Culture: May 2004 Archive Page

[It's a visual site with little text to quote.] --Don't Buy It: Get Media Smart (PBS Kids)

Found via watercoolergames, where the "make a cereal box" utility was featured. I couldn't get that to work on my computer, which is too bad, because I really wanted to make a Jerz's Literacy Weblog cereal box, and maybe a cereal box icon for each of my classes in the fall. I don't know why I decided to do that, but if the boxes are cool I can probably retrofit some pedagogical rationale to it. Or not. Er... what was this blog entry supposed to be about? Oh, yeah.

A well-designed site that doesn't overwhelm with text (as I probably would if I were trying to teach the same lesson). I would appreciate more links off-site to more in depth resources, but maybe that's stuff is somewhere on the site -- I didn't look through it in depth.

Yes, graduates, as much as you love your Mom and Dad, you're realistic enough to understand, deep down inside, that they are the two most annoying human beings on the planet. And so the time will come -- I give it six weeks -- when you realize that you can no longer continue living with them. And so you will summon your courage, take a deep breath, and ask them to move out. It's only fair! They've had the house practically to themselves for years! Now it's your turn! Let THEM go work at Starbucks. --Dave Barry --Good news! You can go home again (Miami Herald -- via Kentucky, for some reason)

Now that's a graduation speech!

"Under the right circumstances," Surowiecki argues, "groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the smartest people in them."

For evidence, he cites how groups have been used to find lost submarines, correct the spread on a sporting event, locate a Web page, even predict the president of the United States. So why aren't we using groups more?

Well, for one, crowds have a pretty bad rep. --John Freeman --If you want good information, ask around - a lot (CS Monitor)

Interesting factoid:

the TV studio audience of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," guessed the right answer to questions 91 percent of the time, torching the "experts," who guessed the right answer only 65 percent of the time.

Hmm... I personally would go to the studio audience first on matters of pop culture, so there may be some filter that means the audience gets more of the questions for which a crowd would be good.

I think it's a bit misleading to say that the studio audience was right 91% of the time. If 96% of the audience guessed randomly, and only 4% actually knew the right answer, that would leave the 3 wrong answers with 24% each, or 72% in toto, and the right answer with 28%. Thus, almost 3/4 of the audience could be wrong, but according to the passage I excerpted above, "the audience" could still be credited with getting the "right" answer. By contrast, the single expert had to be 100% accurate in order to get the "right" answer.

I imagine that Surowiecki covers all this in his book, but the way it's presented in the article seems somewhat misleading.

A student who admits plagiarising his way through his three-year degree course plans to sue his university for negligence after he was caught out on the day before his final exam.

Michael Gunn was told by the University of Kent at Canterbury earlier this month that a routine review of his English literature degree coursework "has revealed extensive plagiarism from internet sources". --'Plagiarist' to sue university (Times Higher Education Supplement)

"It's not about the money," says the admitted plagiarists's mother. Hmm...

She now has 81 grandchildren and great-grandchildren to hear her schoolgirl tales, but the end of the story always troubled her. So after outliving three husbands and letting seven decades pass since her last high school class, Babson decided it was time to go back to school. --Jill Barton --Fla. Woman, 90, Receives H.S. Diploma (MyWay/AP)

Great suggestion, Rosemary.

If you?re curious about how much you think like a leader versus thinking like a manager, answer the following fifteen True or False questions. Then follow the link at the bottom of the page to see the answers and a brief discussion of each question. --Are You A Leader? Part I: The Leadership Self Test (Schuler Solutions)

One of my responsibilities is advising the student newspaper. It's really the editor in chief who is the leader of that organization; my job is to troubleshoot. Our new editor was an ROTC leader in high school, but a newspaper staffed mostly by volunteers is going to feel very different.

Via an interesting collection of leadership links from Lisbeth Klastrup, who's temporarily levelling up.

Here?s the dilemma and confusion. Asking students to conform to a print based logic in an electronic world is not teaching anyone to think on one?s own. Indeed, this kind of pedagogy translates into a continual academic stubbornness, a refusal to recognize the communication shifts we have experienced and are experiencing currently. Telling students to write according to the logic of print (whether the writing is on paper or not ? I am talking about the logic not the medium) is to force students to reject the communicative practices around them: IM, the Web, Film, TV, music, etc.
The other serious problem here is that the refusal to recognize the remix is also a refusal to recognize the nature of texts we often value and admire in English Studies (and the university in general). The Wasteland? Remixed. Shakespeare? So remixed. Las Meninas? Remixed Velasquez. Pick a Medieval text at random. It will be a remix. Newspaper stories? Always remixed (I remember my own newspaper experience at several publications? we would go through other papers looking for ideas). Literature reflects a Borges universe where every story is remixed and mixed. Spun around on a literate turntable and wondered over. --JRice --Remix etc. (Yellow Dog)

It's true that one's own ideas only come after one has filtered through many other ideas. I think the problem I see in the classroom is that students find it difficult to trace details back to the source. It's one thing to read Shakespeare, and then write a creative work that riffs on Shakespeare. It takes perhaps a bit more skill to read, say, The Jew of Malta alongside The Merchant of Venice, or any of a number of standard revenge tragedies alongside Hamlet, and note what elements of a common story Shakespeare kept, and where his artistry made the common story into his own dramatic work. It's something else entirely to be shown a creative work, or a marketing pitch, or a political speech, and -- without an authority figure telling you what sources the author consulted -- independently seek out the influences that were remixed and remediated in order to produce the new result.

So students who can only remix don't get practice thinking critically about culture -- and it's certainly possible to recognize remix culture and design assignments that ask them to think critically about it, without rejecting it out of hand as plagiarism.

One problem with remix culture is that the products of remixing are meant almost exclusively for audiences that are familiar with the sources. I had a roommate who sometimes wrote poetry or short stories that quoted long passages from popular songs. Since I usually hadn't heard of those songs, they didn't have the emotonal effect my roommate wanted them to have, so they fell flat for me and I wasn't really able to get the full impact he wanted his creative writing to have. Since he was mostly writing for himself, he didn't need to cite and explain every cultural reference, but if he were giving a speech to a local city council meeting or writing a proposal for a scholarship, it would be his responsibility to make sure that his audience understood all his references. One way to do that is to identify the source of those references.

I don't know much about music, but I have heard on NPR references to composers who "quote" each other. You can't interrupt a symphony to identify the source of a certain passage, so I recognize that some media are better suited to the kinds of explicit citation that college composition courses require.

In the early 90s, Johnny Carson did a comedy bit about psyops campaign against American troops, where the troops were warned that back home, their wives were being seduced by movie stars like Homer Simpson. A serviceman overseas must have heard about or watched that show, but changed the name to "Bart Simpson," and passed the story on to a reporter. A legend was born.

I don't expect students to arrive at college knowing everything they need to know -- if they did, none of us would have jobs.

Remixing is one thing when it comes to the creation of cultural artifacts -- but when it comes to examining facts about the world, and making decisions that may affect people's livelihoods or even their lives, the culture of the remix is sloppy and dangerous.

I certainly don't feel that students should never, ever remix -- but if we graduate students who can ONLY remix, and have never been forced to trace an idea back to its source and critique its validity, but instead settle for riffing on it and referencing "www.somehomepage.com" as one of a handful of "Works Consulted," then we are doing them -- and our culture at large -- a great disservice.

When recruited athletes make up such a substantial fraction of the entering class in at least some colleges, is there a risk that there will be too few places for other students, who want to become poets, scientists, or leaders of civic causes? Is there a possibility that, without realizing what is leading to what, the institutions themselves will become unbalanced in various ways? For example, will they feel a need to devote more and more of their teaching resources to fields like business and economics -- which are disproportionately elected by athletes -- in lieu of investing more heavily in less "practical" fields, such as classics, physics, and language study? Similarly, as one commentator put the question, what are the effects on those students interested in fields like philosophy? Could they feel at risk of being devalued? --James L. Shulman and William G. Bowen
--How the Playing Field Is Encroaching on the Admissions Office (Chronicle)

An old article, but on a subject that weighs on my mind from time to time.

He began calculating frantically. He gathered data on 616 auctions, observing how much each item sold for in U.S. dollars. When he averaged the results, he was stunned to discover that the EverQuest platinum piece was worth about one cent U.S. ? higher than the Japanese yen or the Italian lira. With that information, he could figure out how fast the EverQuest economy was growing. Since players were killing monsters or skinning bunnies every day, they were, in effect, creating wealth. Crunching more numbers, Castronova found that the average player was generating 319 platinum pieces each hour he or she was in the game ? the equivalent of $3.42 (U.S.) per hour. "That's higher than the minimum wage in most countries," he marvelled. --Clive Thompson --Game Theories  (The Walrus)

There isn't really anything new in this article, but it's told in an engaging way, which would make it a great introductory piece. Via KairosNews.

The truth about the campaign, which Mini USA and Crispin Porter call "interactive fiction," is to be finally revealed this month. Wall posters are to go up in big cities like Los Angeles and New York, featuring the Mini Cooper logo above images of the "motorbots." Those images will also turn up on the brand's official Web site (miniusa.com).

The goal of the unconventional campaign - the most recent in an innovative series from Crispin Porter since the Mini Cooper came out in March 2002 - is to help generate that elusive quality known as buzz for the car, particularly among mechanical-minded male drivers who may be put off by women's praise of it as cute. --Stuart Elliott --Pursuing Marketing Buzz (NY Times (will expire))

An ad agency has "concocted an elaborate advertising campaign disguised as a debate over whether a British engineer has built robots out of Mini car parts".

The retro design of "Colin Mayhew's home page" is appeaing, though overall the whole thing is so slick with advertising money that it simply doesn't look cheesey enough to be real.

All in all this campaign is very reminiscent of Bigredhair's more engaging and creative treatment of "Biolerplate."

I'm not at all comfortable with the the ethics of putting deliberately false information out there on the Internet, when the purpose is to draw attention to a real product. For some reason, I was less bothered by the hype around the Blair Witch Project or the game that went along with the movie Artificial intelligence. But this seems somehow to be crossing the line.

Sheet music began to have cars on the cover almost as soon as the automobile was invented. Some songs, like The Swagger Two-Step, didn’t have lyrics, and so the car on the front, along with the opulently dressed couple, seem to have been part of the illustrator’s attempt to make the tune symbolize wealth and class privilege.... Despite the fact that there were only about 8,000 cars in the United States at the time, the illustrator made the automobile more visually prominent than the trolley, perhaps to suggest that the song was modern and urbane. --Cars! Cars! Cars! (Smithsonian Institute)

Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.