Academia: March 2004 Archive Page

I look at my students: some barefoot, others wearing hats and dressed in clothes they could easily have slept in, and I think how the college classroom has become an adjunct of the dorm bedchamber. Sometimes, when I begin classes, I get the impression that the students resent my interrupting their conversations. Few of them take notes, and I unconsciously make an effort to be more entertaining.... Today's tenure process, particularly the requirement that one get high scores on student evaluations, makes it extraordinarily hard to demand as much from students and to use the fear of disapproval as a motivation. It's hard to deny there is a direct correlation between high scores on student evaluations, grade inflation, and the relaxation of standards. | From the perspective of more than a decade, I can see how much I learned from the old lions, but, if they had been required to hand out student evaluations, my younger self would have punished them with the lowest possible scores.--"Thomas H. Benton" --Remembering the Old Lions (Chronicle)

Throughout the conference I went to several sessions on blogging. I'm not convinced, however, the presenters who claimed to be blogging are actually blogging. They're using blogging software, their students use blogging software, but I'm not convinced that using the software is the same as blogging. For example, does posting writing prompts for students constitute blogging? Are students blogging when they use blogging software to write to those prompts? --Richard Long --Back from San Antonio (2River)

A good point. Link found via Will R.

We the "early adopters"have been playing with blogs in our classes for awhile now. We're loved them just for the sake of loving them. We've evangelized them to our peers and our students, with mixed success.

But now, blogs must pull their pedgagogical weight. It's no longer enough to just put a student blog collective online and see what happens, or to send your students to Blogger and allow them to pretend like it's the same experience as writing a paper journal that they turn in to their teacher. --Stephanie Holinka --And The Crowd Cried out for Pedagogy (Weeblog)

Another CCCC blogger reflects...

Mike Vitia Blogs the 4Cs (Vitia)

Mike Vitia has a good series of blog entries covering several sessions at the 4Cs, including the great panel by Terra, Charlie, and Clancy, of which Mike had this provocative, if vague, observation: "Most of us know that the theories of Landow and Negroponte lie broken and useless: how, then, might we begin to build rigorous theoretical models that help us to account for the phenomena described by Terra, Charlie, and Clancy?"

Departures and Arrivials in the Blogosphere

The Invisible Adjunct says goodbye. Noam Chomsky says hello. Two links that rocked my world on a Sunday evening, courtesy of CultureCat.

Of course, the notion that these Web sites have to "count" toward tenure and promotion is one that most directly pertains to a relatively small audience: tenure-track faculty members, particularly those seeking tenure, promotion, or other institutional recognition. These Web sites have value (and thus "count") for an audience that is much larger than this, an audience that includes teachers working in non-tenure-track positions, those teaching at schools where the tenure requirements have little to do with scholarship, graduate students, Web readers interested in the topics of the sites, and so forth. I also think it's important to say that the creators of these Web sites put together their pages for reasons that exceed the question of how it might (or might not) fit into their own cases for tenure and promotion, much in the same way that most of us who are trying to publish our S/scholarship in journals and books are presumably motivated by more than simply how it looks on our cv. Steven Krause --Where Do I List This on My CV? Considering the Values of Self-Published Web Sites  (CCC Online)

As it happens, when I was printing out the final copy of my 4C's paper before I left the house (in the wee hours of the morning), I ran out of paper, and pulled the staple out of my printout of "Where Do I List This on My CV?" in order to use the blank sides of those pages.

Oddly enough, that's also my provisional answer to your question -- self-publishing isn't enough, and neither is any cutting-edge new media project. Publishing in traditional academic genres about new media activities does take time and energy away from those new media activities, but I don't think we really have any choice -- at least, not until we have succeeded in explaining to the reigning generation of scholars why what we do is valuable, and why doing it the traditional way is less valuable. We're not there yet.

My "Computer Connection" section (in a distant corner of the main exhibition hall) was more interactive than I had expected, so I didn't get to cover all my material -- notably this list of "good practices" for using blogs in the classroom. Since a "real" weblog is a license to write whatever and whenever you want, an instructor who assigns the topic, frequency, or length of blog entries (in order to facilitate grading) violates the spirit that draws voluntary bloggers to their avocation.

The "forced blogging paradigm" is the resistance that results when even voluntary bloggers feel hampered by the imposition of academic rules and standards. It's also the resistance that results when students who don't really want to blog at all are forced to do so. Here are a few strategies I've found helpful.

In Class, Refer to Student Blogs. In the minute or two before class starts, I sometimes chat with students about the content of their blogs. Of course, the best bloggers will tend to get the most attention, and the result is that the infrequent bloggers will feel marginalized. That'sthe way it is in the blogosphere outside of academia, but it makes good pedagogical sense to recognize the achievements of less committed bloggers, too.

When asking a student to repeat for the class the contents of a particularly good blog entry that I feel might be useful in sparking a discussion, I find that students sometimes need their memory jogged if they are expected to talk about something they blogged in the wee hours of the morning or maybe a couple days ago. Calling the blog entry upon on the screen, saying a few words about why it seemed significant to you, and then inviting the student to click through their weblog seems to be a good strategy.

Begin Oral Presentations from Blogs. I ask my students to blog their notes for their oral presentations. In my upper-level course, peer pressure encourages students not to identify this kind of forced blogging as an assignment -- students just casually mention a thought that occurred to them while reading Plato, and then launch into their subject from there. Since I encourage them to link to their sources, it's easier to encourage them to emphasize their own ideas, rather than spend most of their oral presentation summarizing what they find on SparkNotes or other curiousity-killing "study guide" websites.

Give Flexible ?Forced Blogging? Assignments. Requiring students to post X comments of length Y every week may force some middle-of-the-road students to write a little longer, a little more frequently; but it will also encourage the Type-A students to stop when they have reached the magic number. That can kill the dynamic of a weblog, which feeds off of the feverish productivity of the A-listers. I might also ask students to write a short response to the assigned text, but give them the option of blogging it (if they have a lot to say and want to make it public) or just hand it to me on paper. Even if only or two students blogs a reaction essay, those will probably be at least mildly interesting.

Blog During Class. Not all the time? but whenever the site is sagging a bit, asking all students to blog for 15 minutes can help perk things up. Sometimes I suggest that they post only comments that contain questions for their peers, rather than create new entries. Responding to the 'Forced Blogging' Paradigm: Good Practices for Weblogs in the ClassroomCCCC 04)

While my suggested prompts regarding John Donne's Holy Sonnets and The Secret Life of Bees sit ignored, during the time I was giving my presentation on blogging at the 4Cs, and while I show the audience the SHU blog, I see that debate is currently raging on the subject of athletics at Seton Hill University.

Blogging puts students in the driver's seat. There's a great community of bloggers at SHU. The ride can be bumpy -- particularly if some students feel left out or attacked. But sometimes, the best thing an instructor can do is sit back and trust the students. They'll work this out, and they'll do it through writing.. what more can a writing instuctor ask?

Sarah Jane Sloane, "Blog is My Co-Pilot: Blogs in a Graduate Classroom."
Cynthia Cox, "Blogging and the First-Year Composition Classroom"
Bonne Smith, "All Along the Blogwatch Tower"
Lisa Langstraat, respondent: "In Blog We Trust"Teaching the Blog (CCCC 2004)

I wasn't able to meet Sarah Jane Sloan, whose dissertation on interactive fiction, Interactive Fiction, Virtual Realities, and the Reading-Writing Relationship, is a tremendously valuable resource for the study of text adventure games as narratives. Sloane wasn't actually here -- she was arriving at the conference late, so Langstraat read Sloane's paper.

Sloane identified the start of the weblog culture with the 1996 Geocities offer of free home pages, and then credited Jorn Barger with the term "weblogging" in 1997. There's a great deal of difference between a Geocities home page and a blog; as far as describing the development of personal online publishing, the chronology makes sense, but the format of the blog was being used by the authors of the earliest web pages. And Barger didn't exactly coin the term "weblogging" -- in a Dec. 1997 newsgroup posting, he announced that he was going to start a log of his daily web readings, and the name of the file where he placed this log ended with "weblog.htm". His post didn't actually use the word "weblog" in its present sense, and he credits Frontier and Scripting News for the form.

All three presenters treated weblogging as experimental, all three were blogging in writing classes (two of which were, I believe, freshman composition, and one graduate writing course), and the latter two particularly followed at format of "what I thought I was going to do with blogs" followed by "what actually happened".

Of the 60 or people in the audience, only a few raised their hands when one presenter asked how many of them were bloggers; I was a little surprised to see that, when the presenter asked how many people use blogs to teach, more hands went up -- instructors who don't actually identify themselves as bloggers are requiring their students to blog. I don't make this observation as part of an argument that only bloggers should be allowed to teach with blogs, but because it seems that teaching with blogs is not enough to make some people feel that they are "really" bloggers. This is directly analogous to the observation that students who blog only because their instructor tells them to are missing out on the benefits that those of us who are excited about blogs tend to observe.

Cox observed that, despite her explanation of what she expected in terms of the length, frequency, and content of student blogging, students tended to find their own values for the online writing that they did.

[Whoops, the next session is about to start... this blog is unfinished, but I'd better post it now.]

If you're an academic who blogs, what prompted you to start blogging? And what keeps you going? What do you try to do in your blog? Does your blog have any relationship to your scholarship? If you're an academic who just reads blogs, do you intend to start your own blog sometime? If yes, what are the reasons that you haven't done so at this point in time? If no, why not? Either way, what do you get from reading blogs? Answers to any or all of these questions (or other related questions that you think are more interesting) would be appreciated. --Henry Farrell --Academics and Blogging (Crooked Timber)

Beware: bloggers do love to blog about their blogs, so here goes...

1. What prompted you to start blogging?
   
   

   I had started developing a collection of online writing resources in 1996, and by early 1999 I was having trouble keeping them organized in several overlapping navigation schemes. I wanted a central location where I could post links to new or recently updated handouts, and in order to give people (presumably my own students and other instructors looking for online resources) a reason to bookmark that page I thought I would create what we would now call a filter (that is, a site with little personal commentary, the main purpose of which was to send readers off to interesting things to do elsewhere). The wayback machine archived how my protoblog looked in June, 1999.
   
   As a literature Ph.D. student teaching technical writing in a liberal arts school, I felt a desire to connect the worlds of technology and humanities. After a former colleague e-mailed me a link to Arts & Letters Daily, I brazenly copied the form. On July 20, 1999, I posted something about the 30th anniversary of the moon landing, and I wanted to emphasize that I was writing that entry on the anniversary -- so I added the date. Throughout 1999, I kept the A & L Daily signature "[more]" link, though I remember being frustrated by it for some time before I started using meaningful words from the body of the blurb.
   
   At first I mostly featured links to writing centers and my own online handouts, but as I realized that my page was attracting more attention from the outside world than from my students, I created one column for humanities and one for technology, and just posted whatever I thought was interesting in either column. I started e-mailing the webmasters of resources I thought were valuable, telling them that they were my "link of the day". I had already been advocating the value of what I called annotated lists of links (I first drafted that handout in 1997), but I don't think I really convinced any of my students to get excited about the possibility.
   

   All this time, I was coding my blog by hand, without any sort of automated tools (well, I did use a WYSIWYG editor). I did later create some PERL tools to automate the process of shifting entries from the home page to the archives, and I later created a form that let me add to the database over the Web, though in order to publish I still had to drive to the office and hit a button that ran a script which copied files from my hard drive to the university server. Bleah.
   
   My site didn't mention the word "weblog" until 2000, when it appears exactly once, when I linked to the Feb 2000 Wired article noting the boom in weblogging.
   
   In 2001, I blogged 10 items that I later classified under a "weblog" category. It wasn't until fall, 2001, when two students chose weblogs as the subject of term projects that I seriously considered the form, and actually started blogging about it. Technical writing major Jan Carroll created what turned into a very popular blog devoted to September 11 poetry, and CS major Chris Warren, who had already been keeping a personal weblog and photoblog (and from whom I coincidentally just got an e-mail a little while ago), wrote a term project on identity in weblogs. Both students were having difficulty finding relevant scholarship, though I noticed early on that journalists seemed to be paying much closer attention to the phenomenon than my English composition and technical writing colleagues.
   
   

2. And what keeps you going?
   
   

   I went back on the job market, this time trumpeting my weblog and other new media experience, in order to see what would happen. I ended up as Associate Professor of English -- New Media Journalism.
   
   

3. Does your blog have any relationship to your scholarship?
   
   Yes -- at first only indirectly. My first "annotated list of links" was a bibliography of websites devoted to interactive fiction (text adventure games); at one point I added print resources and the result was published in a journal. I had an article called "On the Trail of the Memex: Vannevar Bush, Weblogs and the Google Galaxy" scheduled to appear in "Dichtung Digital" a few days after Google announced its purchase of Blogger, so I spent the weekend updating it... Although I ended up not being able to attend the conference, my paper "(Meme)X Marks the Spot: Theorizing Metablogging via 'Meme' and 'Conduit'" from last year's BlogTalk is being published in the proceedings.
   
   
   
4. If you're an academic who just reads blogs, do you intend to start your own blog sometime? If yes, what are the reasons that you haven't done so at this point in time? If no, why not?
   

   
   Not applicable to me.
   
   

5. Either way, what do you get from reading blogs?
   

   
   Fodder for my own blog... Seriously, I also I value them as ways to connect with distant people who travel to conferences more frequently than I can (what with my two small kids, "all-but-dissertation" wife and a heavy teaching load), and as ways to connect with my students. This term I'm using blogs in three of my four classes and also supervising the development of the online student paper, so I'm thinking quite a bit about pedagogical blogging. Our school is big on getting students to use PowerPoint, but I can't stand that medium, and instead require students to blog their oral presentations. They present by going up to the front of the room and clicking through the links in their blog entry. That usually makes the oral presentation go better, since students don't have to take notes on the content; it also makes the network of student blogs richer -- I've managed to create a culture where students discourage each other from saying "I'm putting this on my blog because my teacher told me to," and students are challenging each other to make their blog entries interesting for their regular readers. Of course, some students only blog when they have to, and others probably drop my class because the whole blogging thing is too freaky for them.
   

   On a personal level, other than videos for the kids, I watch almost no TV, preferring instead blogging, reading, or computer games.
   

Very Tired on a Friday Afternoon. But it's a good tired.

I just heard that my proposal, "Moveable Types of Information Literacy: Emerging Electronic Genres and the Deconstruction of Peer Review," has been accepted for the Georgia Conference on Information Literacy this coming October.

Seton Hill University featured "information literacy" in a faculty seminar at the beginning of the year, but thought the content of that training was too basic to be of much interest or help to me. While I've found my new media activities to be well-supported here, I do expect that I'll have plenty of explaining to do when it comes to annual review time. Now that weblogs are mainstream enough that I can expect my students to "get" blogging without much trouble, I need to start thinking critically about how to present the value of blogging to a generation of scholars who don't automatically go "Wow that's so cool!" when they see a blog. Hence, this conference proposal.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

I'm still working on "Forced Blogging: Students' Emotional Investment in Their Academic Weblogs," which I'll be giving at the 4C's next week... I'm behind in my blogging for the Princeton Video Game conference earlier this month, and I've haven't yet managed to unbotch my handling of the paperwork for a conference I attended last August.

What's this? Little voices from several stacks of papers are calling to me... "Grade us! Grade us!"

Back to work.

A story in a campus paper has alarmed administrators of one of journalism's highest awards, prompted a crackdown by the university and sparked a debate over journalism ethics, privacy and freedom of the student press. --Michael Weissenstein --Student Article Sparks Ethics Debate (Newsday/AP)

Hmm... I think the faculty member was probably out of line. I think a student officer who steps down for personal reasons shouldn't have his grades publicized, and that the faculty member who helped get those grades to the paper was not thinking clearly.

Thanks for another great link, Jim. (Well, I didn't actually link to Yahoo's version of the story -- that site is too cluttered, and there are more legible copies of AP stories available.)

The first student chooses State University. Immediately, word spreads across campus, and high-fives are exchanged all around. "She's a fine young woman," exclaims a top university official. "And what stats! A 1520 on the SAT. A 4.0 GPA, including several advanced placement courses. She will boost the status of our chemistry department in a way that no one has for years!"

At the crosstown rival, they're stunned. "We did all we could to recruit her," says a professor, who asks not to be identified. "We flew her in on a private jet. Took her to the finest restaurants. You can't win 'em all."

Next to sign is another blue-chip prospect. Not just someone with the usual high GPA and SAT score. This one also has had six years of Arabic and an internship in the Middle East.

"We got him!" cries the chief recruiter for a top Ivy League school as soon as the student states his intentions.

[...]

On and on, the announcements come. Reporters scramble for quotes from family members. The sought-after students make brief remarks on how difficult their choices were.

Meanwhile, high school athletes go to after-school workouts as usual, dreaming, naively, that the public and media will one day place as much importance on throwing a football as on the skills that made these other students the center of attention. --Mike Revzin --If the limos were for high scores (SAT not football) (CS Monitor)

A student e-mailed me this link and suggested that I post it. Done.

The conference provided a compressed picture of some of the intellectual activity going on in video game studies today. In a short summary, it was clear that early attempts to define the discipline or ague against a sort of "academic colonization" were hopeless. The ideas flowing into the area of video game studies from all quarters hold great promise to energize the notion of studying something as banal as video games. The literary critics were not going to leave our beloved game world, I discovered. Then again, neither were the musicians, lawyers, cultural studies folk, computer science departments or anyone else.

The fact I gathered over and over again at the conference, and one I think that has been missed in the past, is that the variety of people studying games'even those who don't happen to call themselves "ludologists"'still share a common passion and pioneering spirit that all gamers have. Yes, even those literary critics care about games. --David Thomas
-- Princeton Video Game Conference (Buzzcut.com)

David Thomas sent me some pictures of me from the Princeton conference... he promises more photos (and, if he hasn't had second thoughts), a long blog post soon.

Update: David's Princeton video game conference notes are up now.

Here is the lineup for session 2. (Note the joysticks in the foreground.)

• Dennis Jerz / You are standing at the beginning of a road: examining Will Crowther's "Advent" (c.1976)
• Christy Wampole / Electronic games as a constrained medium
• Robert Bowen / Musical by-products of Atari 2600 games

Playing something (probably "Atari Adventure") on the projection screen, courtesy the Atari 2600 brought by Nick Montfort.

A Few Photos from Princeton Video Game Conference

I intentionally tried not to post about this (I guess I am meta-posting now) for a simple reason: this is not the way that a scholar discussion should take place....

This is not how this game is played. If anybody has to respond about what has been said at a conference, that should be made based on the actual papers that were presented. Of course, since papers are published on, well, paper, they are not up-to-date to the wonders of blogging technology, which allows us to have a debate instantly. Again, I have no problem in defending my position and ideas, contrasting them with other arguments and changing my mind if I am proved to be wrong. But I simply cannot do that based on anything but the original authors arguments. If we do not follow these simple academic rules, then he get into a “he said she said he said” game that could be a lot of fun, but will not do any good to videogame research....

[I]f we want to be serious about game research, we must discuss based on published material and not on blog posts, which can be useful for many things, but cannot be the only source of material for scholarly debate. --Gonzalo Frasca --The Dangers of Academic Blogging (Ludology.org)

In reply to Gonzalo's post, I wrote, in part:

My other major area of scholarly interest is weblogs, where this kind of metascholarship, as messy as it can be at times, seems to me a vital part of the academic discourse. When I couldn't attend BlogTalk in Austria last year, I greedily lapped up the real-time blogging on the event, with the understanding that what I was reading was just that -- blogging.

Do we need a new symbol like the smiley... a suitably unassuming icon that means, "This is my own subjective opinion, based on what I remember hearing six hours into the day-long conference I attended a couple days ago"?

Nah, probably not.

those in the humanities tended to distrust the technology, and those in the sciences often considered humanities-applications to be wasteful of a precious resource.

Specific kinds of projects, however, were more readily assisted by 1960s technology, even if character-sets were inadequate because computer-printers had either an all-uppercase or upper-and-lowercase character-set that was designed to represent standard English language. Nonetheless, medievalists, despite their graphic needs, generally made the heaviest use of the technology, often to assist preparing editions of manuscripts --A Brief History of Computer Concordances (CCRH)

Just taking a little break from videogame blogging...

The Critical Study of Computer Games: A Brief IntroductionJerz's Literacy Weblog)

Part of: Princeton Video Game Conference reflections.

While I mostly wrote those conference reflections for the benefit of game theorists who weren't able to attend the conference, if you're new to the subject, you might appreciate a general introduction.

Over the past few years, a very exciting movement in Europe (and particulary in Scandinavia) has been carving out a new field of game studies; it looks like the name "ludology" is going to stick (ludus being Latin for "game").

The mainstream press has covered this trend with bemusement ("Off to College to Study... Videogames?"), but the general thrust of the article is usually something along the lines that computer games are now too deeply embedded in our culture to ignore.

The ludologists reject the idea that games are primarily a kind of variable storytelling, a kind of interactive movie, a kind of educational role-playing, an occasion for pathology, etc. Instead, games are games -- objects in their own right, with an aesthetics, a rhetoric, a cultural history, and a discourse of their own (so far as it has been shaped right now).

I don't intend the following to be definitive, or limiting. I'm just doing my best to describe what I see, in a framework that my humanities colleagues and students will be able to understand.

Of course, I wouldn't say ludology necessarily denies that the storyline or cinematic elements of a game might be part of its value. A great story or great visuals is not enough to make a game successful; in fact, plenty of games with no narrative content, blocky graphics and horrid bleepy sound, and which seem to have no point, are nonetheless fun (at least, to the people who play them). In order to get at that core -- what makes a game worth playing -- a theory of computer games has to get really geeky, drawing on the mathematic principles of what might be called classical game theory , which basically atomizes games into abstract principles such as risk, payoff, strategy, objectives, agency, and equilibrium. Gonzalo Frasca boils all this down to one concept: rules. These are foreign concepts to narratologists (who want to think in terms of stories, or potential storeis), film theorists (who concentrate on the visual grammar that is used to represent the game state), psychologists and sociologists (who are concerned with what games do to us when we play them), though they are probably very familiar to business people (who want to know the secret formula for an addictive game, so they can make it just hard enough to be a challenge, but not hard enough that people don't think it's worth the money).

Whew.

While my literary background and my chosen subfield within games (interactive fiction) would seem to naturally predispose me towards narrative, I think my work with text games shows me just how poorly the vocabulary of fiction applies to other types of games (such as simulations or game-like social spaces, where the narrative content, such as it is, is mostly improvised by players interacting a shared virtual space).

Tell your kids, there are more and more ways to make a career out of video games! They could become game designers; they could also play games all the time (or observe other people doing so) for academic research. -- Anne Collier --Web News Brief 7 (Net Family News)

Tell your kids -- maybe it's not quite that simple.

It's interesting to see how the general public is constructing this field -- and of course this helps me see what to expect when I start publicizing my "Game Culture and Theory" course for next January.

While it's important to choose an academic field that you enjoy, I spend far more of my (limited) research time reading scholarly works and writing up my own research, than I spend playing games or watching others play games. And playing a game for fun is a different kind of activity than playing a game because you're about to write a paper about it. When you're about to give a talk on Adventure, you want to be sure you don't confuse the crystal bridge that appears when you wave the rod and the rickety wooden bridge that collapses when a bear crosses it. (I'm happy to say I caught that mistake before I delivered my paper, but only because I had the game with me on my PDA during the train ride...)

Culture CacheJerz's Literacy Weblog)

Part of: Princeton Video Game Conference reflections.

"Culture" was in the title of the conference, but it was only obliquely discussed, as in Peter Bell's "Hidden play," an analysis of handheld gaming culture (as compared to cultural responses to the Sony Walkman); and Greg Lastowka's "Virtual crimes," which ponders the legal ramifications of actions that have economic consequences in the real world (as evidenced by the eBay auctions of cyberspace goods and services), unlike the social transgressions examined by sociologists working in MUDs and MOOs. I felt Tevis Thompson's hymn to the action of jumping in "Tevis Thompson / But our princess is in another castle: towards a 'close-playing' of 'Super Mario Bros.'" was very useful to me, particularly since since Joust was the last jumping game that I really enjoyed). My own paper dealt, in part, with the manner in which the culture of the Cave Research Foundation (the organization through Will Crowther explored the real Colossal Cave) influenced "Colossal Cave Adventure," though in the time I had, I only managed to touch indirectly on how caving may have affected the history of game design.

Form, Culture, and Video Game CriticismJerz's Literacy Weblog)

I see that Nick Montfort has already posted a quick overview at GrandTextAuto, so I won't try to cover everything and every talk equally -- instead, I'll focus on those talks about which I have the most to say (however naive some of my reaction may be). Most of the next couple of blog entries were at least drafted on my PDA during the train ride back -- quite a time saver. But I have an unusually early meeting Monday morning, and thus won't be able to blog until dawn (which is what I want to to do).

• The Critical Study of Computer Games: A Brief Introduction
• Is There a Ludologist in the House?
  
• Culture Cache
  
• FilmCroft: I'm Ready for My Closeup...
  
• What IF? An Alternate History without "Adventure"?
  
• Metaconference Morsels
  
  • Good People, Good Memories
    
  • You are What You Blog
    
  • Gaming Reporters
    
  
  

Princeton Videogame Conference: PrologueJerz's Literacy Weblog)

Presenters have started to gather for Princeton's videogame conference. About eight of us met for some socialization last night. On the way home, I misread my map, managed to get myself taken to the wrong Red Roof Inn. This is all rather ironic, since part of my talk covers map-making in Will Crowther's "Colossal Cave Adventure."

I just shook hands briefly with Nick Montfort while on the way to make copies of my handouts. I'd better get back to the coffee and donuts... More later.

Examining the '10%' MemeJerz's Literacy Weblog)

Many of my students are thinking and talking about the gay marriage issue. Johanna Dreyfuss mentioned the "10%" statistic, citing the Kinsey report, via http://www.socal-glide.org/statistics.html.

I've encountered this statistic in student papers before, so I know that Kinsey didn't actually claim that 10% of the population was gay. According to The Kinsey Institiute, "10% of males were more or less exclusively homosexual and 8% of males were exclusively homosexual for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55. For females, Kinsey reported a range of 2-6% for more or less exclusively homosexual experience/response."

That's not the same thing as saying 10% of the population is gay, but it's much less quotable. Just like a student who has already written a research paper that defends his or her position, any advocacy groups looking for statistics to support their views will emphasize the evidence that supports their position best, and often completely ignore evidence that calls their convictions into question.

I haven't read any of the Kinsey reports, but I am aware of the controversy over his research methods. In one study, he measured the number of ograsms that juvenile male subjects have during a timed period -- and this study included children from age 14 to 5 months. One of Kinsey's former associates says the research included collecting information from trained volunteers who had experience. Or, to give the same statement a shocking "spin" -- that is, they worked over an extended period of time with pedophiles who used stopwatches to observe "partners" as young as 5 months.

Dr. Judith Reiseman writes,

Kinsey fathered not only the sexual revolution, as Hugh Hefner and others have said, but the homosexual revolution as well. Harry Hay gave Kinsey that credit when Hay read in 1948 that Kinsey found "10%" of the male population homosexual. Following the successful path of the Black Civil Rights movement, Hay, a long-time communist organizer, said 10% was a political force which could be melded into a "sexual minority" only seeking "minority rights." With Kinsey as the wind in his sails, Hay formed the Mattachine Society.

But 26% (1,400) of Kinsey's alleged 5,300 white male subjects were already "sex offenders."[34] As far as the data can be established, an additional 25% were incarcerated prisoners; some numbers were big city "pimps," "hold-up men," "thieves;" roughly 4% were male prostitutes as well as sundry other criminals; and some hundreds of homosexual activists at various "gay bars" and other haunts from coast to coast.[35] This group of social outcasts and deviants were then redefined by the Kinsey team as representing your average "Joe College." With adequate press and university publicity, the people believed what they were told by our respectable scientists, that mass sexual perversion was common nationwide-so our sex education and our laws must be changed to reflect Kinsey's "reality." -- Kinsey and the Homosexual Revolution

So... regardless of whether you agree that people found in gay bars are "social outcasts and deviants," the study of 5300 white males included 26% who were "sexual offenders" and 25% who were "incarcerated prisoners".

I'd have to read the study myself to determine whether Kisney would count a prisoner who is serving a jail term of three years, and who is raped by his fellow-prisoners on one occasion, would count as having sexual experiences that are "more or less exclusively homosexual" during that three-year period.

But look out -- Dr. Reiseman is a professor of communication, she is not an expert in human sexuality; her area of expertise is not human sexuality, but how selected details of the Kinsey studies have been publicized by certain advocacy groups, to the point where nowadays few people bother to question them. She is president of "The Institute for Media Education," and she writes books and gives talks on the subject of fraudulent sexuality studies; thus, she's made a career out of debunking Kinsey's research. Those details may affect how you accept the evidence she chooses to present, but you should be equally critical of the way people who support Kinsey's claims present Kinsey's research. (See www.drjudithreisman.org.)

No matter what your position on whatever issue, be skeptical of statistics that you hear someone cite on TV or that you find online. I think supporters of gay marriage should stay far away from the 10% statistic.

For many under 30, the host of Comedy Central's "The Daily Show" is, improbably, an important news source.

A poll released earlier this year by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that 21 percent of people aged 18 to 29 cited "The Daily Show" and "Saturday Night Live" as a place where they regularly learned presidential campaign news.

--Young America's news source: Jon Stewart (CNN)

I blogged this Pew report on the NMJ@SHU site a while ago, but it's interesting to read CNN's response:

Random conversations with nine people, aged 19 to 26, waiting to see a taping of "The Daily Show" last week revealed two who admitted they learned much about the news from the program.

The word "random" downplays the obvious bias involved in interviewing people who like Jon Stewart enough to want to be in his studio audience. A good news editor would be on the lookout for things that might be easily misinterpreted.

The electric shock hadn't hurt Jeremy very much, but he had bumped his head on a metal leg of the auditorium seats which he fell into. I had told him to ham it up when I applied the electrode of my violet-ray machine to his outstretched hand, but this was much more than I expected.

I was using the machine in a lecture on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. (Many of the Romantics thought of themselves as "natural philosophers" and employed such devices to experiment with electricity, which they thought had rejuvenating powers.) I was so flustered by Jeremy's feigned collapse (and twitching) that for another five minutes into my lecture, I forgot to remove my black rubber gloves. But I'll bet that was one of a handful of lectures those students will remember for a long time; maybe they'll even retain an intuitive appreciation for the complementary relationship of science and literature.

[...]

Eccentric professors are genuinely loved, and they are a glue that holds together the culture of an institution over time. They are not highly paid, transient "superstars"; but they are the professors to whom former students send their own college-age children. --Thomas H. Benton --In Praise of Eccentric Professors (Chronicle)

I remember Prof. Irby Cauthen, a Milton scholar at the University of Virginia, who seemed eccentric simply because he loved Milton. And James Trefil was the physics professor who shot a bullet into a stuffed Barney for us. I don't recall him having any particularly eccentric mannerisms, though.

While no replacement for writing articles and books, and no one is going to get tenured or promoted through blogging (at least not today); but what I've called a serious blogger would get a big plus on the positive side on the ledger from me when it gets to merit review time! Failing to reward it would be failing to recognize that blogging is not just another new communication medium; it is a new way to do scholarship. Mark Sargent (a dean at Villanova) --Academic Credit for Blogging (Professor Bainbridge)

Via jill/txt.

I reworked the draft, adding some charts and tables to demonstrate that the program wouldn't require any new dollars. But mostly I substituted abstract nouns for concrete ones, stuffed sentences with nominalizations, and replaced active verbs with passives, violating the rules of writing that students in the M.F.A. program would be expected to follow. --Dennis Baron --New Programs, New Problems (Chronicle)

Note: I added the above links.

I'm not part of Seton Hill's MFA program, but as the "new media journalism" specialist I was hired to take a leadership role in getting the NMJ program off the ground.

Planning for the program was well underway when I was hired, so my role was mostly writing up or otherwise wrangling together syllabi to flesh out the 8 or so new courses in the NMJ curriculum. Two of the courses hit administrative snags that John never fully explained to me, aside from glancing in the direction of the administration building and giving a sad little sigh every time I brought it up. For a sample syllabus on "New Media Aesthetics," I had offered a special topic course on "The Documentary Film" because I thought it would fit better in a journalism program, because I thought it would be easier to explain that course to non-experts, and because it's a genre that interests me; but cinema also fits in with art and communications, so the proposal set up a red flag.

John was very encouraging when I suggested that I supply a version of the syllabus that focused on digital culture instead.

He handled all the final paperwork details for the new slate of courses. As the deadline approached, I sent him an e-mail with about 12 files in different formats, and he filled out all the forms, checking the right boxes and, I presume, providing the right amount of administrativese.