Humanities: May 2004 Archive Page

"They struck his head with a reed and spat on him." -- Mk 15:19

--The Crucifixion (in Lego) (The Brick Testament)

This site, by "Rev" Brendan Powell Smith, features Lego illustrations of Biblical passages -- including many that you don't often see in kiddie books, including the Dueteronomy passages on rape, bestiality, incest, homosexuality, transvestism, and "how long to hang somebody".

I'm fascinated by the scowling face of the rapist who pays the father of a violated virgin 50 shekels, and who then has to marry her. I didn't know there were scowling Lego minifugres.

I don't exactly recommend it for vacation bible school. VeggieTales it ain't.

Jerzies: Tastes Like Cardboard!

After I lamented that I couldn't design a box of cereal for myself, this is apparently Mike Arnzen's way of telling me I'm a flake.

Or maybe just that I stay crispy in milk. Thanks, Mike.

eeeeeee ee [iiiiiii:'ii] v. to move. e eeeeeeee ee eerp mph; move over, you meatball, I can't breathe under your furry butt. --Harrap's Rat-English Dictionary (ratbehavior.org)

A rat-English dictionary. Via join the dots.

[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.

How can we ask our students to read great literature and then criminalize them when they respond, on occasion, with the angry bitterness of Hamlet?

Clearly, we're not dealing with the proverbial "isolated incidents" here. FEAR ITSELF is loose in America and it needs to be addressed, strongly, powerfully, by all of us who teach composition and encourage written expression. --John Lovas --[Criminalizing Writing] (Jocalo's Blog)

An important set of observations...

When in grad school, I used to have recurring dreams that I was reading and re-reading a page of some academic book. I guess my dreaming mind doesn't have a buffer large enough to store a whole page of text -- each time I re-read it, my dreaming mind re-wrote it, reflecting my developing understanding of whatever I thought the author was trying to say.

I'm having that experience now, after more about 10 days of blogging during the kids' naps, with no time in the office to sort through and organize my thoughts. I thought I had an appointment in the office last Monday, so I didn't bring my PDA charger home over the weekend, and the battery has been dead for over a week now. I even resorted to pulling out a reporter's notebook and jotting down lists and ideas the old-fashioned way, while my daughter was briefly engaged with The Wiggles or tearing the stuffing out of one of her dolls.

Anyway, knowing that a little darling may wake up at any moment, let me try to address this topic...

In high school, I worked off some stress during the last semester of my senior year by writing a serial short story in which various members of the drama club got "offed" in spectacular ways. I don't remember whether I did it before or after, but I also tried my hand at a comic strip.

Young Americans are growing up in a society that encourages them to express themselves. Thankfully we've ditched the Victorian tendency to think of children to be perfect little china dolls, but we're still not culturally equipped to deal with what happens when children express darkness and angst. Fairytales (in their pre-Disneyfied, somewhat gory, and often morally ambiguous states) served an important cultural function: they attracted the darker energies of children, in the context of bedtime stories where adults were fimly and lovingly in control.

That's no longer the case -- kids are developing huge social networks under the noses of their parents. I don't think this is, in itself, a bad thing, but it's certainly incumbent upon the parents to take as much interest in kids online activities as any other activity. For a growing segment of society, the distinction between online culture and offline culture is blurring.
The story of the teen who used a chatroom to arrange his own (attempted) murder would be an incredible case study, but the ethics of publishing all those private communications would be too complex for me to want to think about.

Well, I'm hearing toddler thumpings from next door, so my musings are going offline for now.

BTW, John, I do think you should write titles for your blog entries -- but the content is, as always, great.

Writing bad poetry is easy when you disregard meter, pace, and rhyming scheme. Just make sure to follow a few simple guidelines:
1. Never write about anything cheerful. Remember, you are a tortured artist. Be one.
2. Be sure to use the following words at least once per sentence, no fewer than 50 times per poem: lament, loathe, soul, darkness, bitter, agony, despair, misery, anguish, pain, suffer, woe, hate, death, love, sultry, angel, rose, acrid and nihilism. Nihilism is a good one because it comes up all the time in normal conversations. --How to become an obnoxious internet cam whore in five easy steps.  (Maddox)

Just in case this professor gig doesn't work out, thanks to Torill, I might have an alternative.

The pictures on the site are hilarious -- and the text is spot on.

The final internet chatroom exchange took place on 28 June last year. "U want me 2 take him 2 trafford centre and kill him in the middle of trafford centre??" said one message. "Yes," came the reply.

Less than 24 hours later, a 14-year-old boy was critically ill in hospital with stab wounds in the chest and stomach. At first it seemed as though a brutal, but straightforward, robbery had gone wrong. But yesterday the young "victim" became the first person in this country to be convicted of inciting their own murder. --Helen Carter --Bizarre tale of boy who used internet to plot his own murder (Guardian)

There's a postmodernist seminar paper in this news story. Talk about "death of the author". Definitely a made-for-TV movie, since it confirms all the worst fears that the traditional media like to stoke regarding the Internet.

This detail stuck out to me:

Police were able to link all the fictional characters back to John because Ms Hogg's analysis discovered common features in the typing style, such as the misspelling of "maybe" as "mybye", of all the characters.

It? exciting to see the topic generate such interest and activity ? especially since that? one of the premises on which the Disseminary is based.

One of the topics involves the question of what the various conversants mean by ?open,? which I?d summarize with the following list of opennesses:

1. ?open source? (Stephen Carlson? emphasis): primary texts freely available online.
2. ?open access?: Scholarship should be available to the reading public apart from the impedimenta of high prices and libraries or bookstores in remote locations.
3. ?open entry? (Paul?s emphasis): Scholarship should take place on the basis of interest and capacity, without according privileged standing to those with Ph.D.s in specialized fields, or academic appointments. Anyone may join in.
4. ?open data? Scholarship should be archived in open, easily-indexable data formats.
5. ?open discourse?: Scholarship should conduct its business in public, where interested parties (who aren?t necessarily aiming to participate) can watch. learn, and pose interesting ?outsider? challenges.

--Openness, Publication and Scholarship (Akma's Random Thoughts)

Via KairosNews.

Amusement parks just wouldn't be amusing without all the warnings that we ignore.

• Whipper-Snapper Whiplash Worries
• Bull's-Eye BS
• Astounding Amusement Park Physics

--Dennis G. Jerz

--Cruel Amusement Park Instructions (Jerz's Online Reading Room)

"Teenagers need to be engaged as equals, not talked down to," Niles said, scrubbing the words "Miss Niles is a kunt" from the surface of her desk. "A heavy-handed approach takes the joy out of learning. Some teachers give out detention, but I praise my students for the times they don't skip class, rather than dwell on the days they do."

A recent graduate of the George Washington University education program, Niles came to Bangor last August with the childlike belief that she could somehow inspire a passion for literature in her uninterested students, who see her as a pushover.
--Naïve Teacher Believes In Her Students (The Onion)

This one was truly painful to read.

While much of my college teaching personal includes emphasizing how a college research paper differs from the kind of paper a high school English teacher would praise, I usually try to emphasize that high school teachers have so much to deal with that it's not a surprise most students come to college unprepared to write at the college level. That's why freshman comp courses exist, of course.

It can be overwhelming for the students who really are good writers, and who are prepared to work hard, but who have never really been in danger of getting anything but an A.

Update (15 Mar 2008) I just found an entry from a blog called "halftone":

Today, in an act of total narcissism, I Googled some of the old Onion headlines that I wrote years ago, to see if any of them had gotten any reaction on blogs and such. I was amused to find that "Naïve Teacher Believes In Her Students" was taken completely seriously by a few people.

This one clearly senses that something isn't right about the article but doesn't seem to ever get that it's not real.

This one seems to understand that it's satire, but still finds it "truly painful." One of the commenters below wonderfully takes the article seriously and has some suggestions for the fictional teacher.

I could imagine how teachers might be offended by the article, and I was a little reluctant to submit the headline when I thought of it (I actually came up with it half-asleep as I was waking from a dream). But there are no sacred cows in The Onion, and to me, the headline is funny simply because it's an inversion of a cliche. The article itself (written by an Onion staff writer, not by me) expands on the joke by clearly making the teacher truly naive. The teacher in the article thinks she understands her students but obviously does not. She thinks she's inspiring her students but in reality she's making it easier for them to misbehave. It's a little disturbing to me that there are people out there who can read that and think that she's doing a good job.

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!

“When Zaphod first comes out of the temple and is approached by well wishers, the banana alien on the mole-horse needs to replace the multi-headed groupie.” You just don’t get notes like this every day. --Kerry Kirkpatrick --HHGG Interview with Myself  (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy [Official Blog])

"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...

Should you happen to find yourself captivated watching slender Lara bound lithely through Tomb Raider's dark, moist-looking caverns, you will do so without quite forgetting that Lara is, in a sense, you. Like the stranded Marine in Doom, the progenitor of first-person shooters, Lara awaits your input before she makes her decisions. Lara and Doom's Marine both look where you look, and their bodies intrude on the screen to stand in for yours. A primary difference is that the sole bodily presence of Doom's Marine is a hirsute arm, gripping a phallic, super-lethal weapon that bobs stiffly in time with his stealthy walk. I can't imagine anyone who wouldn't rather be Lara. She is far more nuanced. Self-possessed in her hip-swaying walk but spry and potent when she leaps and scrambles, she has the build of a rock-climber and the carriage of an elegant socialite. --Mike Ward --Being Lara Croft, or, We Are All Sci Fi (Pop Matters)

As Mike Vitia notes in a recent comment, this pre-Jolie article is dated now, but it's well worth reading. Thanks for the suggestion.

I do find it limiting when I consider the set of assumptions that cinema experts bring to videogames. For example, Ward here waits until near the end to dicsuss the controls (keyboard in this case, when most dedicated players are probably using a hand-held controller).

A social studies office worker said she was fired this week after administrators discovered provocative posts in her online journal, including threats to fellow workers and superiors. --Leon Neyfakh --Online Weblog Leads To Firing (Harvard Crimson)

An online weblog... as opposed to some other kind of weblog, such as an offline weblog, which, according to the article, the weblog in question appears to be.

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.

In a society devoted to "reality shows" and rampant commodification, it had to happen some time. Late last month an independent scientist auctioned off his services as a co-author on eBay, with the promise of helping the highest bidder write a scientific paper for publication. The offer even had the added allure of a linkage with the legendary mathematician Paul Erdös. --Richard Monastersky --Hot Type: Thumbing His Nose at Academe, a Scholar Tries to Auction His Services (Chronicle)

Neckties worn by doctors can and do carry dangerous pathogens, a clever new study released yesterday reveals. It suggests a bedside visit by a well-dressed physician could dole out disease along with comfort and care. --Helen Branswell --MDs' neckties 'a health hazard' (Toronto Star)

“Most writers are not getting published in magazines or literary journals,” Lee said the other day, clicking through her Internet Explorer favorites in her cluttered cubicle at the I.C.M. office on West Fifty-seventh Street. “For some more unconventional voices, for people that don’t have connections, blogs can be an entryway into the game.” --Daniel Radosh --A Book in You (New Yorker)

Thanks for the suggestion, Mike.

Students might be surprised to know how nervous some experienced teachers can be at the prospect of a new class. I have taught at least 40 classes, but I still find teaching stressful, particularly after the summer break or a sabbatical. As the first day approaches, I'll begin to worry: Will my voice tremble? Will I sweat profusely? Will I forget my lesson plan? Will I lose their confidence right away? --"Thomas H. Benton" --Shyness and Academe (Chronicle)

Blogging something like this during the school year seems just too confessional. I know some of my students are still reading my blog even though classes are out, or my future students might find this post in my archives.

My teaching persona is extroverted, and I am generally extroverted with my family, but in a social context, I'm an introvert. That's not exactly the same thing as being shy, of course.

I did attend three Seton Hill parties in four days last week (and managed to drag my wife along to two of them, thanks to my wonderful parents, who came up to babysit for us).

At the bottom of each entry in this site’s blog, I use </30> to designated the end of the it.

In my own way, it’s a nod to the tradition of ending newspaper stories (and occasionally broadcast and magazine pieces) with - 30 -.

While no one’s sure why 30 was used as an end sign, there is no shortage of ideas. --Craig Saila --Why end with 30? (Living Can Kill You)

Somebody e-mailed me this question. In the back of my mind, I thought, "An obsolete typesetting symbol?" but I didn't know.

3.5 million for heaven.
3.9 million for hell.
9.4 million for Florida. --Bruce Stockler --On the Web, in the HeartNew York Times)

An extremely interesting example of using rhetoric to organize data.

The artists will reverse engineer Mystery House, the first graphical adventure game; reimplement it in a modern, free language for interactive fiction development; and make a kit freely available to the public so that others may modify Mystery House Taken Over as they see fit. The artists will create their own modified versions and commission ten such games from the interactive fiction community and from other creators of net.art and electronic literature. Thus, the project will also introduce several novel games, all with identical structure, which will be artistic contributions themselves. --Nick Montfort, Dan Shiovitz, Emily Short --Mystery House Taken Over (Turbulence)

This proposal is one of several that garnered $5000 from the 2004 Turbulene competition. Congrats!

The Associated Press story from January this year breathlessly reports that:

"U.S. soldiers in Iraq are killing themselves at an unusually high rate, despite the work of special teams sent to help troops deal with combat stress."

You have to scan a lot lower in the story to read the following:

"[T]he military has documented 21 suicides during 2003 among troops involved in the Iraq war. Eighteen of those were Army soldiers... That's a suicide rate for soldiers in Iraq of about 13.5 per 100,000... In 2002, the Army reported an overall suicide rate of 11.1 per 100,000.

"The overall suicide rate nationwide during 2001 was 10.7 per 100,000, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."

"An unusually high rate"? It's only marginally worse than the suicide rate in the Army during peacetime, and indeed than the "civilian" suicide rate.

Now consider the fact that active military service overseas tends to be more stressful than normal life back in the United States. Also consider that US forces in Iraq are composed mostly of young males between the ages of 18 and 35 - the suicide rate for that demographic back in the US is almost 21 per 100,000, which is 7 per 100,000 more than for soldiers in Iraq (the actual figure I got for 2001, for "suicide injury deaths and rates per 100,000; all races, males, ages 20 to 34" on the National Centre for Injury Prevention and Control website calculator was 20.74). So a little bit of context to the story would have showed that in terms of suicide, Iraq is actually safer that Iowa.

But again, that would spoil a good story.
--the forest for the Iraqi trees  (Chrenkoff)

I'm blogging this becuase I'm often frustrated by how uncritically students accept statistics they read online. This analysis, written by somebody who makes no secret of his political opinion, makes an interesting case study.

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.

You can choose to fight evil alone, or you can join a gang of good guys. As humiliating as it might be, you could become a sidekick apprentice to characters with more developed skills. So far, the player community is welcoming; there aren't many foul-mouthed teens and crabby veterans. Newbie-friendly areas exist, and subscribers so far welcome the uninitiated. Do-gooders won't have any trouble forming their own Justice League or X-Men. --Scott Steinberg --Wanted: Heroes to Rescue City  (Wired)

What does one do with a blog? Here are links to some of my favorite recent postings that highlight part of what I do with my blog.

Teaching

• Plagiarism Roundup
  In honor of Mike Arnzen's unmasking of a plagiarist, here are a few recent blog entries on academic dishonesty.
• Circle Games and Cyberpunk
  In order to discuss some of the key concepts in the novel, I had to make sure that my "Intro to Literary Study" class (English majors, overwhelmingly freshmen) grasped some of the basics of network theory.

Language and Rhetoric

• Rant or Remark? Invective or Discussion?
  If it doesn't make your blood boil, then it's not doing its job. (An analysis of the Elizabeth Ito case.)
• Why people think they are above having to read instructions
  I am in the 7th grade. My project this year is attempting to prove that 99% of people fail to read the following directions after being told and read to do so.

Media

• Watch One Hour with Me... In the Lobby: Waiting for Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ"
  What do the marketing droids think the audience that comes to see Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ" will want to spend money on? What previews will I have to sit through?
• "The Passion" is the Medium
  Yes, I had to look away during the torture scenes -- but no, not for the reason you probably suspect.
• Theory vs. Craft in Computer Game Studies
  While the computer game industry is, at bottom, driven by money, what might be called the "theory industry" is stacked with people who are very intelligent, who have been trained their whole career to think in abstract and theoretical terms, and who are completely mystified by things that computer gaming designers take for granted.

Personal

• 'The Meatball: Not A Funny Rhyme' says Peter Jerz, age 5-3/4; or, Child Traumatized by 'On Top of Spaghetti'
  "I just can't stop thinking and thinking about that poor meatball," he says, tears rolling from his pinched, squinting eyes... "For who would want to eat it when it's mush under a bush?... And another thing... they should close the front door."
• Headless Heroes, Car-crash Residue, and Styrofoam Peanuts
  I ended up with a big trash bag on the highway outside St. Emma Monastery. What did I pick up?

Favorite Blog Entries: Journaling ModeJerz's Literacy Weblog)

A weblog is a great tool for jotting down thoughts as they come to you. I find my students tend to use their blogs as a repository for their own thoughts, and don't offer annotated links to offsite resources as frequently as I do. I've collected a set of my own blogs that follow the "journaling" model, so I'll be able to point them to it easily in the future.

--Playing with 'Web Album Generator'Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I've got a huge backlog of digital images that I've wanted to post online... I'm using Web Album Generator, which automates the navigation and the thumbnail.

Now making a collection of images is a lot less fiddly -- though I wish it offered some way to add a comment to the main page, or at least a way to link out to some other page besides Web Album Generator's home page. I can probably figure out a way to do that through the style sheet, but I wish there just a box to type in.

First, words have rules. The mansion of the Word Wizard has many rules. The game of Ad Verbum also has rules. Much of the problem-solving and puzzle-unpuzzling of the text is in recognizing the rules in play and using them to get out of sticky situations. In fact, the player (via text) and adventurer (via sound) are warned by a mysterious and booming, sonorous voice before entering a room, ?You may be very, very frustrated if you walk in there without reading the WARNING.? -Edmond Chang --Words Matter: Nick Montfort's Ad Verbum (ENGL 668k: Digital Studies)

A student paper submitted for Matt Kirschenbaum's class.

These games aren't much fun to play, even if you are a Bush supporter. Nevertheless, it's significant that a major political party now sees games as a useful campaigning tool. Presumably, the RNC thinks Tax Invaders will get Bush's economic policy across to "the kids". But it's hard to say for certain because, so far, the RNC has not talked about the games to the press and they didn't respond to a request for an interview.

However, others are talking about this new campaign strategy - in particular, Ian Bogost and Gonzalo Frasca, two game designers/ researchers who contribute to Water Cooler Games, a blog set up in October to track the development of "video games with an agenda". "I believe in this medium as a more efficient means of communicating social and political messages," says Bogost. "So I'm encouraged when anybody tries it, whatever their political persuasion."

Unfortunately, the games aren't that good, says Frasca. "They look like they were programmed by Bush himself." In particular, Tax Invaders, with its South Park image of bullets flying out of George Bush's head, seems ill conceived. "Knowing his trigger-happy approach to international politics," says Frasca, "this is something that may well backfire." --Jim McClellan --The role of play  (Guardian Unlimited)

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.

I'm such an important blogger that I don't have to give you any reason as I urge, even command, you to visit this link.

[W]hen famous A-listers write those self-satisfied one-line posts, they aren't really blogging well. Instead, they are just spending the social capital they've already accumulated. They accumulated that social capital by first learning how to listen and read the professional and blog genres that interest them (interpretation on one level), then following the conversation closely enough to know how to contribute something (more interpretation), and then, when they are at their best, linking in richer, fuller posts that build social networks, yes, but that also discuss what they are linking to (interpretation again). I think Jorn Barger said that good links add value to the thing being linked to -- for interpretation, Kurt Spellmeyer sometimes says, is saying something the text has not already quite said. Not just quoting it or pointing to it, not just linking alone. --CCCC Waves and Ripples (Weblogs in Higher Education)

I missed this blog post when it was originally written, back in March...

I was a soldier. I was a sergeant, who taught five-hour training sessions on the Geneva Convention and the Laws of War. And I'm disgusted, and I hope you'll let me tell you why.

The two soldiers in the photographs, as well as the others you may have seen in more recent pictures, will be imprisoned at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. And they deserve to be, and more. Not only have they violated the military's rules and international law, they've forgotten the reason why such laws exist, the moral imperative: whatever the horrors of war, the people on the other side are human beings, with families, with lives. Most soldiers understand that, and understand better than anybody else the horrors of war. Academics can cry for peace from their ivory towers, but soldiers are the ones being shot at, and they understand that the other guy is just like them, with wives, with kids, with lives. Just like them. --Mike Vitia
--The Photos (Vitia)

A powerful, painful essay.

Henry shared the media that influenced him, including films like Operation Frontal Lobe and Isaasc Asimov sci-fi novels. He agued that every other pop culture medium has been involved in education, and games need to catch up. Even Hollywood markets films with education guides (e.g. The Alamo, which has one available on the official website).

Some stats Henry shared:

• 100% of entering college freshman play games
• 65% call themselves regular game players
• 48% said games keep them from studying "some" or "a lot"
• 32% play during classes

With that many students playing, said Henry, maybe the teachers should join them. --Education Arcade, day 1 (Water Cooler Games)

Glad to see Ian is braving "The Dangers of Academic Blogging" to give his ground's-eye view of what looks like an important conference. Perhaps Wired will have more later, but at the moment I'm not impressed by its coverage.

One panel featured Wagner James Au, James Paul Gee, Warren Spector, and Brenda Laurel. What a line-up! I'd also like to have heard what Royal Shakespeare member Tom Piper had to say about a collaboration with MIT.

I listen in part because I am intrigued and seduced by what I don't know: by the Greek tragedies I will never have time to read, by the symphonies I will never have time to appreciate, by the questions I will never have enough philosophical training to ask or understand in their richest contexts.

Like many of my colleagues, I often dream about sitting in on courses that spark my curiosity. Just about every semester I toy with the idea of taking an introductory piano course, or brushing up on my Spanish or French. I have even spoken idly of shedding my responsibilities and pursuing whole new degrees, maybe in zoology or art history or anthropology. --James M. Lang
--The Benefits of Eavesdropping (Chronicle)

It's not so much the content of this essay that moved me to blog it. It's also really, really good writing... and as I see the light at the end of the grading tunnel, and contemplate my plans for next term, I really appreciate this reminder of how exciting teaching can be.

He added that a difference exists between journalism and propaganda.

As he addressed some of the hard hits journalism has taken in the field of ethics, Carroll noted that anyone could be a journalist because, unlike other fields, journalism had no qualification tests, boards to censure misconduct or a universally accepted set of standards.

However, Carroll said a great depth of feeling remains on the importance of ethics that is centered around newspapers' sense of responsibilities to their readers.

"I've learned that these ethics are deeply believed in even though in some places they are not even written down," he said. When ethical guidelines are ignored, their proponents respond with 'tribal ferocity,'" he added. --Ayisha Yaha --Esteemed journalist lectures on ethics (Daily Emerald)

Caroll complains about what he calls "pseudo-journalism." All the more reason to emphasize critical thinking skills in education.

What's the point? What adult has the time to master this stuff? Could it ever be worth it?

Recently, I've decided the answer is yes, even if you're reduced to tears by a hellish game, it can be worth it to plug through. Why? For the same reason it's often worth struggling through many other pieces of art or entertainment that we consider "difficult." Anyone who's slogged through the experimental swamp of Ulysses knows that it seems like a pointless chore at first. But if you're patient, the literary payoff is powerful?er, so I've been told?perhaps all the more so because you've worked hard for it.

[...]

Each game offers a different flavor of achievement. The quick-hit delights of Mario Kart are similar to the joys of a detective novel or a romance paperback, while the intense, grinding slog of Ninja Gaiden creates a sort of exhausted exhilaration, like finally reaching the end of War and Peace. Neither one is better than the other, but too many people miss out on the latter merely because the barrier to entry is so high. -- Clive Thompson --Tough Love: Can a video game be too hard? (Slate)

A blog is a Web site with regularly updated chronological entries containing commentary, opinions, lies, rumors, half-truths and innuendos. More importantly, it's where you can express your opinions, make comments, spread rumors, tell lies, create fiction and bore the world with your thoughts on just about any subject.

[...]

In a lot of ways, reading a blog is like reading someone else's diary or, better yet, an old Larry King column. Free flow. No continuity. No boring segues or transitions. No holds barred. And in most cases, shallow. Shallow is good -- there's nothing wrong with shallow.

But there is one major difference. Even Larry King had to get his copy past an editor. And what an editor he must have been.

But bloggers do not face this roadblock. They can run their mouths forever and ever. There is no word or space limitation in the Blogosphere. But some bloggers have been hammered by fellow bloggers for their stupid blog posts and have subsequently and sadly developed severe blogophobia, or fear of blogs. --Angus Lind --Much ado about nothing: Web logs are everywhere and full of nothing  (Times-Picayune)

A member of the writing establishment, whose position in the world of print is threatened by the expansion of blogging, misses an important point about blogging. What Lind smirkingly calls "blogophobia" is the subsitute for the editors and gate-keepers, the absence of which he laments in the blogosphere. Thus, it's not just that anyone with a web page can be a writer, but anyone can also be an editor and critic. Some will be more informed than others, but it's not hard to read blogrolls to figure out who the most respected bloggers are in whatever niche that interests you.

While there are probably millions of teen angst blogs out there, and while few of them are probably good reads for an outside audience, nobody is forcing Lind or anyone else to read stuff that's boring. I have some sympathy for those who feel Google is swamped with commentary from crazed bloggers, but Google does offer a "News" search feature that restricts itself to news publications, and anyone who knows a tiny bit about searching can add "-blog -weblog" to a Google search.

I also think Lind does a disservice to his readers by presenting content from "The Dullest Blog in the World" in order to support his claim that blogs can be dull.

Via Doctor Daisy, who offers a rebuttal to Lind.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being had a remarkable success when it was published in English in 1984 (this autumn will see an anniversary edition from Faber). Here was an avowedly "postmodern" novel in which the author withheld so many of the things we expect from a work of fiction, such as rounded characters - "It would be senseless for the author to try to convince the reader that his characters once actually lived" - a tangible milieu, a well-paced plot, and in which there are extended passages of straightforward philosophical and political speculation, yet it became a worldwide bestseller, loved by the critics and the public alike. --John Banville reviews Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
--Light but sound  (Guardian)

I was a little disapointed that so few of my "American Literature, 1915-present" actually read the last novel on the syllabus, William Gibson's Pattern Recognition. Many said they just simply couldn't get into it -- at least not while spring weather competed for their attention. I don't remember what time of year I read The Unbearable Lightness of Being as an undergraduate, but I do remember being resistant to its message when I first read it. I must have skipped one of the classes we spent on it, because when I read the ending shortly before the final exam, I recall being surprised and impressed.

I'm sure this book is one of the boxes I still haven't unpacked from my latest move.

It's not one of my favorite books, but maybe I'll at least re-read a few of my favorite passages -- as a kind of antidote to the "You'll forget everything you learned here, go back to your room and smoke a joint" rhetoric of the commencement speech Stan Sheetz just gave here at SHU.