September 2004 Archive Page

By teaching kids to become both media producers and media consumers, the Adams Avenue project promotes the reading, writing, and critical thinking skills necessary to succeed at the college level, Seiter says. That's especially important for at-risk students, she adds, because while "they may know a lot about TV or movies or video games, kids don't get points in school for just being media literate. In fact, it tends to get you labeled as someone who is media-saturated and not growing up in a healthy environment." -- Sara-Ellen Amster --Shakespeare vs. Teletubbies: Is There a Role for Pop Culture in the Classroom?  (Harvard Education Letter: Research Online)

Since I work in a program with creative writing colleagues who publish popular fiction, and since the areas in which I have been working recently (weblogs and computer games) yield much to pop-cult inquiry, I've become more interested in examining this subject.

As Amster notes, being fluent in pop culture doesn't necessarily help you succeed in college or the professional world -- unless, of course, you go into the pop-cult industry. But the ability to memorize Star Trek trivia or sing Disney songs only takes you so far in life.

I do sometimes encounter students who are frustrated that, when they do choose to write on a popular culture topic, they are still held to the same rhetorical standards (no unsupported personal opinions or generalizations; cite your sources; focus on specific passages from the book, etc).

I'm not so sure that this article's final point about journalism follows from the premise, but I still appreciated the overview.

Recommended reading: “Descriptions Constructed” by Stephen Granade, a just-posted close-up look at IF output text, and “Crimes Against Mimesis” by Roger Giner-Sorolla, a broader essay from 1996 on what can go right or wrong in IF, still worth a read today. --Nick Montfort --IF Essays, New and Old (Grand Text Auto)

William Shatner’s low-budget sci-fi flick, “Invasion Iowa,” that was supposedly filming in Riverside, turned out to be an elaborate hoax.

To borrow the phrase from MTV, the entire town was “punk’d.”

Yes, William Shatner is there, and yes, there is a film crew, but the whole thing wasn’t for a movie, but for a “reality” show on what it’s like when a Hollywood film crew descends on a tiny Midwestern town.

The ruse was revealed last night by Shatner and producers at a town gathering at Hall Park, and Shatner held an official press conference in Riverside at 11 a.m. today. --Riverside feels 'Wrath of Con' (Iowa City Press-Citizen)

Local officials were apparently alerted when Nimoy showed up with a beard (reprising his role as the evil, mirror universe Spock).

A brief story about the supposed movie ended up on the Associated Press wire.

I didn't check at the time when I blogged it, but the IMDB has no entry for "Invasion Iowa," or Aint It Cool News. Typically, by the time the mainstream press covers a movie project, the film geeks have already posted at least something about it.

I really enjoy Shatner's hammy style, but this seems mean spirited. I'm not a fan of the "reality TV" genre, at any rate.

When we see a drawing of a transportation futuristic, we instinctively know that'swhat it is. But what do jetpacks, rolling boats and these other endeavors have in common? With few exceptions, such as Leonardo da Vinci'svisions of helicopters and airplanes, the futuristics are the product of the Industrial and post-Industrial Age, a time when the pace of technological change rapidly accelerated and people began dreaming about the future in new ways.

--Transportation Futuristics (Berkeley)

Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.

--Interactive Fiction Workshop 1 (Writing for the Internet)

This morning I introduced my Writing for the Internet class to Pick up the Phone booth and Die and 9:05.

I always enjoy this class period. Most get to at least one of the endings in 9:05. About five minutes before class ends, I ask the students for their reaction to the ending they reached. Then, just before class ends, I ask them to restart 9:05, and I tell them to perform an action that gives away the ending from the first move... I won't spoil it here. If Adam Cadre could hear the gasps and see the amused/shocked expressions in the room, I'm sure he'd be very gratified.

For homework, they are to play Photopia.

In upcoming IF workshops, students will learn to program a short game. After that exercise, they will play some more IF. They are usually better able to appreciate the accomplishments of a polished and detailed IF work after they have built one of their own.

Blogger, and several of the other blog-systems, have a feature that lets you blog in the future. I can set the date on the post for a date in the future, and then it will be posted when I am dead. This is a classic set-up for the: "There is a letter with my lawyer, and if I die, it will be opened" plot in movies and books. "If you hurt me, the names and addresses of who I was to meet tonight will be published on the net tomorrow."

But we can go beyond that. Imagine writing the letter to your loved ones that you would want them to find when you are dead. Tell them how you think about death, thank them for the time you had, and let them know it was great while it lasted, and they can never lose that. Or the dark secret you never wanted to reveal, but you needed to share. How you always loved a man or woman you never dared to approach, how you were the one who was behind that drunken hit-and-run in 1994, how you could not be the father of your child, but you never told your wife you were infertile and just loved the baby when it happened to be born... --Torill Mortensen
--Afterlife by blogging  (Thinking with My Fingers)

With a clean, no-nonsense interface and existing search engine traffic, Google News didn't take long to attract a loyal following and elbow its way into the top-10 news sites, pulling in some 6 million unique visitors a month. Of course, executives at rival online news publishers couldn't help but wonder why they shouldn't just imitate Google's model and pare their budgets to the bone.

As it turns out, however, Google has a problem that is nearly as complex as its algorithms. It can't make money from Google News. --Adam L. Penenberg

--Google News: Beta Not Make Money (Wired)

Self-service has been around for decades, ever since Clarence Saunders, an American entrepreneur, opened the first Piggly Wiggly supermarket in 1916 in Memphis, Tennessee. Saunders's idea was simple, but revolutionary: shoppers would enter the store, help themselves to whatever they needed and then carry their purchases to the check-out counter to pay for them. Previously, store clerks had been responsible for picking items off the shelves; but with the advent of the supermarket, the shoppers instead took on that job themselves.
--You're hired (The Economist)

Self-service works well where there is also self-motivation. Now that I can use online booking companies, I do all the work that I used to pay a travel agent to do for me. And I like it that way, since I can do that work at 2am if I like.

I've only once used the self-checkout aisle in a Wal-Mart, and that was because I was in a hurry and there were long lines in all the other stations. One employee stood watch over four self-serve terminals.

The company is obviously trying to determine whether whatever losses ensue when customers make mistakes (honest or otherwise) will offset the cost of having to pay an employee for each register.

There are, of course, hidden costs -- the software that supports self-service has to be much more robust, since it has to train first-time users, and it has to handle all sorts of contingencies.

While I've never taught a completely online course, I do put a lot of resources online -- particularly exercises and workshops that I've given so many time that I've perfected the delivery. For instance, I barely teach MLA style in class anymore, since I have two resources (instructions for formatting MLA style papers and a works cited entry builder) that I've tweaked over the years to the point where students can use them independently.

Writing out online instructions that are detailed enough to answer all student questions takes a tremendous amount of work. I don't give my Writing for the Internet students enough workshop time to complete all their homework assignments in class, but I typically let students start an activity in class; before the due date I offer one or two open workshop periods, where I walk from computer to computer and troubleshoot.

I had initially hoped that those students who had figured out an assignment due Wednesday (create a network of simple web pages with a navigation scheme that includes a subdirectory; do some basic image-processing; and FTP the whole thing to a web space) would help out their peers -- but because I made the mistake of giving them all their exercises at first, students who were making progress felt the perfectly understandable pressure to go on to the next task, rather than indulge in a philanthropic desire to help their peers.

In the past, I have saved the "create a website structure and upload it" activity until later in the term, but then technology-shy students who had been intimidated by this onerous task were even more stressed when it came time to publish the web pages they had already written.

Of course, if I asked students to pay for their own copy of a powerful commercial HTML authoring tool, then the software would handle a lot of the fiddling details that I'm asking them to work with on their own. That's another hidden cost -- it takes time and causes stress.

But how does one measure the godliness of bacteria versus a fruit fly? (Keats opted for flies in lieu of humans, which, he said, would require "a really big bell jar.") After briefly considering omnipotence, Keats decided to measure omnipresence. Did the number of organisms increase? How fast? In the case of the fruit flies, Keats, who considers himself Jewish "by heritage," found the Christian Kyrie prayer brought about increased and statistically significant reproduction compared to the control group.--Kari Lynn Dean
--Engineering God in a Petri Dish  (Wired)

While the method is rather farcical, his philosophy is actually rather intriguing:

"Science rejects God for want of empirical evidence, and religion rejects the scientific method the moment it contradicts the Bible.

"I'm trying to explore whether faith and reason can peaceably coexist. I think they can. So this project is truly a thought experiment: By taking the assumptions of extremists on both ends of the spectrum, and combining them, I'm hoping we can sort out the implications."

The late writer's estate hasn't approved publication of the 1924 piece, a gory, over-the-top parody about a bullfight in the Spanish city of Pamplona, the manuscript's owner, Donald Stewart, told The Associated Press on Monday.

--Found Hemingway Story Won't Be Published  (Yahoo!|AP (will expire))

The Weekly Standard posted an article on its website Saturday charging Tribe with using language that closely mirrors sections of Henry J. Abraham's1974 book on Supreme Court appointments, Justices and Presidents.

And at one point in his 1985 book, Tribe lifts a 19-word passage verbatim from Abraham'stext.
--Prof Admits to Misusing Source (The Crimson)

This is the third plagiarism case involving a Harvard Law School professor in the last year.

The really big mistake comes when you treat people as authority figures when they are not expert but simply well known. There is a terrible tendency to treat people as reliable sources of fact when in fact they are simply "important" people or people who happen to be in the news. It is doubly perverse when you consider who gets counted as "important". For example, the victims of train accidents appear on television as authorities on rail policy and celebrities endorse presidential campaigns as though they are expert on politics. It's sheer insanity.

--Get it right! (New Scientist)

A great suggestion from Ron Zeno. I can't find a date on the page, but Ron says the article appeared just before the CBS News document incident.

Anywhere Books has piloted a digital bookmobile -- a van outfitted with a laptop, laser printer, bookbinding machine and cutter -- in remote areas of Uganda to print free books for children since November 2003. Now the project has plans to expand to Ghana and Macedonia. --Rural Kids Print, Bind and Read  (Wired)

One complaint that hardcore IF fans have about such derivations from the old school plain text game is that developers often get so caught up in designing the graphics and recording the sound effects that the story line, the most important part of a true interactive fiction game, gets lost in the shuffle.

The difference between such videogames and true IF might be likened to the difference between a book and the movie based on it. You might get some enjoyment out of the flick, but if you want the real story, you pick up the book.
--Interactive Fiction - An Overview (Literary Tease)

My students in "Writing for the Internet" are asked to blog the notes for their in-class oral presentations. Moiria Moira Richardson has posted an excellent overview of interactive fiction.

Another lesson is for journalists to pay attention to chatter on the Internet. Within hours of CBS making its charges -- basically that Bush was a laggard in the National Guard -- bloggers and other commentators on the Net expressed doubt over the veracity of documents that CBS used to back its story (and later posted on its Web site). Less than a day after the broadcast, the Cybercast News Service, a division of the Media Research Center in Arlington, Va., had picked up on the chatter and backed -- with its own interviews with independent experts -- the bloggers' contention that the documents were phony. The rest of the mainstream media took note, and quickly followed. But CBS was slow to pay attention. Jay Rosen, chairman of New York University's Department of Journalism, asks, "Why doesn't CBS have someone reading the Internet?" --Marshall Loeb --Lessons from the CBS News failure (CBS Marketwatch )

...Everyone gets everything he wants. I wanted a golden ticket. And for my sins, they gave me one. Brought it up to me like room service.... I was about to end all candymakers on earth... and I didn't even know it yet. --Milloway, Wood and Freese --Chocolypse Now (Freese Design)

There is little financial incentive for recycling, and recycling is generally, with a few exceptions, more expensive than dumping and making new goods from virgin materials. Yet there is a growing campaign for recycling, particularly promoted by local government - and more people are taking it up. The 'black box' outside your house is becoming a symbol of virtue, to reassure yourself that you are doing your bit. --Rob Lyons --Being seen to be green (Spiked)

I just picked up a few extra bucks reviewing the manuscript for a forthcoming freshman comp reader that included a whole chapter with about 12 readings on nature and ecology. The chapter included no articles that offered any significant challenges to environmentalist assumptions.

I dutifully put my cans and plastic bottles in a recycling bin. I save up all my junk mail and bring it to the university to recycle. I open the drapes to the east-facing windows in the winter, in order to take advantage of passive solar heat.

So it surprised me to read "recycling is generally, with a few exceptions, more expensive than dumping and making new goods from virgin materials". I know about the bet between Paul Erlich and Julian Simon, and I've blogged from time to time about environmental skepticism, but I still don't want to think that the (admittedly modest) effort I put into recycling at home makes so little impact.

blogs.setonhill.edu down

Whoops... it looks like blogs.setonhill.edu is down. I've sent a note to the system administrator, but I've got to go offline for the evening now. Let's keep our fingers crossed...

Update: Blogs are back up.

Hello,

My name is [Name Here] and I am a [My Title Goes Here] facilitating programming in both [Administrative Unit One] and [Administrative Unit Two]. My position is an assistantship through the [Office of Something] program at [Nearby University]. In my [Title of a Class Here] class I have a project where I am to interview a faculty member who does not have any close relations to [My Field]. Basically, the interview is to help us gain a faculty perspective on [topic 1], [topic 2], and [topic 3].

I was given your name by some [position title goes here] as a ?good fun professor who would be easy to talk to and interview?. I would like to conduct this interview sometime Thursday the 30th or the afternoon of Friday the 1st. This Friday the 24th also works for me and would help to give me more than enough time to turn the interview into the 4 page paper for my report but I figured it might not be enough notice. I picked these days and times thinking that you would have a normal 9-5 type schedule on campus. If this does not work for you because of classes but you would be willing to interview after 5 pm on Mon, Thurs, or Fri that would work for me as well.

I emailed all 4 of you just to simplify the email contact part. If you are available any of those 3 days or multiple nights and would not mind an interview that shouldn't take more than an hour, just email me back and . I appreciate you help in advance and understand if you have too many previous engagements to be able to conduct the interview.

Thanks for your time.

I look forward to hearing from you and meeting you.Request for Faculty Interview (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

There's a difference between "fun... easy to talk to" and "doormat".

I and three other "fun" professors got this message earlier this week. I checked my schedule, decided where I could fit this person in, and sent a reply.

I got no response.

Maybe I'm over-reacting, but since this message came on a very busy day, I'm irked.

It was a very good rhetorical strategy to mention that my name came up as "good fun professor who would be easy to talk to and interview." Of course, I don't feel particularly "fun" as I use this (carefully anonymized) message as an example of how not to write effective professional e-mail.

The message lacks the "you" attitude -- that is, the extra bit of effort that an author of professional correspondence invests in order to craft a message for the benefit of the receiver. While the title ("Request for Faculty Interview") was good, "Name Here" spent far more time than was necessary talking about him/herself.

Note the warning, "I will probably just go with the first person to email me back." This sender asked for four people's attention, knowing that he/she only needed a positive response from one, and planned in advance not to respond to each individual response. Isn't that essentially the same thing as spamming?

Since the sender put my name in the "To" line, I can see the names of the other 3 "good fun" professors -- one of whom was obviously chosen over me.

It would have been far more gracious for this author to send a single message to a single recipient:

When would be a good time to schedule an hour for an interview, for my [Title of Class Goes Here] class, sometime between now and Oct 1? I am free anytime Thursday or Friday afternoons.

I'm interested in learning more about [topics 1, 2, and 3]. I'm asking you because, according to some of my [associates], you are a "fun and good professor who would be easy to talk to and interview," so I look forward to meeting you.

Because your Sims are much more self-sufficient than in the original -- they can generally manage to eat and go to the bathroom when they need to -- you're freed up to help them out with their aspirations, which puts you more in the role of a benevolent guardian angel than an invisible day-care teacher. Moving the focus away from bodily functions and toward hopes and dreams is a subtle but important improvement. --Lore Sjöberg
--Sims 2: Face Lift of the Original  (Wired)

Great captions in this article... here's the one for the image I clipped above: "It's a Sim, playing The Sims, in The Sims 2! It's, like, Shakespearean or something."

The Last Starfighter, a world premiere science fiction musical inspired by the 1984 screenplay of the motion picture of the same name, will open the 2004-05 season of Off Broadway's Storm Theatre, Oct. 15-30.The musical marks the return of lyricist-composer Skip Kennon (Herringbone, Time and Again) and draws on the Jonathan Betuel screenplay, about a teen video-game player enlisted to save a universe. Fred Landau penned the libretto. (The movie marked the last film appearance of Robert Preston.) --The Last Starfighter, the Musical, Beams Down Into World Premiere in NYC (Playbill)

"Beams Down"? What a cliche. I thought theater people were supposed to be creative.

I need a new blog category called "retro".

You'd have thought I'd thrown rats down on the tables. One student got really angry, said he never knew what to expect in this class and now he'd always be on guard from now on. Another said he felt that I'd broken his confidence--"It's one thing to see it back and forth on e-mail, but when you print it out like that, I feel violated." --Students offended by distribution of printed listserv postings (KairosNews)

All this, because a teacher handed out printed versions of listserv discussions. Sounds like there may be some other issues at play.

I begged the Dean not to make me teach "Modern American Politics" this semester. I knew that in order to teach it properly I would have to delve into the secrets of the Bush administration. I knew that I would learn THINGS THAT HUMANS (as we say in these post-sexist times) ARE NOT MEANT TO KNOW. I feared that this would drive me insane--into shrill unholy madness. And so it has.

But up until now I have still able to teach my course. I am proud of that. Far gone in shrill unholy madness as a result of the incompetence, mendacity, malevolence, and disconnection from reality that I am, I could still communicate with my students in English and. Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Krugman R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aiiiiiii!!!

Apologies. The fits come and go. They come more quickly now. By proper effort of will I can sometimes. Ph'nglui mglw'nafh. Stop them. There. --MORNING ANNOUNCEMENTS: MISKATONIC UNIVERSITY: SEPTEMBER 16, 2004

An amusingly goofy example of Aaaiii! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh demonic fisking (a rhetorical mode that Lovecraft would have done well). Thanks for the link, Josh.

WHEN I heard the learn?d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander?d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look?d up in perfect silence at the stars. --Walt Whitman --When I heard the Learn?d Astronomer (Bartleby)

I never noticed the "unaccountable" pun in the fifth line.

William Shatner, who played the commander of the starship USS Enterprise in the '60s Star Trek series, arrived in Riverside [Iowa] Tuesday to hold auditions for four small parts in a low-budget, sci-fi movie he wrote with Star Trek co-star, Leonard Nimoy.....Although Kirk's hometown was never mentioned in the TV series, Gene Roddenberry, the show's creator and executive producer, wrote in The Making of Star Trek that Kirk was "born in a small town in the state of Iowa." --Shatner, Nimoy team up on sci-fi project (Toronto Star)

In Star Trek IV, Kirk mentions he is from Iowa. "I only work in space."

"Yoda's philosophy was quite simplistic. 'If you get angry, you're gonna lose.' 'Don't try, do.' He has a basic philosophy that is very charming. Not very profound, although young people consider it profound. I wish they would read more." --Irvin Kershner, mentor of George Lucas.

--Naked Wookiees and broken R2-D2s (CNN/AP)

Internet bloggers have drawn blood and American journalism may never be the same.... Orville Schell, dean of the School of Journalism at the University of California in Berkeley, said CBS's admission of error after days of stalling was "a landmark moment for the balance between the blogosphere and mainstream media." --Triumph of the bloggers? (CNN/Reuters)

The lead is a bit melodramatic, but the story offers useful background information (such as the reference to Trent Lott).

Blogrolling'sgone dark and the blogrolls lie limp, no shuffle and bustle as busy blogs hustle their way to the head of the queue.

Gone too are the diacriticals, small, precious marks of individualization, the QWERTY electron bursts that celebrate fresh activity, new life?our SETI receivers. Brackets and parentheses, asterisks and exclamations, plusses and minuses and equals and other arithmetic operators, all gone as we soldier on with our invisible speech. Here'smy mark, I'll make it in its absence: ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

There. But will anybody read this now? --Matthew G. Kirschenbaum --^ [Kirschenbaum's Blogrolling Outage Lament] (MGK)

I don't use the Blogrolling service on my own site, but Matt's is one of the sites whose blogrolls I consult to help guide my surfing activity.

Spam: In Your E-Mail and on Your Blog (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Wikipedia has an excellent overview of spam -- electronic junk mail. A strict definition of spam identifies it as unsolicited commercial bunk messages, but viruses that send multiple copies of infected messages, and chain letters bearing bogus virus warnings or charitable messages are responsible for another kind of spamming.

SPAM® is a canned meat product from Hormel; the name derives from "spiced ham," which is how it was initially marketed (starting in 1926). Because the cans did not require refrigeration, it was an economical and convenient way to get meat in your diet. You have probably heard of the 1970 Monty Python SPAM sketch, which features a chorus of operatic Vikings singing the praises of the ubiquitous product (which was plentiful in Allied nations during wartime, when many other products were carefully rationed). I've seen several online references to a website that credits Hormel with creating the first commercial jingle in a 1940 ad that featured the word "SPAM" repeated in a jingle sung to the tune of "My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean" (see "The SPAM Story") but that doesn't ring true -- I imagine that there were radio jingles long before that.

Unsolicited bulk messages have existed ever since there have been messages, but it is so easy today for a small number of spammers to make the internet virtually unusable.

The internet and other forms of electronic communication are not free. Someone has to build it, design software for it, and maintain it. But the cost of sending any individual message is insignificant. A marketer who sends out a million e-mail messages may get responses from a fraction of a percent of recipients, but that may be all the marketer needs in order to make money.

The tragedy of the commons describes the human tendency to take more than one's fair share of resources that appear to be abundant and are unmonitored. Originally "the commons" was a public, grassy area where people could graze their flocks. A small number of people who unethically overused this shared resource could destroy the grass completely.

Seton Hill University's internal spam filters regularly trash any e-mail sent to me from a hotmail address; this has caused some distress for students, and some tension at home (since my mother-in-law uses hotmail).

For a while, I completely gave up on my Yahoo account because of unsolicited bulk e-mail (mostly due to viruses, which flood my in box with numerous copies of unwanted messages) that rapidly filled up my in-boxes, thus preventing me from getting the messages I did want.

Competition from other advertising-supported e-mail services caused Yahoo to improve its interface; now it does a good job of filtering out the bulk messages. Occasionally, when I see a junk message in my regular in box, I feel virtuous when I identify it as junk, since by doing so I might help hide it from potentially millions of others who get the same message. I recently installed the free open-source Office add-on SPAMBayes, which learns from what I have classified as spam in the past, and predicts the spamminess of every incoming message. If it contains certain keywords that rarely if ever appear in messages that I consider to be legitimate, the spam score rises. If it contains keywords that often appear in messages that I consider legitimate, the spam score drops. If it can't predict, the message goes into an "unsure" folder, which is where messages go when they have mostly de!iberately mispe!!s w0rds designed to exploit the human ability to recognize alternate ways of spelling.

Spam in blogs is another matter. Every couple days, I receive one or two junk messages. But I've recently created the 170th blog on blogs.setonhill.edu. These blogs all exist in the same database; they are accessible according to a program that can be rather easily hacked. One day I found over 300 spam messages across the blogs, which rendered the "50 most recent comments" page unusable. I installed MT-Blacklist, a free extension to Movable Type, which cannot actually prevent the creation of spam, but does simplify the removal. MT-Blacklist has a master blacklist, which contains URLs and keywords that other MT users have banned from their blogs. All a spammer has to do is create a new URL that isn't on the list, of course, but without MT-Blacklist I think I would have given up on academic blogging.

At any rate, if you have a MovableType blog, and your MT installation includes MT-Blacklist (as all the Seton Hill blogs do), you can help keep your blog (and everyone else's) less clogged with spam if you go to "Weblog Config" and check the box "E-mail new comments." You will get an e-mail message shortly after anyone posts to your blog; the e-mail will include a link that you can use to delete the comment from your blog and add the sender's URLs to the MT-Blacklist. If the spammer is actively spamming hundreds of Seton Hill blogs at that moment, you might be able to help me block intrusions into other student blogs.

I could have sketched the layout of her blog for her with fair accuracy, but I?ve never before spoken her name. --Jill Walker
--ubiquity? (jill/txt)

An interesting epiphany describing the impersonal intimacy one can experience in the blogosphere.

Anything that lets us avoid a trip to the video-rental store, while simultaneously offering more choices of movies, sounds good at first glance. In some ways, it's the future of home entertainment.

If such a service ever does take shape, however, it'll likely include severe restrictions on what customers can do with what they've rented. The copyright wars ensure that.

The service would further reinforce a business model that reflects the entertainment industry's narrow view of the world. To Hollywood, we are nothing but ``consumers'' of ``content,'' and as digital content takes over we will rent, not purchase, what we consume.

But the Internet is a more expansive place than that. The future of video should be an expansion of choices: into dimensions far beyond the traditional tube.
--Hollywood: It's time to get creative, use the Net (SiliconValley.com)

We just had a spirited classroom discussion regarding file-sharing, as part of a panel called "Current Issues in Cyberspace." I had to cut the discussion off, but I hope students will continue it on their blogs.

Several students complained that the price of albums is too high, and that they only want one or two singles and don't want to purchase the whole album. But only one or two had any experience buying single songs from places like iTunes. That's the very service they say they are being denied, but they're not using it.

There were a few reluctant smiles when I turned their arguments around and said, "You know, I really like skydiving, but it's just too expensive for my budget. I think I'm going to steal a plane so that I can practice my God-given right to enjoy skydiving."

I have no real vested interest in popular music -- financial, emotional, or otherwise, but I do enjoy watching the rock-n-roll industry try to teach morals. This is the third generation of young people who have been carefully groomed to respond to the aesthetics of rebellion.

--Xenoblogging (Google)

Last week when I posted on a course web page a detailed explanation of how I plan to evaluate student blogs, I coined a phrase and googled it. Nobody seems to have used it before.

Now, thanks to the reach of KairosNews and a few popular bloggers who read it, several other edu-bloggers are thinking about and reflecting on the taxonomy I whipped together. The word I coined was "xenoblogging," which means the work you do to help other people's weblogs (commenting, suggesting links, following up on their ideas, giving them credit, etc.).

My main goal was to find something other than "blog three times a week, for 500 words" (or some other, equally artificial formula).

See the original post in which I introduced the subject on KairosNews: Guidelines for Evaluating Classroom Blogs.

Isolated and Stranded...and Wet (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Yesterday afternoon, if you were on campus at Seton Hill University, you might have noticed signs going up in the hallways, stating that the faculty/staff e-mail server would be down all weekend, for unavoidable emergency repairs.

If you were behind me as I was driving home in the pouring rain, you might have noticed that my third-hand Crown Victoria (which is the same age as many of my students) wouldn't go faster than 25.

If you didn't pass me when the engine died (and my power brakes and steering went out, thus giving me quite a workout) you might have noticed that I coasted downhill from downtown Greensburg to Tom Clark Ford, the dealership/service center right next to the Krispy Kreme.

If you didn't drive on past me laughing at my misfortune, you might have seen me standing in the rain reading the sign on the front door, informing me that both the dealership and service center had closed about 15 minutes ago.

If you weren't already blissfully on your way home by now, you would have noticed me climb up a steep embankment and walk, dripping, into the Krispy Kreme, where I asked to use a telephone to call my wife.

If you had been in the house with my wife, you would have seen that the baby was still sleeping and that my wife and son had just settled down to play a board game.

If you had seen my wife pulling out of the garage, you would have noticed that the drains at the bottom of our steep driveway were clogged, and that water was flooding the garage. You would have seen my wife pulling off the metal grates and frantically scooping muck out with her bare hands.

After a delay of almost an hour, you would have seen her pull up outside the Krispy Kreme, ready to pick me up.

(Damage to the garage was averted, but I'm still e-mail-less and carless, and thus can't make The Labor of Love, a service event that I really enjoyed last year.)

Update, 19 Sep: My e-mail seems to be up again. No word on the car, though.

An Idaho English teacher is in trouble for ripping up a Bible in class.

Burley High's Karen Christenson said she was trying to illustrate a point about censorship, as her sophomore students read Ray Bradbury's novel "Fahrenheit 451," which is set in a future society that commands all literature be burned. --Teacher In Trouble For Ripping Bible

I once did a scene from Dr. Faustus for a drama survey course. I did the same scene two or three different times, to demonstrate how a different acting style could bring out different themes.

At any rate, at one point, I threw a "Bible" across the room. But I immediately picked it up and showed them it was just a prop -- an ordinary book with a cross on the cover. I managed to make the point.

Maybe Christenson ripped her bible on the spur of the moment... but with a little planning, she could have made her point without risking offense.

Thanks for the e-mail, Josh.

Much of what I and a former student put in "Writing Effective E-Mail: Top 10 Tips" also applies to e-newsletters, but people are much more likely to scan (or trash) newsletters that seem irrelevant.

I like e-mail newsletters because they are self-contained -- I can print them out and read them offline, or I can download them to my digital organizer (which doesn't have internet access) knowing that I can read it while standing in line at the grocery store or during my son's piano lesson, and I won't feel disenfranchised by the fact that I can't click a link.

• What A Newsletter Can Do For Your Business
  
• 7 Formulas for Writing Articles that Get Read
  
• Writing E-Newsletters that Sell
  
• Targeted Email Newsletters Show Continued Strength

E-Mail Newsletter Writing Tips (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

With funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Committee on Institutional Cooperation conducted a study (June-November, 2003) to determine the extent to which publication of a scholarly monograph is essential for faculty to receive tenure in the humanistic disciplines.... Among the major findings are the following:

• With the exception of scholars who are doing ?creative work? or whose work is in certain subfields of Anthropology, department chairs expect a faculty member to have published (or have in press) a scholarly monograph prior to consideration for tenure.
  
• Department chairs are not willing to abandon the scholarly monograph as a standard for promotion and tenure.
  
• Only in History departments does a majority of faculty believe a book should be required (with rare exceptions) for tenure in their departments. Faculty with tenure and faculty who have not yet achieved tenure are similar in their views about this issue.
  
• Most of the faculty members surveyed do not feel a book length manuscript is necessary to present their scholarship.
  
• Department chairs and junior faculty have different perceptions about the type of support provided by the department to untenured faculty.
  
• The publication record of faculty achieving tenure has increased since the 1970s, suggesting that requirements for promotion and tenure in CIC schools have increased.
  
• Nearly one-fourth (24.5 percent) of the faculty report being asked for a subvention for one or more books. Respondents differ in their perspectives about subventions with some quite accepting of the practice and others concerned about the implications of providing subventions.
  
• Junior faculty have numerous concerns about the process of getting their work in print, including issues of market forces, time between submission and response and the changing profile of presses.
  
• Faculty members are beginning to examine electronic publications as an outlet for scholarship. A small number of departments have formally considered how electronic publications should be evaluated.
  

An analysis of these findings is contained in the full report to be distributed prior to the December 2, 2003 meeting of CIC provosts and LAS deans. --Leigh Estabrook --The Book as the Gold Standard for Tenure and Promotion in the Humanistic Disciplines

The graphics on this page are broken, unfortunately.

Via MGK.

Update, 18 Sep: Shortly after I brought the broken graphics to Estabrook's attention, the webmaster got the message and fixed them.

Our first and most important line of defense against academic dishonesty is simply good teaching. Cheating and plagiarism often arise in a vacuum created by routine, lack of interest and overwork. Professors who give the same assignment every semester, fail to guide students in the development of their projects and have little interest in what the students have to say contribute to the academic environment in which much cheating and plagiarism occurs. --Lawrence M. Hinman
--How to Fight College Cheating (The Washington Post)

FactCheck.org fills a journalistic void. Major media outlets tend to report on the strategy behind campaign commercials rather than analyzing the content for veracity. Even though Jackson pioneered ad watches for CNN, the cable network let him go last year.

"I've seen the press generally put less emphasis on ad watches and fact-check-type stories," Jackson said. "Political coverage is too much weighed toward covering the sport of politics: who's ahead, who's behind." --Louise Witt --Finding Truth on the Internet  (Wired)

After much delay, the results of this year's BetaComp are in. I was pleased to see that once again, each entrant found at least *something* that no other entrant did, and no single entrant found more than about 50% of all the bugs that were found. This reinforces the prevailing theory that several testers (and possibly multiple rounds of testing) are most effective in ferreting out all the bugs. --Jess Knoch
--BetaComp 2004 Results (rec.games.int-fiction)

The "BetaComp" is a competition for beta-testing interactive fiction computer games. In the world of literature, a good editor with a sharp pencil can make the difference between a mediocre novel and a critically acclaimed classic.

Beta-testers play a game when the author thinks it's finished. They often try solutions the author never dreamed of -- some of which cause errors that make the game unwinnable, others of which are just annoyances. It's up to the author to use the beta report(s) to revise the game, either so that the alternative solutions the beta-testers tried all work, or there is some belilevable (or at least humorous) in-game reason why a legitimate attempt is disallowed.

The winner is Graham Holden, who found a lot of bugs and wrote a detailed report for the benefit of the designer.

I found it much more effective to ask one or two beta-testers to look at my work in progress, then as soon as I get the reports, fix the problems and send it off to another few testers.

The other option, which is sending the same version out to six or eight people at once, means that many of the testers will be frustrated by the same bugs, and you'll have scores of pages of transcripts and suggestions to go through.

The problem with comments, open forums, e-mail discussion lists and other user-generated online content is that it takes work -- usually a moderator or trust system -- to make sure the comments stay relevant, clean and spam-free. In fact, spammers have made old Usenet groups unreadable, have flooded most e-mail inboxes, and have brought their multi-level marketing messages to every open chat room, bulletin board and online guest book they can get their digital paws on. --Mark Glaser

--Bloggers Declare War on Comment Spam, but Can They Win? (Online Journalism Review)

A good plug for Jay Allen, whose free MT-Blacklist helps me manage spam on SHU student blogs.

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim. --Richard Cory Interactive Adventure  (LLamas)

Quite frankly, this was a disappointment, but it was still sick, so it might still have some morbid entertainment value. (The climax of the game is visual, which overwhelms and in my opinion distorts the literary message of the poem.)

Via Giant Robots in Space Therapy (which wins this month's "Coolest Blog Title" award.)

You are now registered for Serious Games Summit at the Loews L'Enfant Plaza Hotel in Washington, DC on October 18-19, 2004. Serious Games Summit Registration Confirmation (Serious Games Summit)

The Seton Hill administration came up with most of the cost of registering for the conference, which was very generous, since I'm not presenting a paper.

My boss agreed to a plan to sqeeze a little more out of another source. My parents came up with a place for me to stay and offered to send me gas money.

When I saw the $25 discount code publicized on Water Cooler Games, that clinched it -- I can make it.

Still rejoicing in the $25 I had just saved, I was very amused by the drop-down list that asked me, "What is your budget for your current game/simulation project(s)?" The first answer was "$12 million or more" and the last one was "$0 to $100K".

I selected "$0 to $100K," which is accurate.

(I will be teaching a course on computer game culture and theory, so this conference isn't just a joyride.)

I have never posted before, and I hope that I am doing this correctly. This is in response to the questions about the dates of the birth of the historical Jesus of Nazareth. --Dennis G. Jerz, 1993. --Clueless Usenet Newbie: ''Re: Jesus' Birthday'' (alt.folklore.urban)

What a dork I was.

I was... am part of the Eternal September -- the wave of newbies that logged on in 1993 and ruined Usenet for good.

Usenet is a large collection of electronic newsgroups, which originated in 1979. Since newsgroups predate the World Wide Web, it's perhaps misleading to say that a newsgroup is kind of like a threaded discussion forum -- but that comparison will do for starters.

According to the Usenet News HowTo (which apparently predates the convention for naming such documents FAQs), "The Usenet is a huge worldwide collection of discussion groups. Each discussion group has a name, e.g. comp.os.linux.announce, and a collection of messages. These messages, usually called articles, are posted by readers like you and me who have access to Usenet servers, and are then stored on the Usenet servers."

Usenet messages look very much like e-mail, but the author of an e-mail has to know the address of an individual person in order to send it to that person. If you subscribe to an e-mail list, the articles are "pushed" into your in box on somebody else's schedule. They might be compiled and sent daily or weekly, but they still land in your in-box with all the mail that has been sent to you alone.

The author of a Usenet article sends it to a group (my favorite is rec.arts.int-fiction, though I mostly lurk there these days). Anyone who wants to see what has been posted lately to rec.arts.int-fiction fires up a newsreader, and points it at that address.

If you've used a discussion forum or a blog, the actions I describe may seem trivial. If your e-mail reader lets you use multiple folders and complex filing and archiving techniques in present-day e-mail readers, it may seem positively boring. But as in the dark days before Google, finding and archiving online information was difficult.

Vannevar Bush, writing in the 1940s, noted that only a generation or two earlier, the average scientist could find and read all the important publications in a particular field. As the amount of knowledge produced increased, however, it became more and more difficult to keep up. Even if you did have the time to read all the relevant words that were written, the stuff that you wanted to read was harder and harder to find, because you had to wade through ever-mounting stacks of stuff that you didn't want to read. (His solution, the Memex, was ahead of its time.)

Usenet was significant because its users organized themselves (with some help from a mysterious non-existent cabal) into hundreds and thousands of hierarchical channels (e.g. "rec" for "recreation," "arts" for "the opposite of science" and "int-fiction" for "interactive fiction"), and made at least somewhat serious efforts to confine their conversations to the assigned subject areas.

Unlike a message board, the newsgroup servers would archive only a certain number of messages at a time. If you wanted to keep a message, you had to save a copy of it locally.

E-mail readers were very primitive back when they were used mostly by geeks who didn't need no steenkin' icons or menus. Newsgroup postings were plain text -- no icons, no graphics, no navigation buttons. This wasn't some odd retro choice -- it was the command-line interface. You typed something to the computer, and it typed back to you. That was how computer interfaces worked (and it was a great improvement over paper tape and punch cards).

So what about the Endless September? At the beginning of every academic year, as a new crop of college students started playing around with their network accounts, Usenet old-timers complained that the communities they had nurtured and maintained according to the rules of netiquette were invaded by clueless newbies who (like me) trampled the flowerbeds, tracked mud into the front parlor, didn't clear our plates when we were finished eating, laughed at all the wrong times, and didn't laugh at the right times. We didn't know when to post a smiley, when to attribute a quotation, and when to STFU.

I cringe when I read what I wrote back then. Why did I post this to a newsgroup devoted to urban folklore? I certainly never expected it to be searchable and clickable years later (after a website called DejaNews published nearly decades of Usenet archives, and Google later bought them out).

Jorn Barger, the legendary netizen who coined the word "weblog," once told me there ought to be a separate netnews ghetto for "you guys" (e.g. academics).

Note that if you click on these links, you will see the messages in your browser window, neatly laid out with an interface that groups and nests threads, and offers complex search capability. That's really nothing like the technological context in which Usenet articles were originally created (on a line-editor -- a word processor that edits only one line of text at a time) and read (mostly in a linear fashion).

Depending on your news reader's settings and the activity level of the newsgroup, posts often disappeared from view after a few days. Unless you archived each message as it came into your reader, or someone volunteered to post archives online, older messages were often irretrievable. As a result, authors were expected to excerpt and cite the relevant passages in posts to which they responded.

While only a handful of students regularly read my blog, I'm sure that my own blogging style influences the blogging of my students. This is true of any teacher in any subject, however. I like to see a good debate in class, but when I see students using their blogs to go at each other's throats, my blood pressure rises.

A few students who have been blogging on their own personal sites for years have noted that they are having a bit of difficulty adjusting to the more formal tone and subject matter that bloggers at SHU tend to adopt. John Spurlock's students are blogging about sex, and Mike Arnzen blogs such topics as "Famine Fiction's Fecal Fixation", and student Kate Cielinski recently renamed her blog "Zombie Hotties and Vampire Vixens." While the subject matter is hardly parochial, the tone is appropriately academic. One doesn't see much casual use of the f-word on the academic blogs, for instance, though it may be common in the online diary a student has kept for years on some other personal site.

While I'll probably never feel comfortable with "f---", I don't mind "sucks" or "lousy" -- two words that used to conjure up shocking images, but which are now innocuous and nostalgic, respectively.

There are certain conventions of online text that I'll probably never give up (such as, "Avoid writing 'Click here!'"), and others that I won't miss at all when they fade away.

While the basic principles of Usenet netiquette remain useful, changing technology has made some of the specifics pretty much irrelevant (e.g. don't use a .sig file longer than your post; carefully edit your replies in order to preserve the chain of nested indented quotations; avoid top-posting). It's always interesting to me to watch my students testing out strategies to drive traffic to their blogs, or giving each other hints on how to make the most of their blogs. I'm trying to resist the urge to save them from all the bumps in the road they are likely to encounter.

It's September, and I'm unleashing another crop of bloggers on the world. But some have been blogging already for years, and have developed a culture all their own. They're going to trample a few of my flowers and track a little dirt on my carpet, but that's okay, because I don't live in a museum.

Last night, in an e-mail discussion list for teacher-bloggers, one member lamented that one of her students was using his blog to trash her and her methods -- in part because she has asked him to apply certain standards of academic decorum to his academic blog. Those standards rankled him, because it meant that he was being asked to change the writing style he had developed in his personal journal.

The discussion that ensued reminded me that a little more than ten years ago, I was a clueless newbie, fumbling my way towards basic internet literacy. It seems like I blinked, and suddenly I'm working with a group of online teachers on establishing standards -- however informal and nebulous -- and debating where to draw the line.

I have never done this before, and I hope that I am doing this correctly.

Update, 16 Sep: Frank Carver describes his own experience with Usenet before newbies like me arrived.

[O]nline media can take us and our readers to places journalism hasn't been before. And in those places, our values may be obstacles or antiques.

Please consider:

Balance/Fairness/Wholeness
Hypertext links to more information can guarantee thorough reporting.

But we should decide:

• When we should link to ads, to editorials or columns, to sites of partisan organizations, hate groups, charities seeking contributions, other news media.
  
  
• What to do about readers leaving a report (via links) before they read all sides.
  
  
• Since we can, when we should use all the photos and words from the scene.

--Online Journalism Ethics: A New Frontier (journalism.org)

One proposal put forward is that Newton's idea that the force of gravity weakens as distance increases may be incorrect over very large spaces, and may drop off over very long distances. --Robin McKie

--Space probes feel cosmic tug of bizarre forces  (Guardian)

NEW YORK - It'snot just students who need to brush up on their writing.

A majority of U.S. employers say about one-third of workers do not meet the writing requirements of their positions, according to a survey by the College Board'sNational Commission on Writing.

--Survey show workers shud write better (MSNBC/AP)

I'm sorry, this is just TOO easy. Is this supposed to be a joke?

(Look closely at the headline.)

It is an article of faith with millions of Americans, most of them on the left, that George W. Bush is stupid. Many reasonable people think his policies are ill-advised, but millions more insist Bush must be a moron because he sounds stupid... In a letter to be published in The Atlantic's October issue, Price calls presenile dementia "a fairly typical Alzheimer's situation that develops significantly earlier in life. . . . President Bush's `mangled' words are a demonstration of what physicians call `confabulation' and are almost specific to the diagnosis of a true dementia." He adds that Bush should be "started on drugs that offer the possibility of retarding the slow but inexorable course of the disease."


--A medical cause for 'Bushisms'? (Boston Globe)

"Turn off the television and read the newspaper. There's more truth in your local paper than you'll find on CNN." -- James McBride, author and musician, concluding his remarks at tonight's lecture here at Seton Hill University. --James McBride Lecture (New Media Journalism @ Seton Hill University)

On April 12 1979, Kevin McKenzie of Arpanet's MsgGroup made the following suggestion:


Perhaps we could extend the set of punctuation we use, i.e.: If I wish to indicate that a particular sentence is meant with tongue-in-cheek, I would write it so:

"Of course you know I agree with all the current administration's policies -)."

The '-)' indicates tongue-in-cheek.


At that time, the initial response was less than enthusiastic and the idea sank into oblivion.

Two years later, Scott Fahlman, a professor from the University of Carnegie Mellon (Pittsburgh) sent this message:


19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman

From: Scott E Fahlman

I propose the following character sequence for joke markers:

:-)

Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark
things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use

:-(


From the Fahlman message, the phenomenon expanded at great speed. First, it propagated to other universities and research laboratories, then worldwide. A few months later, tens of variants began to appear in messages, becoming more and more elaborate.


However, not everybody agreed that Scott or McKenzie were the true inventors of this system. Some chronologies assure that PLATO educational system users began using smiley characters probably as early as 1972.


The main problem was that the original messages in which the smiley was invented had been lost... until September 2002. After a significant effort to locate it, the original post made by Fahlman on the CMU CS general Bboard was retrieved by Jeff Baird from an October 1982 Vax backup tape. To our knowledge, the McKenzie message has never been retrieved. --FIRST SMILEYS (APRIL 1979)  (old-computers.com)

The full archives of the MSGGROUP discussion used to be available at www.tcm.org, but that link is now defunct. Much of the site (I don't know how much) is still archived at http://web.archive.org/web/20020209153802/www.tcm.org/msggroup/.

At any rate, I pulled McKenzie's original post and the first response, and did a preliminary search for the text string "-)" that came up negative. I used this subject for a class years ago.


>http://jerz.setonhill.edu/resources/clippings/smiley/emoticon.txt

McKenzie says "This idea is not mine, but stolen from a Reader's Digest article I read long ago on a completly different subject." While McKenzie himself seems to have vanished into the ether, I did at one point head to the library where I looked at microfilm copies of several years of Reader's Digest articles. I found one interesting article about the messages a family leaves on a refrigerator, but I couldn't imagine how McKenzie could get "-)" from that.

In his book Strong Opinions, Vladimir Nabokov describes, with some amusement, journalist Alden Whitman sending him questions in April 1969. According to Nabokov, of the dozen or so questions, only three of N's answers made it into the New York Times article. He suspects that the unpublished answers will appear as a future "Special to the New York Times." (Here's a link to what seems to be a transcript of the article.)

When asked, "How do you rank yourself among writers (living) and of the immediate past?", Nabokov writes,

I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile--some sort of a concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your question. (133-4)

I am fairly sure that Reader's Digest exerpted Nabokov's book... if I weren't up to my neck in unrelated work, I'd try to dig up that reference.

(Other sources have noted Nabokov's "supine round bracket," but I don't think I have seen anyone make the connection between McKenzie and Nabokov. So I really should turn up the citation.)

McKenzie's contribution is often overlooked now because, well, it was overlooked when he originally made it... but since his suggestion was for "tongue in cheek," not a "smiley," it's probably inaccurate to use MacKenzie's post to indicate "the first smiley". I think "-)" for "tongue in cheek" probably failed because it's a literal depiction of a metaphor. The symbol represents a metaphor, which represents an ironic, detached mode of speaking. The ":-)" figure is an icon that represents something far more immediate and informative. As much as I hate to quote the lyrics to "It's a Small World After All," it's probably true that 'A smile means friendship to everyone," while I wouldn't expect speakers of other languages to understand what "tongue in cheek" is supposed to mean.

The popular online pastime known as blogging has found its way into the English classrooms at Georgia Tech.

In an innovative approach, Dr. Charles Tryon and Dr. Doreen Piano have both integrated blogging into their English 1101 classes this semester for the first time. --Jeff Wei

--LCC professors explore weblogging in English classes (Technique)

I'm afraid I don't know what "LCC" means in the headline of this article.

As a side note, I'm intrigued by the design of the paper.... it formats the page according to the size of your browser window. It's cool to see, but I'm not sure it's useful. What if I want to send a link to something that's on page 2 of the article as I view it, but your browser window puts that text on page 3? That kind of uncertainty would keep me from linking to specific sections.

Article found via Scribblingwoman.

"While trying to improve math, science, and technology in our schools, we've neglected writing," said Commission member Gaston Caperton, president of the College Board, which founded the Commission. "Writing is a fundamental professional skill. Most of the new jobs in the years ahead will emphasize writing. If students want professional work in service firms, in banking, finance, insurance, and real estate, they must know how to communicate on paper clearly and concisely."

--Writing Skills Necessary for Employment, Says Big Business (The National Commission on Writing)

This is a press release associated with "Writing: A Ticket to Work... Or a Ticket Out (pdf/356k)".

Fie on the organization for releasing their findings as a PDF. I'm going to print out for later.

Thanks for the e-mail, Mike.

Called Ka-on, which means "flower sound" in Japanese, the gadget consists of a doughnut-shaped magnet and coil at the base of a vase.

It hooks up to a CD player, TV or stereo and relays sounds up through a plant's stem and out via the petals.
-- Flower power turns up the volume (BBC)

Thanks for the odd link, Rosemary.

While some early reviews bemoan the fact that elements of Fable had to be scaled back, it'sclear that the game is still remarkably ambitious. As the player'scharacter ages, and as the world changes around him ("him? because plans for female heros were among those cut), he can choose at almost any time to explore and adventure in the world, pick up the plot of the hero'sjourney, or try to use the actions available in the simulated world to route around what would be the next necessary step in a hoop-jumping adventure game. And, what'smore, this world isn't just a graphical world. It'salso a linguistic one. It'sone in which the work of writers -- James Leach chief among them -- is central. --Noah Wardrip-Fruin --Writing Fable -- part one (http://grandtextauto.org)

An illuminating analysis of the writing that went into this X-Box game. I look forward to more!

While there were times in which some students wrote longer messages, more often than not, the posts were short, merely links to other documents, or text that was "cut and pasted" from another source. There was very little writing that could be described as reflective, dynamic, collaborative, or interactive. There was almost no exchange or conversation between posters, and no"themed" group writing project emerged from any of the blogs, which was one of the goals of the assignment. It wasn't even clear if the students were reading other posts. Individuals made their posts in an erratic and inconsistent manner, and then they moved on.

In other words, the experiment failed. --Steven D. Krause --When Blogging Goes Bad: A Cautionary Tale About Blogs, Emailing Lists, Discussion, and Interaction (StevenDKrause.com)

Everyone learns when an educator reflects on his or her mistakes.

I've seen many instructors who are excited about blogs become disappointed when their students don't share their enthusiasm. I don't have a crystal ball that will tell me the magic formula that will get all students excited about blogging, but an "experiment" in which an instructor announces, "Let's all play around with sticks and straw and see whether we can make baskets," or "Let's all bang on piano keys and see what happens" is not any more likely to be successful than an experiment in which the instructor says "Let's all look at some books and put some words on the page and see what kind of critical writing results."

So kudos to Krause for making such a public statement, which offers pointed and valuable criticism of the unbridled enthusiam we as edubloggers bring to our classroom blogging.

In my present job, I teach only undergraduates, in a program that is mostly female, at a school that only became officially co-educational a few years ago (it used to be a women's college). So the gender and power relationships that I experience are very different from those that Krause describes. Since the "new media journalism" program I'm watching over is young, I have mostly freshmen and sophomores, most of whom are just beginning to get a grasp on how to think about and work with the kinds of complex texts and ideas that lead to the sort of complex discussions Krause can expect his graduate students to have on a regular basis.

I resist telling students how often to blog or how long their entries should be, because I worry that they may stop writing when they reach the magic frequency or volume. I do see the value in keeping assignment parameters open, but that can create anxiety in students, who feel comfortable knowing exactly what is expected. (This is why I recently blogged a framework for evaluating a blogging portfolio.)

Further, I don't use blogs as a replacement for the listserv or threaded discussion list... Krause notes at the conclusion of his essay that blogging works well for "individual students publishing texts they own".

I do give each student his or her own blog, for them to keep after the class is over. I don't give them any extra credit for personalizing their blogs, and I even warn them that if they fiddle endlessly with their stylesheets instead of writing, they aren't fulfilling their obligations as student bloggers. Still, one of the early presentations in my "Writing for the Internet" class was on how to personalize your blog, and a blogging veteran has voluntarily posted a personalization tutorial for this year's newbies.

I've spoken with numerous professors who say that in just about any class, for just about any activity, a third of the students will be so excited and eager they will practially teach themselves, and a third will do the bare minimum required, or perhaps not even that. Much of teaching involves setting up an environment in which the middle third has to decide which way to go. (Meanwhile, you also have to challenge the excited third and encourage the disinterested third; I find it very difficult to serve all three groups equally well.)

Perhaps in a course like "Writing for the Internet," where students have presumably chosen because they like writing or computers or both, I may find a different dynamic. But we'll see.

I'm beginning to feel more strongly that one of the great uses of blogging is that the hyper-involved students can get a tremendous amount of feedback from their peers.

When history books are written, bloggers' real contribution to the 2004 election may well turn out to be in providing leagues of amateur sleuths to fact-check political controversy.... The Bush memo story has shown the Internet's broader power of linking thousands of readers together, as much as it has demonstrated the intrinsic power of blogs themselves. --John Borland --Bloggers drive hoax probe into Bush memos (ZD Net)

Thanks for the link, Mike.

CBS's Dan Rather is holding his ground on the veracity of the memos, saying the memos come from a reliable source.

Drudge is down at the moment, but yesterday I was amused to see that Drudge was putting the "th" in "Rather" in superscript.

A blog is the perfect vehicle for an analysis of a complex document, since you can actually link to the document and let your readers inspect it yourself. While an online version of a story written for another media may offer the same service, typically reporters are trained to summarize for the benefit of the masses. Most readers won't take the time to check original sources, but bloggers are already used to writing for small audiences of highly committed readers. Throwing in a link that would only be of interest to a handfull of obsessive readers (who might also be bloggers) helps perpetuate a line of inquiry that the traditional media might not continue.

When I blogged about the memo story the other day, I gave in to a momentary whimsical fancy, imagining that I might be able to make an exciting career out of my knowlede of geeky stuff like typefaces and typewriters.

My "Writing for the Internet" students on average guessed that a list of significant innovations in online writing all took place within their lifetimes (with the exception of the dates for the founding of IBM, Apple, and hard drives, each of which was placed, on average, in the early 80s). Bloggers are writers who are perhaps more aware than most about issues involving writing and technology. The technology of writing is so ubiquitous it is largely transparent to those who haven't studied it.

Would the Bush memo story have moved across the blogosphere so quickly if the amateur knowledge required had involved, say, Shetland ponies and inner tubes?

Er... come to think of it, if there were reports of a presidential scandal involving Shetland ponies and inner tubes, the mainstream media outlets wouldn't need any help from bloggers to push the story along.

Welcome to the exciting world of hurricane journalism!

While your highly paid colleagues on the anchor desk are broadcasting from the dry safety of a heavily fortified television studio, you and your camera crew will be out in the maw of the storm, risking your lives for no good reason.

? What you should wear: Always choose the flimsiest rain jacket available, to visually dramatize the effect of strong winds. All foul-weather gear should be brightly colored in the event you're swept out to sea or sucked down a drainage culvert, and someone actually goes searching for you.

--On the beach, waiting for Frances (Miami Herald)

When the reporters write a story about the reporters waiting around waiting for news to happen, you know it's time to go reorganize your sock drawer.

On April 19, 2002, U.S. District Judge Stephen N. Limbaugh Sr. ruled that video games do not convey ideas and thus enjoy no constitutional protection. As evidence, Saint Louis County presented the judge with videotaped excerpts from four games, all within a narrow range of genres, and all the subject of previous controversy. Overturning a similar decision in Indianapolis, Federal Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner noted: "Violence has always been and remains a central interest of humankind and a recurrent, even obsessive theme of culture both high and low. It engages the interest of children from an early age, as anyone familiar with the classic fairy tales collected by Grimm, Andersen, and Perrault are aware." Posner adds, "To shield children right up to the age of 18 from exposure to violent descriptions and images would not only be quixotic, but deforming; it would leave them unequipped to cope with the world as we know it." Many early games were little more than shooting galleries where players were encouraged to blast everything that moved. Many current games are designed to be ethical testing grounds. They allow players to navigate an expansive and open-ended world, make their own choices and witness their consequences. The Sims designer Will Wright argues that games are perhaps the only medium that allows us to experience guilt over the actions of fictional characters. In a movie, one can always pull back and condemn the character or the artist when they cross certain social boundaries. But in playing a game, we choose what happens to the characters. In the right circumstances, we can be encouraged to examine our own values by seeing how we behave within virtual space. --Henry Jenkins --Reality Bytes: Eight Myths About Video Games Debunked  (PBS: The Video Game Revolution)

Part of PBSs "The Video Game Revolution," a companion website to a show that I probably won't be able to see anytime soon. Via GTA, where I just noticed Nick Montfort's excellent "Academic vs. Developer, They Will Fight Eternally."

A computer game written by Douglas Adams is being revived to coincide with a new BBC Radio 4 series of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.

The text adventure will appear on the station's website and was described by the late Adams as "the first game to move beyond being 'user friendly'".

"It's actually 'user insulting' and because it lies to you as well it's also 'user mendacious,'" he said.

--Radio 4 revives Hitchhiker's game (BBC)

The text game was available on Adams's own website for some time. While there was no link to download it, if you played it on the site, a playable copy of it appears in your web cache (provided you have a separate player for the game).

The story indicates the new version will be illustrated.

"People fall for it all the time," said Greg Paradee, a Chatting AIM Bot, or CAB, fan. "It acts so much like a real human, sometimes it's hard not to fall for it. The bot ... keeps conversation going with normal, everyday questions, so people answer those thinking it's a real person."

--Beware of Bots Bearing Messages (Wired)

In this age of computer virus paranoia, I wouldn't have used a "beware" headline for this story.

Note also that the author casually links to the Wikipedia entry on Infocom. (See "Librarian: Don't Use Wikipedia as Source")

Student Impressions of Internet History Milestones (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

This morning I gave my students a randomized list of key events in the history of the internet, and asked them to estimate the year when each event happened. "Average" gives the average of all student guesses. "Actual" gives the actual date. "Diff" gives the difference.

	Event	Average	Actual	Diff
	IBM founded	1980.6	1911	69.6
	first computer with a disk drive	1983.7	1956	27.7
	first computer sold with a keyboard and monitor	1984.8	1960	24.8
	mouse (pointing device)	1988.0	1963	25.0
	word "hypertext" coined	1988.0	1965	23.0
	internet created	1986.6	1969	17.6
	working computer hypertext system demonstrated	1989.0	1968	21.0
	first e-mail message sent	1987.0	1971	16.0
	Apple Computer Co. founded	1982.1	1976	6.1
	first commercial computer game	1984.6	1978	6.6
	CD (compact disc)	1986.4	1981	5.4
	Microsoft Windows	1987.9	1983	4.9
	HyperCard (hypertext system for home computers)	1991.0	1983	8.0
	World Wide Web created	1990.8	1990	0.8
	first graphical web browser created	1990.0	1993	-3.0

Some of these details are fairly obscure -- at least, for the vast majority of people on the planet who don't get their jollies researching the history of technology. So I'm generally pleased with what I saw.

The collective intelligence of the class was able to sort these events roughly in chronological order, which suggests they have a certain familiarity with the medium of the internet. But it looks like they underestimated by about half the amount of time that has passed since these milestones. They got more accurate with more recent events.

The average answer for the date of the creation of the World Wide Web is correct, but graphical browsers are actually a few years older than the average figure guessed by the students.

Historical Awareness of the Internet (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Most college students today would probably say that they feel very comfortable using the internet. Some really and truly are expert users, with a deep understanding of the function and history of the internet. But I find that when they first arrive at college, most students bring with them an experience that is shaped (and in many ways limited) by the social and entertainment uses of the internet. While I would say about a quarter of my "Writing for the Internet" students had used weblogs before , several students who had kept LiveJournal accounts didn't consider that an experience with online authoring or weblogging.

According to web design expert Jakob Nielsen, "The idea that children are masters of technology and can defeat any computer-related difficulty is a myth." Nielsen's research involved sitting and watching as children from age 6 to 12 struggled to use various web pages. My own teaching experience is with college students, but I can see that most leave high school with only the most basic sense of how to use the internet in their research.

I teach a new crop of college freshmen each year. They are trained to use Google to find "the answer" online; they often aren't terribly critical of what Google decides to put at the top of the list. Every year I have to tap-dance, plead, and cajole in order to get them to see the difference between the article in a peer-reviewed academic journal that is only accessible through a library database and an easily Google-able resource such as this "History of a Victorian Era Robot."

But most recognize that college is supposed to push them outside their "comfort zone" and into the world beyond. Many are amazed that after a fifteen-minute demonstration, they are online authors. (See Vanessa Kolberg's, "Look at Me, I Have a Blog!") I love seeing this kind of enthusiasm, and I hope I can sustain it after the newness of online publishing wears off.

At my previous university, I taught "Writing Electronic Text" as a 300-level course. The class began with theory, then moved to web design, and also included a researched essay. That class was my one shot at teaching HTML, hypertext theory, and alternative forms of e-text such as interactive fiction -- so I loaded quite a lot into it. (I'm bracing myself for what Will, a survivor of that class, is going to say about this blog entry!)

In my present position, "Writing for the Internet" is about half freshmen, most of whom won't be taught how to write a college research paper until next term. They are generally very comfortable with computers and writing (though not always equally), but it's an entry level class. The "New Media Journalism" class includes two 300-level media courses (one is "Media Aesthetics" and the other is "Media and Culture") as well as a senior projects course, so there will be plenty of time for advanced research papers and in-depth projects.

My "Writing for the Internet" students generally have less college-level experience than the students to whom I used to teach "Writing Electronic Text," but that's OK. Since most are recent high-school graduates, they are used to writing assignments that value personal expression. Since one kind of weblog is an online diary, I can introduce weblogs right away. Students can begin writing in an informal, personal voice. As they begin to develop an academic voice, I can ask them to adjust their online writing style. But more important, they can begin to feel the rhythms of webtext right away. After they've done online writing for a while, I will gradually introduce the theory. I hope they will nod and say, "Yes, I noticed that on my own, and here's somebody who's laid out categories and terminology to help me understand it!"

So far, so good.

When I first started teaching full-time in 1998, I asked all my students very early in the term what they remembered about the first time they used a word processor. After four or five years, I stopped asking that question, because almost all the answers were, "I don't remember."

The internet changes so rapidly (just a few weeks ago, I would have capitalized "internet") that the cyberculture that gave birth to online file-sharing, blogs, the WWW, and even the genesis of the internet itself is as hazy and mythologically distant to most of my students as the history of the transistor radio and the cathode ray tube was to me when I was in college.

If I have time in class today, I plan to ask my students to estimate the dates of various key events in the development of cyberspace and hypertext-- birth of the internet, the first e-mail, etc. I'll publish the results as soon as I've compiled them.

We don't have cable TV at home, so I don't watch much TV. My mother-in-law occasionally tapes educational shows from PBS, and sends them up to us. In 2000, when my son was 2, she filled a whole tape with "Between the Lions" (about a family of lions that lives in a library... get it? Between the lions?). While this is supposed to be public television, every show began and end with a classic soft-sell advertisement for eToys. A banjo strumming, a maternal voice humming and "oohing" a soothing tune, and ad copy that tries to connect a show about reading to a website that sells toys. We watched those tapes over and over again, usually pausing it in the middle of the eToys theme music. Sometimes if Peter's attention had wandered, the sound of the eToys theme music caused him to come running from the next room, crying because he didn't want me to shut off the tape.

One day, I mentioned offhand that eToys had gone under.

My wife was shocked... the ads were such a constant presence in our house, and the content of the ads somehow suggested that eToys had been around when you were a kid, and will be there when you are a grandparent.

eToys was a dot-com.

   The memos were written using a proportional typeface, where letters take up variable space according to their size, rather than fixed-pitch typeface used on typewriters, where each letter is allotted the same space. Proportional typefaces are available only on computers or on very high-end typewriters that were unlikely to be used by the National Guard.
   The memos include superscript, i.e. the "th" in "187th" appears above the line in a smaller font. Superscript was not available on typewriters.
   The memos included "curly" apostrophes rather than straight apostrophes found on typewriters.
   The font used in the memos is Times Roman, which was in use for printing but not in typewriters. The Haas Atlas -- the bible of fonts -- does not list Times Roman as an available font for typewriters.
   The vertical spacing used in the memos, measured at 13 points, was not available in typewriters, and only became possible with the advent of computers.

--False Documentation? Questions Arise About Authenticity of Newly Found Memos on Bush's Guard Service (ABC News)

When I mentioned the memos to my wife the other day, she noted that the White House spokesperson seemed unusually calm when fielding reporter's questions about this latest scandal. Since I don't watch much TV news, I wouldn't have been able to pick up on that detail.

Regarding the efforts to compile the data I listed above... wouldn't that be a cool job? Using my finely honed paper-grading skills to determine the political fate of a nation!

"It is a curious thing," remarked Holmes, "that a typewriter has really quite as much individuality as a man's handwriting. Unless they are quite new, no two of them write exactly alike. Some letters get more worn than others, and some wear only on one side. Now, you remark in this note of yours, Mr. Windibank, that in every case there is some little slurring over of the 'e,' and a slight defect in the tail of the 'r.' There are fourteen other characteristics, but those are the more obvious."

"A Case of Identity," Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle.

A ROBOT that will generate its own power by eating flies is being developed by British scientists.

The idea is to produce electricity by catching flies and digesting them in special fuel cells that will break down sugar in the insects' skeletons and release electrons that will drive an electric current. --Robot eats flies to make power (news.com.au/The Daily Telegraph)

At the moment, this tremendous technological breakthrough requires the services of human attendants, who catch the flies and gently feed them to the robot.

I'm sure there is some deep, philosophical observation worth making here...

Whoops, gotta go... my robot is hungry.

Your online participation is evaluated mostly by your portfolio -- a collection of your best blog entries, that represent your developing intellectual engagement with the literary works we have studied.
--Framework for a Weblog Portfolio (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I'm using weblogs in my American Lit course. I thought the experiment went well when I did it last year, but students were a little anxious about how they would be evaluated. Some dreaded not being told what to blog about, while others hated being assigned topics (we called that "forced blogging").

This year, I am posting occasional "recommended blog topics," for those who need to kick-start their critical thinking apparatus. But more important, I feel, is the adjustment in the way I evaluate weblogs.

The very fact that blogging is on the syllabus will of course affect the kind of blogging that students will do; many who would never blog voluntarily are being forced to do so in order to earn a grade. Of course, many students would never otherwise read the books we assign, or write the research papers we assign, so there's nothing really new about that.

I resist forcing students to blog, say, three times a week, or to write entries that are 200 words long. Those guidelines are fine for traditional journaling exercises, but they kill the creativity and spontaneity of blogs.

I do want students to feel that their blogs are "theirs," but at the same time I am asking them to move beyond the personal writing with which they may already feel comfortable, and instead use their blogs to develop their critical thinking and writing ability.

I have posted a general outline for the blogging portfolio, which asks students to submit blog entries under several different categories: "Coverage" "Depth," "Interaction," "Discussion," "Xenoblogging," and "Wildcard".

Update: Some feedback offered by George and scribblingwoman.

For math and science geeks it was a badge of honor, nestled neatly into a plastic pocket protector along with a handful of stubby pencils.

And then, one dark day in 1972, with the advent of the pocket calculator, the slide rule went the way of the abacus. Why fiddle around with the arcane log scales and indexes required to use a slide rule when an inexpensive calculator required nothing more of its owner than the ability to push a few buttons? --Michelle Delio
--Slide Rule Still Rules  (Wired)

The exhibit features "celebrity slide rules," such as one donated by astronaut Neil Armstrong.

In the mid-70s, I had a metric-to-English conversion slide ruler that I loved. I wonder if I still have it... I remember after watching the first Star Wars movie, I used it as a light sabre (extending the middle portion while making a dramatic "schloommmvvvvvvv" noise)... until I nicked it in battle with one of my siblings, and it wouldn't slide so easily anymore.

Bliss, Sugar, Cosmo girl, Elle girl, the list goes on ... The power of such marketing is highlighted today by a survey which shows that most seven- to 10-year-olds are using makeup.

The survey showed that by the age of 14, around nine out of 10 girls apply some type of eyeliner, mascara or lipstick. The number of those in the 11-14 age group who report using lipstick or lip gloss on a daily basis has more than doubled intwo years.

Mintel, one of the UK's leading consumer research organisations, which carried out the survey, draws the controversial conclusion from its results that cosmetic companies could go much further in their drive to entice young girls to buy their products. Firms should place vending machines for their products in schools and cinemas to target teenage consumers, Mintel says.

--Makeup and marketing - welcome to the world of 10-year-old girls  (Guardian)

What hath Barbie wrought?

Many humans are less inhibited when they're typing then when they are speaking face-to-face. Teenagers are less shy. With cellphone text messages, they're more likely to ask each other out on dates. That genre of software was so successful socially that it's radically improving millions of people's love lives (or at least their social calendars). Even though text messaging has a ghastly user interface, it became extremely popular with the kids. The joke of it is that there's a much better user interface built into every cellphone for human to human communication: this clever thing called "phone calls." You dial a number after which everything you say can be heard by the other person, and vice versa. It's that simple. But it's not as popular in some circles as this awkward system where you break your thumbs typing huge strings of numbers just to say "damn you're hot," because that string of numbers gets you a date, and you would never have the guts to say "damn you're hot" using your larynx. --Joel Spolsky --It's Not Just Usability (Joel on Software)

Spolsky tweaks software design guru Jakob Nielsen, with the claim that "an application that does something really great that people really want to do can be pathetically unusable, and it will still be a hit." True. Bad usability will may scare away people who haven't made a decision yet, but if you're committed, then you keep working regardless of the interface headaches.

I remind myself of this every time I click the "Start" button in order to shut down my Windows computer.

It's a mistake to assume that college students who hold jobs are working to pay tuition -- or, for that matter, any college-related expenses.

One full-time student at Wright State complained of working 50 hours a week, but then admitted using much of the money to pay for flying lessons. Others acknowledged spending a substantial chunk of their money on electronic gadgets, or drinks at the bars along nearby Colonel Glenn Highway.

But the share of students, nationally, who report needing to work to pay college expenses has spiked in recent years... --Peter Schmidt --Paying the Price for Tuition Increases (Chronicle)

It would be hard to measure which students are taking multiple part-time jobs in order to pay for their portable phones and entertainment, rather than their tuition.

I watched a few episodes of "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" this week. I enjoy the concept -- a "deserving family" is whisked away on a vacation while a team of designers leads an army of workers to re-design their home, though I rolled my eyes at the efforts to emphasize tension between members of the design team (gruff and aloof designer A borrows a chisel from gruff and aloof designer B without asking; fur flies).


Even watching "free" television brings with it commercials that create new "wants" that can only be satisfied with new purchases. Ultimately, however, I came away from the show realizing that its premise is that families that suffer "deserve" a fancy home, which will magically lessen that family's suffering. It's a very materialistic concept, and it's the same one that undergirds The Sims.

My six-year-old has been trying to teach our two-year-old the difference between "wants" and "needs." She "needs" love, but she "wants" a cookie. She "needs" a new diaper, but she "wants" this particular toy.

There are two ways you can have all that you "want": you can try to get enough money to pay for all your wants, or you can discipline yourself to "want" less.

Of course, anybody's family life would be a little less stressful if there were a little more money to pay the bills. Truth be told, if we did have a little more money, we would have bought a slightly bigger house, and we'd still be watching our pennies -- and I'd still get in trouble with my wife for occasionally buying a book that I could have gotten via inter-library loan.

Two researchers argue, in a paper published this month in the journal Global Environmental Change, that following the norms of American journalism, U.S. media have promulgated a bias in the coverage of climate change essentially by giving too much credence to climate skeptics at the expense of the scientific consensus.

--Climate: Media's Balance Tips To Bias (SpaceDaily|UPI)

I don't know where the quotation marks went in this online copy of the article. I wasn't able to find a linkable copy of the text of this article online, but I hope I can introduce build a unit on this case, the next time I teach journalism.

Reporters do like a controversy, which means they are naturally going to seek out and report on any disagreement within the scientific community. Since I've given some blogspace to environmental skeptics and to articles about one-sided media reporting in the past, it's only fair that I present this article too.

I didn't even blog the reports that the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence project had encountered a signal from aliens, since the article that started the speculation spent far more time investigating the possibility that the signal was a hoax or a phantom created by an object near the radio antenna that detected it. It would be an exaggeration to title that story with a headline such as "Researchers may have found alien signals."

After 180 days in the U.S., email messages lose their status as a protected communication under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and become just another database record. This means that a subpoena instead of a warrant is all that's needed to force Google to produce a copy. Other countries may even lack this basic protection, and Google's databases are distributed all over the world. Since the Patriot Act was passed, it's unclear whether this ECPA protection is worth much anymore in the U.S., or whether it even applies to email that originates from non-citizens in other countries.

--Gmail is too creepy  (gmail-is-too-creepy.com)

I do have a GMail account, but I haven't really used it. This article makes me ask myself, in what cases would I actually want to use GMail?

Thanks, Mike.

What made the early Internet so very threatening to the mainstream media was not just the new opinions being expressed, but the fact that people were spending hours of their lives doing something that didn't involve production or consumption in the traditional market sense. Families with Internet connections were watching an average of nine hours less commercial programming each week. Douglas Rushkiff --The Real Threat of Blogs (Douglas Rushkoff)

The floppy disk has several replacements, including writeable compact discs and keychain flash memory devices. Both can hold much more data and are less likely to break.

Even so, floppies have been around since the late 1970s. People are used to them. They were the oldest form of removable storage still around. --Mark Neisse --Floppy Disk Becoming Relic of the Past (AP|MyWay)

Would they enjoy a peek into the diary of a wombat?

That, of course, would be up to me. I had the power of a book in my hand, and like any conscientious role model -- parent, coach, teacher, baby sitter -- I approached this responsibility with enormous respect for its importance.

Few things create a more powerful emotional bond between adult and child than the simple act of reading. --Gerard DeFlitch --Librarians hold key to young audience's literacy journey (Tribune-Review)

--The Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick Form

A project so glorious and immense;
Pointlessly witty magnificence.
With limericks numerous
Defining so humorous:
Versified database brilliance.

Via Sarcasmo.

Television started as a powerful community-building force. If you had a TV set, you would watch what was broadcast, discuss it among the family at home, and also with the wider context of friends, relatives, neighbours and colleagues. If you encountered someone else with a TV set, the immediate assumption would be that that you had seen all or most of the same programmes, and could thus discuss the resulting issues from a base of shared understanding. Television was a "literate" activity in a similar way to books, newspapers and radio from earlier generations, and in the same way that usenet, the world wide web, and blogging would later become. --Frank Carver --Computer Writing and Permanence (Frank Carver's Weblog)

My mother kept scrapbooks when we were little kids. At one point, my older brother was fascinated by numbers, so my mother would clip out the one-page TV listing from the local paper, and paste it into the scrapbook. ABC, CBS, and NBC would be on the left, then the two independent Washington CD channels, 5 and 20. There were two dials on the old TV sets -- in order to get to the VHF stations (with channel numbers above 19 or so), you had to set the main dial to "VHF" and then turn another dial. There was a weak PBS (public broadcasting station), probably from Baltimore, on channel 22, and then "our" PBS station on 26.

I remember one evening, as a youngster in the 70s, out of curiosity clicking all the way round the VHF dial. Click, click, click, click. There was something on channel 45 -- another independent TV station. Like Channel 20, channel 45 had Star Trek reruns!

When my siblings and I watched the channel 45 version of Star Trek episode that we already knew backwards and forwards, sometimes -- oh, joy of joys -- we would catch a minute or two of Star Trek that we had never seen before. The scene in Trouble with Tribbles when Uhura and Chekov go shopping on Space Station K-7. An extra bit of character development in The Cloud Minders. The opening sequence of Shore Leave, when McCoy actually sees the white rabbit that he tells Kirk about just after the opening credits.

We figured out that "our" independent station had been cutting about two minutes of Star Trek to make room for commercials -- mostly self-promotions. The "other" independent station had been doing the same thing, but they cut out a different two minutes.

In retrospect, I think cutting the white rabbit from "Shore Leave" was probably a good idea -- Kirk thinks McCoy is pulling his leg. That not only helps define Kirk's friendship with Bones, it also underscores Spock's assessment of Kirk as not performing at top capacity because he is overworked (and in need of shore leave).

I am amazed at how much television is out there. I don't think of it as "my" medium anymore. My kids go to bed late (around 10pm), and since we don't get cable, if the TV does happen to be on, I'm always conscious of the language and the content one is likely to see on the few stations we do get. When Peter was two, he used to love watching Wheel of Fortune. When I came home from work, I would send my tired wife off to her regal retreat (the bathroom), and put on the Wheel while I made dinner. One night, just as the show as ending at 7pm, the very first thing that appeared after the closing credits was a network promotion for a late-night soap... one woman scowled at the other and shouted, "Goddamn you, you bitch!" and slapped her.

At that moment, my fatherly genes kicked in, and I stopped thinking of TV as a harmless entertainment. We own a lot of videotapes now -- either provided by relatives with cable and/or better television reception (a whole tape of Zaboomafoo, another of Sesame Street, another of Teletubbies, etc.), or picked up on sales.

It really is something to be able to pop in "The Wizard of Oz" or "Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang" whenver my kids want it. When I was a kid, the networks would show these shows once a year on a "movie of the week" special. Most Disney movies would be chopped up to fit into two episodes of The Wonderful World of Disney. <voice style="Grumpy Old Man">That's the way it was, and we liked it!</voice>. The next day, everyone at school would be talking about it.

Broadcasting gets less broad with every new channel. I don't think this is a bad thing. I've seen recent studies that suggest that people who spend lots of time online take that time away from the television, not away from reading books.

Whew... New Class Blogs are Up (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

The first week of classes is over, and the university modem pool, which was down for about a month, is finally back up. So I can finally return to my habit of blogging a bit after I've put the kids to bed.

My big project of late has, of course, been getting ready for my new slate of classes.

I'm using Elizabeth Lawley's impressive Moveable Type templates in Writing for the Internet, American Lit I (1800-1915), and Seminar in Thinking and Writing.

I made a few changes to the template, most of which are minor, but a few of which are worth mentioning.

• Since I always print a copy of my online syllabus and the first few online exercises to hand to students on the first day of classes, I was appalled by the way MT cuts off the rightmost 1.5 inches (or so) when you print a page. I had already implemented a CSS print page for most of the pages on my jerz.setonhill.edu website, so that I can print out online handouts without including the menu bars and other details that just take up space on the printed page. (I have yet to implement that for this blog, however.)
• I put the blog in a 2004 directory, and changed the date and month archives so that it doesn't add the year to the filepath (because otherwise we'd get files archived under "CourseNum/2004/2004/09/01". My thinking is that the next time I teach the course, I will create a new blog in the CourseNum directory, and point its output to a directory named 2005. That way, students in future years who list out the "due dates" or "projects" category archives won't see entries from previous years at the bottom of the page listing the current class information. The easier solution would have been to overwrite the content of the blog the next time I teach it, or to move the current information to a new directory called "archive" later on, but that destroys the whole concept of "permalinks," doesn't it?
  
• The CourseNum/ subdirectory automatically includes the content of the CourseNum/CurrentYear directory. I can imagine wanting to link to a particular year's course website, or wanting to link to whatever is the current syllabus. I haven't much experience programming in .php, so at first I was a bit apprehensive about making changes. But once I remembered that the MT templates are just HTML files, I got over it. So the redirect instruction is a template that sends its output to "../index.jsp". When the course is over, I'll untick the box that says "automatically update this template when index pages are updated," and when I create CourseNum/NextYear, the "../index.jsp" file will be updated with a new target URL.
• Another very minor change... I added a "due dates" tab. I'm obviously not doing something right, since the tab isn't highlighted when the due dates category is visible, but otherwise it works.
  

In short... Someone wrote a really DUMB web scraper, and harassed me with it. --Peter Seebach --Can they really be this stupid?

Peter Seebach, who happens to host blogs.setonhill.edu, also hosts a variety of sites dealing with interactive fiction. He recently got an e-mail from the Entertainment Software Association that threatens him with legal action for hosting a pirated copy of Doom 3, the iD Software title that was leaked to the internet a few weeks ago.

The only problem is that the file "doom3.zip" is actually "Last Days of Doom," part of a trilogy of interactive fiction games created by Peter Killworth (originally for Topologika). The third "Doom" title was released in 1999, and is about 114k in size.

(So it's obviously not an archived version of a full-budget professional game, since those titles typically fill up a CD and often run to multiple CDs.)

Thousands of irreplaceable books were feared lost or damaged in a fire at one of Germany's most precious libraries, though some 6,000 historical works - including a 1534 Martin Luther Bible - were saved by a chain of people who spirited them away from the flames, officials said Friday. --Jochen Weisigel --Rare Books Feared Lost in German Fire (AP|MyWay)

So how do you start? Where do you begin?

I start my graduate seminars with "intellectual autobiography." I ask my students to write a couple of pages about who they are, how they came to where they sit in my room. We share these stories of who we are and how we came to be.

I start with mine: I mix up the personal and the academic, as it is in my life, making it comfortable for them to do the same if that's what their lives are like and what their work is like. I keep copies of the autobiographies they give me. They're my crib sheets for going back and figuring out what a student is doing when they go off on some odd tangent in class, or as I read their later work for the course. --Barbara Katz Rothman --From Seminar to Study Group (Chronicle of Higher Education)

This author is talking about graduate students, but I like the sound of "intellectual biography." This term I've started each of my three main classes with a brief reflection paper on why the student is taking the class (some are honest -- they need a few more credits, it's required for their major, the time slot fit their schedule). At the end of the term, after students have finished formal reports and oral presentations, I'll ask them to reflect again.

I'm always intrigued by the responsfges I get... the English major who confesses she hates to read, for example; or the chemistry students who feel completely out of their element (no pun intended).

It is the one great weakness of journalism as a picture of our modern existence, that it must be a picture made up entirely of exceptions. We announce on flaring posters that a man has fallen off a scaffolding. We do not announce on flaring posters that a man has not fallen off a scaffolding. Yet this latter fact is fundamentally more exciting, as indicating that that moving tower of terror and mystery, a man, is still abroad upon the earth. That the man has not fallen off a scaffolding is really more sensational; and it is also some thousand times more common. But journalism cannot reasonably be expected thus to insist upon the permanent miracles. Busy editors cannot be expected to put on their posters, "Mr. Wilkinson Still Safe," or "Mr. Jones, of Worthing, Not Dead Yet." They cannot announce the happiness of mankind at all. They cannot describe all the forks that are not stolen, or all the marriages that are not judiciously dissolved. Hence the complete picture they give of life is of necessity fallacious; they can only represent what is unusual. However democratic they may be, they are only concerned with the minority. --G.K. Chesterton, The Ball and the Cross --G.K. Chesterton: on 'The one great weakness of journalism' (Mode for Caleb)

Think of this the next time the TV news anchor tells you to "stay tuned" for coverage of a shocking survey or university study.

Computer Labs Aren't Designed for English Lit Students (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Long ago, I realized that computer labs aren't designed for students writing English lit papers.

You may have heard about a revolutionary new development in communications technology.

[N]o wires, no electric circuits, no batteries, nothing to be connected or switched on. It's so easy to use even a child can operate it. Just lift its cover! Compact and portable, it can be used anywhere -- even sitting in an armchair by the fire -- yet it is powerful enough to hold as much information as a CD-ROM disc.

It's the Built-in Orderly Organized Knowledge device.

As an undergrad at the University of Virginia, I recall elbowing my neighbor in the computer lab, trying to prop up my beloved Riverside Shakespeare (a huge, 10-pound, densely annotated behemoth), one or two books of literary criticism, the MLA Style Manual, and my latest rough draft.

Many of the texts I consult today are online; at this moment, I have ten overlapping windows open on my computer screen right now. Yes, I'm a multitasker.

When I return to the world of books, however, multitasking is awkward.

In some ways, books are the victims of their own success. Books are so commonplace that we don't even think about them, or about how they work. Unless you happen to learn, the hard way, that books themselves weren't designed to be cross-referenced this frequently by a person who also needs two hands free for typing.

We are in many ways a post-literate society, but books of all sorts are still a big part of the academic life. We?re in a period of transition, to be sure. While Harry Potter and other blockbusters sell a lot of copies, many, many other books hardly sell at all. Since there more readers on the planet, and more different books being produced than ever before, the chances are rapidly diminishing that any two readers have read the same book. If we don't read the same books, we can't talk about them, and the culture of books becomes less cohesive, less worth discussing.

Still, books do let us learn from and argue with people who have been dead for centuries. If publishers and libraries feel we have anything worthwhile to say, the books that we write may still be around long after we are dead.

Technology has a tremendous effect on how we write. When went off to college, I brought an electric typewriter and a Commodore 64 computer (I hooked it up to a little five-inch black and white TV screen that I thought was pretty cool). At that time, many students wrote out the first drafts of their papers by hand. The process of composing a draft was completely separate from the act of typing out the final draft. If you hit the wrong key, you would have to roll the paper out, dab correction fluid on the mistake, roll it back in, and keep typing. Any significant change meant that you had to re-type the whole page-- or you would "cut and paste" -- with scissors and clear tape. Then you would photocopy your patchwork quilt, and hope that the funhouse effect of the slanting rows of type wouldn't be too distracting.

Today we bind our pages with glue, but printers used to take a big piece of paper, fold it into four, eight, or sixteen sections, and sew them to the spine. The bigger the piece of paper, the more efficient the printing process, because the paper was less likely to jam.

I find it amazing to think that someone, somewhere invented each of the features that we expect to find in books: the table of contents; the index; page numbers; the use of Arabic versus Roman numerals; chapter divisions; chapter headings; title pages; italics; the semi-colon. And putting the title of the book on the spine, so you don't have to pull the book off the shelf? Brilliant!

I'm hardly an expert on the history of the book, so perhaps I have an overly-romanticized notion. Still, a Victorian reader knew perfectly well how you read a book. You start at page one, and you turn the pages sequentially.

Our Victorian reader also knew that you needed to have a paper knife handy. (Why? To cut open the edges of the folded pages, of course.)

We also get information about books from the design of the title page (Drippy red letters? Goofy balloon letters? Stately Times Roman letters?), the quality of the paper (glossy or pulpy?), the blurbs on the back cover, and even the context in which the book is encountered (Received as a gift? Purchased on impulse in an airport? Purchased under duress from a college bookstore along with a bunch of other textbooks we don't really want? Found in an old trunk in an attic?).

Of course, whether a text is printed or electronic, readers still respond to grammatical and typographical errors, writing style, errors of fact, and so forth.

But authors of electronic documents must deal with another set of completely different set of contextual cues. Will your reader encounter your text on a dot-com website, with distracting pop-up ads? Does the page load quickly or slowly? Does it use garish colors? Does the reader know what else is on the site, and how to get there?

The literary novel is called a "novel" because it developed in order to take advantage of the technical and formal properties of the printed book, which was once a "novel" idea. Web pages are still very "novel." Conventions are emerging, but every day more "newbie" authors are unleashed on the internet. Technology is changing so quickly, and likewise the conventions demanded by that technology. Hein writes:
A month in hyper-space can scatter the brain. Traditional books offer readers respite from hyperactivity. The book's definitive, closed, linear argument lets mind and sensibility enjoy moments of inner harmony. Linear text offers the kind of contemplative thinking that goes beneath the surface. (Electric Language, xvi)

The word "paper" comes from "papyrus," a reedy plant from Egypt (although a papryologist will tell you, papyrus is not the same thing as paper). As allegiances and power structures shifted in the Middle East, Europe was cut off from access to papyrus -- which prompted the switch to parchment. The change in the medium precipitated a change in the content, and a sweeping cultural change.

What is parchment? If you were a medieval scribe, and you wanted to write something, you would need to find a sheep, kill it, cut off its skin, scrape the gunk off it, boil it in a vat of urine and who knows what else (don't ask me how someone got the idea to do that), and hang it up to dry. While it was drying, you had to find ink somewhere. Standard sizes for books were based on the number of pages you could efficiently cut out of an animal skin. A sheep would produce about 16 pages.

All this means that books were rare. And that it was the rare scholar who had the luxury of being able to consult multiple different texts at the same time. Books simply weren't designed for that kind of environment.



Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States and founder of the University of Virginia, had a solution: this absolutely wonderful rotating bookstand, which could hold five books (one on each face and another on top). It also folded up into a tight little cube, which would have made it perfect for my dorm room.

Computer lab designers of the world, take note! English lit students need rotating book stands in their computer labs!

Either that, or we need to teach more e-texts in literature classes.

Hmm...

Well, that's a subject for another blog entry.

Though, I must admit, blogging is not only extremely addictive--must be the subliminal messages, but also fun. Where else could you find a community of writers and readers that can be as wide or as narrow as you gear your works to be? And where else can you start controversy and discourse short of a coffee shop poetry night? Blogging, to me, is a place where I can warm up and practice, like a musician, for my next performance. My audience, being my ?director? and my weblog being the instrument through which I ?play my music." --Evan Reynolds --Save a Tree, Buy a Computer and BLOG on it! (Color in a Lurid World)

Evan is a new freshman at Seton Hill University. He has jumped right into the blogosphere, even before I held the "introduction to weblogs" class.

Everyone who teaches with blogs would love to figure out what it is that makes some students love blogs and others think of blogging as just another homework assignment.