July 2004 Archive Page

"We have to turn back some of the creeping, un-Pennsylvanian and sometimes un-American traits that are coming into some of our politics," she said. Morning television shows broadcast the remarks.

When a reporter from a conservative Pennsylvania newspaper, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, pressed Heinz Kerry what she had meant by "un-American" she said repeatedly, "No, I didn't say that, I didn't say that."

She then turned away only to return moments later. "You said something I didn't say, now shove it," she said, pointing her finger at the reporter. --Kerry Defends Wife's 'Shove It' Comment (The Pittsburg Channel | AP)

I don't usually cover politics except to comment on something related to journalism or rhetoric.

I've noticed that some of the coverage of this story identifies journalist Colin McNickle simply as a reporter, when in fact he is the editorial page editor at the Trib-Review. He's covering the convention as a columnist, not a news reporter. While a columnist isn't expected to fair to all sides of an issue, one does expect all journalists to get their facts straight. In the video, McNickle seems to be calmly reading from his notes, which would suggest he is double-checking before running with the story.

Some reports don't have McNickle asking Heinz Kerry about what she meant by "un-American activities" -- his question is quoted or paraphrased without the word "activities" included. But it's aparently his use of the word "activities" -- and its association with McCarthyism -- that sets Heinz Kerry off. But she also denies having said "un-American," which the tape clearly shows she said.

Still on my vacation blog pause, but I managed to get a few minutes online.

Vacation Blog Pause (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I'll be on a little family vacation until August 1. My access to the Internet will be sporadic at best.

Feel free to chat among yourselves while I am away. And enjoy the postings from "buup114" and the other spam that will doubtless collect in my absence.

It's not just the dainty pressing of keys we're talking about, and none of those pansy wrist pads are involved. We're talking real, blood-circulating, bone-strengthening snapping on the machine. We're talking about the sweep and thump of the carriage after each line, the bing of the bell adding a little music. We're talking exercise not just for the fingers and hands, but for the heart and mind. Simply put, I type to stay physically fit and to maintain a healthy lifestyle.

I use typewriters because I like their names. Don't throw your high-tech Millennium terminology at me, like Microsoft (something very small, and very soft?), Multiscan 1705, SyQuest, Aip drives, Ram Doubler 2000 or Trinitron 300 ES (a bad sci-fi movie?). Give me the old names, those regal, elegant names that are fun to pronounce and have small, manageable numbers: Remington 2, Royal De Luxe 5, Penncrest Caravelle 10, Smith-Corona Classic 12. --Bill Meissner --Tribute to the Typewriter (The Classic Typewriter)

Traditional Methods are Tools, Too (PILOT Reflections)

One often hears that computers and other online instruction methods are only tools, and that they should complement, rather than replace, traditional methods of instruction. But aren't traditional instructional approaches also tools?

I just finished a week of teaching a Vacation Bible School, and I absolutely love sitting on the floor with first-graders who are raising their hands and almost red in the face, pleading to be called on. It's hard to imagine what can beat that traditional interaction!

Still, today's young people -- who use e-mails, instant messages, and phone text messages to maintain, instigate, and sometimes curtail personal relationships -- may not think of e-mail as the cold impersonal thing that it appears to be when it's something you only use for work.

Teaching the Gifted Student (PILOT Reflections)

I was a little surprised to find "gifted students" on the list of subjects to discuss in an accessibility and inclusion workshop.

On the one hand, gifted students are a joy. They do the readings. They participate in class. They ask thoughtful questions.

On the other hand, gifted students can be a burden. They can monopolize class discussions. They might expect that simply being bright ought to be enough to earn them an A. They might send you multiple e-mails arguing over the half point they missed on a quiz. They demand that you justify the A- they got on a reflection paper, and insist that you list all the things they did "wrong". They never had to work this hard in high school, so you're obviously out to get them. Heaven help you if you should have to give them a B!

Gifted students aren't necessarily more mature than their peers. Sometimes high-achieving students hold scholarships that require them to keep extremely high GPAs, so it's not fair to dismiss hyper-awareness of grades as if it were motivated by pride and pettiness. It's very likely that they really do have a lot of additional pressure, beyond a desire for perfectionism or a competitive streak, to maintain the high grades they see as a sign of success.

One of the first classes I took in my Ph.D program was on the history of the English language. I knew I was learning a lot, so I was shocked when I found myself getting grades like 83 and 85. I made an appointment with the professor, and while I hope I didn't come off as belligerent or rude, I was eager to know what I was doing wrong. Little did I know that in the marking scheme at the University of Toronto, a grade from 80-89 is considered an "A", and 90-100 is an A+.

I sure felt like a grade-grubbing dweeb.

In school, I know I hated being put into groups with deadbeats who didn't carry their weight. Gifted students need additional challenges, but I think they rightly object to doing additional work simply because they are gifted. In a composition or literature class, I don't think I need to provide extra assignments to challenge gifted students. Writing is never finished the way a mathematical equation is solved or a list of anatomical terms is memorized.

While grade compression has diluted the meaning of an "A" from "top-notch, outstanding work" to "You didn't make any significant mistakes", for short assignments and exercise, I will single out the exceptional work of gifted students, to let them know I am paying attention. I grade most exercises on a four-point scale, and tell students that a 4 counts as an A, but I return their grades on slips of paper that include numbers from zero to five. It is possible to get a grade higher than a 4, but I give out 4.5s and 4s only very rarely. A few students will end up with quiz averages higher than a 4.0, but if they do, they've worked for it, and their other work is probably top-notch, too.

In the spring semester I changed the way I enforced late penalties for papers. If a student hands me a completed, properly-formatted and stapled paper at the beginning of the class period, I add a "decorum bonus" of 1/3 of a letter grade. If the paper is crumpled, unstapled, or unpaginated; if the student bursts into class 10 minutes late, with the pages still warm from the printer; if I find the paper slipped under my door a few hours after class, then the student loses the 1/3 decorum bonus.

It's kind of like doubling the price of your wall-to-wall carpet one week so that you can advertise a 50% price cut the next week, but this method permits me to grade a little more realistically. A student who is used to a 4.0 average might make some mistakes in an otherwise good paper. I can give it an A-, knowing that the true perfectionist will have turned it on time and in the proper format, and thus the grade will be bumped to an A. I don't appear to be an overly harsh grader, and the student who feels the world owes him or her a 4.0 doesn't burst into tears, yet the A- reinforces the message that the student could be doing better work.

After I've marked the first few freshman composition papers, it's usually pretty clear who the gifted writers are. Last year, when my Seminar in Thinking and Writing class had settled into a pattern that involved the five or six most active students doing all the talking while the rest listened, I told the core group of active participants that they had already distinguished themselves as active students who would probably get great class participation grades, and pointed out that if they keep raising their hands or talking among themselves, the whole class will stagnate.

I tell students who have already distinguished themselves as active participants that I will henceforth evaluate them on their ability to get the other students in the class to participate. That strategy has worked to a point, but whenever the gifted student gets excited about something, the old pattern returns. When my dean visited my classroom last term, she approvingly noted the teacher-student dynamic, but indicated that she would like to see more peer-to-peer interaction. My colleague Terry Brino-Dean asks students to fill out a self-assessment form every few weeks, which gets the students to focus on their efforts to foster classroom discussion.

My "Writing for the Internet" course has to accommodate students who are experienced bloggers and HTML authors, as well as students who can barely e-mail. While a student who is experienced with HTML is not necessarily gifted, and while a student who is not comfortable with technology may still be gifted, the diversity of opinion makes me realize I'll have to add more self-paced modules.

My last batch of student evaluations included complaints from students who thought the course moved too fast, as well as students who thought the course moved too slowly. I've asked a student who has already taken the course to serve as a mentor, which should help me give more specialized attention during labs.

In addition, I can ask the students who already know the material to help me teach it to those who don't. They'll have to cultivate a significant sense of ownership over the material if they are responsible for their peers's learning. (Of course, I'll help the student prepare, and I'll be ready to step in if the student stumbles.)

Teaching Students with Psychiatric Disabilities (PILOT Reflections)

When I was a grad student teaching a freshman writing class, a student wearing a leather jacket and miniskirt put her fishnet-stocking-clad leg up on the table and blew spit bubbles through her front teeth, popping them with her finger while talking to me about her assignment.

Maybe that was some sort of sorority initiation, but I still have nightmares about it. Another time, again while I was a grad student, on the final day of a class that I found very enjoyable, just when a small group of about four or five students were lining up to say good-bye to me, a student who had missed six of the last seven classes started screaming in my face because I wouldn't accept a paper that was four weeks late.

Student (holding hand knee-high): "I have a son!"

Jerz (cautiously): "Congratulations?"

Student: "It doesn't matter whether I have a son or not!"

Due to advances in medicine and a shift in attitudes towards institutionalization, more people with psychiatric disorders are attending college. I have had students walk out of the room when it was their turn to give an oral presentation and attack me verbally during class for my alleged slowness in solving the individual student's advising problem (something that had no relation to what the other 24 people in the room needed to hear).

Sometimes a student will gripe, or slam a fist on the desk, or stop out of the room. While it's never pleasant to be on the receiving end of such misbehavior, most students in the class can recognize when their peers step out of line. All I have to do is remind myself that this is crunch week, and I'm much less likely to take such crabbiness personally.

I don't mean to suggest that all students are psychotic and all instructors are helpless victims. Instructors do sometimes use their position of power in unethical or at least morally questionable ways. But in this post I'm reflecting on my own experience with students who seem mentally unbalanced.

I twice taught a student with a severe speech disfluency (the latest, or perhaps simply more accurate, term for what I would have otherwise called a "speech impediment), once in a lit class and once in an advanced tech writing class. The student was mostly fine speaking one-on-one, and often spoke up in class. I once asked her (in private) if she found herself stuck in a stutter, and I thought I knew what word she was trying to say, should I say it for her? She said no, just let her work her way through it. In the lit class, she was supposed to give a five-minute oral presentation. She asked whether she could use a computer to present something instead. I said yes. I imagined she would have handouts with activities for small groups, tied together with a slide show presenting the major themes, and then at the end of her oral presentation sum up what happened. Instead, she clicked through a small number of slides, then sat down.

It was really my fault. I completely misunderstood the nature of her speech disfluency.

Although she wasn't actually talking during her presentation, she was still nervous, and thus she couldn't manage a computer-based classroom activity, which is even more psychologically demanding than reading from a script. The next time she had to give an oral presentation, we spent more time planning an acceptable alternative.

When a student asks me to make an accommodation, I don't mind being a little flexible. I see nothing wrong with permitting an alternative format or giving extra assistance, as long as the student gives me reasonable lead time. But when it comes to excusing students from the consequences of late papers and bombed assignments, I have to be on guard. I don't want to reward a bright smooth-talker who has coasted on a talent for charming him or herself out of hard work. At the same time, I don't want to put up a barrier to block a student who finds it difficult to ask for help.

If the student claims to be in a crisis, I always respond as if I believe the student 100%, even if I secretly have doubts. I let the student know that whatever caused them to miss the deadline on that paper that was worth 20% of their final grade has got to be serious. Their first priority is to take care of that problem. Since I'm eager to accommodate students with legitimate excuses, the grade they get in my class should be the least of their worries.

A student who is really in a crisis will usually be relieved when I tell them that, once the current crisis is over, they can contact the dean or a university counselor, who can contact me so that the three of us can figure out what steps to take.

If the student continues to press me for specifics ("Can I reschedule the oral presentation I missed two weeks ago?"), then I'm generally less convinced the student is really in a crisis. A student who knows he or she has no good reason for requesting help will probably give up at this point. But a student with very low self-esteem, who blames him or herself unnecessarily, might also give up.

I do remind students that the university wants to keep taking their tuition money, so it's in our best interest to offer all sorts of services to keep students in school. If staying healthy means dropping a class or taking an incomplete, then so be it. If the student says he or she would rather not get anyone from the university involved, I point out that their problem (whatever it is) has already affected their grade in my class, and they're asking me to be involved by adjusting their workload somehow. When a problem starts affecting your education, that's a pretty good indicator that you're not handling it on your own.

When the student expresses reluctance to get the university involved, I point out that by missing work and coming to me to ask for an exception, they have already asked the university to become involved.

Since I'm not a trained therapist or counselor, and can't diagnose or treat their problems, I want assurance that the student is talking to somebody with the necessary knowledge.

It occurs to me that I don't want the dean to perceive me as passing the buck to her in order to avoid making a judgment call. Perhaps I should leave the dean out of it until I really need her input. I should ask the student to consult with an academic services counselor before approaching the dean.

Dyslexia in Freshman Composition Courses (PILOT Reflections)

While Seton Hill does offer an Honors section of "Seminar in Thinking and Writing" (the two-semester freshman comp and "welcome to college life" course), its other students of various abilities are mainstreamed. Students take a test during orientation, and may be placed in a one-credit lab course or a three-credit developmental course, either of which they take along with the regular STW course.

I've taught technical writing to students who were very shaky in their knowledge of English, so I do have some experience recognizing ESL issues. That means I am able to help work with students on their higher-level thinking processes, even though the drafts they give me may have small word-level errors.

But a student with dyslexia in a freshman composition course faces a difficult challenge. We can provide the student with a peer note-taker, we can audiotape lectures and discussions, and the writing center can offer one-to-one tutoring. But plenty students whose education is affected by dyslexia don't identify themselves as dyslexic, and thus don't seek out help.

A few years ago, I had a pair of exchange students in a literature class. Both participated ardently in classroom discussions, but one crashed and burned with every writing assignment. She was in tears in my office, when I noted that I am not an expert at diagnosing LD, but that I noticed what looked like coping mechanisms -- a fluency at talking through her ideas, a reluctance to draft and revise, a reluctance to stick to an outline, a resistance to structure. She wanted to think of herself as a free spirit who thrives on adrenaline and inspiration, rather than someone who has serious difficulty concentrating and planning. Since she didn't identify herself as LD, I told her that my hands were pretty much tied -- I couldn't excuse her from the work or change the criteria I used to judge her.

A few months after the class ended, I got an e-mail saying that when she was back in her home country, she did in fact get tested, and was diagnosed with dyslexia. A counselor showed her a whole new bag of coping mechanisms that were making school much easier for her.

It was one of those e-mails that you save in your "Why I Became a Teacher" file, to consult whenever you feel your enthusiasm flagging.

On the other hand, one student who relied upon an in-class note-taker started skipping way too many classes. I got a note from his academic tutor, informing me that he was having difficulty following my verbal instructions, and asking me to type them all out. This was during a period in class when we were going over student writing samples that I hadn't seen before, so there was no script that I could write out in advance. I wrote back, asking the tutor whether the student had discussed his attendance record, and suggested that the reason he was having difficulty following my oral instructions was because more than half the time, he wasn't in class to hear them. Once the tutor heard my side of it, she backed me up.

Asking the student to come to a one-on-one conference, and then sending a tape of that conference to a developmental tutor would not only help the student, but would also be an opportunity for the developmental tutor to advise me.

In SHU's "Seminar in Thinking and Writing," in-class discussion, the time- and stress-management lessons that students learn the hard way, and the bonding that occurs in extracurricular activities mean that even a student who is not demonstrating good progress in writing assignments may be gaining something from the class, and may be contributing significantly to the class culture. While students may be surprised by the extent to which college writing differs from the high school writing that earned them As, SHU offers many resources to students who are struggling.

I don't consider myself a gate-keeper, whose job is to flunk those students who aren't worthy of a college education. Still, the high-functioning students with learning disabilities that did not seriously affect their success in high school need to be encouraged to take advantage of the full range of resources that the university makes available to them.

Varying Instructional Methods (PILOT Reflections)

I wonder if I'd do a better job varying my instructional techniques if every college classroom came equipped with a first-grader to act as an early-warning system, ready to flop over on the carpet and moan at the first sign of boredom.

I love writing workshop days because there's usually little prep to do. On the rare occasion when I prepare a formal lecture, I do tend to take up the whole period (and sometimes more). After spending a week teaching first-graders in a Vacation Bible School, I learned very quickly the value of varying one's instructional approach.

Instead of a day-long writing workshop on Monday and a day-long lecture on Wednesday, split each day in half. That would also accommodating students who can't type or sit for extended periods.

Missing Class (PILOT Reflections)

Preface: Did I Miss Anything, a short poem by Tom Wayans.

Amusing: A FAQ page that I put up is the top Google hit for "missed class".

Students sometimes miss class for extended periods due to illness.

I once had a student who was a group leader in a technical writing class. She passed out assignments to her team members, then didn't show up for six weeks. This student was in regular contact with me, but her group members had little reason to believe that she would actually come back. I think I can understand why they wouldn't feel particularly motivated to work on their group project.

Whenever a student mentions a health problem, or a problem with a family member's health, even before I ask for documentation, I typically tell the student that their grade in my class should be the least of their worries. I don't mind making exceptions for students who miss class for reasons beyond their control.

Obviously, asking a dependable student to take notes, encouraging the student to keep up with the readings as much as possible, and inviting the student to participate in online activities as much as possible is a way to keep the student from dropping completely out of the classroom community. And since I design the in-class activities to reinforce the concepts that will become even more important in final projects and term papers, missing even a "fun" class can affect a student's grade later on.

Mobility as a Learning Needs Issue (PILOT Reflections)

My father has a neck injury that acts up whenever he is immobile for a long period of time. Concentrating or racing the clock aggravates his injury. Getting to sleep can also be a problem.

He has experimented with different seating postures, but what seemed to work best was if he happened to drop off to sleep in the middle of the day in front of the couch, don't wake him up -- it might be the best sleep he would get that day. His desk job with the U.S. Government was seriously impacting his health, although he could split wood with an axe and work like an ox outdoors.

If I knew a student had a similar mobility issue, I would try to schedule several different activities during a class period, letting the students know the general timeframe (so that a student who was feeling discomfort would know when the next change of pace is due). My students seem to welcome "circle games" and other activities that get them out of their seats, though I'm also aware that students who haven't done the readings welcome any change of focus, so I ration these games so that I'm not doing more than one in any given week of classes.

Circle games work well for classes that involve a lot of discussion, but classes that involve a lot of computer work would be a little harder to accommodate. Establishing small breakout groups, where students can pace, sit on chairs, sprawl across tables, or even use a cluster of couches in a lounge area would help.

If a student has mobility problems that prevent him or her from typing, then tape-recording lectures and using a human note-taker can help with the intake. Output, particularly in a timed classroom exercise, would be another issue. My own handwriting is atrocious, and in the academic crunch times, my carpal tunnel syndrome acts up. My previous department chair had a budget line for technology to prevent repetitive strain injury and other occupational injuries, so he sprang for Dragan Naturally Speaking, a voice-to-speech software package.

I seeded it with my dissertation, a few other academic articles, and the contents of my "sent" e-mail folder, so that it would have a good sense of my vocabulary. My personalized copy knows to capitalize words like Miller and Rice, since I'm less likely to talk about agriculture than about American playwrights. I rather enjoyed leaning back like Commander Adama dictating his log on Battlestar Galactica -- my words appearing as if by magic on the screen.

Getting thoughts down on the page is relatively easy, but using only voice commands to format and edit can be tricky. Navigating the web by voice is also a pain. The "fun" factor wore off quickly, and I felt like I wasn't "breaking even" until I was using the software for more than a month.

Editing the text once it's on the page can be very tedious -- I would generally switch back to the mouse and keyboard, but that's not an option not available to students with significant mobility impairment. It would make a tremendous difference to let the student know which assignments should be formatted and punctuated properly, and which can be just tossed off without any editing beyond what is necessary for clarity.

Asking that the student use voice-to-speech software is only part of the solution -- we can't have one student dictating her answers into a laptop while everyone else in the room works quietly.

Depending on the degree of mobility impairment, perhaps the student could use a trackball or other pointing device to complete an online quiz. If the purpose of the quiz is simply to make sure the students are doing the readings, I would probably try to rely more on multiple-choice and fill-in-the blank. For the essay questions, perhaps we could just converse in quiet tones while the rest of the students are writing.

Accessing a Map of the United States for a Visually Impaired Student (no answers -- just musings) (PILOT Reflections)

If I wanted to use a map of the United States in a class that includes a visually disabled student, what would I do? For a low-tech solution, I'm sure there are Braille maps, or 3-D maps that show terrain and so forth.

In "Cathedrals," a much-anthologized short story, a rather cynical sighted man who learns about the power and beauty of cathedrals while trying to describe them to a blind man. While the story employs the stereotype of a blind person as having the unique ability to "see" what the sighted characters cannot, it's an excellent metaphor for examining writing, teaching, art, architecture, and humanity in general. At the climax, the sighted man and the blind man draw cathedrals together -- that might be a way to help the student conceptualize the boundaries of the map.

I recall playing a computer game in the early 90s that let you terraform a planet. There was a lot of information to track. You could trigger what I think the interface called a "song," that would play a note to indicate the average temperature (or population density or water depth or whatever) in each horizontal band, from the north pole down to the south pole. If you left that "song" playing in the background while you tended to other matters, a sharp change in the "song" meant something was happening on a global scale.

I imagine that if I found a web page that has a good clickable image map, with alt text tags that can be fed to a screen reader, I'd be in good shape. I might download that map and personalize it with my own data.

I don't rely on maps to teach English, but I have used maps as part of a lesson in visual rhetoric. For instance, one an get a false sense of the geographic landscape of the United States through maps that show huge swaths of sparsely-populated counties voting Republican, while heavily populated areas that take up only a pinprick of space on a map vote for Democrats. (See this analysis of the Schwarzenegger vs. Bustamente contest for governor of California.)

How would one transmit that to a visually impaired person?

If it's not practical to make a physical model, one alternative would be to use sound. When the user mouses over a region, a different sound could play. Maybe the sound of a braying donkey for the Democrats, a trumpeting elephant for the Republicans. The volume or number of animals could vary to indicate relative differences. This would take some technical doing, of course.

A much more sophisticated version of the same thing is the subject of a Microsoft research project at the University of North Carolina called the Blind Audio Tactile Mapping System (BATS, though that acronym should be BATMS, shouldn't it?) I wasn't able to find a quotable prose description of the project, but I gather that it uses 3D surround speakers and "iconic sounds" such as the chirping of birds to represent a forest. If there is a forest west of the user's simulated position, the sound of birds might come from the left speaker. The volume of the iconic sound would represent distance, and perhaps the number of different birds would indicate the size of the forest. You'd be able to tell you are in the middle of a forest if there are bird songs playing all around you.

Something that is within my technical capabilities would be a textual version of the same thing. Imagine a text adventure game like this...

You are in the state of Virginia, where the lush rolling hills and soaring oaks dig their roots into the soft clay. To the northwest, hills rise to form the Blue Ridge Mountains. The land flattens out to the east, as it falls towards the Atlantic Ocean. In the northeast, the climate gets a little muggy and smoggy near Washington, D.C. (on the other side of the Potomac River).

Route I-95 leads north, through the District of Columbia and on to Maryland, and south to North Carolina.

>go ne

Northern Virginia

You are in northeast Virginia, a tangle of commuter highways and parking lots.

A mural that is part of the scenery in Emily Short's text adventure game "Metamorphoses" offers an excellent study in the granularity of textual representations of space. I recently played through Andrew Plotkins' "Shade" for the first time too -- it's a game set in one room, but the room has three distinct areas: a central living room, a bathroom alcove and a kitchen alcove. Depending on what object you interact with, the textual description differs, emphasizing those objects that are near other objects you have recently interacted with.

Hmm... something like that could be really interesting. There is a community of visually impaired computer gamers who play text adventure games (among others). I wonder if a class project like this would be a good way to introduce my students to interactive writing. One more thing for me to investigate, if only I had world enough and time.

I couldn't simply slap something like this together if I learn that a visually impaired student has just added into my class. Realistically, I'd probably check with a librarian to see whether we have (or can get) a tactile map.

After spending a bit of time on Google, I can see that Canada seems to be putting some resources into making maps accessible to the visually impaired. I might ask a few people I used to know at the University of Toronto whether they can point me to a website with online maps that might be useful for visually impaired users with screen readers.

Since my first instinct is always to go for the high-tech solution, I'll force myself to consider a low-tech alternative.

While I personally am not very into hands-on crafts, the presence in the class of a student with visual impairment would be an excellent motivator for having the class build a tactile representation of the information in question. Assuming that I wanted to present a map showing the rural nature of Republican political strongholds and the urban nature of the Democrat strongholds, we might photocopy an ordinary flat map onto several large sheets of paper. I'd ask the students in the class who identify themselves as Democrats to come up with an iconic tactile sensation (soft fuzzy fake fur? would that offend animal-rights activists) and likewise the Republicans (maybe fur would better represent the hunters' rights activists). Glue strips of this material on the map. Perhaps the more populous states could be built up with cardboard cutouts.

All these activities would be perfectly appropriate to a course in media studies. I can imagine that a student studying Faulkner, or Tolkien, or James Joyce would benefit from peer-manufactured tactile maps... such an activity would be great for the day students turn in a major paper, since most will have stayed up all night working on it and would appreciate a change of pace. If we're running low on creativity, I could at least ask a work-study student to glue yarn onto the contours of a basic line map, and use pushpins and other physical objects as icons to represent various features.

Including the Student with Moderate Hearing Impariment (PILOT Reflections)

I know a smidgen of sign language. I once rode a bus from Virginia to Texas, and happened to sit next to a hearing-impaired young woman. (Hmm... I was young at the time, too.) I learned to sign the alphabet when I was in third grade, and she could read lips, so we had a good starting point. I learned the basic concept of ASL very quickly, so much that sometimes when I didn't know the right word, I would guess, and either I guessed right, or I was close enough to understand. The sign for "forget" is sort of wiping a thought away from your forehead and throwing it away, so it makes sense that the sign for "remember" is grabbing a thought and putting it into your forehead.

My two-year-old daughter likes repeating the sign language gestures done by Maggie Stewart, the actress who plays Mayor Maggie on Mr Rogers' Neighborhood. (When Ms. Stewart and some of the other cast of the show were recently at a local theme park, Ms. Stewart sort of clicked out of auto-pilot, put down her autograph pen and spent some time signing back and forth with my daughter. The fact that my daughter toddled up to her and, in sign language, called her "beautiful" and "wonderful" probably helped get her attention!)

But there is no way that I could learn enough ASL to translate my lectures if I learned a few days before class started that a hearing-impaired student had signed up for one of my classes.

Using blogs as a way of discussing class material will help level the playing field, so to speak, but I'm going to work against my tendency to see blogs as the solution to every instructional problem.

While I depend upon the classroom bonding that takes place during informal class discussion, that bonding can take place through more physical and visual activities.

I've picked up some other tips that seem pretty obvious, but which I might not think of in the middle of a class:

• Show DVDs with the titles turned on.
• Don't turn your back to the class (to write on the board, for example).
• Speak slowly (that will be a problem with me!)

I already often send follow-up e-mails after introducing new material. Perhaps the hearing-impaired person would benefit from being able to read this material first, so that the classroom experience is less fatiguing.

At my previous job, a student did a senior project on the humor of hearing-impaired persons. An example she gave was that after Clinton's sexual history began to affect his presidency, the sign for "Clinton" changed in the deaf community, taking on some of the elements of the sign for "slippery" or "slick" (or maybe it was "waffle", I don't remember -- something else mildly critical). And I'm also familiar with the play/movie "Children of a Lesser God," which operates from the premise that sign language is a beautiful culture in its own right, one that risks being destroyed if the world at large forces the hearing impaired to adapt to the culture of the hearing world.

I'd be careful not to expect the hearing impaired person to give "the deaf side of things", just as I wouldn't single out the lone non-white student or the lone male student to give a minority report. Still, if I were teaching a literature or media class, I would try to include "Children of a Lesser God" along with, say, "The Miracle Worker" (the story of Helen Keller).

Depending on the future educational and career goals of the hearing-impaired student, I would consider how strictly I would ask him or her to conform to standard written English. I'd probably be lenient in a literature or media production course, but I'd have to educate myself on the syntax of signed English, which, when translated into written English, can be structurally very different. Asking this student to participate in informal typed conversations, via e-mail or via blogs, may help the hearing impaired student recognize the differences between standard written English and transcribed signed English.

If the student has moderate hearing impairment, and can understand conversational speech but may miss offhand comments made by students in the back of the room, then I might restructure classroom discussion so that it is more ordered. Students speaking into a microphone may begin with prepared statements, and then a panel will give their responses. Students could then break up into small groups, so that everyone gets the chance to participate in a freer discussion, but the hearing-impaired student doesn't have to strain to listen to comments lobbed from the back of the room. Students might be asked to write up a conclusion from their breakout sessions, and post it to a central location.

Actually, now that I think about it, if the students who start with formal statements were required to submit them in advance for a grade, so that they could be reviewed in advance by the hearing-impaired student, that strategy would also help students who feel uncomfortable speaking in class, who have difficulty taking notes, who regularly miss class due to extracurricular or health obligations, etc. (That may be a good example of Universal Design.)

Universal Design in Education (PILOT Reflections)

At the local Shop 'n Save grocery store, after you swipe your credit card through the slot, the green LED's light up with the message, "$9.95. Is this OK?"

But there's no "OK" button on the credit card machine.

There is, however, a well-worn arrow, scrawled in black ink from a felt-tipped pen, next to the "Yes" button.

The word "yes" does make sense as an answer to the question "Is this OK?" but obviously, many people who are asked whether something is "OK" instinctively look for the "OK" button. One checkout clerk can sense when the customer is confused -- she asks, "Is that OK?" and when you nod or say OK, she reaches around and, with an expert sense of direction, pushes the proper button that completes the sale.

While the customer is only inconvenienced for a second, when you consider how many customers the average checkout clerk sees in a day, and how many clerks there are in all the stores that use this particular machine, it's amazing how much time is wasted because the designer of the credit card machine made a bad decision.

Taking a traditional course and adding a few accessible online components to it is kind of like taking a black ink marker and scrawling an error on a poorly-designed credit card machine.

My students sometimes approach revising their papers the same way. Once I noted that a passage was “redundant,” and the student’s revision was to insert the word “redundant”, completely out of context, right where I had marked it. Other students will respond to my marginal questions, again, putting their response into the paragraph exactly where I asked the question.

To use yet another metaphor, if we stick an internal combustion engine on a horse, we don’t end up with a car – we end up with a horse that doesn’t perform as well as other horses, and a would-be car that doesn’t come close to performing like cars.

In education, Universal Design calls attention to the fact that instead of figuring out how to touch up the lessons that we’ve been using all along, in order to make them work for students with varying learning needs, it makes sense to go back to the drawing board, and re-visit the whole matter, planning the whole course so that students of all levels can benefit from it. That's a tall order. In the past, students with special learning needs simply didn't have access to college, because their potential wasn't recognized earlier on. I'm not an expert on the history of education, but mainstreaming special-needs students has significantly altered the culture of the classroom. I have been impressed by the respect my students showed to students with severe reading issues, or speaking issues, or other challenges. I'd like to build on that goodwill, and make the educational experience better for all students.

Since "Seminar in Thinking and Writing" is a shared course, I don't have the freedom to tear it apart and build it up again, but I can rethink my educational strategy. I used to teach freshman comp as a computer-intensive course. Three out of five instructional hours were spent in a computer lab. Last year, my classroom didn't have Internet access, so I taught it as a traditional class -- in part because I didn't want to become dependent upon technology.

Revising Seminar in Thinking and Writing (with an eye on inclusion) (PILOT Reflections)

In my first year teaching at SHU, I found the wide range of students I encountered to be eye-opening. My Seminar for Thinking and Writing class included top-notch students who showed up already knowing how to do college-level research, and it also included students whose fear of public speaking or whose dyslexia caused significant challenges.

Since Seminar in Thinking and Writing is a year-long course that also serves as sort of first-year-experience "homeroom" class, I think it makes good sense to have a wide range of students in the class. SHU also offers a one-credit lab and a three-credit developmental course that goes along with STW, for those students who need extra help. If I work more closely with the other resources on campus that are available to students, I think I can make STW a better experience for students with additional learning needs.

In my previous STW course, only one student was identified in advance as needing special accommodation; and a volunteer from the class took notes for another student who has difficulty following oral instructions. But issues with time management, fear of public speaking, and the pressure of timed assignments also surfaced. In a slightly different but not unrelated category are those students who missed far too many classes due to athletic commitments.

I was glad to see that the course asked us to look at the example of a student-athlete with far too many commitments. It’s refreshing to be reminded that I’m not the only instructor who feels frustrated about how difficult it is to teach students who miss class. A student who misses class misses out on the discussions, informal interaction, and bonding that takes place in the classroom. That student also misses the opportunity for Q & A, and timeliness is a factor, too – a question that I would love for a student to ask two weeks before an assignment is due may be a burden for me to answer (and impossible for the student to absorb) the night before the assignment is due.

Sometimes I feel like a broken record, reminding students how important it is to manage one’s time. But I’m the pot calling the kettle black – I often chat far too long with students during my office hours, and then rush through a stack of papers to return them in time. There are some necessary activities that are not fun, and there are some fun activities that are not necessary.

One major adjustment I will make is to rely less on the oral delivery of instructions. However, when I shift to written prose descriptions, I tend to get too verbose. I have a large collection of online instructional handouts, and any time I find myself explaining anything in words, part of my brain starts wondering, "How can I make this chunk of text do double-duty as part of an online handout (or weblog entry)?" Invariably, I add too many hyperlinks to related concepts, which frustrates the student who simply wants to know what I want for this particular assignment.

Promoting Instruction and Learning Opportunities with Technology (PILOT) project (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I’m taking training in acessibility via Seton Hill’s Promoting Instruction and Learning Opportunities with Technology (PILOT) project. I’ll be blogging some of my thoughts on the "inclusion" unit of this online course.

• Revising Seminar in Thinking and Writing (with an eye on inclusion)
• Universal Design in Education
• Including the Hearing Impaired Student
• Seeking a Map of the United States for the Visually Disabled: A Remediation Thought Exercise
• Mobility as a Learning Needs Issue
• Health Issues: Students Missing Class, or Restricted from Writing or Sitting
• Varying Instructional Methods
• Dyslexia in "Seminar in Thinking and Writing"
• Teaching the Student with Psychatric Disability
• Accessibility and Gifted Students
• Traditional Methods are Tools, Too

This site is about TV Licensing? (the "television licensing authority") . . .

. . . and how they treat those who do not have television.

I have not had a television for many years. One would think that would be an end to it, but it isn't. One cannot simply refuse this entertainment service, without appearing to be dishonest in the eyes of TV Licensing? (a.k.a. the Television Licensing Authority or TVLA). The non-viewer does not fit into their framework. To TV Licensing? there are licence-payers and licence-dodgers and the non-viewer (with whom they really have no business) is treated as a suspect licence-dodger. Whether there should be a licence-fee at all (or the present organisation to collect it) is a new and interesting topic; however, this site is primarily concerned with how the mechanism of BBC funding unfairly affects those who do NOT have television.
--How the British television licensing system unfairly affects those who do NOT have TV (Marmalade.net)

In the UK, an impressive public broadcasting system (the BBC) is funded by expensive licences extracted from TV owners. But not everyone watches TV.

Suggested by "Non-viewer in the UK" in a comment posted to "The Disgrace of the BBC."

Academy Award-winning composer Jerry Goldsmith, who created the memorable music for scores of classic movies and television shows ranging from the "Star Trek" and "Planet of the Apes" series to "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." and "Dr. Kildare," has died. He was 75. --Oscar-winning composer Goldsmith dies (CNN/AP)

Queen Victoria, Abraham Lincoln, Florence Nightingale and other characters from history may soon be able to speak again, as scientists perfect techniques to recover the sound from recordings that are far too delicate to be played. --Maggie Shiels --Getting back into the groove (BBC)

Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.

Today STAR TREK spans six television series, ten feature films and several interactive CD-ROMs. In addition, the STAR TREK afficionado had hundreds of novels to choose from with dozens more being published each year. It was not always thus. Those of us who were loving STAR TREK in the late 1960's and into he early 1980's remember a time when STAR TREK was not so abundant. In the years between 1969 and 1981, we had only the animated series (22 half hour episodes), reruns of the original series, one movie and a handful of novels. In those 12 years there was published only 15 original novels and two collections of short stories. This was before Pocket Books gained the rights to publish STAR TREK books. --Guide to the Early Star Trek Novels

I am such a geek. There are only two or three of the original Star Trek episodes that I remember seeing for the first time -- I grew up with them being shown five days a week in prime after-school viewing hours. (This was back in the days before VCRs and cable TV, when if you lived near a major city you got the three major networks, PBS, and maybe an independent station or two).

I read and re-read most of the early Star Trek novels on this list, in addition to the James Blish short story treatments of the TV episodes.

The first Star Trek novel produced was "Mission to Horatius," in 1968, while the original series was still running. One of our local libraries was selling the books it took out of circulation... my wife picked it up a 1999 facsimile for chump change.

My son asked me to read it to him for our next bedtime story. (We just finished "The Whipping Boy").

I'll be honest -- the characterizations are not nearly as detailed what I remember from the later novels (which I haven't read in about 15 or 20 years), and in places the story looks like a pastiche of favorite bits and pieces from TV shows, without any of the epic scope that a novel (free from the special effects budget limitations) can produce. Plus, the author spends far too much time explaining the technology of the Enterprise. We know what the bridge looks like, thank you, so you can dispense with the opening exposition that describes exactly who is sitting where.

The book was obviously written with children in mind, and as long Peter's enjoying himself, I'm happy.

The NEA’s recent “Reading at Risk” report, which concludes that there has been a 10% national decline in what it calls literary reading since 1982, with the drop-off even more precipitous among younger age groups, is surely of concern to anyone who cares about the future of literature and a literate populace. While the report suggests there are potentially a variety of factors responsible for this decline, it especially notes that we live in an era of pervasive electronic media.

We at the Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) share the NEA’s concerns, but we see the screen as well as the page as a natural venue for literature and imaginative writing. --Matt Kirschenbaum --Reading at Risk: A Response (MGK)

I added the hyperlinks for your convenience.

Those of us who love e-text can get carried away by our own hype, but reading and writing online is a subset of literacy, not its antithesis (as the NEA document seems to suggest).

More than 30 independent Web journalists have been accredited to cover the Democratic convention, and the Republicans said Friday they'll also credential so-called bloggers.

It's the first time bloggers will be joining the thousands of newspaper, magazine and broadcast journalists at the quadrennial presidential-nomination events. --Political conventions to welcome bloggers (CNN/AP)

A few people have mentioned this story to me... I think CNN's version won't disappear from the web in a few weeks.

Update: See Wired's too-cutely-headlined "Blogging against Convention".

The university also will create a Web site modeled on the Apple iTunes online music site from which students can download songs and course content from faculty, including language lessons, lectures and audio books.

Lisa Merschel's Spanish class will use the iPods to listen to textbook exercises and Spanish songs. Sally Schauman plans to have students record field interviews on the ethics and science of urban water conservation. --Duke to Provide Freshmen With IPods (AP|MyWay)

She resolved to end the love affair with Ramon tonight . . . summarily, like Martha Stewart ripping the sand vein out of a shrimp's tail . . . though the term "love affair" now struck her as a ridiculous euphemism . . . not unlike "sand vein," which is after all an intestine, not a vein . . . and that tarry substance inside certainly isn't sand . . . and that brought her back to Ramon. --Dave Zobel --Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest: 2004 Results  (Bulwer-Lytton.com)

Note... the website isn't announcing "winners". There's a reason...

“Games that treat religion realistically, weaving it into the game as it is woven into people’s lives, can provide a richer and more realistic simulation,” says Destination Games founder and Ultima creator Richard Garriott. “Spirituality lends the game world credibility and completeness. The search for meaning in life is universal, and a shallower life of conflict and treasure collecting will never match the strength of a game that includes ethical or spiritual underpinnings.”

While religion and spirituality add a lot to a game world, they often aren’t used effectively. “I don’t think there are any games that treat religion at anything more than a superficial level,” says Firaxis founder, and Civilization creator Sid Meier. While PopTop Software’s Phil Steinmeyer agrees, noting that “Religion is ignored in gaming, or if it is portrayed, it’s wildly caricatured.” --Andrew S. Bub --Game with God (Gamer Dad)

Messages such as "HTTP 404 - File not found", which appears when a web page is unavailable, and "invalid credit card number" on e-commerce sites, make people feel stupid when they have not done anything wrong. This scares them away from exploiting computers to their full potential, he says.

But Jonathan Klein, who builds robotic toys at iRobot in Sommerville, Massachusetts, warns that any apology will eventually cease to sound sincere if it is repeated too often. --Celeste Biever

--Polite computers win users' hearts and minds  (New Scientist)

Beware -- annoying popups.

She graduated a year ago with a major in English and a minor in information systems. Now she works as a cashier. She wore a red smock and a little plastic nametag with the word "Target" on the bottom.

Pampers, VeggieTales videos, Harry Potter paperbacks, and kitchen utensils designed by Michael Graves rolled by. My former student scanned and bagged the objects as if she was running on a treadmill. She recognized me, and I tried to return her nervous smile. We each asked how the other was doing and said "good." I swiped my card, and she gave me a receipt. There were bored people all around, and the whole conversation was understood in a few embarrassed glances.

"Good to see you," I said, leaving. "Yeah, you too, professor," she said, flatly. I saw her feigned cheerfulness droop a little as she turned to the next customer. --"Thomas H. Benton" --An Adviser Without Advice (Chronicle)

I've been very fortunate in the academic job crapshoot. All of us who advise undergraduates do so from the same position of privilege. I admire “Benton” for his frankness. I can permit myself to dismiss some of the observations made by outsiders, and thus wave it away with a nervous laugh. But this was written by an insider, which makes it more painful.

Last term, while talking with a professional outside academia, I came up with this forumua. I can prepare students to be competitive when it comes to getting an internship, and the internship can prepare the dedicated student for a job in the real world. While many of the students I teach are English education majors, who are in fact pegs being groomed to fit into a very specific hole, that grooming happens in their education classes, not in my English classes.

Since I advise the student paper, I am involved in training students for a particular trade, but many of the students who work on the paper aren't planning to be journalists -- they just like doing it. I tell my journalism majors, and high school students who are considering Seton Hill, that if they expect a piece of paper to get them a job after four years, they should consider a full-fledged journalism college, or something like education or nursing.

An article that Benton wrote a few years ago, "A Superhero's Perspective on the MLA Convention," has deeply affected the way I advise students who are considering (or in) grad school. When I first read it, I was on the job market, and things were actually going pretty well for me, but it kept me humble: "[T]his is a conditioned response from people who reacted to schoolyard taunts by winning the praise of teachers. But, as one advances and ages in the profession, there are fewer and fewer teachers to please."

A road trip with someone you've never met—more specifically, a road trip across a prison-clogged desert with an English professor you've never met—is a delicate thing, and we both want this to go well, because he's about to be my guide and interpreter for four days at the 119th Annual Modern Language Association Convention. Gideon Lewis-Kraus --In the Penthouse of the Ivory Tower (The Believer)

It's a tradition for reporters to attend and mock the MLA convention.

I find I enjoy the 4Cs (Conference on College Composition and Communication) to be much more enjoyble and practical, but that's only natural... college composition is a much more practical subject. My memories of going to the MLA are so closely connected to a harrowing job search. Further, the MLA convention is always between Christmas and New Year's, and since the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas are full of marking papers and dealing with stressed students, I'd rather spend that time with my family.

As mockworthy as the MLA is, any organization develops its own jargon and culture; and specialists who come together to talk to other specialists rarely do a good job communicating their relevancy to outsiders.

Lewis-Kraus does a good job placing this article in the context of the anti-intellectualism and humanities-bashing one often finds in certain sectors of contemporary culture. The MLA conference is for modern languages, not just English, though throughout the author keeps referring to the relevance of English research and publication.

Some amusing, well-written anecdotes, such as this one:

As Charlie and I orbit the small table, calculating who deserves how much of the steadily evaporating cheese, a short bald man approaches; he's wearing a green argyle vest and a maroon tie emblazoned with little shieldlike insignia. His name tag reads "DOD." Charlie steps backward, away from the table and asks him, "What does DOD stand for?"

"Department of Defense," says the man, as he commands the remaining hunks of cheese. We both freeze for a minute before Charlie produces an anxious chuckle. "Oh, interesting. What are you, uh, up to, here?"

"Oh, I'm a translator at DLI, the Defense Language Institute, and I'm here for some, uh, workshops on translation." Charlie tries to mollify the man with an anecdote about his wife's failing a security clearance test at DLI as a teenager, but the man says nothing in response and takes the rest of the cheese. The man wanders off.

"Why'd you talk to that guy?" I ask Charlie. "He's probably uploading our names and pictures to some defense satellite right now."

"And he took the rest of the cheese," Charlie says.

And this:

The actual papers delivered are so bizarre and freakish and sodden with jargon as to make them utterly incomprehensible. But it is a truly virtuosic incomprehensibility that makes sense only as a kind of poetic performance.

Warner Brothers is developing a film based on the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Newcomer Matthew Sand will write the script for the film version of the story, about a knight who takes up the sword against a monster.

The eighth-century tale centers on Beowulf of the Geats, who is called to slay Grendel, a monster that is attacking a Danish kingdom. The poem is known to have been an influence on J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings, the trade paper reported. --Beowulf Goes To Movies  (SciFiWire)

That's the full article.

For the Old English scholars out there... does "weblog" count as a kenning?

Bill Stevenson, 79, and Sten Gerfast, 74, both retired 3M employees, were eating at the Sun Ray Shopping Center Bruegger's Bagels when they heard a man cursing loudly on his cell phone, they said Friday.

"You know, there were about 15 people in there and some children and this person, if he stood in the corner and talked in his cell phone, that would be one thing, but he actually walked among the tables, pacing and talking loudly and you could tell he annoyed a lot of people," said Gerfast, of Mendota Heights.

After hearing the obscenities, Gerfast said he approached the man and said, "Would you mind, sir, to go outside and take your call?"

He was met with a round of obscenities, according to a police report, that would have made Vice President Dick Cheney blush. --Mara H. Gottfried --Cursing on cell phone starts bagel-shop bruhaha (Duluth News Tribune)

Once people overhear some pale guy with wizard hair explaining how a light saber simply isn't possible, as the exposed plasma from the device would irradiate every living organism with a 5-kilometer radius, what are people supposed to think? "Sexy?"

Yet, part of being a sci-fi fan is being its harshest critic, and so we can't help ourselves. --Adam Berliant --10 Dumb Moments in Sci-Fi Cinema (MSN)

I remember when I originally saw The Black Hole in the theatre, there was a little boy of about three years a few rows behind me. In the climactic sequence in which the Cygnus is swallowed by the titular black hole, and swirls down a firey red whirlpool, the boy shouted, "They're going down the toilet bowl!"

And he was right -- that's exactly what it looked like.

Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.

The father of the World Wide Web was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II on Friday, and said his revolutionary invention was the result of being in the right place at the right time. --A royal occasion as Web inventor is knighted (Independent)

At the start of the final exam for "Principles of Accounting I," the team of professors who taught the popular course posted on its Web site an answer key loaded with false responses to the 30 multiple-choice questions. As some 400 students deliberated over their answers, the exam proctors sat and watched -- ignoring occasionally suspicious noises coming from a few cellphones, according to some of the test takers.--Brock Read --Wired for Cheating: Some professors go beyond honor codes to stop misuse of electronic devices (Chronicle of Higher Education)

Is this entrapment? If I were to leave my office door open, with a fake answer key visible near the door, would that be entrapment?

The detail about proctors (who were supposedly there to enforce a "no Internet" rule) deliberately ignoring evidence that students were cheating is a bit troubling.

When I do create quizzes, I often put misinformation in the "attractors" (that is, the wrong answers that sound believable) in multiple-choice questions. One of my favorite questions is a list of four plausible things that didn't occur in a story, and one implausible thing that did.

In my American Lit course last term, several students who hadn't read a particular book on the syllabus tried to glean plot details from the multiple choice questions, and tried to fake short answer questions and essay questions based on that misinformation.

I don't mean petty details, such as "Huck eats two berries" or "Huck eats three berries". I might describe a character reacting in a plausible way to a nonexistent plot twist, or invent a subplot that gives a minor character a pivotal role.

I do teach classes in which I expect students to use the Internet -- for instance, when they have to demonstrate their ability to create and upload a small web site. I'll tell students they can bring in a template if they want, but I won't give them the client's identity or the subject of the website until the last minute. (In the past, I've had them write for an eccentric who loves the color green, or to write about Rainbow Hector.)

Still, if I taught classes with hundreds of students, and I suspected that cheating was rampant, I'd probably want to be very aggressive about it. But I rarely give final exams, since there's really no effective way to test writing ability via multiple-choice exams.

Suzuki Sampler: Cello | Piano | Violin | GuitarSuzuki Sampler: Guitar (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

It's 20 minutes after we're supposed to have started, and there's no instructor here. When you consider how rapidly a Suzuki lesson goes, I figured that didn't bode well for today.

My son Peter and the other student in the class, Georgie, immediately start playing with each other while they wait.

Complicating matters is the fact that I have to leave early, so my wife has to bring our 2-year old along.

The instructor arrives. If she gives her name, I don't catch it. She begins with the standard "get to know the instrument" demonstration.

The guitar is your friend. Will never fight with you or break up with you. When you're happy, he's with you. When you're sad, he's with you. But you have to be delicate.

Hmm… I'm not sure that my six-year-old son would understand the concept of "breaking up," but otherwise the introduction is fine. The instructor shows the guitar's head and neck, and asks the boys to show their own heads and necks. That's working out well enough.

Since the boys have seen two other string instruments this week, Peter glances at the handout and shrugs. "You know what, I don't even need to look at this to know what it is."

But there are parts of a guitar that don't correspond to other instruments. For instance, I didn't know there was such a thing as a "tapping plate".

Georgie recognizes the bridge, and sings a bit of the cello teacher's "this is the bridge" melody. He starts tapping the guitar, which upsets Peter, but the instructor says that's fine.

Now that Peter knows the instructor won't get mad if he touches the guitar, he's like a moth to a flame. The instructor keeps shifting it over a few inches, just out of his reach, and Peter keeps scooting after it.

When I leave, Peter and Georgie are learning the letters that go along with the fingers on their right hand -- p, i m, a, e. I wonder what the letters stand for, and why there isn't a mnemonic for it.

I give the camera to Leigh and head off to my meeting across town.

* * *

When I get home a couple hours later, Leigh is on the couch, reading books to Carolyn, and Peter is nowhere in sight. He's in bed already.

Uh-oh.

Leigh tells me that the lesson was a disaster.

Peter was sticking out his tongue at everybody, shouting "blaah!" and "I don't care!". When Georgie decided that he would be a dog for the rest of the night, Peter chased him around and tried to knock down his imaginary doghouse.

According to Leigh, this is the worst she's ever seen Peter act in public. (He can be stubborn and sullen, but I've really only seen him throw one honest-to-goodness temper-tantrum, and he was probably only two then. Now, he prefers to stew over a particular injustice, rather than lash out in general lamentations concerning the injustice of the universe, which is more Carolyn's style.)

The previous lessons (in cello, piano, and violin) always seemed to teeter on the verge of chaos, but somehow managed to remain coherent. I think that after 20 minutes of playing with each other, George and Peter were too interested in each other to focus when the guitar finally arrived.

According to Georgie's mom, Carolyn, whose presence we worried would be disruptive, was the only one good enough to deserve to play the instrument.

The study followed about 1,000 people from the age of three into adulthood, and found that those who had consistently spent more than two hours a day watching TV between the ages of five and 15 were at increased risk of being overweight, having high cholesterol, and poor cardiovascular fitness. --James Meikle --Limit child TV viewing to an hour each day, study urges  (Guardian)

This is a news story based on an academic publication, so I'd need to read the whole study in order to answer the questions that pop into my head.

We don't get cable, and my kids watch almost no broadcast TV -- it's all videos. My sister or in-laws will fill up a whole tape with "Between the Lions" or "Zaboomafoo" off of PBS, and send it to us for presents.

When Peter was small, we carefully rationed his TV to about a half hour a day, but Carolyn has a huge library of videos available to her whenever she asks. Whenever she asks for a video, I will try to get her to sit to read one or two books first, and often she'll forget about her demand for the TV and ask for another book.

Sometimes I show her home movies... does that count as TV?

Peter watches less TV than Carolyn, but he's playing computer games instead (mostly educational).

My wife kept maxing her library card out, so she got a card at a different library, too.

(BTW, the library cards are mostly maxed out with books -- we have a corner of the living room that we set up like a bookstore, with the newest books cover-out, not spine-out, so the kids will pick them up when they're bored.)

Webloggers are turning a profit, sometimes unexpectedly, reports the Chicago Tribune Online. Blogs such as TalkingPointsMemo, Wonkette, and RightWingNews are securing enough advertising to turn a profit. A firm called Blogads has been connecting advertisers with bloggers and enabling them to reach an 18 to 34-year-old demographic that is dwindling from traditional media outlets. Recent surveys conducted independently by Blogads and TalkingPointsMemo finds Web logs reach an affluent audience. Blog ads are also much cheaper than the cost of those on major sites or search engines. "In my experience, and this is often attributed to a smaller and more targeted audience, ads on blogs and smaller niche sites tend to perform better," says Carlo Alvarez, director of media planning at Special Ops Media. --More Weblogs are turning a profit (Online Journalism Review)

Hawking has always stuck resolutely to the idea that once information goes into a black hole, there is no way out. Until now. When news@nature.com asked about his change of heart, Hawking smiled and wrote: "My views have evolved." --Mark Peplow --Hawking changes his mind about black holes (Nature)

[Translated from Italian, by Google.]

More interesting, above all for the informative content, are instead articles of historical character like "The scientist on the stage: to survey "of M. To Orthofer, a review of teatrali witnesses from the classic antiquity today with a more rather wide deepening on the dramas of the atomic "era ", or "The experimental seduction of mechanistic modernism in Eugene O' Neill' s ' Dynamo' and the Federal Theatre Project' s ' Altars of steel'" of Dennis G. Jerz that faces the glares of the cultural debate in years Twenty and Thirty on the transformation in industrial sense of the United States, passing from the end of the strong critic of O' Neill in the comparisons of the blind faith in the progress to the end of the propaganda dramas on the effects benefits of the industrialization process. (Google's translation of Silvana Barbacci) --Review: Science and Theatre: between pedagogical debate and historical reconstruction (Journal of Science Communication)

A review of a special issue of Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, (Volume 27, Number 2, Autumn 2002) where I published an article that remixed parts of two separate chapters of my dissertation. As far as I can tell from the translation, the reviewer, Barbacci, seems to complain about dramatists (and critics?) who make mistakes with their science or technology in order to make a didactic point. He places my article in the more favorable "historical reconstruction" category.

If anyone out there can help me make sense of the original Italian, I'd be grateful.

When you think about it, the Times may have it backward. It charges $1 for the latest news in print, and offers it free over the Web, but for old material demands $3, which is three times the price of an entire newspaper. --Adam L. Penenberg --Searching for the New York Times (Wired)

The NY Times is a great paper, but you have to register to read articles, and they quickly dissapear into paid archives. So it's not making a dent online. There are ways to get around it, but I haven't found it worth the trouble. It's also possible to get Salon articles for free (if you sit through a long commercial), but there's plenty of other good stuff online that will be less annoying to read.

Suzuki Sampler: Cello | Piano | Violin | GuitarSuzuki Sampler: Violin (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Monday was cello, Tuesday was piano, today is violin.

Miss Ramona starts with the usual chit-chat that one can count on going over well with young kids.. how old are you? She asks them how old they think she is.

Peter thinks. "You're probably twenty-five years old." (He’s way under. She doesn't correct him.)

Miss Ramona has the kids pick a sticker and put it on the carpet, then sit on it. Peter is reluctant to sit on whatever Lion King character he’s chosen, but he does so anyway.

She asks them to sit “like an Indian.” Years of politically correct conditioning in academia cause me to cringe each time I hear that, though that’s probably an over-reaction.

She leaves them sitting on the ground for a while, while she sets up. (She had been teaching a private lesson until right before we entered.)

Peter squirms too much. George leans over and snaps, in a tone that exactly mimics the command I have been hissing at Peter all week: "Listening body!" (A positive alternative to "Don't slouch and roll around like that, pay attention instead!")

When the students ask a lot of questions or plead to hold their instruments right away, Miss Ramona doesn’t let them babble on off topic – she cuts them off with a pleasant but final "Nope."

Once she is set up, selecting little violins that are the right size for her pupils, she gives a little lecture about following directions -- and threatens to take away the violin if the students don't do what she wants, when she wants it.

This isn't playtime.

She's perfectly pleasant, sitting on the floor with the kids, and nicknaming Georgie “baby doll,” but she's also very professional and efficient.

While the little tiny violins are still in their cases, on the floor next to each student, Miss Ramona first plays Twinkle, Twinkle. She explains it’s the first song you learn on any instrument in the Suzuki method, and I understand that it’s also always the last song that one plays at a Suzuki concert, so that everyone – even the newest students – can play along.

I’m getting very familiar with that song.

Miss Ramona plays it again, and asks them to sing along this time. She claps for them when they’re done.

10 minutes into the class, they are doing fairly well.

She introduces the string family, taking the word “family” literally. The violin is the baby, the viola is the big brother. Cello is mommy, bass is dad.

"Who's the sister?" asks Peter.

"There is no sister, it's a boy family," says the daughter of the cello instructor (who has been hanging around with nothing better to do while her mother teachers in another room).

Miss Ramona demonstrates the instrument’s pitch range, she plays it at different speeds, she shows how to bow, pluck, and bounce the strings with the wood of the bow (a "special effect"), She also demonstrates the mute.

At the 15 minute mark, they open up the tiny violin case – but they take out only the bow. The violin doesn’t come out for another 5 minutes.

As they go through the anatomy of the instrument, Peter recalls a bit from Monday’s cello lesson, though he calls the scroll a "screw", and the pegs "pins," the fingerboard "finger rest." He does remember "bridge".

The students pluck the E string. The A string lives next door, and on to D and G.

At one point, Peter raises his hand and solemnly informs the instructor that a whitesmith works with steel, and a blacksmith works with iron.

She smiles. “Ooo-kay.”

When she demonstrates what happens to the sound of a string when you play it while also turning the tuner, the tuner makes a horrid clicking sound.

"Stop that," says Peter, worried. "I don't want to see you doing that.”

He’s convinced that she’s breaking the violin, because we have a little plastic toy guitar at home, and when you turn the little cheesey plastic toy tuner, the little cheesy plastic toy strings pop out, and Daddy has to fix it.

“Stop that!” says Peter. “Or else."

The instructor stops, her curiosity roused. "Or else… what?"

Pause.

Peter folds his arms. "I'm not doing that," he says, meaning he’s not going to turn the tuner.

Miss Ramona goes back into her spiel about how the vibration and tension of the string affects the sound.

Peter sighs. "We've heard that over and over."

Miss Ramona taps the violin, and invites the students to tap theirs and listen to the sound.

Peter won't tap the violin -- he doesn't want it to break.

Miss Ramona tries to get Peter to loosen up a bit. "You probably couldn't hit it hard enough with your hand to break it," she says.

Peter eyes his violin.

I blurt out, “Peter, don’t try.”

I needn’t have been worried. Obviously the instructor's reference to the violin as the baby of the string family has made an impression -- Peter wants to cradle his. "Has anyone made up a song called 'Rock a Bye Violin'?"

The cellist’s daughter seems to have officially crashed our lesson. With a new student in the room, the dynamic changes; George and Peter have just barely gotten used to the idea of taking turns, but with a third person, there’s a bit more squirming and poking going on.

The cellist’s daughter has taken cello for five years (she looks about seven or eight) and has to unlearn a few cello things in order to do violin things. Her hand shoots up with an answer for every question. She knows all about what rosin is for and how to put on your bow, but when asked where rosin comes from, she pipes up: “Maple.” She doesn’t know how or why, she just knows rosin has something to do with the word "maple". While the girl is very sweet, the competitive Dad in me is pleased to see that something has stumped her.

Peter gasps – he notices the instructor has been touching the bow with her finger. “Don't touch the horsehair!” he blurts, genuinely concerned.

"She knows what she's doing," says the cellist’s daughter.

Peter (holding the rosin up to her): "Sap!"

I snicker into my hand. That was a good one, Peter, though I’m sure it was completely unintentional.

At the 36 minute mark, the kids are doing very well, though they’re still eager to start bowing.

Peter suggests that the rosin and pitchpipe can be the violin’s cousin.

Peter hears someone scraping away at a cello. He reaches out towards it, looking for all the world like the Frankenstein monster from "Young Frankenstein," clawing away at the air which bears the music which calms the savage breast. "I think the cellos are going on!" he shrieks.

Our instructor introduces four rhythms that are important for playing violin:

Mississippi hot dog.
ice cream (shh) cone.
Ham-burger cheese-burger
Michael Michael motorcycle

At the 45 minute, we take a little break. When we come back, we practice stretching and reaching with the “bow hand” and the “violin hand”.

Learning to hold the bow: make a bunny with your hand. Pinky and index finger up, other two touching thumb. Now the students show their parents.

Holding the bows more or less properly, it’s time for “Bow Olympics.”

Make windshield wipers – back and forth, back and forth.

So far, so good.

Now, make a rocketship.

Whoops – immediately, both boys start making engine noises and running all around the room, making their bows chase each other and shoot laser missiles.

The idea is to get them to hold their bow straight up and down, so perhaps “tree” or “flagpole” would be a better image to put in their heads.

It takes some time to calm them down for the next step…

What’s your favorite food? Macaroni and cheese, of course.

The students use their bow to help them stir a big imaginary pot of macaroni and cheese.

After some singing practice, it’s time for posture. One at a time, they stand before the teacher, first holding just the violin, then both violin and bow. This takes much more doing than playing the cello.

Finally, after more than an hour, they’re ready to play “Mississipi hot dog” on one string.

Time to put the violins back in their case for some more listening. Peter pleads to play again. He makes his hands into spaceships and makes them swoop, dive and shoot at each other – a nervous habit that flares up for weeks at a time whenever he watches one of the Star Wars movies.

The cello teacher arrives to pick up her daughter. She and the violin teacher talk shop a bit. The violin teacher turns to Peter and asks which he likes better, violin or cello?

Peter looks from one to the other.

“Piano,” he says. Then, after a tiny pause, “And violin and cello.”

For his prize at the end of the day, Peter receives a sparkly butterfly sticker.

He brings it right to me. “You wear it,” he says. “I'm just too generous.”

The lesson is over.

Peter pines after the closed violin case.

"I want to play!"

Elisha Gray (born in Barnesville, Ohio, on Aug. 2, 1835, died Newtonville, Mass., on Jan. 21, 1901) would have been known to us as the inventor of the telephone if Alexander Graham bell hadn't got to the patent office one hour before him. Instead, he goes down in history as the accidental creator of one of the first electronic musical instruments - a chance by-product of his telephone technology. --Elisha Gray and 'The Musical Telegraph' (1876) (Obsolete.com)

Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.

With assertiveness, we’re looking at the extent to which the question is designed to favor or invite a particular answer. For example, if a journalist asks the president, “Are you going to run for reelection?”—that’s relatively neutral. Another way is to say: “Mr. President, many of your supporters are calling for you to run again. Are you going to run for reelection?” Obviously that question is pushing for a yes answer. Here’s another way: “Mr. President, aren’t you going to run for reelection?” It turns out that anytime you put a negative into the interrogative—“Don’t you think?” “Isn’t it true that . . . ?”—for some strange reason it heavily tilts the answer in favor of yes. So now we can code yes-no questions and ask whether they have linguistic features that tilt them one way or another. In that way, we’ve been able to chart the evolution of more assertive styles of questioning over time. With adversarialness, we’re interested in the extent to which the question contains information that either disagrees with the president or is somehow critical of him, or holds him accountable for his actions. For example, “Mr. President, why did you decide to do such and such?” That’s a mild accountability question. The more adversarial version is “Mr. President, how could you do X?” Obviously, it implies that there is no acceptable explanation. Dwight Eisenhower never got a question like that; that form was virtually nonexistent as a journalistic practice in the 1950s. It’s not common today, but it’s now part of the journalist’s repertoire. --Steve Clayman, interviewed by Alan Burdick --Discover Dialogue: Conversation Analyst Steve Clayman (Discover)

Suzuki Sampler: Cello | Piano | Violin | GuitarSuzuki Sampler: Piano (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

The piano lesson was a little more stressful than yesterday's cello lesson, in part because we have a few toy and electric piano keyboards around the house. While playing with the cello, and even smelling it, was a new and exotic sensation, the action of sitting down and hitting a key is familiar to him (via his exposure to computer games).

Nevertheless, I am enjoying my own exposure to the Suzuki method.

First, Miss Charlene asks the students to say the musical alphabet - A B C D E F G. She claps her hands with each letter, and invites the boys to do the same. She then invites the younger boy (who is very squirmy today) to make up a different gesture. He flaps his arms. Miss Charlene and Peter imitate him, shouting out letters. While the other instructor always started with Peter and then let the younger boy copy Peter, this instructor seems to spread it around fairly evenly.

Next, the children are invited to sit at the piano and push a few keys. Then the instructor starts at the lowest white key and plays each one, counting as she goes.

By the time she gets to forty, both boys are squirming, but she soldiers on... after reaching the top, she works her way back down on the black keys.

So far, so good.


Now it's time to do some simple stepping up and down, focusing on getting the students to use five fingers of one hand.

The familiar melody "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" is divided up to four sections:

* Bread: "Twinkie, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are."
* Peanut butter: "Up above the world so high"
* Jelly (softer): "Like a diamond in the sky"
* Other piece of bread: "Twinkie, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are."

The transitions from the piano (on one side of the room) to the table (on the other side) aren't going very well. Peter and George feel comfortable enough with each other to poke each other and play. The colored stickers they're supposed to put on a picture of a clown each time they learn a lesson are just too tempting to fiddle with during the next tabletop lesson.

When the instructor holds up a little rubber treble clef, Peter brightens -- he recognizes it from Jump Start Music (computer game), and correctly identifies it as a G clef.

The game that comes next is a hit. One student goes out into the hall, while another hides the treble clef somewhere in the room. When the first player comes back in, looking for the treble clef, a third student plays louder on the piano when the first student gets closer to the clef.

I notice that the instructor asks each of the boys if they would like to be the player, but neither volunteers. They choose to do the hiding or seeking, so the instructor does the playing -- and introduces the next melody in the process.

Just as parents were drafted into playing the cello last time, parents are drafted into playing "hunt the treble clef" this time.

Peter is able to find C with no trouble, playing it up and down the keyboard. He finds F pretty easily too. Now the instructor holds up a raisin, and announces that she will say either C or F, and Peter has to play the right note before the raisin drops to the ground.

I am pleased at how well is doing.

Then when it's little George's turn, I notice the trick -- she waits until he has decided which key to go for, and then she drops the raisin. It doesn't really make any sound when it hits the ground, so when she says George wins, he just beams happily.

As I noted, transitions aren't going very well. Yesterday, each boy had his own cello, but today they have to share the piano. There's a lot of sliding around on the bench, poking each other playfully when they share the bench, and flopping and slouching in their chairs while they wait for their next turn at the piano.

Just when both boys are near the breaking point, the instructor calls a bathroom break. When the students return, each gets a baggie full of crackers, on which they munch in relative contentedness, while the instructor reads to them a book about the orchestra.

She also has big flash cards designed to teach rhythm, and introduces a rest.

At one point, sitting on his chair while George takes a turn, Peter looks around forlornly.

"I wish the cellos were here," he says.

(Update: Corrected Miss Charlene's name.)

In traditional print journalism, the imperative is to filter, then to publish. The filtering is possible because of a daily printing cycle and large editorial and production staffs. With large, capital-intensive printing presses and a prohibitively expensive distribution system, newspapers in fact require large staffs. Organized hierarchically, these staffs funnel the information out from a center. For bloggers, the imperative is to publish, then to filter, or to be as concerned with unmaking and testing public opinion as forming it. The ethos for news and information blogs, then, is based more on values such as immediacy, transparency, interconnectivity, and proximity to the events. As a heterarchy, diverse bloggers post, cross-link, blogroll, and trackback to interact in a network, pulling ideas and knowledge from the edges. --Brian Carroll --Culture Clash: Journalism and the Communal Ethos of the Blogosphere (Into the Blogosphere)

I'm slowly working my way through this collection of academic articles on blogging....

I’m not sure whether the distinction between “media” and “media formats” is a hair worth splitting. And I stumbled over “to their near vanishing point” because a vanishing point isn’t near – it’s on the horizon, far away. Should that be “near-vanishing point”? Phrasing it as “nearly to their vanishing point” avoids both unnecessary complexity and pedantic hyphenation.

As for the mission of journalism… journalism only has a mission of informing the electorate in societies where there are such things as electorates, and where freedom of the press is permitted. If you define journalism as only the kind of news reporting that takes place in a democracy that supports the freedom of speech, then you limit the kinds of social change that journalism (and/or blogging) can bring about. For much of its history, journalism has been published mostly in partisan papers that made their biases clear.

I’m not saying that objective reporting is not a good and noble goal, but it’s also true that an important mission of a news reporting institution is making enough money to pay the bills (and then some, from whence comes the profit). In light of Carroll’s statement of old media’s economic traditions and policies, perhaps instead of a democracy metaphor, a revolutionary metaphor would be more appropriate.

Since I doubt that Hunt made special reference to blogs in 1996, I gather that Carroll is applying what Hunt wrote about other media to blogs. Thus, by extension, any medium would seem to convey the sorts of values held by the creators of the content. If that’s so, then I’m not completely sure what is gained by applying that observation to blogs – though to his credit Carroll seems to address that same question in his description of how Rogers and Malhotra expand on Hunt. Fair enough.

While professional journalists work as part of a vast hierarchical team, I’m not sure I would accept Carroll’s characterization of the “lonely blogger, a single node in a vast heterarchy”. By virtue of being a node, the blogger isn’t really alone. Comments, cross-blog discussions, and e-mails from readers tend to reinforce bloggers. Those who aren’t sufficiently motivated by the kinds of responses one gets from blogging tend to drop out of the blogosphere, meaning that a certain kind of person whose writing generates a certain kind of response tends to keep producing more of that kind of writing. A journalist isn’t tied quite so closely to the love (or hate) that comes via reader feedback. At any rate, the image of being part of a network and being lonely work against each other, particularly a few paragraphs later when Carroll mentions “what Hunt called the communal ethos of websites”.

To say that a newspaper staff “funnel[s] the information out from a center” once again causes me to stumble as I read. A funnel just doesn’t work that way – it uses gravity to push grains or liquid down into the center. I think Reddy was right when he says that the conduit metaphor is so ingrained in the English language that we can hardly think of communication without it – but if we want to use metaphors (“filter” and “network”) it makes sense to avoid mixing them.

I’m not sure that one can easily say that blogs are heterarchical and be done with it… to paraphrase George Orwell, some blogs are more heterarchical than others. The culture of the A-list bloggers, and what they deem blogworthy, does affect search engines to a degree disproportionate to their numbers.

I agree with this: “Blogging and journalism do not have to be dichotomous; the two divergent schemas for understanding ethos do not have to be mutually exclusive,” but since the title of the article seems to presume a culture clash, I’m not entirely satisfied with this formulation.

I was very interested to read of Sipe’s blogging of the John Allen Muhammad trial for the Virginian-Pilot, though I’m not sure it’s clear that the blogging was the cause of the paper’s boosted circulation during the trial – the relationship may merely be associative (though Carroll seems to have done more work on that, so I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt here.) But that brief discussion comes close to the end of the article.

I do like Carroll’s closing observation, complicating Winer’s bet with Nisenholtz (that by 2007, Google will rank blogs higher than the NY Times).

Suzuki Sampler: Cello | Piano | Violin | GuitarSuzuki Sampler: Cello (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

In the first few moments of his first Suzuki music lesson, my six-year-old son is sitting on the floor with Miss Rann, who is introducing him to the parts of a cello.

The instructor sings a very simple melody: "This is the bridge," and the students are supposed to sing back, "This is the bridge."

"This is the fingerboard," she sings, to a different tune.

"This is the fingerboard," the students repeat.

Maybe the bits of music she is singing are from a famous composition she's trying to drill into their minds. I never learned to play an instrument, and my knowledge of music is very limited, so I have no idea. Maybe she's just improvising.

For about ten years I was a church cantor, but I never had any formal training (other than an hour or so before Mass, and the occasional extra practices for more complex Christmas and Easter programs). The most I can say for myself is that I was probably a little better than having no song-leader at all, though I did enjoy it because many people in the congregation already knew the songs, they just needed to be reminded when to start.

Later, when she points to the bridge again, the instructor uses the same tune, singing, "What is this piece?"

She asks Peter to sing a question to the other boy, and vice versa. They're practicing pitch without realizing it, just like The Karate Kid, who polished Mr. Miyagi's old cars with a circular motion, not realizing he was practicing the motion you use to deflect an opponent's blow. Okay, I think I get it now.

I'm very impressed with Miss Rann's ability to keep his attention. Peter and the other boy are the only students in our group, so I'm sure that helps. Still, I'm amazed.

Now they are practicing posture -- how to sit down and get ready to play cello. One -- stand with feet together. Two -- move left foot left. Three -- sit on edge of chair, holding imaginary cello in left hand. Four -- tuck in and start playing.

One -- feet together.
Two -- feet apart.
Three -- sit down.
Two. (Whoops! She faked them out! After some fiddling, the kids stand up, feet apart.)

One. Two. Three. Four.

Peter does pretty well, aside from tending to fart on "Three", though it's the adults in the room who exchange glances and try not to laugh.


"Boy, you look good playing a cello," says the teacher. "You look like a born cellist!"

Peter puffs up at the flattery.

"Now I want to see how strong you are -- how long can you hold a cello, while you listen to me play?"

Peter looks very serious. "Excuse me, you'd better use the bow."

She does. He seems to enjoy the music the teacher makes. He closes his eyes, listening.

A little later, he chirps, "Look, I can hold the cello with my eyes closed!"

The teacher asks the kids to sing along with her as she plays each of the cello's four strings, A D G C. The lyrics:

"Axe, Dig into the Ground, all the way to China."

"Do you know why we have to sing?" she asks.

"Because you do," says Peter.

Well, yes, but she also wants the students to get into the habit of hearing the notes in their head, or they won't play them right.

Peter plucks the strings in the right order -- he is accompanying the instrutor as she sings! I'm amazed.

I watch more closely, and of course the instructor can see his fingers (which I can't, not from my position behind him), so she times her singing to his uncertain plucking.

Still, the illusion works -- and he laughs with pleasure.

I can't help but think of Harold Hill's 'Think System'. I wonder if The Music Man was written as a response to the Suzuki method?

When it's the other boy's turn to play, and Peter has to wait, he presses his nose against his (borrowed) cello, announcing, "Well, if I can't play it, I'll smell it."

A little later, the students pluck G over and over, one two one two, plucking while the instructor bows a more complex harmony around it.

I have to bite my tongue to keep from barking out orders, realizing Peter has to learn to listen to his instructor, and that if he's not ready to do that, he's not ready to play an instrument.

So far, they've only plucked. Peter has asked eight or ten times to use the bow.

While the other little boy takes a bathroom break, the teacher shows Peter how to put rosin (resin from a tree? Miss Rann has an accent that I can't place, so I'm not getting all her words, and she's not talking to me anyway) on Peter's bow, and lets him tug on it.

The other boy comes back; the instructor asks Peter to explain what rosin is and where it comes from.

I realize that, as much as possible, she's first instructing Peter, then asking him to repeat the lesson for the younger boy. The little boy gets to watch the new step twice before he's expected to perform it, and Peter gets the lesson reinforced when he teaches it.

"I'm tired," says the other boy.

Peter pretends his hands are spaceships and makes them shoot at each other -- something he does almost constantly, whenever his mind wanders.

Now it's time to teach a conductor's gestures. She lets the boys play whatever they want, but getting them to play soft and loud together, and -- very important -- to stop on her cue.

It's been just about 20 minutes. Now it's time for a walking break -- she takes the kids out into the hall. Away from the instruments.

Away from the parents.

They must have been playing follow-the-leader and Simon Says out there, because when they come back into the room, Peter is eager to get back to his instrument, yet they first have to play "Cello Maze".

Follow the teacher as she weaves through the chairs, around the cellos placed carefully on the floor. The object is not to kick the chairs or the instruments.

"I'm sure that piano is easier," says Peter at one point.

Now it's time for the "Cello Song," which is designed to remind the students to hold the cello with their knees and chest, not their hands:

I love my cello very much
I play it every day
I love to watch my spinning strings
When my hands fly away.

I can't help but think of the Battlestar Galactica episode where Starbuck taught some kids a battle plan in rhyme.

Next, it's time to turn the cello over and tap out a beat on the back. The teacher taps it out, then puts her hand on her head -- the sign that the student should repeat it. Peter has played rhythm games like this before in computer games, so he does very well. The other little boy strokes his cello, which squeaks under his palms. Instead of telling the boy, "No, don't make it squeak, you should tap it instead," the instructor compliments him on learning a new sound to make. Everyone tries to make their cello squeak for a while.

Whoops -- the middle part of the class flew by without any time for me to take notes. But I quickly noted that she's alternating "playing the instrument" with some other more physical activity.

The instructor demonstrates how the cello can make the sounds of a cow, a mouse, and a woodpecker. We sing and play "Old MacCello Had a Farm."

I have to help Peter; she's going a little fast, and Peter is getting frustrated his sounds don't sound like hers. He doesn't care that much about the cow, he wants to keep doing the mouse.

Just in time, the teacher gives them a break from the instruments.

What I don't expect is that I and the other parent get drafted to play the one two one two G drone in something the instructor calls "Muset" -- I didn't expect to be asked to play anything, but it was easy, and doing it really felt great.

Ten more minutes left.

She's teaching students how to bow (not the horsehair thing, I mean bend at the waist to accept applause). Everyone watches the instructor, until she makes big wide eyes -- that's the signal to bow.

Seven minutes left.

"What did you learn today?

"What a mouse sounds like!"

"Show me what a mouse sounds like!"

>squeak squeak< with the bow.

She explains the technical term for whatever it is they are doing. I don't catch it.

"What else did you learn?"

"How to bow!"

"Show me how to bow."

Peter makes big wide eyes, and flops over at the waist. The teacher follows her cue, and bows with him.

At the end, it's time for stickers.

For the rest of the week, Peter will spend one lesson each on violin, piano, voice, and something else (I forget). Depending on how that goes, we'll ask him if he wants to take another week on one particular instrument.

Then we'll see.

Yesterday (July 8, 2004) I took the Internet Bookmobile to Walden Pond in Concord, Mass. It was the 150th anniversary of H. D. Thoreau's book "Walden." The Thoreau Society had a dawn to dusk reading.

After an hour of having readers print and take away free copies of "Walden," I was asked by the Walden Pond Reservation police to pack up and leave and threatened with arrest. I left.

The park supervisor (Denise Morrissey, 978-369-3254) told me I could not pass out free literature without a permit. And she would not give me a permit because, as she explained, the state park gets money from a concession by the Thoreau Society, which operates a store that sells "Walden"--and I was competing with them by giving away free copies. --Eric Eldred --Free Walden (Internet Archive)

I'd try to peek through the gaps between his fingers, attempting to piece together images through the tiny trickles of light and color that broke through the gaps between his knuckles. But that didn't work very well, so I'd have to use my imagination to fill in the blanks.

And this is how I was corrupted, you see. Not because of the movies, exactly. But because I had to account for what I wasn't seeing, based solely on everything that lead up to the darkness, and everything I heard while it encompassed me. I had to imagine what led from one of Dad's "cuts" to another. --Mike Arnzen
--What Corrupted Me (ReallyScarry.com)

My colleague writes about his father's habit of taking him to scary movies and covering his eyes during the most extreme parts affected his development as a creative writer.

Dana Gioia, chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, writes in his preface to this report:

Reading at Risk merely documents and quantifies a huge cultural transformation that most Americans have already noted -- our society'smassive shift toward electronic media for entertainment and information. -- most electronic media such as television, recordings, and radio make fewer demands on their audiences, and indeed often require no more than passive participation. Even interactive electronic media, such as video games and the Internet, foster shorter attention spans and accelerated gratification.

The funny thing is, the report does not document such a shift. There are no results pertaining to the effects of video games or the Internet on literary reading, only rhetoric without foundation.

The executive summary similarly asserts:

Literature now competes with an enormous array of electronic media. While no single activity is responsible for the decline of reading, the cumulative presence and availability of these alternatives have increasingly drawn Americans away from reading.

The report later admits that ?frequent readers watch only slightly less TV per day than infrequent readers? and that ?[i]n some cases, TV watching may have a positive impact on literary reading.? The conclusion is that ?television does not seem to be the culprit.? But one must be found?

--Nick Montfort --Reading at Risk from Library - um, I mean Internet (Grand Text Auto)

My wife read about the NEA report in the local paper, and hit me with it before I read about it online, so I was unprepared to respond.

Thanks, Nick, for noting the F.U.D. factor here.

Earlier today, we dropped our daughter off at college. Like her brother before her, she went and grew up on us.... And as usual, whenever a buzzer sounds, the competitor within wants a score. How'd I do? whispers the bottom-line lobe of my brain.... [S]omehow, my kids' leave-taking has cracked open my shell. Suddenly, I can see some areas of Daddy weakness. --Hugh O'Neill --Put up the Hoop Sooner: 10 lessons of parenting from one wise guy who's done doing the dad thing (MSN)

The time is waning that my son will want nothing more than to play Battleship and The Magnificent Race with me all afternoon. Some day I'll make a silly joke, and my daughter won't giggle with glee, she will roll her eyes and say, "Dad, you're embarassing me."

Thanks to Torill's praise of my ongoing reviews of Into the Blogosphere, and the other bits of encouragement I've recieved here and there, I've been feeling a bit guilty that I haven't posted another review in a few days. This article cured me from feeling that guilt. There's plenty of time to read academic articles. I'll work my way through that collection. Just not today.

The first adventure game was called Adventure and ran on IBM mainframes. It became known as Colossal Caves or The Hobbit, and was influenced by Dungeons and Dragons. --Theo Clarke --The Infocom Adventure (Strategy Plus)

The Hobbit? WTF?

A transcription from a book, the full publication data of which is not given.

See my "Colossal Cave Adventure" page.

The five ran a firm called InfoCom.

On Wednesday, they were found guilty of shipping money to countries regarded by the US as sponsors of terrorism, and could face up to 10 years in jail. --US Muslims convicted over exports (BBC)

Where's a grue when you need it?

We thought a lecture about game criticism was most likely a recipe for disaster.

Straight off the bat, Matteo Bittanti, a teacher at the European Institute of Design, in Milan, proved us wrong. The very first thing he said was, "Hello. I am here to talk to you today about videogame criticism. Because right now, it's bullshit." Brandon Sheffield --GDC Conference Report V: Make Better Criticism: A Mature Form of Cultural Analysis (Insert Credit)

See also Preserving Videogame History.

Unlike the film industry, where anyone can write a script and submit it to the film studios, there is no real equivalent in the game industry – they are simply not set up, in the main, for that kind of approach. A writer does not produce the "screenplay" for a game and then a studio makes the game. A development studio creates a proposal for a game, then brings a writer on board as the project requires it, sometimes at the point of developing the proposal itself. --Steve Ince --My Fingers are Blistered and Bleeding: Writing for Games (GIGNews)

Via Grand Text Auto.

The user plays Sergeant Smith, while the other characters are virtual constructs. Using a laptop, the user speaks for the sergeant, in Arabic, through a microphone headset and controls the character's actions by typing keyboard instructions.

The project is part of a major initiative, financed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, to explore new ways of training troops by making use of the large installed base of existing technology, especially laptops. --Margaret Wertheim
--Virtual Camp Trains Soldiers in Arabic, and More (NY Times)

It's hard to tell from the description, but it sounds like a command-line interface... I wouldn't call clicking an arrow key or tapping the spacebar "typing".

Via Grand Text Auto.

A US inventor has come up with a hi-tech way of allowing the deceased to talk from beyond the grave - by fixing video screens to their tombstones.

Robert Barrows says people could leave video messages before they died, to be played to friends, loved ones or the just plain curious from the grave side. --Video diary from beyond the grave (BBC News)

Hmm.... the web story runs without a picture of the invention, and the inventor was speaking on radio, where he wouldn't be expected to show a sample.

Okay, BBC News, let's google for Robert Barrows...

Bigfoot -- - Major Bigfoot Expedition Seeking Participation From Corporate Sponsors and Journalists

And on "barrows.com", "An adult male Bigfoot is shown here eating the entrails of some kind of animal...."

While a talented inventor may also happen to believe in bigfoot, an while these may be two different people with the same name, a good reporter ought at least to investigate. Is it any coincidence that "barrows.com" is the home page for an advertising and marketing company? The website proudly displays its 1996 web design aesthetic (gotta love those HTML frames) and is happily "optimized for Netscape 2.0".

Cf "The Final Curtain" (a hoax by Joey Skaggs, who every year sends out a press release about a huge "April Fools' Day Parade" -- tricking sloppy researchers into showing up with their cameras and notebooks.)

Whoops, my two-year old has just removed all her clothes and marched through the kitchen in a bid for attention from me. I seriously hope she outgrows that stategy in a few years, but clearly I need to log off.

"Art often gets taken down when the school is painted and they don't get put up again. So many valuable and important works were forgotten in boiler rooms, locked closets, bicycle rooms," Bernhardt-Hidvegi said.

[...]

"We went through every building, every classroom, every basement, every boiler room, every closet, and under every stage" in Philadelphia's schools and about 200 of the most significant pieces were moved to storage, Paquin said. --Art Treasures in Philly Schools (WPVI-TV)

These finds are worth $20 to $30 million dollars, according to the article. Wow!

One never knows what one will find in an attic, as some student reporters learned at Seton Hill a few months ago...

Weblogging is no panacea for writing instruction, nor for engendering greater course participation among students. But our initial study has convinced us that weblogging as a general writing activity is worth pursuing in college courses, and that understanding the wide range of generic knowledge students bring to weblogging will help instructors orient and motivate students in the use of weblogs. Our specific findings and claims are:

• Journal weblogging is likely to remediate a familiar print genre that has positive connotations, but the prevalence of this online genre will likely cause a certain amount of generic interference for instructors asking students to write notebook or filter weblogs.
• Notebook weblogging is more likely to succeed as a genre within a collaborative weblog than when assigned as an individual weblog project. Notebook weblogs might take as their guidepost online discussion boards rather than print notebooks.
• Filter weblogs have the potential to be an intellectually rich genre for students to work with, but their complexity is buried beneath a deceptively simple presentation of link(s) and analysis.

--Brooks, Nichols and Priebe --Remediation, Genre, and Motivation: Key Concepts for Teaching with Weblogs (Into the Blogosphere)

I've seen many news articles and some academic essays that include a statement like "Blogs are many things, not only A, but also B, C, D and E," but where the athor proceeds as if a "real" blog is mostly A. So it was refreshing to read this article, in which the authors examined blogs as remediations of familiar academic/writing genres such as notebooks, journals, notecards, and freewriting. There's been plenty of scholarship on each of thouse genres.

Still, spending too much time examining how blogs can help us do what we already do may downplay the ways that blogs can open up student experience beyond the classroom. My students are energized when, from time to time, a professor from a different class at our school, a student at a different university, or the author of the text we have been discussing drops by to weigh in. My own talk at CCCC '04, on "Forced Blogging," did some preliminary investigation into the social networks that comments made visible (my students don't use Trackbacks, but that's in part because so far I haven't introduced the concept in any classes). The serendipity, the surprises, the community that formed in a core of committed bloggers (some of whom are still blogging over the summer, purely for pleasure) was very rewarding to some students, and generated a critcal mass that kept me from feeling that I was obligated to read and comment on every student assignment.

I am planning to introduce blogs, in a very minor way, in this fall's freshman comp course; it's a two-semester course, and we share a common syllabus, so there really isn't room to carve out a major assignment.

This article is a useful reminder that freshmen will probably not be that interested in what blogging can do for their academic writing, particularly at the beginning of term, when many are still expecting to be able to "coast" on the survival techniques (lots of plot summary and personal opinion) that helped them get through their senior English classes.

In order to demonstrate what blogs can do for students, I could, for instance, assign students to write a "filter" blog entry as advance preparation for an oral presentation. We know that Google is just too tempting to ignore when launching out into unfamiliar fields, and as writing teachers we know what happens when students quote from "onesidedextremistwebsite.com" and "specialinterest.org" -- they look for information that confirms their own biases.

I'm puzzled as to why, in the Fall of 2002, fewer students claimed weblogs motivated them to write "for your class assignments" than claimed that weblogs helped them write for "any school-related task". Aren't class assigments school-related tasks? Did students interpret the second question as referring to "any other school-related tasks"?

And, as with any survey that asks people to give their personal responses, I'd like to have seen some qualitative data to back it up. Did students who claimed that weblogs helped them stay motivated actually write more entries? Get better grades in the course? (The authors note, "We have no benchmark for measuring the success of weblogging relative to freewriting or note card taking as a motivating activity, but the initial results suggest the activity is worth pursuing, the pedagogical understanding and techniques worth developing." Agreed -- I'd love to read more in that area.)

The authors note that that in one survey set, students were permitted to chose more than one genre, so there was some motion towards collecting more information, but reducing the question to a binary "do you like subenre A or not" reduces the amount of data one can collect. I would have asked students to respond on a seven-point scale, rating their response towards weblogs in general, and each of the subgenres in particular. Perhaps those who are most likely to dislike blogs in general will like subgenre A best (or dislike it least), which may provide some insight for how to motivate students who aren’t excited by the social and networking possibilities of blogging culture.

But these are all quibbles – I’m glad I found this article. Some of the statements about the value of individual blogs vs community blogs will bear further investigation. I'd like to know what steps the instructors took to generate community, what the on campus culture is like, etc.

I wanted to try out the effects of democratization and subversion on this process of keeping a klog, and in doing so, possibly learn ways workplace practices could one day be further affected by the force of these software systems.

I also saw a visible (and documentable) clash of cultures between old and new media?perhaps made even more acute than it might be at more ?typical? large corporations because the primary, external ?product? or knowledge commodity of Time Warner embodies almost in its entirety the assumptions of broadcast or mass media, often unreflexively, as stated or even unstated truisms. --Christine Boese
--The Spirit of Paulo Freire in Blogland: Struggling for a Knowledge-Log Revolution (Into the Blogosphere)

The author notes that her own involvement in the blogs she is studying means the information she presents isn't unbiased, though she argues that being involved is the only way she could have come by this information. The brief digression on the invisibility of the cyborg gives us convenient point to latch on to her narrative.

I think I would rather read a good piece of investigative journalism, or a long blog entry, that presents insider information in this manner. Reading academic prose online can be very slow-going, but the academic essay is a genre with its own conventions (though those conventions developed over centuries, for the convenience of print readers). I think I would have appreciated, in the abstract, a few brief nuggets that show the kind of thing that is going to be investigated -- linking patterns? Fact checking? Harassment of bloggers at the hands of government authorities? The quote from the first day of Kucera's blog isn't enough to satisfy my curiosity, though the fact that Kucera mentions Boese does cement Boese's credentials as an insider. The excerpts from "The Other Side" seem to function more as chapter headings than integrated parts of the article -- I'm thinking particularly of the transition from Boese's brief comment on the Google toolbar's pop-up blocking ability to a blog entry discussing war panic in Erbil.

Regarding Boese's credentials, I was personally more interested to learn that Boese "was working for CNN Headline News, writing the afternoon on-screen headline ticker Mondays through Fridays") -- a detail that suggests Boese has a firm grasp on audience and rhetoric. Still, from the obligatory "what is a blog" paragraph, we find: "blog is defined as a regularly updated webpage using blogging software."

I respect Boese's desire not to get too bogged down, but it should be possible to signal "I don't want to go there" without resorting to tautology. (I "blogged" for years just by writing ordinary HTML, and doing a lot of cutting and pasting. I then created some PERL and DOS batch files to automate some of that cutting and pasting, and that gradually developed into my own home-grown PERL/XML blogging software, though I mothballed that when a student who needed an extra credit project designed for me the blogging software that I now use. But that quibble shouldn't detract from Boese's excellent examination of the tension between blogging and journalism.)

While it's true that there hasn't been much scholarship on blogs, there has been some that Boese misses in her overview. We are all still applying the tools we learned in our own separate subfields to the "new" subject of blogging. The rapid development of the Internet in general and blogging in particular means that we'll always be playing catch-up -- though Boese's description of what she calls "techophobia" at CNN makes me wonder whether the business world is any different. More collections like Into the Blogosphere and BlogTalk (I hope they publish a BlogTalks 2.0 anthology) will help us coalesce and synthesize (and that's, in fact, why I'm going to try to blog something on so many Into the Blogosphere articles.)

To continue the general scholarship tangent... much of what has been said about Usenet, MUDs, and other forms of Internet communication can be applied to blogs -- though it's very true that journalism seems to have noticed the wider effect of blogs before, say, the rhetcomp community or the bloggers themselves. Journalists pride themselves with getting "out there" on the street, ear to the ground, while academics spend more time mastering a more narrowly defined subfield in their chosen area. (That's supposed to be a nice way of admitting that academics have to fuss about in libraries a lot.)

Just as the committee-authored "official" blogs of politicians are group-thinked into a thin gruel, due to the pressures traditionally placed on the creation of "official" statements, a newsroom blog brings with it pressures that the average social blogger (or student forced to blog for course credit) doesn't face. Broadcast writers were not only used to thinking the audience as passive recipients of their product, "they also constructed THEMSELVES as passive recipients of media products, despite the fact that they were actively writing and shaping those media products every day at work. The anonymity of the “voice” with which they were conditioned to write seemed to preclude finding a voice with which to speak up on a klog."

I like "first person idiosyncratic" – Boese’s characterization of a blogger’s point of view.

At Seton Hill, many of the same students who are active in the student paper are also committed bloggers. Some have posted strong personal opinions about topics that they might later have to write about (objectively). One reporter was trolled anonymously on her personal blog for an article she wrote. Since we’re a small school, our paper only comes out about once a month, but we’re planning to ramp up the online version of the paper. Since the online paper is published within the same subdomain as the student blogs, Without getting sucked too far into the “are blogs a new form of journalism” debate, I’m continuing to watch this subject closely, so that they as individuals will understand their obligation to keeping their credibility in the eyes of the public.

Since it’s been years since I’ve spent much time in a newsroom (what with all the fussing about in libraries) I welcome Boese’s insights. She applies to newsrooms Michel de Certeau’s concept of the “wig” -- a diversionary tactic, in which workers pursue their own agendas on company time (without actually pilfering, or being unavailable for “real” work should they need to reprioritize).

Google actually has an official policy, in which employees are expected to spend 20% of their time developing their own personal projects. Of course, Google will own the intellectual rights to whatever the employees come up with, and I doubt the 20% free time extends to groundskeepers and cafeteria workers… given Google’s proven ability to mutate with the times, I think that particular practice is worth investigating in the context of the questions Boese raises.

Before you read on let me note Gmail is still the best free web mailer around, in fact you won't find any other even playing in this league. But hey, we come to expect that from Google. Some things however we do not... --Philipp Lenssen --Looking Back on Gmail (Google Blogoscoped)

Minnesota communities outside the Twin Cities area have an immediate need for $6.9 billion worth of wastewater treatment, drinking water and storm sewer facilities, according to a report by West Central Initiative, a regional foundation based in Fergus Falls.

"If, all of a sudden, you can't flush your toilet, your house isn't worth anything," said Nancy Straw, president of West Central Initiative. --Clear Water Costly For Small Towns (WCCO-TV)

Our plumbing problems haven't been that bad, but Rosemary must have noticed I've had sewage on my brain for the last few days. Thanks for the suggestion.

Nigeria's agency against economic and financial crime said Monday that it had detained more than 500 suspects and seized property worth more than $US500 million from suspected fraudsters.

"Presently we have over 500 suspects in custody, seized assets and recovered properties worth over $US500 million with over 100 cases at various stages of prosecution," agency chairman Nuhu Ribadu told a seminar.

--Nigeria arrests 500 Suspected Email Scammers (The Australian)

GREETINGS. I AM THE ELDEST SON OF THE RECENTLY ARRESTED KINGPIN OF AN ALLEGED NIGERIAN E-MAIL SCAM OPERATION.

...being a virtual community is important for sustainability. It is worth noting that at the end of the blog author Julie'sendeavors to cook her way through the cookbook, she stopped her blog posting. Although several participants tried to create an online group for fans of the the Julie/Julia Project to interact, it failed. The Julie/Julia Project was not self-sustaining. It depended heavily on Julie to succeed.

These findings have implications for our understanding of the importance of sense of community in determining whether or not a virtual group can be correctly called a virtual community. --Anita Blanchard
--Blogs as Virtual Communities: Identifying a Sense of Community (Into the Blogosphere)

A good case study of a single blog, but I wonder about the value of the survey results. Is this dataset the baseline, or an exception? We can't tell from a single measurement, since there's no context in which to place it.

If survey respondents are 25% more likely to agree that blog X makes them feel like part of a community than they are to make the same statement about blog Y, then such a survey is useful. But the simple statement that X% of respondents said that blog X made them feel like part of a community is only worth so much. There may be other factors as well -- perhaps people who are interested in a cooking blog, or people who find out about a blog via a TV news report, have different definitions of "community" than the readers of other blogs. It's probably safe to assume that a blog with a mostly male readership might require a lower level of activity before its members would say they are part of a "community" -- or, maybe the activity would simply be of a different nature.

The Julie/Julia blog had a particular narrow focus. While it also met other needs that emerged along the way, once the main objective was fulfilled, the blog stopped. A blog that exists for a specific purpose -- to document one woman's progress through a particular book -- shouldn't be judged by the same criteria used to judge open-ended blogs that don't have mission statements that include a final destination. A made-for-TV movie "stops", but a soap opera does not (unless the show is cancelled, of course). They are different genres.

While I'm quibbling about the lack of context, I liked the methodology of this article, though the intense focus on one blog means we don't (yet) know what will happen if a similar survey is done across a wider range of blogs (k-blogs, edublogs, fiction blogs, group blogs, etc).

And while this particular blog didn't make use of blogrolls, there are tools, such as Technorati and other content aggregators, that can serve much the same function (that is, bring together strangers who have both blogged about a similar topic).

This area still appears to be pretty wide open, though there are several other articles in this collection that touch on similar areas.

From the outside, this professional complex of modern buildings along Route 30 East near Ligonier had all the appeal of a sedate college campus. Two newer, red-brick buildings sat near the administration office and lab, both housed in a structure that easily could be called Old Main.

There was even an aesthetically pleasing weather vane on the roof.

The problem is, the place smelled like ... --Gerard DeFlitch --Wastewater job really stinks (Tribune-Review)

Hm... the author went to great lengths to be respectful of the men who do this job, but the headline is a stinker.

Blogging away for the common good or just to keep from watching whatever crap is on TV right now. --Michael Moore --My First Blog Entry (MichaelMoore.com)

This is a welcome development... I'll be very impressed if he enables comments!

Thanks for the tip, Mike.

In the current rejection of the close-up in mainstream cinema, filmmakers seem to have learnt nothing from the past. The 1950s epics now seem stolid, and most of DeMille is unwatchable. In a few years' time, The Phantom Menace, George Lucas's first Star Wars prequel - which was filmed almost entirely in medium and wide shot - will look like one of the most boring movies ever made. Entranced by his ability to show Hieronymus Bosch-like scenes of myriad complexity, why would Lucas do anything as boring as bring the camera close to the faces of his actors? Future audiences will be un-impressed by such CGI showreeling and will be perplexed by the film's lack of foreground. --Mark Cousins --Cinematic truth lies in the close-up (Prospect Magazine)

While Jar Jar was painful to watch, I completely lost interest in Star Wars the moment rockets popped out of Artoo Detoo's legs and he flew around the droid factory.

Okay, okay, maybe his rockets don't work underwater, which is why he didn't use them to get out of the swamp on Degobah, and maybe there was too much sand on Tatooine, which is why he didn't use them to fly to Obi Wan Kenobi.

I'm sure someone has retconned this oversight somewhere.

Does this mean that future weblogs should favour image over text? To do so would be to the detriment of the medium as it is the combination of words and images presented over time that make the visual blog what it is. Yet the contributions that images can make within weblogs should not be underestimated -- they act as a way of catching our attention and turning a glance into a sustained appraisal but as the examples discussed in this paper show, images are more than mere decoration. A rapport is quickly established between images and words in weblogs where one supports and enhances the other. If blogging continues to develop as it currently is -- with images becoming an increasingly common element, it seems reasonable to expect that visual blogging will evolve from being a subset of the phenomenon and will strike out on its own -- a medium in its own right. --Meredith Badger --Visual Blogs (Into the Blogosphere)

As a textual person, I'm uncomfortable with Badger's formulation of the Internet is something that "we tend to glance at". Glancing (or skimming, or, as Jakob Nielsen would call it, scanning) is one of many strategies that we use when we access information on the Internet. If we do glance, at least some of the time we do because we are looking for something to read (or consult, or archive, etc.). I think she conflates the Internet with the World Wide Web, since usenet and e-mail existed on the Internet as primarily textual media long before the arrival of the WWW (and blogs).

Being made uncomfortable is often a good thing, so I’m not complaining about it. I enjoyed the intellectual exercise of being asked to think of blogs as something to "view" rather than something to "read" -- although I noticed that Badger still refers to us as "readers" of blogs.

In my BlogTalk article, a section called "Metaphor, Language, and Genetics" touches on multimedia blogging in the context of a visual "fisking" of a politically charged news article. I appreciated reading what a visual rhetorician was able to bring to an examination of blogs. I do find it odd that the article uses the term "photoblog" only in the title of a cited work. Instead, Badger introduces "vlog" late in the article.

I'm not sure what to make of Badger's claim that the Internet destabilizes images, since she makes that claim just before introducing a series of photos, in which each one reveals a bit more about a narrative that unfolds. Is it the images that are destabilized, or the reality the image is purported to depict? Isn't narrative about telling, while images are about showing? Perhaps I'm just too unfamiliar with the rhetoric of visual discourse to know whether these hairs really need to be split.

Blogging from a mobile phone equipped with a camera opens up a new dimension entirely. Weblogs that present images with little or no commentary are certainly worthy of examination for the insights they reveal about digital culture. But the culture of blogs includes quoting, refuting, aggregating, and networking. Until we have widespread tools that can automatically sort and file information found in digital images, it seems to me that text is still a better tool for finding patterns and trends in digital media.

And while it's wonderful to contemplate what people CAN do if they had access to vlogs; blogs that show thoughtful and aesthetically pleasing images offer one perspective. But since textual blogs range from juvenile angst-fests to turgid academic prose, it’s also fair to examine the range of what people do with vblogs. That includes a range of emergent vulgarity, offensiveness, hilarity, and crudity such as found in the regular "Photoshop contests" on Fark (example: Photoshop Tim Burton's version of Willy Wonka. The virtuoso digital processing often found on this site offers visual equivalents of the fisking, quoting, mis-quoting, and aggregating at work in the textual blogosphere. Fark even has a whole set of visual in-jokes, some of them generated by combining a recent image from the news with a pop culture reference. Others are purely in-jokes (I’m thinking of “cliché kitty” and “Domo-kuns). The "All Your Base Are Belong to Us" meme of a few years ago is a good reference point, as is the image of the World Trade Center tourist (to which was added an image of an approaching airplane – a darkly comic attempt at dealing with the trauma of 9/11).

A minor note: a typo in the URL of the photo of "Kaycee" -- the URL should be http://www.logboy.com/jr/kaycee/BKhoop.jpg.

We saw other recruits in 20-man teams who had completed the daytime infiltration course with bayonets fixed. They had crawled through puddles of water, slid under barbed wire and thrust their bayonets into tires mounted on wooden dummies.

We too completed the course and, panting and sore, found ourselves soaked from bellies to shins.

I had shed 18 pounds since arriving at Parris Island. I was 38 pounds lighter than when I had first started getting into shape. I knew I could take it.

We learned we would have to complete the same course again that night, in the dark. --Bill Cahir --Getting the Boot: Reporter trains for new job: Marine (Evening Sun)

I've never thought of myself as military material, but this guy is just a year younger than I am. I'm impressed.

(He's a good writer, too... focusing on a series of vignettes rather than long descriptive blocks of prose.)

Um, has anyone here actually used MT?

The 'multiple blog' feature is pretty literally that - it's not just a mangling of category usage. Each blog has it's own config, users/permissions, templates, and so forth.

For a single user it may not be a big deal, but in a school or business environment it's a great help. And that's even considering it has pretty weak user/perms management overall. It would be a great thing to have in WP but if the infrastructure's not there, it's not there (yet?).

So while it may be possible to simulate it, that's not the same thing, esp for the majority of people who aren't going to hack PHP to make it happen.
--Multiple blogs are a reality surely? (WordPress)

A reality? No, they aren't... and stop calling me Shirley.

I was just checking to see whether WordPress has made any progress towards implementing multiple blogs. Many people who commented on this thread are thinking of multiple blogs in terms of "One blog for my professional stuff, one blog for my personal stuff, one blog for what I'm reading right now."

Yes, it's easy to fake that by creating separate subcategories within a single blog, but that won't work when we're talking about a single administrator and scores of separate users (or, in the case of the U of M, hundreds of users).

I expect I'll be stuck with MT in the fall. I'd rather stick with MT than take on the added burden of installing WordPress 90 times and having to deal with remembering 90 passwords, and having to install updates 90 times -- in addition to teaching 90 users how to blog using different software.

For the time being, I can still keep using the free installation of MT I've already got, and soon I'm going to present to my boss a budget for our software expenses (that would include the cost of upgrading MT to the paid educational version).

We shall see.

A doctoral student at Northeast Urban University -- I'll call him Mr. X -- presented my dissertation as his own. He received a Ph.D. and took an excellent research job at Prominent African University. Through my subsequent efforts, he lost his degree, his job, and his reputation.

[...]

Mr. X must have thought that he would get away with his theft because nobody reads dissertations. Was he correct? Was all that work simply a hoop to jump through to get the Ph.D.? What is the value of a doctoral degree if dissertation committees take as little care with their students as Mr. X's did with him? --Kim Lanegran --Fending Off a Plagiarist (Chronicle)

Blogging and other electronic forms of rhetorical delivery and performance will not retain their power and ability to help white people in particular overcome our institutional and other kinds of racism, as I have strongly claimed here, if the Military-Media Complex, the five communication conglomerates in the U.S. as well as others in, for example, Italy and Germany, continue to replicate ideologies unknown to them by consolidating media and therefore rhetorical power via their monetary influence over the U.S. Congress, the U.S. Presidency (both major parties), and other governmental units. --Kathleen Ethel Welch --Power Surge: Writing-Rhetoric Studies, Blogs, and Embedded Whiteness (Into the Blogosphere)

I've read this sentence six or eight times and I still can't get my head around it.

In "continue to replicate ideologies unknown to them by...", to whom does "them" refer?

And is the list of items following "by" restrictive or illustrative (that is, "unknown to them by X Y and Z, but possibly known to them by other avenues", or "replicate ideologies by methods X Y and Z")?

I'm not sure that the thesis "X can advance racism if we don't resist it in our own X" gains much additional rhetorical power if you insert "blogging" or "academic publishing" or "posting quibbles in the comments fields of blog entries". The general statement "Racism is bad, we should resist it," to which I heartily assent, pretty much covers blogging. Blogging may be an excellent platform for re-enacting the consciousness-raising exercises of a previous generation, though it may be that the average college student today already has much greater access to alternative sources of information than the college student of a generation ago.

If racism is deeply rooted in human culture, then it is no surprise that it might be found in hardware and software (along with everything else that humans do). But from what I know of lawsuits concerning racial preferences at Microsoft, or stories about offensive graphics in clip art, I'm not sure that cyberculture is any more racist than any other human endeavor. Opening the Internet up to everyone entails opening it up to racists and bigots, but we can always hope that a rational person, when faced with a ranting diatribe on one side and a reasoned rebuttal on the other, will choose to be persuaded by reason. Ideological "fisking" can certainly help in that area.

The meme that "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog," supports the belief that cyberspace can at least possibly be a space where communities can break through the old biases and prejudices, so of course I see the value of reminding bloggers of the possibilities.

This online, edited collection explores discursive, visual, social, and other communicative features of weblogs. Essays analyze and critique situated cases and examples drawn from weblogs and weblog communities. Such a project requires a multidisciplinary approach, and contributions represent perspectives from Rhetoric, Communication, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Linguistics, and Education, among others. --Into the Blogosphere

Putting aside the issue of whether popular culture is distasteful, no one wants to preside at the opening of the Department of Beanie Baby Studies. --Nick Montfort, interviewed by "Mat". --Interview with Nick Montfort (E Boredom)

Brando revolutionized American acting with his Method performances in "A Streetcar Named Desire" and "On the Waterfront" and went on to create the iconic character of Don Vito Corleone in "The Godfather." --Marlon Brando Dies at 80AP|MyWay)

A Sudden Case of 'Routine Maintenance' in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Our local amusement park has a ride based on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. The trolley takes you past large-scale mock-ups of various sets from The Neighborhood of Make-Believe, and yes, Trolley goes through a tunnel.

"Come along, come along, to the castle hug-and-song," you're supposed to say to the characters at each stop along the ride.

Okay, the animatronics are a bit lame, but my two-year-old rode it four times in a row the last time she was at the park.

We went back for another go the other day, and after waiting in line for a half hour we were told we would be in the last row of the next car.

Then I noticed a flurry of activity in the loading area. A trolley rode away with nobody on it, and park attendants carrying mops and buckets walked out onto the tracks.

A few minutes later, the park mascot appeared out of nowhere, shaking hands with the people who were first in line. That's strange, I thought... wouldn't it make more sense for the park mascot to cheer up the kids who are farther back in line, in order to keep them happy?

When a full trolley returned from the ride, the kids were unloaded from it, and a bunch of park attendants started leading them in the Hokey Pokey, something in my mind realized: "This is the booby prize -- the ride is busted and they're trying to keep parents and kids from freaking out."

The park attendants would only say "The ride is temporarily closed for routine maintenance. You can wait here if you like, and you'll be first in line for the next ride, or you can enjoy the rest of the park."

My wife was very confused, until I told her that "routine maintenance" must be themepark-ese for "technical difficulties".

Can it possibly be routine to let people wait for a half hour and then send them away? Wouldn't it make sense to stop admitting people to the long ride first, if a scheduled maintenance is coming? And what kind of an amusement park schedules routine maintenence during the middle of the day?

When pressed, the park attendant only said, "King Friday has laryngitis." Again my wife was confused, until I translated for her: audio problems.

We decided to stick it out, eating our lunch in the line. About twenty minutes later, everyone else had bailed out, and we were first in line when the ride re-opened. I had brought along my new digital video camera (a Father's Day gift), and recorded the whole adventure.

It was actually perfectly pleasant... the park attendants recognized us from our previous visits, and we had brought along a picnic lunch that we would have had to eat sometime.

(See also "It's a Didactic Day in the Neighborhood".)

It's a Didactic Day in the Neighborhood: Mister Rogers and Educational Ideology (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I recently lamented that my kids are growing up without Mister Rogers -– a very sweet public television show that features an infinitely gentle father figure who wears cardigans and talks directly to the camera. (We don’t have good reception of our local PBS station.)

Someone gave us a copy of a Mister Rogers show. My wife suggested that I watch it. So the next time my daughter asked for "Mister Roberts!!" I sat with her to check it out. I found an interesting exercise in didactic drama -- a creative performance designed to teach a specific ideology.

If you've ever seen the show, you know that Mister Rogers talks without a trace of condescention, irony, or "aren't I cute, buy my stuff" attitude (like a certain purple dinosaur and even, I’d have to say, a certain fuzzy red monster).

There isn't a trace of razzle-dazzle in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood -- but I was surprised that the piano chords that signal the arrival of Trolley and the start of a trip to The Land of Make-Believe still make my pulse race after nearly 30 years.

In this particular episode, children from the local school (where the student body is all puppets, of course) have been invited to attend a field trip to the castle, but a rather stuffy and somewhat arrogant inventor (also a puppet) shows them an invention called a Learning Machine, which is a helmet that teaches you everything you need to know, replacing the need for teachers, school, field trips, and everything else.

I couldn't help but think of Doctor McCoy's encounter with The Teacher in the so-bad-it's-good Star Trek Episode "Spock's Brain" (where Leonard Nimoy spends half the time voicing lines as a brain-in-a-box, and the other half as a zombie operated by a remote control gadget... but I digress).


At any rate, when Mister Rogers informs us of the backstory, he mentions the Learning Machine with distaste. Other human (non-puppet) characters in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe express their amazement that anyone could possibly choose a machine over a field trip. Ironically, in order to support this claim, Lady Aberlin (had to look that one up) and a male character whose name I didn't catch drive a battery-powered go-cart, which the children won't get to ride if they never come to the field trip. And, of course, Mister Rogers is using television to deliver his anti-technology message... but that's beside the point.

The climax of the fantasy sequence features the inventor, wearing his "learning machine" helmet, and the teacher informing the students that they should vote -- do they want a field trip, or the learning machine?

I was perhaps over-sensitive to the dogmatic nature of the scene. It was, after all, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood... and I confess I was surprised to see how strongly it seemed the deck was stacked against technology. The inventor spoke as a stuffy academic, while none of the children actually seemed to like the learning machine. Prince Tuesday said, "My father would probably want me to vote for the learning machine," but his father, King Friday the Thirteenth, is usually presented as benevolent but pompous, so that was hardly a ringing endorsement.

Just when I was getting a little annoyed at the straw man argument being presented, timid little Daniel Striped Tiger speaks up... why do we have to choose between the learning machine and a field trip? Why not use the learning machine, but also keep teachers and field trips?

It was a simple solution... of course, budgets and limited space in a curriculum and the cost of teacher training and so forth are way too much to bring into a show designed for preschoolers.

But I've got to hand it to Fred Rogers -- who also provided the voice of Daniel. Not only is Daniel wiser than any of the other puppets, he also appears to be wiser than Mister Rogers (who frowned and shook his head when he mentioned the learning machine when introducing the Neighborhood of Make Believe segment).

It takes real humility and true faith in the intelligence of your audience (even if they are preschoolers) to make a sweet but dippy puppet wiser than you are in the show that bears your name. It's much easier, on the other hand, to use dippy puppets (or straw men) to present the "other side" -- the one you want to attack.

Update: See also, "A Sudden Case of 'Routine Maintenance' in the Neighborhood of Make Believe".)

This site is a listing of Water and Waste-Water Plants throughout North America and some of all around the world, that will give you a tour of their facilities. Enjoy!

If you notice any link that does not connect, please send me a quick email with the name of the city for which the link does not work. This will be much easier than if I go and check every link every day! If you know of, or are from, a town that does not have their site in our index, email us and give us what name and link you want. I will then ADD YOUR URL to SEWAGE WORLD. --Sewage World

My six-year-old son loves water treatment plants. To paraphrase a line that Harvey Korman said on a spoof of "Jaws" from the Carol Burnett show, he was born with sewage in his blood.

I owe it all to Richard Scarry's What Do People Do All Day, a classic book that I myself loved as a kid. (I'm pretty sure the abridged edition, which is the only one you can still buy in stores, doesn't include either the water treament plant or the coal mine -- the two coolest sequences.)

The Cassini spacecraft has successfully entered orbit around Saturn, after a seven year voyage. The planet is now the most distant from Earth to be orbited by a spacecraft. --Cassini slips smoothly into Saturn orbit  (New Scientist)