contours, same balance and proportions. Whereas once upon a time toothbrushes were made from a single plastic cast, contemporary models, like contemporary athletic shoes, are built up out of inscrutable deposits of layers and sediment that speak to some elsuive yet exquisitely refined ergonomic principle. --Matt Kirschenbaum --Of Sneakers and Toothbrushes (MGK)

This one made me smile. Does the target audience for Nike ads actually call them "sneakers" these days? Just curious.

You could dismiss this as nostalgia, GenX-ers pining for the simpler pleasures of their Cold War youth. But that doesn't really explain it, because half the people buying these games are teenagers at Urban Outfitters.

No, these Jurassic games are popular for a more powerful reason: They're the canon of video games, and they prove that keeping it simple still works. Chunky, low-fi games like Pac-Man show us why so many of today's more advanced games can be so paradoxically dull. --Clive Thompson --Blasts From the Past (Microsoft/Slate)

A good application of a few basic elements of game theory to current consumer trends. (His earlier article on videogames as editorals was more trend-spottingly illuminating.)

Don't miss the final line: "Video games turn out to be just like sonnets and pop songs. Often it's restrictions, not freedoms, that inspire creativity."

In my opinion, Google today is far from the great search engine it was in those far-off days, yet I still use it.

Even knowing that it indexes only a small proportion of the web using a technique that too often gives precedence to pages that lack authority or coherence, that it is skewed by multiple blog links and can be manipulated by unscrupulous advertisers, doesn't stop me typing search terms into my toolbar and feasting on the results. --Bill Thompson --Is Google good for you? (BBC)

Thanks to the fact that I write, my life is satisfactory: I can inhabit gloom and live in joy. When something unpleasant happens to me, provided only that is potentially of literary use, my first thought is ?How best can I describe this?? I thereby distance myself from my own displeasure or irritation. As I tell my patients, much to their surprise -- for it is not a fashionable view -- it is far more important to be able to lose yourself than to find yourself. --Theodore Dalrymple --Reasons to be cheerful (Spectator)

Dalrymple is an erudite, literate medical doctor who specializes in prison services. He is also a wonderful writer.

"A hole in the ground, like any other structurally engineered design, is just an artifact of human technology," said Will Whitfoot, mayor of the town of Michel Delving and a spokesman for the hole-dwelling community of Hobbiton. "Like any tool or technological artifact, it has no moral imperative per se, but performs strictly according to the needs of its user." --Hussein Capture Unfairly Stigmatizes Holes, Say Hobbits (Watley Review)

Perfectly silly.

Look at the room you're in. Chances are it has thousands of objects in it. Imagine having to write a description of every single one of those objects and its relationship to every other. Eeeagh! Instead, you winnow it down to the objects you'll actually need, plus a bit of scenery. In other words, the author does for the player what the autistic person is incapable of doing for himself. No wonder there seems to be a disproportionate number of autistic-spectrum folk in IF fandom: it must be wonderful to wander around a virtual world where surroundings can be completely apprehended without being overwhelming (which isn't guaranteed even for graphical adventures). --Adam Cadre --Autism and Interactive Fiction (adamcadre.ac)

Via Grand Text Auto.

Beneath the arena's grandeur lay a netherworld of gladiatorial schools and storerooms, all linked by corridors filled with pulleys and levers, animal cages and gladiators. | The system was run by teams of slaves who faced being fed to the animals themselves if their timing went awry.-Michael Leidig --Animal magic of Rome's Colosseum underworld (Sydney Morning Herald)

Well, that's one way to motivate your techies.

Bjorn Lomborg, the author of a controversial book attacking the environment movement, was cleared yesterday of "scientific dishonesty" by the Danish science ministry.

The ministry overturned a ruling in January by the Danish committee on scientific dishonesty (DCSD), part of the Danish Research Agency, that Mr Lomborg's book The Skeptical Environmentalist was "clearly contrary to the standards of good scientific practice". --Houlder and MacCarthy --Danish writer cleared of 'scientific dishonesty' (Financial Times)

I've been following this one for a while. Well-meaning reporters and students often uncritically accept the statistics given by activists who misrepresent, misunderstand, or simply mis-emphasize scientific findings.

Thus we are pleased to announce the winners of The Chronicle's First Annual Awards for Self-Consciously Provocative MLA Paper Titles (also known as the Provokies). All selections are cited as listed in the program for the 119th MLA Annual Convention, to be held this month in San Diego. (In other words, no paper titles were made up.)...[T]he judges quickly reached consensus on Most Provocative Panel Title: "Apertures and Orifices in Chaucer." As luck would have it, Most Provocative Paper Title went to a presentation to be delivered during that same session: "'The Entree Was Long and Streit, and Gastly for to See': Visual and Verbal Penetration in the Knight's Tale," by Disa Gambera of the University of Utah. --Scott McLemee --Signifyin' at the MLA (Chronicle)

One of my favorite MLA paper titles was "The Semiotics of Sinatra," presented by the former chair of the University of Toronto's English department. (Yes, that's Frank Sinatra.)

But we have brought you into the world to be rulers of the hive, kings of yourselves and of the other citizens, and have educated you far better [520c] and more perfectly than they have been educated, and you are better able to share in the double duty. Wherefore each of you, when his turn comes, must go down to the general underground abode, and get the habit of seeing in the dark. When you have acquired the habit, you will see ten thousand times better than the inhabitants of the den, and you will know what the several images are, and what they represent, because you have seen the beautiful and just and good in their truth. And thus our State which is also yours will be a reality, and not a dream only, and will be administered in a spirit unlike that of other States, in which men fight with one another [520d] about shadows only and are distracted in the struggle for power, which in their eyes is a great good. Whereas the truth is that the State in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed, and the State in which they are most eager, the worst. --Plato, as translated by Jowett.
--The Allegory of the Cave (Plato's Republic/University of Evansville)

In this excerpt from Plato's Republic, education is presented as the means to creating noble leaders. Socrates (the character in Plato's dialogue) notes a double-dichotomy; those who are most fit to rule do not hunger after power, while those who hunger most after power are the likeliest to rule, though their rule is not best for the State. While the general populace sits chained in a metaphorical cave, watching faint shadows of puppet shows on the wall and doing their best to sort out what they see, the true philosopher has left the cave and seen more of the world through the natural light of the sun.

But -- and here's the part I don't remember "getting" when I first came across this selection as an undergraduate -- it is not enough for the individual philosopher to escape the shadows; those of truly noble character will be moved to pity the multitudes still chained in the dark, and will voluntarily return to the world of shadows. At first, having grown accustomed to the sunlight of reason, they will have difficulty adjusting to the shadow world, but eventually they will be able to teach the masses about the reality of the objects they perceive only via shadows.

I found this site via the Plato FAQ website.

Evolutionary psychologists insist that wherever an intense pleasure is found in human life, there is likely some reproductive or survival advantage connected with it. Art has little practical value, but can deliver intense pleasure. Why? Aestheticians, please explain. --Denis Dutton --Let'sNaturalize Aesthetics  (Aesthetics Online)

Dutton is the creator of the monumental Arts & Letters Daily, which inspired me to blog shortly after I first encountered it in 1998.

This bibliography was originally compiled by Scott Stebelman from 1996-2000. Scott, a librarian at Gelman Library at George Washington University from 1986 until 2000, retired recently. The page is currently being updated and enhanced by Dr. Seth Katz and Jim Bonnett at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois. --Hypertext and Hypermedia: A Select Bibliography (Bradley University)

The pages I checked focus mainly on print resources published in the mid 90s, and the index page hasn't been updated since 2001, but it still looks very impressive. It led me to a site with much of Sven Birkerts's The Gutenberg Elegies online.

The pleasures of videogames are frequently enjoyed by those that commonsense might encourage us to consider as non-players -- "onlookers" that exert no direct control via the game controls. In this article, I want to suggest that videogame players need not actually touch a joypad, mouse or keyboard and that our definition needs to accommodate these non-controlling roles.

[...]

Many a great game has poor visuals -- an entire generation of players grew up with blips of light, @ signs and even text-only games -- but there are few good game with bad controls. --James Newman --The Myth of the Ergodic Videogame: Some thoughts on player-character relationships in videogames (Game Studies)

Some good observations on the complexity of the player's identification with elements within the game world.

When my son Peter was about 2, he was spooked by one of those little coin-operated riding machines. He still enjoys sitting in them, but he never wants us to put in any money. The employee at the arcade near the shopping mall food court in Wisconsin got to recognize my face, and noticed that I never spent anything; at one point he would drop two or three tokens into a machine where Peter was happily watching the demo loop. When the familiar sequence was replaced with a "get ready to play" screen, Peter would put up with the interruption, or say "You play, Daddy." After the game was over, he would resume his enjoyment of the demo loop.

During the coin-operated videogame craze of the late 70s and early 80s, I spent about two dollars on Asteriods, but I would often go to arcades to watch. Often, after having watched somebody play two or three games, the gamer would invite me to push the fire button, so that he (always a he) could concentrate on moving and accelerating.

Looking back, I wonder whether maybe I should have reciprocated; I never did, and I never recall getting glared at for my stinginess. It was my perception at the time that the paying player was, at least in part, rewarding me for being such an attentive audience.

Dennis Jerz tiene un excelente Literacy Weblog, hoy navegando su sitio, he encontrado un link a un super artículo, sobre Memes, Memex y Vannebar Bush... Aquí transcribiré solo algunos fragmentos. Pero lo más importante es que, dado que El Tao de Internet ya ha llegado a Vannebar Bush, Memes y Memex por caminos alternativos, es bueno leer a un especialista en el tema. --Laura Mansilla --Meme, Memex y Dennis Jerz  (El Tao de Internet)

Yo no habla Espanol, but using the on-site link to the Babelfish translator really opens up a world of scholarship and ideas.

This morning, while my son was at choir practice, I spent an hour reading through the paperback "Canterbury Tales" that I first read as an undergraduate. It's taking a while to get back my reading knowledge of middle English -- long enough to remind me how difficult even my own language can be.

This is not passive news consumption. Neither is it broadcasting. The average blogger has time to surf the web, but no resources to report stories. Some bloggers will follow a news story to the end, some may lose interest after a few days. Commentary will range from the fully-formed to the random blurt and can freely mix the public and the personal.

All this represents something new: participatory media. And it matters. Not because of its resemblance to familiar institutions, but because of its differences from them. -- Rebecca Blood --The revolution should not be eulogised  (Guardian)

A good article, in which a committed blogger speaks intelligently to the wider world of non-bloggers. I do, however, question her estimate that an "average weblog" will be updated "perhaps a dozen times a day". Blogs that show that much activity are very rare, indeed.

From a Guardian special report on weblogs, which I found on Scott Rettberg's site.

The word "grammar," Mr. Ellis writes, had an old vernacular usage, meaning "the ability to do magic." That overtone survives in "grimoire," the term for a book of spells, as well as the word "glamour," which was originally "an illusion of beauty created through black magic."

A sorcerer, then, is a kind of scholar, and vice versa. --Scott McLemee

--The Devil and Bill Ellis (Chronicle)

Finished Reading Angela's AshesJerz's Literacy Weblog)

I finally finished reading Angela's Ashes. I can't really say that I enjoyed it, although I appreciated the skill in the storytelling. I've noted before, I find myself resisting the melodramatic tugs at my heartstrings, and since the book is presented as a memoir, of course I feel terrible for not being moved as I should.

The author's unromanticized view of Ireland is better than shamrocks and leprechauns, but the endless tales of drunkard men and nagging women are just as monotonous. I find it interesting that, with all the drinking the narrator reports, he doesn't even seem tempted to drink before he turns 16. If there's one thing his drunken lout of a father would want to be a part of, you'd think it would be the ritual of buying a 16-year-old his first drink. You'd think that a boy as perceptive as the narrator would be able to see what alcoholism has done to his family and, indeed, his whole class. Of course, the story is told so that we would indeed be horrified by what Frankie is turning into (that is, his father), so that we would share the protagonist's desire to escape the life that seems destined for him.

At the end of the novel, it's not clear whether life in America will be much different for the narrator, and I didn't share in the narrator's 19-year-old exultation of sheer and utter joy that he is now free -- I've seen plenty of 19-year-olds who have no idea what to do with their freedom. (See Karissa reflecting on a former high school classmate who overdosed on heroin.)

I know the story picks up in 'Tis, and I'm interested enough to see what happens that maybe one day I'll get it from the library, but not any time soon.

The fact that Google now "sucks" is in a large part not Google's fault: Google simply reflects what it can see, and most of the Web is simply invisible to Google, as it now lies behind closed doors. Google's aggressive, but essentially dumb robots can only get so far. We're painfully aware that Google's lack of specificity leaves its robots chomping through thin air, dead pages, or trackbacks, more often than not. --Andrew Orlowski --A Quantum Theory of Internet Value (The Register)

Orlowski ruminates on the impact of Google Print, a new feature from Google (see BBC's coverage) that searches the contents of selected print books, along with the Internet.

It's a sure bet that the scholarly books that don't have huge print runs or huge advertising budgets won't be the ones paying Google to "feature" their results, which means that Google will be even less valuable than it already is to students seeking credible scholarly information.

I get to add another detail to my list of "why you shouldn't rely on Google" freshman comp speech (which I have to repeat in every class, at every level. Many students, rewarded by their high school teachers for their ability to summarize plot or express their own personal opinion of a text, seem to write up their whole paper first, and only then look for sources.

I ask students to submit notes telling me what they would have done more of if they had the chance, and the activity of scholarly research is often described as "finding quotes that support my argument," rather than constructing an argument based on the reading you have already done.

A student who has already polished the sentences and paragraphs, and has a few hours before being overtaken by sleep (or, in some cases, the actual deadlie) tends not to be very descriminatory when Google returns a list of hits that "look good".

Note: I'd already blogged this article when Jim e-mailed to me a suggestion. Keep 'em coming, Jim.

I'll be the first to admit I'm not a sports fan. And here's one reason why.

"When I was (in school), we had a day when everyone who was receiving scholarships — academic or athletic — was called up at an assembly and honored. One guy who barely met NCAA requirements got a full athletic scholarship, while several other people who had almost straight As got $500 or $1,000.

"It is funny thinking back on it, because I was one of the athletic guys who got the big check for football," [social studies teacher] Whicker added. -- "Gold & Black Illustrated".

Things That Make Me WeepJerz's Literacy Weblog)

So, it's "funny," is it? I'm not laughing. This is sad.

(The article itself, about a spoof article that was picked up as true by sports journalists, is somewhat amusing.)

Gaming Culture and Theory -- Or; Will Somebody Please Pinch Me?Literacy Weblog)

About a half hour ago, I returned from a meeting with the dean of academic affairs, at which I was planning to pitch a new course that I'm calling "Gaming Culture and Theory." I brought a short stack of scholarly books along with me, intending to justify the academic value of such a course, particularly as Seton Hill University continues admitting more men.

But before I even made it to the chair, the dean said, "Just so you know, I'm going to ask you teach this course next January. Tell me, what will it be about?"

In return for teaching a course in the first few weeks of January (during Christmas break), I would get a lighter teaching load in the spring.

In order to accomodate the needs of students who want to go home for Christmas break, the dean wants me to teach the course online, and to commit to teaching it every other year (which is typical of electives at our small school).

I had already roughed up a syallabus that had us meeting in virtural environments for all of the second week and using blogs throughout the term, so I didn't have to think very much about that. She also asked whether the course would meet the university's "artistic expression" area requirement, and I said that I thought it would -- graphic designers could produce storyboards, English majors could write branching dialogue trees, programmers could produce their own Elizas, etc.

I decided to go with a cultural focus, rather than a heavy theoretical focus, because one of my goals would be to get students to begin thinking critically about the games they play (and about the rhetoric of gaming as it is represented by the mainstream media). Perhaps after I've taught more upper-class SHU students, I'll have a clearer idea of what kind of theoretical concepts to attempt, but something tells me a three-week intensive course offered during the January break is going to have to have a lot of hands-on game time. Since three weeks is probably not long enough for students to become fully invested in an epic MMORPG, I don't think I'll be able to work with EverQuest in class. And I want to include an exploring/socializing game, such as There.com, SimsOnline (neither of which I've played). I'm thinking of assignments such as asking students to use their avatars for cross-gendered role-play, to discuss such issues as sexual harrasment or body image in virtural environments. I'm not sure I could teach stand a course on the mathematical algorithms for generating the shadow for a stream of spurting blood, but the course will have to appeal to the gaming geeks in order for it to attract enough enrollment.

My parting shot was a request that I be given a budget to fund my own exploratory research on the pedagogical uses of virtual environments. Sure, she said, put it in the proposal. (Which is easy enough to say, but still... she didn't burst out laughing, which is a good sign.)

Where to start... EverQuest is probably out (though maybe I should investigate a little further before deciding...). Star Wars Galaxies? Deus X 2? Grand Theft Auto?

(Somebody, pinch me!)

Okay, okay, back to my long-enough list of short-term goals.

No matter how tricky or convoluted the map becomes, you will always have a clear picture of how to get from one part to another. Accurate mapping cannot be overstressed if one is to become an above-average adventure game player. Top players map at least 50 percent of their game-playing time. --Roe R. Adams III --Computer Gaming Methodology (Digital Deli)

Boy, that brings back memories. Back in my day, we didn't have this fancy camera-floating-along-behind-the-PC, 3D realtime-rendered automapping. What we had was a piece of paper and a pencil. That's the way it was, and we liked it!

Also of note farther down on the same page is a sidebar on dragons in computer games since Adventure. (The article's from a 1984 book, so the list isn't long.) And, while I'm at it, I found an interesting discussion of comptuer therapy (starting with Eliza, but moving on a bit.)

I'm working on a bit of computer history myself, or will be when I finish grading (tomorrow!). Historical research 101: the older your source is, the more valuable its observations; they haven't been tained by the passage of time, which tends to filter out the unpopular or unusual opinions and replace them with commonly-accepted wisdom.

Reading a decision novel is much like walking along a path: when you come to a fork in the path, you must decide on the left path or the right path. You cannot leave the path. Decision books look a lot more like novels than interactive fiction. They are cleverly woven stories that overlap at certain points and they are a far cry from being interactive. They do allow you a choice, a "decision," but what happens if you want to do something that is not one of the preconceived choices? --Michael Berlyn and Marc Blank --Interactive Fiction and the Future of the Novel (Atari Archives)

A classic article from the 1984 book Digital Deli, which is available online at the wonderful Atari Archives website.

I'd have to disagree with their claim here. It's true that interactive fiction (text-adventure games) offer far morie decisions than "decision novels" (the best-known of these were the "Choose Your Own Adventure" novels -- made up of one-page stories with a multiple-choice question at the bottom: "If you pick up the telephone, turn to page 10. If you let it ring, turn to page 14").

But an IF game still offers only a finite set of solutions. A good programmer will account for all sorts of attempted actions, typically by writing funny refusal statements (such as, when a frustrated gamer types "bite tree," the game might respond, "That would be worse than its bark."). But even if a game recognizes a lot of attempted actions, only a very small number of actions will actually affect the outcome of the game. Yes, you can type whatever you want in response to the ">" prompt, just as I could take a Jane Austen novel off of my shelf and start turning pages at random. The Austen novel is optimized for the reader who starts at page one and turns pages sequentially, just as the typical interactive fiction game is optimized for the gamer who knows the conventions of the genre (or who is willing to learn them as they are taught by the author during the early stages of the game).

This classic article, co-written by one of the founders of Infocom, naturally emphasizes that company's improvements over Will Crowther's original two-word parser. Despite the article's bias, or perhaps because of it, it offers an excellent introduction to the structure and possible future of interactive fiction.

Of course, improved graphics displays and the rise of CD-ROM games would kill the commercial value of the genre -- but the whole computer gaming market sort of imploded in the late 80s anyway, mostly due to the failure of dozens of independent computer platforms.

On an only barely related note, one of my students wrote that until she visited the office of the student newspaper (which uses Macs) she hadn't seen an Apple comptuer since elementary school -- that is, not outside of "old movies." (By the way, she's a CS major.)

Moveable Types of Information Literacy: Emerging Electronic Genres and the Deconstruction of Peer ReviewLiteracy Weblog)

Vannevar Bush, writing in 1945, lamented that the volume of scientific knowledge being published each year forced researchers to spend unprecedented time and energy searching for relevant information (and choosing what to ignore). His solution, the Memex, was a photocopier crossed with a microfilm storage and access device. A Memex user would theoretically create links between documents, annotating those links, add those annotations to the filing system, and share the resulting "trails" with other researchers. In some sense, what Vannevar Bush was trying to accomplish with his annotated "trails" has been implemented through the weblog genre (specifically, the research blog or "edublog").

Traditional textual scholarship aims to construct a specific, ideal, "correct" text. But computer science -- the discipline that generates the technology that drives (or hampers) information literacy -- aims instead for abstraction. In the open source software development model, particularly as described by Eric Raymond's "The Cathedral and the Bazaar," individual programmers contribute their labor freely to a common project made available to the general public for free.

Given the financial pressures publishers of journals exert upon libraries, and the brewing rebellion against what some activists characterize as a cabal of print publishers, some emerging electronic forms have radically altered the dynamics of the scholar-publisher relationship, without necessarily reducing the filtering value provided by peer-review. Electronic journals such as First Monday offer cutting-edge, peer-reviewed scholarship on a timeline of weeks. Even more radical is the Wiki, a form of electronic authorship that decentralizes authority and encourages all readers to annotate, expand, edit, or completely revise a common text.

In such genres, peer-review (in the form of inbound links, e-mailed or posted corrections/refutations, revision, or even deletion) is expected to happen after a text is published, thus making the process of peer review visible, instead of simply the product. Popularly-edited texts online typically summarize general knowledge, rather than offer a forum for the presentation of new knowledge or controversial opinion; further, emerging electronic genres also typically over-represent particular opinions espoused by technorati who manipulate the system (an effect which inspired the term "Googlewashing," and illustrated by the recent online prank that now causes a Google search for "miserable failure" to point first to George Bush's official biography on the White House web site). Developing strategies to compensate for these anomalous effects is a vital skill for 21st Century information literacy.

Considering how little return American students get on their books during "Book Buyback" at the end of the semester, I wondered if Iraqi students could use these donations instead? --Mike Arnzen --Gun and Pencil: Book Buyback for Baghdad? (Pedablogue)

A reflection on the CS Monitor's report on the state of higher education in Iraq. Now there are some professors whose problems really make me feel like a whiner.

Me: Okay, okay, Jerz...enough procrastinating, and get back to those papers.

Me: Just one more blog entry? Pleeease?

Me: No!

Me: Then can I at least run that errand to the business office?

Me: Okay... but no stopping off at the cafeteria.

Me: Aw.....

If there's a problem with PowerPoint, it's not that it makes you dumb, it's that Microsoft has never taken the time to show us how it can make you smart. --Mike Gunderloy --PowerPoint Doesn't Make You Dumb (ADT Mag)

Enough people responded ethusiastically to the NY Times article dissing PowerPoint that I thought it worthwhile to link to an opposing viewpoint.

What's that on the home page of ADT Magazine -- is that an ad for Microsoft? And what's that on the main menu bar -- a link to a whole section devoted to Microsoft's .NET?

While Gunderloy is critical of Microsoft, his claim that people simply haven't been trained to unlock the power of a piece of software is consistent with a marketing policy to sell training sessions (or books, or magazines) so that people will be better able to use Microsoft products.

Of course, the subject of the NYT article, Edward Tufte, is also selling his anti-PowerPoint brochure, so what's my point?

I'm not sure... I must've missed that slide.

Back to my grading.

On another note... I realized that I just used the word "dissing" without quotation marks or self-conscious irony, which probably means that what coolness it once had is now officially over.

The machine's inventors are somewhat vague about what the food simulator will actually be used for, but they suggest that it will be helpful in designing new foods... --Lawrence Osborne --Food Simulator, The (NY Times (will expire))

Here's the PowerPoint business plan these guys must have followed.

Step 1. Invent a device that can simulate the sensation of chewing food.
Step 2. ?
Step 3. Profit.

BTW, I don't know why the NYT puts "The" at the end of the headline.

A Florida man claiming to be selling tickets to a Christmas show took $10 each from hundreds of school children then splurged on wine, sunglasses and movies.... David Lee Ellisor collected money from students at schools all around Miami for a "once in a lifetime" Christmas show that never took place. --How the Grinch Stole... (Yahoo/Reuters)

He's innocent until proven guilty, of course... but if Ellisor shows up in the next town selling band instruments and uniforms, be suspicious.

Count your ideas. Be careful not to have too many. | And if a student dares to have four ideas, instead of three? . . . Toss one out. Only three ideas allowed. I've seen students fail assignments because they had the wrong numbers. | And they can't stop writing that way. Many have told me, even in tears, that they try to write differently, but they can't. | Brainwashing does that. Now, imagine the future." --Lynn Stratton --Taught to Remove all Thought (Floridian)

Is it really this bad? The hated "five paragraph essay" is a device we teach our students so that their biology and economics teachers will be able to find the answers they want the students to produce on essay tests; these professors typically don't want to see a student's rough drafts, and typically aren't intersted in helping the student discover knowledge and take ownership of its expression. (Of course, there are teachers who are exceptions.) Seton Hill University is going through a plan to identify certain courses as "writing intensive," and restrict the enrollment so that the instrutor will have more time to work with writing. (My colleague Mike Arnzen rather gutsily pointed out that, based on the administration's guidelines, all English courses should be designated "writing intensive," and we should therefore reduce the enrollment in all the courses we teach; but I doubt that his suggestion caused more than a passing chuckle from the administration.)

I don't think there is anything wrong in teaching students to write in a manner that their professors who are not writing experts will appreciate. But I spend a lot of time teaching students who have already mastered the five-paragraph essay to unlearn that form and adapt to the requirements of a news article, a memo, or a web site. Sometimes it's easier to teach students who don't have to unlearn their knowledge of the traditional English essay. I'll have to revisit this whole discussion in January.

Link found via a comment by "cgb" on Kairosnews.

"Ladies and gentlemen, we got him." (The Australian)
"Ladies and gentlemen -- we got him." (Time)
"Ladies and gentlemen: we got him." (Washington Times)
"Ladies and gentlemen... we got him." (ic Wales)
--Ladies and gentlemen [?] we got him. (Google News)

Interesting how the various news agencies are punctuating this catchphrase, which will probably soon be as overused as the "road map" metaphor in stories about Israel and Palestine.

This will give the news organizations something else to do besides stoking the public's fears about the flu.

Mike says that the five-paragraph format is a shortcut, and "short-cuts -- whether a five-paragraph theme or a preemptive military strike -- seldom offer lasting solutions." Amanda says that "[w]hat it generates is more a list than an essay." I agree with what Amanda says when she argues (implicitly) that it's not so much the number of paragraphs as it is that the format doesn't encourage connection-making, critical thinking, or innovative ways to write introductions and conclusions--ugh, especially conclusions... --Clancy Ratliff --On the Five-Paragraph Essay (KairosNews)

A good introduction to the flurry of bloggers responding to a recent NYT article.

Who really killed Hamlet's dad? What does King Richard III want with a horse anyway? And where did the gravedigger get that gorgeous pink dress? Avenge your father, defeat your evil uncle and ascend the throne of Denmark in William Shakespeare's long undiscovered text adventure. --Robin Johnson --The Most Lamentable and Excellent Text Adventure of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (Online Residence of Robin Johnson)

Very nice, Scott-Adamsesque implementation of Hamlet as a text adventure. Doesn't shoot nearly as high as Graham Nelson's verson of The Tempest (game | my review) but the JavaScript interface looks very smooth. I've got a long-dormant work-in-progress that features a character with a speech impediment, so I was amused to see Johnson's treament of Ophelia.

In order to compose this piece, I had to depend on a circular way of thinking. Initially, my plot was linear, but that did not work well. Rather than use a traditional pyramid plot structure, I outlined plot points, and wrote something for each. Then, I added more pages under some plot points and linked it all together. I linked absolutely everything to anything at first, and then gradually deleted links and added new to get rid of infinite loops or excessive backtracking. --Julie Young, a student in my "Writing for the Internet" course. --Rationale for 'La Tour Eiffel' (A Work in Progess)

For her term project, Julie started writing a hypertext travellogue, but soon realized that a hypertext document defies traditional notions of time (and space). Since Julie came into the course as an experienced blogger, I encouraged her to challenge herself for her final project. There wasn't time for me to offer a unit on hypertext literature, so Julie was pretty much on her own.

She conducted usability testing on a rough draft, and adjusted her linking technique and added more material after she observed what her test subjects did or didn't like about her work. As is the case with most literary hypertext, the brevity of each individual node can convey the false notion that the text itself is insubstantial, when in truth the amount of planning and fine-tuning that a mutipath story requires means that even a brief creative hypertext generally takes far more brain power than a traditional short story of the same length.

I like how she used devices such as a journal to take us back in time, and a suitcase full of brochures to take us forward. Have a look at "La Tour Eiffel."

Écrite en 1920 et jouée pour la première fois à Prague l'année suivante, cette pièce de théâtre, intitulée Rossum's Universal Robots (R.U.R.), introduit le terme robot, qui remplacera dorénavant celui d'automate. La pièce de Capek fut acclamée dans le monde entier. -- Dennis G. Jerz (via an anonymous translator) --Le règne des robots (L'Encyclopédie de L'Agora)

An editor from a Quebec online encyclopedia just asked me to approve a French translation of my web page on RUR (Rossum's Universal Robots). The request would have been more gracious if it had come before the translation was posted, but I already knew some of it had been put into Wikipedia's RUR article, and I helped edit that page, so I'm OK with this.

One problem -- I don't know French... I guess I'll ask Seton Hill's French teacher to take a look at it for me (if she has time).

I've been tweaking the original page since I first posted it when I was a grad student, and a reader recently took me to task (politely) for recommending the Toward the Radical Center translation, so I suppose this page needs even more work yet.

Among the attractions at the 1958 World'sFair in Brussels, Belgium, visitors would have beheld ?Professor RAMAC,? a four-ton IBM machine capable of offering up responses to users? queries on a two thousand year historical span... [T]he Professor offered the general public its first encounter with the magnetic disk storage technology today called the hard drive.... In 1950 Edmund C. Berkeley had published a book entitled Giant Brains: or Machines That Think, the first work to introduce computers to a general audience. The shift from Berkeley'santhropomorphism to the RAMAC'sfull-fledged personification as a ?Professor? or ?genius? hints at the kinds of synthetic identities that would culminate with Arthur C. Clarke'sHAL 9000 only a decade later. --Matthew G. Kirschenbaum --An Excerpt from Mechanisms [2]: 'Professor RAMAC' (MGK)

I left a niggly comment on the author's blog. It somehow didn't feel right simply posting, "Thanks, I enjoyed that."

To quote a student of mine... heck, phooey and darn. I got distracted before I hit "submit" on that comment and now it's gone. Drat.

Weblog TweakingJerz's Literacy Weblog)

I've made a few very minor tweaks to the blog, as I re-familiarize myself with JSP. Will is planning on making some changes to the site soon, and I want to be up to speed so I can more fully understand what he's accomplished for me.

The underlying code that he created for me is beyond my fathoming at this point, but Will has very wisely separated the guts of the program from the display, which is what I'm fiddling with.

Now the comments display the date. (That info had always been collected, I just didn't get around to figuring out how to display it until now.) I've also changed a few things about the editing screen that I use, mostly to reduce the amount of scrolling I have to do when creating a new blog entry.

My next project will be creating an RSS feed.

Early, link-heavy blogs were, for the most part, a method of sharing links. They usually contained entries that consisted of one or two hyperlinks, the blogger's commentary on the link's content, and a place for other bloggers to make comments about the entry. These early blogs often focused on what Blood calls "the dissemination and interpretation of the news." By linking to news articles from "lesser-known sources" that might be otherwise overlooked by the "typical web user," weblog authors supply "additional facts, alternative views, and thoughtful commentary" that is often unavailable from large news sources (10/01/03). See Appendix A.

As blogging became more popular, many weblogs shifted from the original, link-heavy forms that dominated early blogs, to a free-form on-line journal where authors have begun to write more freely and frequently. Many blog entries now contain no links at all, as the new generation of bloggers share "notes about the weekend, [or] a quick reflection on some subject or another" (Blood 10/01/03). Many bloggers write bi-daily in these journals, which serve as more of an ?Update-in-the-life-of?,? than a source for news. See Appendix B.

Although weblog journals have gained immense popularity over the past four years, the original link-heavy style is still respected by many current weblogs. --Kirsten Schubert, a former student of mine, in her senior capstone paper at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire. --Blurring the Borders of Rhetoric and Hypertextuality in Weblogs (The Hypertext Project)

Kirsten's blog truncated my (long) comment, so I'll post my reaction to her paper below.

To the best of our ability to discern, we have included only links to electronic journals that are scholarly, peer-reviewed, full text and accessible without cost. We have excluded professional magazines that are largely not refereed, and commercial journals that may only allow access to a very limited number of articles as an enticement to buy. By restricting membership in this way on the list that follows, we hope to do what little we can to promote free access world wide to scholarship in education. --Open Access Journals in the Field of Education (AERA-SIG)

Here's to open-access online journals. I hope Google notices this link and adds my PageRank value to the value of this page. (Via the original Pedablogue.)

Two North Carolina men were indicted for violating the state's junk e-mail law by sending thousands of e-mail pitches for investments, software and other products, in what prosecutors said was the nation's first felony charges for unsolicited e-mail. --Virginia Nabs Two Big Spammers (Wired/AP)

I'd like to think this will make a difference... maybe it will, maybe it won't.

Works Cited

"Susan" (smgct1@comcast.net). "Oddly enough..." [Weblog comment.] N.d. "More Questionable Use of My Work." Dennis G. Jerz. Jerz's Literacy Weblog. Seton Hill University. 10 Dec 2003. (http://jerz.setonhill.edu/weblog/permalink.jsp?id=1998)

Poster's Lastname, Firstname, I. (or screen ID) "Title of comment, or first few words." [Weblog comment.] Date comment was posted. Title of blog entry. Author of blog entry. Name of Weblog. Sponsoring organization -- if any. Date blog entry was posted. (URL that displays the comments in context, if possible.) Date you accessed the comment.

Note: See also "Citing a Weblog Entry in MLA Style".Citing a Weblog Comment in MLA StyleJerz's Literacy Weblog)

I couldn't immediately find Susan's full name when I looked at her website, so for the above example I treated "Susan" like a nickname; the quotation marks indicate that I haven't simply forgotten to type her last name.

I think the bracketed label "[Weblog comment]" is probably necessary for clarification.

The URL for the citation should display the comments in context, rather than a link that opens a pop-up window with the comments inside (and no easy way to see the entry that prompted the comments).

As with any MLA citation, if the information is lacking, keep a placeholder there. Thus, since my system doesn't at the moment display the date when a comment was posted, I added "N.d." (for "no date") in the slot where the date should be.

Works Cited

Jerz, Dennis G. "Citing a Weblog in MLA Style." [Weblog entry.] Jerz's Literacy Weblog. Seton Hill University. 11 Dec 2003. (http://jerz.setonhill.edu/weblog/permalink.jsp?id=2000). 11 Dec 2003.

Lastname, Firstname, I. "Title of individual blog entry." [Weblog entry.] Name of Weblog. Sponsoring organization -- if any. Date posted. (URL to permalink.) Date accessed.

Note: See also "Citing a Weblog Comment in MLA Style".Citing a Weblog Entry in MLA StyleJerz's Literacy Weblog)

The MLA handbook doesn't, in my opinion, do a very good job differentiating between a static personal home page and other kinds of self-published websites (such as an annotated bibliography or an anthology of short autobiographical essays). Citing a weblog isn't much different from citing any web page, but students may appreciate a clear example.

I would prefer to put angle brackets around the URL, but my blogging software chokes when I try that. And I was working on a hanging indent, but couldn't get my stylesheet to display it properly. Some other day. I think I've got it now.

I thought it was necessary to put the "[Curricular weblog.]" statement there because, while my blog has the word "Weblog" in it, not all do. Possible values to fill this slot could include "Group weblog," "Professional weblog," "Personal weblog," etc. [I've actually changed that around a bit now...] Should it simply be "Weblog," and should it be there only if the blog doesn't include "blog" or "weblog" in the title? I can see particular value in "Group weblog," so that citing a post that I make to Kairosnews or New Media Journalism @ Seton Hill University does not make me look like I own the blog (since many people can and do post on these sites.)

Comments or suggestions?

In response to a request by Susan. Which makes me realize I ought to do a separate blog entry for citing comments...

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 28 (UPI) -- Thousands of Iraqis took to Baghdad's streets Friday condemning terrorism and urging a halt to political violence. '

[OK... so far, so good.]

The demonstrators shouted "death to terrorists"...

[Gaak! This sounds like a bad MadTV skit. Were these demonstrators paying attention to the supposed purpose of their event? Or are Iraqi political demonstrations just naturally dripping with ironic metacommentary?] --Iraqis Demonstrate Against Violence (UPI/Washington Times)

Found via Drudge.

More Questionable Use of My Work

While surfing the web today, I was surprised to find, in an OpenWiki installation on a web page published by the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science & Management (University of California, Santa Barbara), a document containing a subtantial amout of my own work. The OpenWiki document in question states that it has been reproduced with my permission, but that text refers to the (belated) permission I gave when I discovered the first copy that Bren School made.

• Current version of my FrontPage Handout
• Copied and altered once without first getting permission
• Once again, copied, altered and this time released in an open source format without my permission

When I initially found the first copy, I saw that references to me and my institution had been removed, and the site was republished under the Bren School banner. I did give belated permission, provided that my name and institutional affiliation be restored to the document, and that a prominent link direct readers to my current version.

I did not, however, give permission for yet another copy to be made, and neither was I asked my opinion about releasing the document in an open format (which would permit multiple authors to modify and change the text even further).

The latest copy on the Bren site still offers my name, but now neither version contains a link to the current version. Life is too short to get mad, and I am a supporter of both the wiki genre and the open source movement, but this is the second time somebody at the Bren School has misappropriated my work for its instructional purposes.

Update, 11 Dec: A few minutes after midnight, about six hours after I contacted the Bren School, I received an e-mail apology, stating that the material had been removed. I'm grateful for the speedy reaction.

Often, while sifting through the mountain of daily Gothamist correspondence, we come across emails asking for advice about starting a blog. Why anyone would consider Gothamist an authority on the sweet, intricate science of blogging is beyond us -- but we are loathe to sidestep our obligation to respond. Here then, based on our blog-exploration and the evolution that is Gothamist, the first in a series of Gothamist Notes On Blogging, entitled "What not to do when you blog." --What Not to Do When You Blog (Gothamist)

While this is a good overview of current blogging trends, I find it offputting to see any definition of blogging used in such prescriptive terms.

I'd particularly disagree with Gothamist's invective against writing about yourself. Good writing is good writing, regardless of the subject. Please don't stop blogging just because the subject of your blog doesn't interest The Gothamist. Maybe you won't get many outside links if you only blog about yourself and the people you already know, but if you start linking to pages you find elsewhere online, you may develop a network of personal blogs written by other people whose personal interests intersect with yours.

Some blogs wear pinstripes, others wear tie-dye and sandals, and others just wear comfy sweats. Whether a blog is professional, creative, or simply a place for your own thoughts, good writing is good reading for whoever finds it.

Spokesman Richard Boucher confirmed Monday that [US Secretary of State Colin] Powell had indeed appointed [James] Brown to be the first US "secretary of soul and foreign minister of funk" but said the job description for the post had not yet been drawn up. --Powell 'appoints' soul legend James Brown to new diplomatic postYahoo/AFP)

And yet again, life imitates The Onion

"The time has come to face facts: To move forward, we've got to get on up, and stay on the scene, like a sex machine," said Brick House Majority Leader James Brown (G-GA), one of getting on up's most vocal supporters. "Say it loud: Only when we have gotten up offa that thing will we, as a nation, finally get back on the good foot."

Think about it -- do you really believe that person who says they couldn't do something because "something came up?" That they couldn't do their homework because the printer broke? Lame.... These lies will work as excuses because no one believes excuses anyway! And to think, if they are outrageous lies, they will become more believable because they are just that inventive!

Some examples:

• "A plane crashed off the coast of Madagascar."
  
• "I was stranded on a desert island."
  
• "I had an unfortunate run-in with an overhead projector, and now must wear goggles until my wound heals."
  
• "The sun didn't come up this morning at my house, and I rely on roosters to wake me."

--Julie Young --Spam and excuses (Work in Progress)

Julie's comments about Spam are fine, but it's the excuses that made me want to blog this. I'm not sure the two observations really go together, but it's still blogworthy. I like particularly the goggles and the roosters.

OK, that's enough fun for today. I've really got to get to my grading now.

The increased adoption of blogging, citizen journalism, Flash presentations and the like portend a different season of political coverage than what we've seen in the past. These aren't new developments, but they've been used more frequently in the last year by the online-news industry, and will likely be incorporated into upcoming electoral coverage. --Steve Outing --Prepare Now for Better Online Election Coverage (Editor and Publisher)

I'll be teaching "Writing for the Internet" next fall, during the presidential election. Plenty of my students have professed their utter boredom with politics (outside of their particular hobbyhorse, if any). So I'm reluctant to tie a major online project to political current events; still, there will be a lot happening in cyberspace, particularly on the Thursday before election day, when scandals are strategically the most damaging to candidates. I'll have to think about this one.

Anyway, here's a great suggestion from the article: "Candidates were asked to give their stands on a variety of issues. In the print edition, candidate responses were sorted into grids, so readers could see who thinks what with a quick glance. But online, the approach was different: Web readers decided what their own stands are, then discovered who agreed with them the most at the end of the quiz."

Unless the population of a state is dispersed evenly in proportion to the size of each county, there is no direct relationship between the physical area of a county and the number of people, registered voters, or votes cast within it. | Which is why I was surprised to see an analyst from a leading all-news television network point to a map of California and single out San Bernadino county, California'slargest county by area, as a significant reason for Arnold Schwarzenegger'svictory. --Jonathan Corum --Mapping Votes by County: County maps and the 2003 California Statewide Special Election. (Style.org)

Note: The above images come from a screen capture of the original site; the cubist design on the left is, of course, a map of California with the counties adusted in size to represent population. I erased some text that would have been illegible at this size, in order to increase the comprssion rate.

Fascinating study of maps that distort the public perception of Arnold Schwartzenegger's political mandate in California. Very reminiscent of the maps showing George W. Bush winning huge tracts of land, with Al Gore winning in tiny, highly-populated spots.

Via Sylvie's HCI Weblog.

One only needs to have had a weblog for about five minutes to see the relevance to blogging of Cialdini's ideas about how we are persuaded and how we reach decisions -- particularly concerning whom one links to or adds to one's blogroll. If you're honest, you'll recognize that at least some of Cialdini's principles have determined your linking/blogrolling preferences:

• Reciprocity (If I put you on my blogroll, you'll feel obliged to put me on yours.)
• Commitment/Consistency (Now that you're on my blogroll I'm unlikely to remove you.)
• Social Proof (If all those other people have X on their blogrolls, then he definitely should be on my blogroll.)
• Liking (The people I link to and have on my blogroll are similar to me, have praised me, are associated with events or projects I'd like to be a part of? at the very least, since I'm never going to reach the A-list, I can bask in the A-lister'sreflected glory.)
• Authority (Anyone on the Technorati Top 100 must automatically be knowledgeable, wise, and powerful.)
• Scarcity (Since the A-list has so few members relative to the total blogging population, what A-listers write must necessarily be of high quality. Similarly, a link from an A-lister is enormously valuable?regardless of the quality of the item at the end of that link.)

--Jonathan Delacour --I'll Link to Whoever He's Linking To (The Heart of Things)

This is a much more thorough examination of an issue I was muddling through a few days ago. Dammit, I wish I had time to pursue this further, but my plate is already full. I'll just have to read what others write (which is a heck of a lot easier than trying to figure it all out myself).

Update, 10 Dec: I don't think Delacour's assessment of "scarcity" is right. Because the A-list bloggers have so many inbound links, their opinions online are anything but scarce. But I agree with him in his application of scarcity to an outbound link from an A-lister. Even if the Alpha blogger has pages and pages out outbound links, each outbound link can be very valuable to the recipient (if, that is, the recipient cares about the currency of the blogosphere).

"We want to find out what your working conditions are, anything that we can do to help you," Otwell tells the young women at the factory. He speaks in English slowly, for the benefit of an Arabic translator, who then turns to an Arabic-speaking sign-language translator to sign Otwell's questions to the seamstresses. | The girls' hands start flying as they tell Otwell about their hated boss. --Tara Copp --Iraq behind the cameras: a different reality (Knox Studio/Scripps Howard)

The angle of this story is that TV cameras cover the bombings and the protests, but don't cover the everyday progress that shows that parts of Iraq are improving, with the help of the U.S. forces. Regardless of the political context, I found this linguistic viginette oddly touching.

"The technology is simple," said Microsoft Office Research Division Head, Richard Greenwood, "students have been doing it for years. Thanks to the power of Microsoft Word 2004, anybody can turn a five-hundred-word report into a ten-thousand-word masterpiece." --Word 2004 to Pioneer AutoUnsummarize Feature (BB Spot)

Not the best spoof news site, but this article isn't bad.

I'm marking blogging portfolios for my Writing for the Internet course. Here are a few gems:

• "I don't get any leftovers at school, and I miss that twice-heated home cooked goodness." -- Amy Slade
• "I'm willing to wager that writing for an online medium is letting me take the easy way out." -- Julie Young
• "The clothes are donated to the YWCA. The owners help dress you from head to toe and even does make-up and hair if needed." -- Tiffany Graham
• "I hate this feeling of stress and nothing getting done." -- Lindsay Dzurko
• "It seems that when something goes wrong here at SHU the baseball team is the first to blame." -- Brandon Whitfield
• "It is all so funny that people are still relying on these 'journalists' to report sex news, when, in actuality they are creating it." -- Amanda Cochran
• "Many cases in the news recently have exhibited the lack of consequences faced by those who commit murder." -- Jess Prokop

Student Blogging Gems (EL 230: Writing for the Internet)

Note to self... next time, have student bloggers blog at least part of their reflection paper on blogging. I'm reading some really excellent observations that I'd like to link to, but I can't because the students have submitted them the old-fashioned way, on paper.

Of course, some students are being honestly self-critical in a way that might be squelched if they were forced to blog their reflections online.

One recurring thread in their reflections is time -- they either don't have enough time to blog as they feel they should, or they are conscious that blogging is a great way to fritter away time while managing to convince one's self that one is being productive. One student reported that blogging feels like an extracurricular activity, like it is nothing at all in the same realm as reading a chapter of math. I say hurrah to that statement, though unfortuantely I can't link to it because the student didn't blog it.

Two more blog portfolios to go from this class.... but it's time for me to head home.

A solid agreement has been reached between BlogShares founder Seyed Razavi and technologist Jay Campbell -- the site is coming back! --Blogshares: Coming Back Soon

I figured that a good idea wouldn't lay dormant for very long.

OneLook's reverse dictionary lets you describe a concept and get back a list of words and phrases related to that concept. Your description can be a few words, a sentence, a question, or even just a single word. Just type it into the box above and hit the "Find words" button. (Keep it short to get the best results.) In most cases you'll get back a list of related terms with the best matches shown first. --Reverse Dictionary

My inbox is rather full at the moment, but I did manage to fish out this gem that Jim sent last week. Looks like it uses the content of wikipedia to fuel its searches.

Citing the prior week's ABC broadcast of "Living with Michael Jackson," the controversial Martin Bashir documentary, the school official lodged allegations of "general neglect by mother and sexual abuse by 'an entertainer,'" according to the summary memo.... [P]ublished reports have indicated that the older boy was taunted by classmates after the documentary aired on ABC's "20/20" newsmagazine. During the February 6 program, the child was seen holding hands with Jackson and resting his head against the singer's shoulder. Jackson told Bashir that he had slept with many children unrelated to him, but insisted, "It's not sexual, we're going to sleep. I tuck them in...It's very charming, it's very sweet." In a clear reference to fallout from the Bashir documentary, the boy's mother told investigators that "she believed the media had taken everything out of context," according to the memo, which summarizes the DCFS child abuse investigation. --Michael Jackson Bombshell: Police, Child Welfare Probers Concluded Sex Charges 'Unfounded' (The Smoking Gun)

Since I did blog about the accusations, it's only fair that I blog this bit of info as well. Looks like the mother's invovlement in the case is very complicated; the Jackson team now has a potential motive for why false charges might be brought against Jackson.

Scientists say measurements taken by the US space agency's Mars Odyssey craft prove that a human mission could survive on the Martian surface. | Instrument data show radiation around the Red Planet might cause some health problems but is unlikely to be fatal. --Richard Black --Humans 'could survive Mars visit' (BBC)

Also interesting in this article: Mars seems to have too much surface water to be sustained in equilibrium. It may be coming out of an ice age.

I hear of and see teachers who write comments on student drafts, sniffily, ?You have reached the maximum number of errors. Rewrite? or ?You don't have a conclusion here. You need to add one.? The message here is clear as a bell: Your ideas don't matter. To Hell with your ideas. Your obedience matters, or it should if you want recognition that you?re educable, that you?re part of society, that you?re productive and upstanding and Good. | It'sno wonder, then, that students talk about their education being a cycle of irrelevant and boring courses, and no wonder that the only thing that keeps them in school is the very instrumental goal of getting a degree. Instrumentality in education is neither new nor a problem as such?goals are good. That the notion of interrogating the world around them, the realities they face on a daily basis, or the ways in which they might become the authors of their goals and lives is so foreign is what leaves me despairing. --A Writing Assignment (Mister B.S.)

Fortunately, I'm not quite this disillusioned yet. Or maybe I have been in the past, but learned to adjust my teaching style so that I can focus on progress rather than the gap between the work that students do and the work that they could do (and that at least some of them do do.)

Yes, incoming students have a lot to learn about their own education, but, isn't that the point, and isn't that why I have a job?

"A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history -- with the possible exception of handguns and tequila." --Christopher Harper Mitch Radcliffe? Ratliff?Computers, handguns and tequilaAnd That's The Way It Will Be... News and Information ina Digital World)

Found this quote in a paper written by a student. I'll have to get that book.

Update, 09 Dec: Whoops, it looks like Harper was quoting a statement attributed to someone named Mitch Radcliffe or Ratliffe. No time today to explore this little mystery.

"I worked hard in high school, but they could have worked me harder," said Belisle, now a sophomore. "Not only was I adjusting to new people, a new place to live and a new city, but I was adjusting to a new way of learning." | From the U.S. Department of Education to the company that designs the Advanced Placement (AP) program, experts have described a growing problem: High-school and college expectations rarely connect. Most high-school graduates are not prepared to enter college, studies show. And when they do enroll, many are not prepared to succeed. --Cara Solomon --College-prep expectations don't mesh with realities  (Seattle Times)

I have great sympathy for students who have been told all along that they are bright, but who have never been asked to work hard until they get to college. In fact, I think it's a tragedy that students like Miss Belisle (quoted above) weren't challenged to reach their full potential.

I remember that some idealistic part of me died when, a few years ago at my previous job, I was teaching a freshman composition course and made a reference to "when you used to do homework for high school," and the class burst out laughing. When I asked them why, they said they never did homework beyond cramming the night before an exam (or more likely the lunch period before an exam). They watched movies during English class instead of discussing books that they read outside of class, and their English papers were summaries of the plot that they remembered from the movie (or that they got from Spark Notes). The very idea that an instructor would read their essays and check them for logical consistency and critial content, rather than simply for grammatical correctness, floored them.

Last year, National Geographic published an article about dorm life, and one college student reported spending eight hours a day entertaining himself with games, TV, or the Interent, three hours a day in class, and an hour or two a day on homework. I don't care how "bright" this kid is, or how much time and effort he puts into charming his teachers -- he's not going to succeed in college for long.

I don't mean to presume that every student who isn't doing well is wasting their college tuition in this manner. Seton Hill University has numerous resources, ranging from tutors to in-class note-takers to financial aid to counseling of all sorts, to help students who are struggling. Yet I am stunned to see that some students react instead by simply not showing up in class.

There are instances when, in the interests of the majority, some censorship may be used for a period of time. Indeed, there is material which virtually everyone would agree should be kept out. Sadistic pornography, incitement to violence against racial or ethnic minorities are just two examples. | But we cannot strive for an information society without allowing the free flow of information which is a pre-requisite. We just have to become better managers, navigators and users of information – let’s just say we need information maturity. | The Information Age has opened many doors for our eager minds to explore. Now the question is not so much ‘What information do I want?’ as ‘What information do I not want?’. --Arthur C. Clarke --Humanity will survive information deluge  (OneWorld South Asia)

"Good job!" doesn’t reassure children; ultimately, it makes them feel less secure. It may even create a vicious circle such that the more we slather on the praise, the more kids seem to need it, so we praise them some more. Sadly, some of these kids will grow into adults who continue to need someone else to pat them on the head and tell them whether what they did was OK.... This doesn’t mean that all compliments, all thank-you’s, all expressions of delight are harmful. We need to consider our motives for what we say (a genuine expression of enthusiasm is better than a desire to manipulate the child’s future behavior) as well as the actual effects of doing so. Are our reactions helping the child to feel a sense of control over her life -- or to constantly look to us for approval? Are they helping her to become more excited about what she’s doing in its own right – or turning it into something she just wants to get through in order to receive a pat on the head? --Alfie Kohn --Five Reasons to Stop Saying 'Good Job!' (AlfieKohn.org)

Kohn suggests that, instead of praising a child for drawing a picture ("Good drawing!") we instead respond more neutrally, focusing our attention on what the child accomplished. ("You drew a big mountain! You sure used a lot of purple!")

This makes a lot of sense to me, though I'd have to read more of Kohn's work to decide how I feel it applies to my own teaching. Students who are used to being praised for effort can be flustered in college, where (most of the time, or at least in my classes anyway) simply expending effort is not good enough.

Found via Pedablogue. (Good job, Mike!)

Oh the snow outside's delightful.
My stacks of papers to mark are frightful.
For the students who want to know:

Days to go, days to go, days to go...Stacks and Stacks of Papers to GradeJerz's Literacy Weblog)

Dear Students,

The last week of classes is always an emotional time for me. I love you all, and miss you already. I hope you are enjoying the snow.

Above is a picture of the stacks of papers I have to mark before I will have your final grades calculated. I received most of these Thursday and Friday morning, and only brought home for the weekend what I could fit in one shoulder bag.

I can understand your enthusiasm for knowing what your grades will be going into the final exam, but no, I don't have your grades ready yet.

Dr. Michael Whitlatch, professor of speech and drama, has a review published in the November issue of Choice. His review of "Technology in American Drama, 1920-1950 Soul and Society in the Age of the Machine," by Dennis Jerz has just been sent to college and university libraries. --Whitlatch Publication (Buena Vista U)

Gulp! As I prepare to mark term papers and final projects, it's probably a good thing that I am suddenly reminded of what it feels like to be judged. I wasn't able to find any online information on the periodical "Choice" -- it's just too common a word to Google; based on the context and the title, I'm guessing it's a librarian trade magazine. I'll have to wait a bit to learn what his verdict is. (On a side note... I like the BVU concept of the BVU information page.)

Whitlatch is a prolific reviewer with decades of specialized experience in the subject matter and time period I studied in grad school. He has plenty of publications under his own belt, so I'm bracing myself for some serious criticism.

A few hours ago I got my hands on Nick's book on interactive fiction ("Twisty Little Passages"), and of course I flipped it open to the works cited list looking for my name, and there it was. I feel like a real academic now. Of course, the URLs are all broken, since they point to my UWEC website, but I'm going to set up a redirect now.

And, while I'm on the subject of academic books, I wrote a long comment in response to SHU student Brian McCollum's blogged rant against literary anthologies. (By the way, I'm not the teacher he's referring to.)

Update: Rosemary Frezza writes, "I found the review of your book - it is short but very positive!" That's a relief. I'll ask the author if I can post it.

I'm not sure I'm artciulating anything new here, but for me, reading some of the "high-profile" blogs feels a little bit like listening to talk radio: a charismatic figure stirs up people's frustrations and fears by linking to a news article or bit of information. Then a feeding frenzy takes place, with dozens of other bloggers quickly linking to this story or adding their comments, creating the noise effect I was talking about yesterday. --Chuck Tyron --Ten Blogs that Shook the World (The Chutry Experiment)

I confess that I probably feel too much validation when I happen to blog something that I later see climbing the charts on Popdex or Blogdex. Often, of course, I have seen the link on Slashdot, Wired, Metafilter, A & L Daily, or some other well-read site, so there is little wonder that other bloggers will pick up an interesting link. It's really far more satisfying when I find a gracious link on thinking with my fingers or MGK; these are people I've met in person (Torill was recently in Greensburg, and although Matthew probaby doesn't remember me, long before I started blogging I met him briefly at a conference -- probably the MLA, though I can't honestly remember).

This blog entry is a bit more of a hodgepodge than usual, but just now as I was scanning the blog entry I wrote for Torill's visit, I was reminded of Torill's reasons for not permitting comments on her blog. My sister Rosemary (whose eagle eye often catches typos in my blog entries -- thanks sis) told me that a comment spammer had struck my pointless Rainbow Hector Weblog. My journalism students are turning in blog portfolios, and one of the components asks them to reflect upon an entry that they wrote that generated good comments. Some students who haven't been blogging regularly probably won't get many comments on the blog entries they are feverishly writing the day before their portfolios are due. The artificiality of expecting students to write entries that generate comments leads to the following well-written, poignant plea from my student Shannon Gerstel, who uses images of nudity and shame to describe the way she feels about her blog in the hours before it is due.

I'll be very interested to see how many of my student bloggers continue to blog over the break, and what they write about when they are no longer thinking about fulfilling the requirements of an assignment.

His voice was calm, but I could tell by his furrowed brow that what he truly wanted to say was, "Graduate school is a slow and unrelenting descent into hell. Save yourself while you still can." | I felt the earth move under my feet. Grad school had been my last great hope. For most of my life, I tried to hide the fact that I liked to learn because it cut down on the amount of after-school beatings from my less enthusiastic classmates. Even in college, where students pay to learn, I discovered to my dismay that many of my peers cared more about beer bongs and frat parties than Shakespeare and Yeats. But despite my disappointment, I remained optimistic because I was holding out for grad school -- the nerd Utopia -- a place where thoughtful people gathered to discuss ideas that really mattered. --Jane Bast --Ignoring Good Advice (Chronicle)

The author compares learning the truth about grad school to learning the truth about Santa Claus. I personally didn't find grad school all that terrible, especially compared to my experience as a buttoned-down scholarly nerd at party-friendly U.Va. And, in response to the article's last point, grad students at the University of Toronto did very little teaching; it was difficult getting experience in front of a classroom.

Key to the technique is comparing news sources that cover the same events but employ slightly different styles. Because they are writing about the same events they contain the same facts, or arguments, said Barzilay. "This gives us patterns which are kind of the same -- and this is the core of the paraphrasing technique.".... [T]he system learned incorrectly that "Palestinian suicide bomber" and "suicide bomber" were the same, and that "killing 20 people" is the same as "killing 20 Israelis", said Barzilay. These mistakes made by the system are "due to how reporters are reporting," she said. "In some sense... the teacher here is what the reporter writes," she said. Kimberly Patch --Software paraphrases sentences (TRN)

The Palestine/Israel detail is presented as an example of pro-Israel reporter bias, but I'm not so sure. If, according to the sample of news reportage being examined, more Israelis were killed than Palestinians, and if the ways in which Israelis were killed (civilians killed in marketplaces by suicide bombers, and also soldiers killed by armed combatants) was more newsworthy than the ways in which Palestinians were killed (armed combatants killed by soldiers and some innocent bystanders killed by soldiers) then the computer's "mistake" might be understandable. But I'm not informed enough about the research involved to be able to make any reliable statement; of course the computer isn't responding to what really happened in the world, it's responding to the way a certain group of reporters described what their research tells them happened in the world. Of course, the results are going to reflect human biases, but the sample fed into the computer is affected by such things as how likely a news source that reflects a particular worldview will publish an online English edition.

On a lighter note...

Speaking at a press conference, researchers shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot and coughed into their hands before insisting, "Of course this software won't be marketed to students intending to fool turnitit.com. Whatever gave you that idea?"

"We realized the only way we could improve on the original is if the Cylons could have sex," quipped co-executive producer David Eick at Tuesday night's Los Angeles premiere. The chrome-domed "walking toasters" from the original TV series are succeeded by -- well, really hot blond chicks, who infiltrate human society to engineer its doom. --Xeni Jardin --Alien Sex! Bombs! Robots! Pathos!  (Wired)

The original Battlestar Galactica, corny and 8pm family-friendly as it was, managed to push a few barriers by making one of the leads, Cassiopia, a prostitute (er.... that is, a "sociolator"). All that added a layer of adult subject matter that (when the writers bothered to address it) complicated the relationship between the womanizing Starbuck and the professionally detached Cassie; but the complexity goes right over the head of my five-year-old when we watch the reruns together. I'm pretty sure I don't want to snuggle down on the futon with my son to watch "a jaw dropper of a scene that blends Cylon eroticism with equal parts pants-wetting apocalyptic terror and blast-tacular deep-space warfare."

OK, he'd love the "blast-tacular deep-space warfare." And it certainly sounds like this miniseries has something going for it.

I don't want to sound like the whiners who, when the Batman movies started coming out, lamented the absence of the "Biff" "Pow!" "Blam!" animation that censored out all the fistfights and thus made the TV series acceptable for the kiddies. And this is all pretty much immaterial -- I don't have cable TV and thus won't watch the new show anyway.

...Ms. Arevelo discovered the distance between what Texas public schools called success and what she needed to know. Trained to write five-paragraph "persuasive essays" for the state exam, she was stumped by her first [college] writing assignment.... "I had good grades in high school, so I thought I could do well in college," Ms. Arevelo said. "I thought I was getting a good education. I was shocked." --Diana Jean Schmeo and Ford Fessenden --Gains in Houston Schools: How Real Are They? (NY Times (will expire))

The article critiques the Texas school system's techniques for measuring student success. Teachers who tailored their lessons to helping students ace a standardized test did their students a disservice, because all the effort placed on mastering a single test did not give the student critical thinking skills, information filtering skills, etc.

Santa Claus needed Rudolph, Hermey, and Yukon Cornelius, and during the show's climactic blizzard, the outcasts negotiated a place within the North Pole's hegemonic power structure... | One can only imagine the looks on the faces of the children who unwrapped the misfit toys. Did they laugh and cheer for the squirt gun that sprayed jelly and the cowboy who rode an ostrich? The polka-dotted elephant might have been fun, but I have a feeling that the poor kid who received the choo-choo with square wheels cursed Santa for caving into Rudolph's demands. | That's the flaw in the moral universe I share with Rankin and Bass's animagic creations. The program refuses to deal with the consequences of dropping special-needs toys into unprepared homes. --Jon T. Coleman --The Trouble with Misfits (Chronicle)

It's only fair to note that the references to the Rankin/Bass Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer are only part of an extended metaphor that introduces a point about Ph.D. hiring committees. Yes, it's overdone, but that's probably the point. Even professors can have fun on the holidays.

Merry Christmas!

The story you are about to read is true. It involves a fugitive heiress, guns, money, and layers of Internet intimacy and deception. It is a mystery that takes place at the edge of technology. And it is unlike anything you've ever read before. --John H. Richardson --The Search for Isabella V (Esquire)

A fascinating additional layer in the "Flight Risk" story (see the abbreviated back story or the abbrv bk stry) . The site itself has lain dormant since October, and none of the entries since mid-September have attracted any comments.

Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski told fans on a message board that he's working on a follow-up to the popular SF series, according to a report on the Dark Horizons Web site. Straczynski remained coy about the project, saying only that he'd have more news next month. --New Babylon 5 project? (Sci-Fi Wire)

I haven't really followed any TV show since B5 ended its run. JMS has said numerous times that he was going to wait until after the Star Wars series was complete, so that he could build upon all the new technology that would be developed.

I'm personally hoping to see the Telepath War (which was clearly set up in the original TV series, alluded to in the short-lived follow-up Crusade, and firmly established as part of the B5 timeline in various books, some of which at one time in the past I actually had time to read). I'd love to see the return of Walter Koenig as the so-evil-you-love-to-watch-him Bester.

Jorn Barger, editor of Robot Wisdom, is missing. He resides in Socorro, New Mexico, and was last seen there by his housemate in very early October. Most if not all of his possessions, including his ID card, are still at his residence. --Eric Wagoner

Update: According to poster "cedar" on Metafilter: "I called the Sorocco PD at (505)835-1883 requesting any information they might have. Officer Richard Lopez returned my call immediately and let me know that Mr. Barger was not considered missing or in danger." Glad to hear it.

Update, 5 Dec: In "Jorn Barger has Left the Building," Wired offers a wrap-up that includes reaction from Barger's sister, but otherwise depends heavily on links to Metafilter. --Where is Jorn Barger?EricWagoner.com)

I've been on the receiving end of some of Jorn's scorn (though I'm sure I was only a momentary blip on his radar). I'm also aware that because of the pro-Palestine angle of his linkage he has been accused of anti-Semitism. Still, I only reluctantly removed Robot Wisdom from my blogroll when he stopped updating it regularly. His contributions to cyberspace are significant (he coined the term "weblog," for instance). Certainly any private citizen has the right to disappear from public view if he or she so chooses, but this sounds very strange.

About a week ago, I thought about writing a rather sad blog entry about the sad state of some excellent blogs, such as John S. Rhodes's Webword (hasn't been updated in since September), and Elwyn Jenkins's Microdoc News (activity across all of Microdoc's blogs has dropped drastically) and, of course, Barger's Robot Wisdom. For some reason I never got around to writing that entry, but let me try a bit now.

Rhodes and Jenkins had hopes of using their blogs to elevate their profile and thus attract business.

Rhodes worked hard to create Webword as a community focused around usability issues, and though I seem to remember his site being ranked #2 in Google searches on usability, it may have been chilly in the long shadow of Jakob Nielsen. During the dot-com boom, when so much money was being spent on poor web designs, I really enjoyed the usability evangelization (and commiseration) that went on in the comments fields. Rhodes deputized some loyal community members to help run Webword. With my recent job change from technical writing to new media journalism, I'm not spending as much time on usability issues, which makes sense because the journalism majors that I educate will probably not be expected to design the websites for which they write. (I do still teach usability in "Writing for the Internet," but since I no longer require students to design web pages for real-world clients, usability is less central to my pedagogy nowadays. Had I stayed in technical writing, or moved to a different school as a technical writer, I would have felt Webword's absence more acutely.)

Jenkins created maybe a dozen or more weblogs with slightly different themes; his aggressive appearance on the blogosphere generated some flak:

"In short, Mr. Jenkins' vaporous content is well on its way to earning him a place on most of the A-list blogrolls. From there he'll be able to make a lot of money from blogging. And Google, no doubt, will make a lot of money by inserting ads on the bloggers' pages. The only people who suffer will be those who try to use Google to find meaningful content." -- from How Bloggers Game Google, from Google-Watch (a site that is as critical of Google as Elwyn is laudatory; one of Jenkins's several content clusters includes the study of Google)

The basic principle of starting a whole bunch of blogs in order to learn what kind of an audience you attract and then figuring out how to make a living serving that audience sounds like a perfectly reasonable strategy; yet I always found it hard to glimpse the "real" Elwyn in his blog (even Elwyn's personal blog is sparse). Now, the spam comments collect on the otherwise inactive ProBlog, a group blog that he and others started as a reaction to Andrew Orlowski's periodic and vitriolic attacks on the blogosphere.

I wouldn't put my own online efforts in the same entrepreneurial categories as Rhodes or Jenkins... personally, I'm delighted that my position as a new media journalism faculty member gives me the excuse to continue blogging, while also permitting me to teach the occasional literature course, in an environment that seems willing to encourage my own creative new media efforts (chiefly in interactive fiction, but blogging is becoming more and more of a creative outlet for me).

As I contemplate grading weblog portfolios, I am once again buoyed by my own enthusiasm about weblogs as vehicles for personal expression, to help students trace their intellectual development, and to get them to experience the pleasures and responsibilities of publishing their ideas in a public forum, where real people can contact them and disagree or agree (as the case may be). Of course, there is always a certain percentage of students who simply can't get intellectually involved in the subject matter, and for whom any assignment is tedious and unrewarding. I don't see weblogs magically helping the disinterested and uninvolved students, but I do see the brightest students and the students in the solid center responding positively to their blogging experience.

No matter how digital the electronics got, the companies that made the gadgets were still stovepiped; suites of devices worked in perfect harmony - as long as they all wore the same corporate logo. If you managed to force a Sony receiver to work with a Panasonic TV, you lived in a rat's nest of cables with a coffee table covered in remotes and a spouse who couldn't turn on the television without a briefing. | Why didn't consumer electronics firms compromise on standards for interoperability? Because they're jerks.... This is where the PC industry comes in and the golden age begins. --Sonia Zjawinski --The Golden Age of Gadgets (Wired)

Mmmm... gadgets.

Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house. --Why Santa is Dead (Spy Magazine/Physics Humor)

I've seen this on the Internet and in my e-mail, but this is the first time I've seen the Spy citation. Take it for what it's worth.

Doctor Who is to get a Buffy-style sidekick when he makes his TV return. His new colleague will be a modern action heroine, according to writer Russell T Davies, who is reviving the sci-fi series for the BBC in 2005. --Buffy 'inspires Doctor sidekick' (BBC)

While the screaming girly female companion is part of the Dr. Who lore, there were several notable exceptions, including Leela (my wife's favorite) in the late 70s, who was very much a Xena/Buffy/Lara Croft type.

It's been an interesting and very rewarding nine months bringing a bit of entertainment to bloggers (and blog lovers). I'd like to thank especially all those people who donated money or their valuable time, those who became premium subscribers, those who worked on cool toys which made use of the fledgling API and all those who could be found on the forums and IRC channel. You turned a silly fun idea of a mad monkey coder in London into something worthy of the attention by thousands of bloggers and the press. --Seyed Razavi --Blogshares -- Closed Down (Blogshares.com)

That's too bad. Blogshares was a fantasy stock market that used incoming links as its form of currency. I also found it a good tool for tracking people who had linked to me, and (even better) a simple way to gauge the relative importance of blogs. But obviously the site required too much maintenance and brought in too little reveune. Thanks for the fun, Seyed!

She does say that people who put an apostrophe in the wrong place, when they ought to know better, deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave, but it's probably mostly in fun. --Oliver Pritchett reviews Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, by Lynne Truss --Pay attention: it's important!  (The Telegraph)

"Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know." -- "Fooot in Mouth" winner US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld --Donald Rumsfeld 'honoured' for confusing comments (Plain English Campaign)

When I first read the "unknown unknowns" statement, I thought it was definitely too confusing for a sound bite, but important in that it demonstrates that the known and the unknown are much more complex than a "memorize what the teacher says and spit it back on the quiz" education leads us to believe. Rumsfeld wasn't babbling or struggling with the language. Granted, he could have probably made his point better with a venn diagram.

If Michael Jackson did not have all his surgery over the years, this is how he might look at the age of 45. --Michael Jackson Aging (ForArtist.com)

Click the link to see the images... I'm too lazy to make thumbnails tonight.

America's higher education system is facing a crisis. Decades of dramatically increasing costs, in both good economic times and bad, are threatening to push the dream of college out of reach for millions of students and families. --College Cost Central: A Resource for Parents, Students, & Taxpayers Fed Up With the High Cost of Higher Education  (U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce)

Boy, these guv'ment folks like long titles.

The key to understanding this flashy website is in the long subtitle -- it is not a fair and balanced resource, it is only for those who want to cut government spending on colleges. In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Stanley Fish illustrates the persuasive, rather than informative, purpose of this site:

Only three of the questions are real; that is, only three of the questions are framed with the objective of finding out something the researchers don't already know or think they know. The others are designed to elicit -- no coerce -- responses that can then be used to support the conclusions that McKeon and Boehner have reached in advance of doing any research at all.

Here, for example, is the first question: "Can colleges and universities be doing more to control their spending and avoid large tuition hikes that hurt parents and students?" Although this has the form of a question, its core content is four unsubstantiated assertions: colleges and universities do not control their spending; uncontrolled spending is the sole cause of tuition hikes; those hikes are large (in relation to what norms or practices is never specified); and they hurt parents and students.

The real question then is, "Do you think that colleges and universities should stop doing these horrible things?" and of course anyone who understands it that way (and what other way is there to understand it?) will answer "yes" and thus provide Boehner and McKeon with one more piece of "evidence" with which to convict higher education of multiple offenses.

I'm going to have to save this example for the next time I teach about critiquing academic resources.