November 2004 Archive Page

Indeed, the core problem facing women who want to advance in academe appears to be at research universities. The higher up the academic-prestige ladder a university is, the fewer women it usually has in tenured faculty positions. Research released this year shows that while the nation is doing a good job of turning out women with research doctorates, the top 50 institutions in research spending are not doing such a good job of hiring them. --Robin Wilson --Where the Elite Teach, It's Still a Man's World (Chronicle)

The whole affair shows that in fact bad writing is a joint academic/public matter, and to broach it as one would in a professional journal article or seminar presentation is to continue to theorize as if theory were never in doubt. In "interrogating the terms" of "bad" or "difficult" indictments, the contributors follow an academic routine, sometimes very well, but they miss how the hubbub challenged the social and political meaning of their work. --Mark Bauerlein --Bad Writing's Back (Philosophy and Literature)

Internet portal Lycos has made a screensaver that endlessly requests data from sites that sell the goods and services mentioned in spam e-mail.

Lycos hopes will it make the monthly bandwidth bills of spammers soar by keeping their servers running flat out. --Screensaver tackles spam websites (BBC)

A very interesting strategy.

Through a new effort, Wikinews, members of the open-source community who write and edit Wikipedia's encyclopedia entries are encouraged to test their skills as journalists. The news site follows a similar set of rules as the encyclopedia, which allows anyone to edit and post corrections to entries, so long as each change is recorded.--Joanna Glasner --Wikipedia Creators Move Into News  (WIred)

I wish this development in Wikipedia had occurred a few months ago, so I could use it in my "Writing for the Internet" class. We're already wrapping up the term, and there really isn't time to introduce a new activity.

The site is still in demo mode, so I'll withhold my evaluation for now.

I don't expect that it will be the best source to go to for breaking news -- but it might be an excellent resource for finding follow-ups to stories that you found compelling. Just bookmark the article that interests you, and check it every so often for major changes (such as links to related stories, new backgrounders and sidebars, etc.).

But who knows... if an eyewitness e-mails a cell phone photo and uploads a quick description of breaking news, the traditional media might use Wikipedia as a valuable "ear to the ground".

I do hope they will have some kind of moderation system, so that stories filed by eyewitnesses will get higher visibility than stories compiled from wire reports.

My concern was that the D would send him from the front row to the back row, where he would turn his baseball cap backward and scowl at me for the rest of the semester.

I couldn't have been more wrong. That D motivated him to come see me about his next paper, and the one after that, and just about every other one in the four subsequent courses he took with me over the next three years.....

That same semester, in that very same class, I had a student who made her home in the back row, along with a friend or two who apparently shared her lack of interest in the course. With this student -- who spoke rarely and eyed me with a look of bemused indifference -- I had little hesitation about stamping a D on her second assignment.

What she needs, I thought to myself as I dropped her paper grimly on her desk, was an intellectual kick in the rear, in the form of a grade that would scare her into better behavior in class and more effort on her written work.

She was absent the next class. When she showed up for the one after that, her attitude seemed -- if possible -- worse than before. She didn't come to see me about her next assignment, as I had suggested she do, and it was as poor as the previous one.

In both of those D narratives, I had my pedagogical expectations overturned. --Failing to Motivate (Chronicle)

These anecdotes are a prelude to an argument against using grades for motivation. Lang isn't suggesting that we abolish grading; rather, that the grades always be "transparent" -- that is, "Convey clearly to the students the criteria for your grades, and ensure that they have the tools and opportunity to meet your criteria."

Students often say "thank you" when I hand them a paper with a good grade on it. I always respond, "You're the one who did the work, you earned it. Thank you."

It's always pleasant to hear those magic words, but I don't want to foster the attitude that I am responsible for what they choose to do with the opportunities I set up for them in the classroom.

Great headline, by the way.

"Serious games" demonstrating everything from flying a jet plane to negotiating a hostage crisis are used to train workers who can't afford to slip up on the job.

Firefighters can use "HazMat:Hotzone" (http://www.etc.cmu.edu/projects/hazmat) to learn how to respond to a chemical-weapons attack, George Soros wannabes can learn the ins and outs of currency trading with Forex Trader (http://www.inusa.com/tour/forex.htm), and college administrators can use Virtual U (http://www.virtual-u.org) to wrestle with angry professors and meddlesome state legislators.

Developers say serious games are especially effective for younger workers who have grown up with "Madden Football" and "Grand Theft Auto," but designers need to incorporate the irresistible appeal of these mainstream hits in order to keep participants engaged. --Video Games Teach More Than Hand-Eye CoordinationReuters/Yahoo (will expire))

There's nothing really new in this article, other than a reference to Halo2. The "recent conference" mentioned in the article as the source of a quote was held about six weeks ago. Still, it's good to see these issues being presented by the mainstream media.

The prototype consists of two related arenas of activity. In the first, children have to survive ?as lions? outside in a playing field, interacting with a virtual savannah and exploring the opportunities and risks to lions in that space. Children are given GPS-linked PDAs through which they ?see?, ?hear? and ?smell? the world of the savannah as they navigate the real space outdoors as a pride of lions. The second domain, the ?den?, is an indoors space where children can plan, research and reflect on their outdoor game-play through accessing resources such as the internet, books, adult experts and an interface that has tracked their outdoors activities.

The experience lasts over a three-hour period in which children are set an overall challenge (to survive as lions in the savannah over the course of a year) within which there are three levels: 1) to claim territory through scenting; 2) to hunt successfully in the wet season; 3) to survive hunger and thirst in the dry season. The children are placed firmly in the driving seat: on completion of each level of the game outside, they return inside to the den to review their success on an interactive whiteboard that has tracked all of their movements; they then decide whether to repeat the level, having conducted further research and planning, or to go on to the next level. --Savannah (Nesta Future Lab)

A game where kids use wireless PDAs to help them pretend to be lions. The kids actually run around outside in a field, and I guess the PDA and headphones help map the simulation overtop their real-world rompting.

Whoops -- I actually mistyped romping as "rompting", which makes me think of "prompting". Does that matter? Probably not, but hey... as long as I was already blogging, why not throw that in, too?

Via Barbara Ganley.

I believe that educational use of blogs is plausible only if the educational context is suitable for its use. For example, it is plausible for me if one uses blogs in a ?journalism? class; however, I don't see any reason for a math teacher to use blogs in ?teaching mathematics?, it'sreally pointless for me. --Murat Ozoglu --INST 7150: Week 6: Blogs, Part the Second (dummies for instructional desing)

This would appear to be a student's online research project.

While I agree that classes that include a lot of writing and personal reflection are probably easier to envision in a blogging environment. I gather that there probably isn't as much reflective, narrative thought going on in entry-level math courses as there is in some humanities courses. But perhaps, as math and science students progress through the courses that call for brute mental force and memorization, and get to the courses that call for original creative work, more procedural efforts that leave themselves open to reflection and narrative cognition, blogs might be more appropriate.

Stephanie Reigh, a Seton Hill student who is not in any of my classes is blogging her biology research project.

A regular reader of this blog, Josh Sasmor, is a math professor... what say you, Josh? I imagine that a plug-in that permitted the construction of equations and such would make blogging math a lot more sensible, though I imagine it wouldn't be too hard just to use any old equation editor and publish .gif snapshots.

What is quality in hypertext? How, in other words, do we judge a hypertext collection of documents (or web) to be successful or unsuccessful, to be good or bad as hypertext? How can we judge if a particular hypertext achieves elegance or just mediocrity? Those questions lead to another: what in particular is good about hypertext? What qualities does hypertext have in addition to those possessed by non-hypertextual forms of writing, which at their best can boast clarity, energy, rhythm, force, complexity, and nuance? What qualities, in other words, derive from a form of writing that is defined to a large extent by electronic linking. What good things, what desirable qualities, come with linking, since the link is the defining characteristic of hypertext? As I have argued elsewhere, the defining qualities of the medium include multilinearity, consequent potential multivocality, conceptual richness, and ?especially where informational hypertext is concerned? reader centeredness or control by the reader (Hypertext 2.0, pp. 33-48). Obviously, works in a hypertext environment that fulfill some or all of these potential qualities exemplify quality in hypermedia. Are there other perhaps less obvious sources of quality? --George Landow --Is this hypertext any good? Evaluating quality in hypermedia (Dichtung Digital)

I'm teaching a small course in media aesthetics next term. This might be a good way to introudce them to hypertext aesthetics. I haven't read this yet... when I do, I'll probably have more to say about it. But right now, I need to see whether Deus Ex: Invisibile War runs on my office computer...

Imagine what higher-ups at the Post must have thought when focus-group participants declared they wouldn't accept a Washington Post subscription even if it were free. The main reason (and I'm not making this up): They didn't like the idea of old newspapers piling up in their houses.

Don't think for a minute that young people don't read. On the contrary, they do, many of them voraciously. But having grown up under the credo that information should be free, they see no reason to pay for news. Instead they access The Washington Post website or surf Google News, where they select from literally thousands of information sources. They receive RSS feeds on their PDAs or visit bloggers whose views mesh with their own. In short, they customize their news-gathering experience in a way a single paper publication could never do. And their hands never get dirty from newsprint. --Adam L. Penenberg --Newspapers Should Really Worry  (Wired)

We do get a Sunday paper, mostly because my wife isn't a digital news junkie like myself. But Google News instantly changed the way I read online news...

I still bookmark the local news and weather pages, and there are specialty news sites devoted to higher education and technology that I check regularly, but I no longer check what CNN or USA Today or The Washington Post thinks is top news. Instead, I check Google News several times a day.

It has taken the dedicated work of professors and academic critics over a period of decades to make sure that Faulkner has an audience. Of course, once properly introduced to him, some of those readers continue to seek out his fiction, which accounts for the continuing interest in even his lesser works.

It fascinates me that Faulkner, a huge beneficiary of the academy's loving attention, was himself almost phobic when it came to universities and schools, at least until his later years, when he established a fairly comfortable relationship with the University of Virginia.

For the most part, Faulkner shunned academe. He was self-educated, like Ernest Hemingway and so many writers of his generation. --Jay Parini --William Faulkner: 'Not an Educated Man' (Chronicle)

He made no mention of the National Guard story in announcing the change, saying he had agreed with CBS executives last summer to leave sometime after the Nov. 2 election. But he was forced to fight for his professional life after anchoring a September “60 Minutes Wednesday” story about Bush’s service that turned out to be based on allegedly forged documents. --Rather to step down as CBS News anchor (MSNBC)

For a moment, I'm paralyzed still taping with the old man in the foreground. I get up after a beat and tell the Marines again, what I had told the lieutenant -- that this man -- all of these wounded men -- were the same ones from yesterday. That they had been disarmed treated and left here.

At that point the Marine who fired the shot became aware that I was in the room. He came up to me and said, "I didn't know sir-I didn't know." The anger that seemed present just moments before turned to fear and dread.

The wounded man then tries again to talk to me in Arabic. --Kevin Sites
--Open Letter to Devil Dogs of the 3.1  (Kevin Sites Blog)

The embedded reporter who videotaped a Marine shooting a wounded soldier reflects on his role in the political fallout that ensued.

Some excellent lessons on the journalist's responsibility to be fair, yet human, when faced with the full range of human behavior.

A standard modification among the Nerfing community for any spring-powered gun is to simply stretch the spring. The formula for the force exerted by a spring is Fs = -kx, where 'k' is a spring constant (which varies from spring to spring) and 'x' is the difference in length between the spring at rest and the spring when compressed. By stretching the spring, we will increase the value of 'x' and therefore increase the force exerted by the spring. So, for instance, say we have a spring which was originally about 20 centimeters long uncompressed, and about 5 centimeters long compressed. By stretching the spring another five centimeters, we effectively increase the force exerted by the spring from 15 times the spring constant to 20 times the spring constant. That's a 33% increase in force! --The Physics of Nerf (NerfOnline.com)

I seem to remember being sent this link before, but I didn't blog it. Via Metafilter.

--textual genre [spammed to hell]

To paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke... "My God, it's full of spam!"

While doing a bit of idle ego-googling as I wait for my kids to fall asleep, I came across this blog, whose author last year favorably linked to an article I had published in early 2003.

A few months ago, this web page was found by a spambot. Since then, it has been pounded over and over again by comment spam. My copy of NoteTabLight counted over 11,400 instances of "http" on this page alone.

The more recent versions of MoveableType are better at preventing this kind of abuse...

There, but for the grace of MT-Blacklist, goes my blog.

On the eve of Schulz'sinduction into the Army, his mother died of cancer. She was forty-eight and had suffered greatly, and Schulz later described the loss as an emotional catastrophe from which he almost did not recover. During basic training, he was depressed, withdrawn, and grieving. In the long run, though, the Army was good for him. He went into the service, he recalled later, as ?a nothing person? and came out as a staff sergeant in charge of a machine-gun squadron. ?I thought, By golly, if that isn't a man, I don't know what is,? he said. ?And I felt good about myself and that lasted about eight minutes, and then I went back to where I am now.? After the war, Schulz returned to his childhood neighborhood, lived with his father, became intensely involved in a Christian youth group, and learned to draw kids. For the rest of his life, he virtually never drew adults. He avoided adult vices?didn't drink, didn't smoke, didn't swear?and, in his work, he spent more and more time in the imagined yards and sandlots of his childhood. But the world of ?Peanuts? remained a deeply motherless place. Charlie Brown'sdog may (or may not) cheer him up after a day of failures; his mother never does. --Jonathan Franzen --The Comfort Zone: Growing up with Charlie Brown (The New Yorker)

My mother purchased paperback copies of "Peanuts" -- we had stacks and stacks in the little room under the stairs, spanning decades. (I remember reading plenty of cartoons on the US space race, jokes about Sputnik, the introduction of the character Woodstock, etc.)

She also had a few volumes of "Pogo" from the same era.

The objective is to fire three shots at Kennedy's motorcade in Dallas from assassin Lee Harvey Oswald's sixth-floor perch in the Texas School Book Depository, all of which has been digitally re-created.

Points are awarded depending on how accurately the shots match the official version of events as documented in by the Warren Commission, which probed the assassination. --Shoot JFK from your own computer (World Net Daily)

Useful historical tool? Insensitive commercial gimmick? The designers have picked a hot topic.

There is a chapter in Graham Nelson's epic interative fiction work "Jigsaw" that involves a similar historical recreation (in text, of course).

Frequently with murder stories, reporters must balance the need to collect information with the feelings of survivors, who invariably endow the martyred loved one with a saintliness that blots out not just the negative but even neutral reality. --Unwanted Spotlight: When private people become part of a public story (Journalism Ethics Gallery)

Does a bus-driver-training school rank its graduating drivers? No, it ensures that all attain the standard required of a bus-driver. Would you like to be treated by a C-grade doctor? No, everyone wants an A-grade doctor! So doctors and drivers are (I hope!) trained and trained and not let out until they are A-grade in standard. Why should other professions be treated differently? --David MacKay --Everyone Should Get an A (Cambridge)

Obviously, this kind of set-up will work best in those fields that have universally accepted and readily measurable "right" and "wrong" ways of doing things. A creative writing major or journalism major who does all the homework and answers all the quiz questions correctly may simply not have the inspirational genius or the "nose for news" that is necessary for the production of "A" quality, publishable original work.

One assumes that students who need extra time to get to the A will pay extra tuition, thus justifying the extra teaching time that they will need. But higher education has a certain percentage of students who are muddling along, getting some kind of liberal arts degree or other, without any particular interest in getting an A.

So the rich will be permitted to dally at the university for much longer, in a causal pursuit of As. The poor, and the disadvantaged, whose pre-college education may not have been top-notch, will be forced out quickly.

On the other hand, presuming that something was in place to deal with abuses, students who need less time to get to the A should be able to skip ahead quickly.

I can hear sounds from the next room that suggest the baby hasn't gone to sleep yet, which leads me to suspect that soon my wife will invite me to take a turn minding our nocturnal princess. I'm kind of blogging my thoughts in order to stay awake. My apologies for the internal inconsistencies that will surely follow, in these wee hours of the morning.

A while ago, I blogged about a university that gives students variable credit for its courses, which has a similar effect.

As an educator, I believe that a student who turns in four C papers but never revises them, and thus never learns from earlier mistakes, gets far less out of a course than the student who turns in, say, two C papers that the instructor insists must be revised to A or B+ level. I had a very complex system of revising papers when I used to teach technical writing. That system helped me to spend more time with those students who wanted to learn.

In five years at my previous school, I only twice taught a class that had more than three or four English majors. (Both times, they were graduating seniors who were doing senior projects -- I loved those classes, and had some of my best teaching moments there.) Now that I have a more regular chance to teach English majors (and, within the English major, new media journalism students), I've reflected more on my obligation to the whole range of students who are in my classes.

Was it elitist of me to presume that the most motivated students deserved most of my time?

Does the student who was worried about getting an A- (but who might get an A if I spend extra time with them) really benefit from my attention more than the student who is in danger of failing (but who might start coming to class again if I ask their coach to threaten them)?

What about the student who simply chooses to get a B, because he or she has other priorities (such as taking care of a family, or acting in a theatre production, or preparing for the big game)?

Via join-the-dots.

Purpose: To introduce the fundamental concepts and methods of object-oriented programming, source code compiling, and creating executable files; to promote the art and science of interactive fiction; and to have fun in a creative and novel way. --Byron Philhour and Albert Boyle --Introduction to Object Oriented Programming through Interactive Fiction (St. Ignatius College Preparatory)

The first day, when they went to the bookstore and bought the book, I thought most of the kids would try to transfer out of the class. "There is no way I'm going to read a book this thick," more than one student said to me. Another student told me the longest thing he'd ever read was an entire issue of Sports Illustrated. Others accused me of trying to kill them, particularly when I told them that we'd be discussing the first chapter (about 30 pages) at the next class.

"I am not going to finish 30 pages in one night," one of the students said.

"Bet you will," I said, trying to suppress the evil seeping out of the corners of my grin.

[...]

It is, indeed, difficult to keep from killing all the pleasure a book offers when you are doing such things as forcing people to read it each night and giving them tests on the content. In an ideal world, people would read whatever they wanted, however they wanted, and talk vociferously about the experience. In the real world, many teachers don't know what to do other than ask what all the colors in The Great Gatsby stand for (green for money, yellow for desire ... or was it green for envy, yellow for...), and so the books that get taught in high school are often the books that are, frankly, the easiest to create multiple-choice tests for.... A healthy culture of literacy needs literatures that aren't sanctioned by schools, literatures that are enjoyed simply for enjoyment, that have a mystique to them, an inability to conform to the central culture of the society. But a healthy culture of literacy also needs literate people, people who are capable of reading more than a basic instruction manual for how to tie shoelaces, people who have active imaginations. I fear we are losing that. --Matthew Cheney --'American Gods' in a High School Classroom (the Mumpsimus)

A teacher describes his success in getting high school students to read an actual book.

I taught Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age last year... it's a whopper of a book at about 400 pages. In order to help students manage it, I stretched it out a bit, giving them other assignments in between reading exercises. I had the advantage of teaching this in "Intro to Literary Studies," which is the entry-level course for the English major, so there was some self-selection going on, and most students who took the course were already good readers. A few were turned off by the cyber-jargon, but because it is a science fiction novel that contains extended fantasy sequences created by a souped up computerized book, and because the novel follows the education of a young girl to womanhood, I thought it would be perfect for a class that included creative writers, education students, lit majors, and new media students.

Overall, I thought it worked pretty well... so well that I'm going to add another novel (a shorter one one) and basically beef up the "critical reading" component of the course. Later they will all take a course in literary criticism, so I don't have to tackle that in this course.

It must be emphasized that, in the entire history of modern science, no claim of any type of supernatural phenomena has ever been replicated under strictly controlled conditions. The importance of this fact cannot be overstated. One would think that all medical journal editors would be keenly aware of this fact and therefore be highly skeptical of paranormal or supernatural claims. One must therefore wonder if the Columbia researchers and the JRM editors were blinded by religious beliefs. Everything else being equal, if the claimed supernatural intervention had been Ms. Cleo manipulating Tarot cards rather than Christians praying, would the reviewers and editors have taken this study seriously? In any case, the damage has been done. The fact that a "miracle cure" study was deemed to be suitable for publication in a scientific journal automatically enhanced the study's credibility. Not surprisingly, the news media quickly disseminated the "miraculous" results. --Bruce Flamm --The Columbia University 'Miracle' Study: Flawed and Fraud (The Skeptical Inquirer)

A fascinating glimpse into the world of peer-reviewed scientific research. I love the illustration, of a man praying, "Please don't let them investigate the study..."

Pupils were left in tears after a teacher told them that an asteroid was about to hit Earth and kill them all.

The spoof announcement was designed to teach 14-year-olds the importance of seizing the day but backfired after they became visibly frightened. --Pupils scared by asteroid spoof (BBC)

I think I'll quietly scratch this idea off my list of classroom activities for next week.

Calling a weblog ?literary? does not require content that is about literature or even content that aims to be literature. It is not an attempt at categorizing one weblog and its author as more worthwhile in a canonical sense than any other. To the contrary, I propose that every weblog can be considered literary in the sense that it calls attention not only to what we read, but also to the unique way we read it....The novel... is defined as much in how readers are trained to enter its shared codes as it is by the specific delivery of those codes. Likewise, the weblog relies on particular codes enacted by both author and readers?readers who become, in this case, secondary authors. --Steve Himmer --The Labyrinth Unbound: Weblogs as Literature (Into the Blogosphere)

While Himmer acknowledges that bloggers choose all kinds of topics and methods, I think his choice to mostly exclude pundit and k-blogs from his analysis makes the following statement problematic: "A typical weblog offers both factual and interpretive information at once, making the distinction between truth and fiction irrelevant in favor of differentiation between trustworthy and untrustworthy."

Yes, it's useful to make the distinction... but there is a huge subset of bloggers who meticulously cite their sources. I recently responded to what I felt were some elisions that were excessive on an entry posted by The Pink Bunny of Battle, and the next time I checked his site, he had a major entry that was meticulously cited. I'm not saying that he changed just because of my entry, but he recognized that his credibility depended on his accuracy, which would increase his legitimacy in the eyes of many readers. (The Pink Bunny is now blue, by the way.) The effectiveness of his Battle Bunny persona wouldn't be as strong if he didn't pay careful attention to the facts that he uses in order to support his points. The polemic and the political speech are both long-standing literary genres. Yes, they depend more on ethos (character, trustworthiness) than logos (facts, accuracy), but bloggers can easily append a comment that links to a fact -- in a way that a citizen cannot stand up and shout out a correction to a speech given in Congress.

Himmer's assessment of weblogs in terms of Aarseth's ergodic text is useful, because it reminds us that weblogs are serial and cumulative, meant to be experienced in short bursts over time -- rather than, for example, in extended, frantic sessions just before one's academic blogging portfolio is due. Himmer's observation that a blog is a text that is never "finished" meshes with the experience one often has with hypertext literature, which never comes to a definitive end. Some people find the open-endedness of the text intriguing because it leads to critical inquiry. A reader who has a consumer attitude -- read the text in order to get to the end and come to a conclusion and get it over with (or get credit for writing your homework) -- brings to the act of reading a completely different set of expectations.

I'll have to think some more about what those expectations are.

Just as with Google Web Search, Google Scholar orders your search results by how relevant they are to your query, so the most useful references should appear at the top of the page. This relevance ranking takes into account the full text of each article as well as the article's author, the publication in which the article appeared and how often it has been cited in scholarly literature. Google Scholar also automatically analyzes and extracts citations and presents them as separate results, even if the documents they refer to are not online. This means your search results may include citations of older works and seminal articles that appear only in books or other offline publications. -- About Google ScholarA Quick Review of Google Scholar (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Google Scholar just went live yesterday. Thanks to my former student, Matt Hoy, for sending me the link. Here are my immediate thoughts.

First Usenet archives, then Blogger, then G-mail, then desktop search, and now academic research. [Update, 19 Nov: How could I forget Google News? --DGJ] Google Scholar is just as simple as Google; the familiar brand name will probably be irresistible once the word gets out. One often hears laments from faculty who note that students are reluctant to go to the library. Some are just as reluctant to use the library’s official research databases, preferring instead the simplicity of findarticles.com, so of course they will be attracted to Google Scholar.

Google Scholar Looks Promising

In general, I like Google's new service. While it offers only some of what you would expect from a library database, the convenience of the one-box-fits-all interface is very attractive. Like most Google services, what really makes the best impression is the added features that you never thought would be useful, but that soon make you wonder how you lived without them. Google scrapes the content of online articles, which means that if the online articles mention offline resources (such as old-fashioned books or anything else that is not a web page), Google will learn about them.

It looks like Google’s bots are capable of reading bibliographical information in many different formats and generating database entries for resources that are cited in web-accessible documents, but that are not accessible on the web directly. This may help make up for the fact that regular Google is naturally skewed towards serving up information that is readily available online. For some search topics, the highest-ranked hits are older academic books that are not available online.

A search for “Grand Theft Auto” brings up references to the game itself, not just articles about the game. So new media objects that are not web pages and books that are not online can also accumulate page rank. This is good.

Google's academic research database isn't perfect.

Nothing is perfect, of course. Naturally I first checked to see which of my own publications were indexed. Not all of them are, but I did find the full text of one of my articles that I thought wasn't available online. Not bad.

My first academic article, which has been online since 1997, isn't in the database. I did a search for the York Corpus Christi play, and followed a link to what was supposed to be an article on "Signifying God" in the play, but turned out to be the abstract of an article on the trial of Charles I (the full text of which was not available).

Search results also include references to offline books, with a link to a service that permits you to find nearby libraries that own copies. It gave me a pleasant little Thursday morning ego boost to see how many copies of my book there are in university libraries in Pennsylvania (for example). More important, the tally of number of links to a particular source offers a quick guide to texts that one assumes to be influential.

Google's bots can't improve on the accuracy of the information they index, and since human researchers have been known to cite sources without reading them, the page-ranking algorithm is not a substitute for real peer-review.

Scholars in technical fields refer to me as "Jerz, DG", while scholarship in humanities fields uses my full name. A human editor would catch that kind of thing, but a bot cannot.

On my second query I saw results taken from what look like papers published on a course website. One assumes that the countless undergraduate papers that will be indexed by the service won't themselves be cited by anyone other than other undergraduates, but the sheer numbers of students citing other student work is going to skew the search results. In this area, Google Scholar is no worse than regular Google, and somewhat better (since even those authors whose work is mistaken for an academic paper will have done some filtering of their source material).

In a regular Google search for "internet addiction," the top hits are commercial sites selling books and tapes that offer cures. The Google Scholar search returns the publications of the leading proponent of "internet addiction disorder," who also happens to be the same person behind the top commercial site (but that's a different story). And fairly high on the list of the Google Scholar results is an article that questions the validity of internet addiction disorder.

Students and Google Scholar

I just got back from proctoring a "Research Skills Quiz," where I brought my freshman comp students to a computer room, gave them a random topic (such as "health issues on university campuses") and told them they could leave the room after they showed me three peer-reviewed academic articles. A few finished the exercise within minutes, most finished it by the end of the period, and a few will have to do a make-up homework assignment. Several were unable to distinguish between letters to the editor that appeared in academic journals, editorials and position statements, and full-length articles in which scholars present their original research.

Google Scholar is not going to help those students develop research strategies. Students who are determined to muddle through without actually learning may be distracted slightly less, but that will probably give them a false sense of relief that will only delay the inevitable jolt that will shake them out of the high school mindset.

One of the features that I like -- the fact that Google Scholar indexes offline materials – is likely to frustrate the entry-level student using Google for an assignment with a pressing deadline. Having been conditioned to think that Google is the easy way to access all information known to human kind, they may be confused by the frequent dead ends and links to printed books that are only available in libraries.

Conclusion

I think Google is a step or two away from extending its reach to yet another area of information technology… and Google is now that much closer to fulfilling Vannevar Bush’s dream of the Memex.

When it comes to the kind of searching that I might do in order to refresh my lecture notes as I prepare to teach a class (when I’m looking for fresh ideas, rather than any particular answer), as I feel my way though a subject that I don’t know terribly well, or for the casual academic research that I do when pursuing inspiration, backtracking serendipity, or just kicking around a topic for a new proposal, I’ll probably turn to Google Scholar first – but that’s because I’m confident that I will be able to filter the search results as I see them. Students who don’t have that skill won’t be served by Google’s coolness.

Librarians and teachers who don't educate themselves about how to use Google Scholar's strengths, and make a strong case for when and where alternatives are preferable, will do their students a disservice.

One of the really good web resources for internet researchers is the wayback machine maintained by the Internet Archive. I have to admit I am not good at using it, but I really should. This was pointed out by David Brake, PhD researcher in London:

You suggest in Personal Publication and Public Attention that "the only traces of this story exist in the blogs of those who blogged about it at the time (Mortensen, 2001). Damn the Pacific is no longer easily available". You should note that the Internet Archive keeps records of many things including the site. (It disappeared when the couple broke up).

As you can see by looking at the last archived post, July 1st 2002, by stu, updates are on their separate blogs. Later on the internet archive has saved a short explanation, telling how they have broken up, giving an email for people who have donated money for the trip to write Lane to have them back. Sad, but very human. But anyway, this means that damnthepacific.org is fairly readily available, and that the world wide web is not quite as loose and transient as it might seem. --Torill Mortensen -- Way Back When (Thinking with My Fingers)

Brake makes a good point, and Mortensen is gracious to acknowledge it, but I don't think the existence of the internet archive undermines her point about the looseness and transience of the WWW. (Of course, Brake never claimed that it did...)

It's true that web-savvy surfers who know about The Wayback Machine can find information that goes missing when a site disappears, but because there is no universal and automatic method of forwarding visitors to the archived versions, the broken links do put a barrier between the reader and the information being referenced.

The barrier isn't insurmountable, but because online writers typically write as if the material to which they link is instantly accessible, the transience of that material does affect the usefulness of the sites that are left behind.

When I teach "memoir writing" to what degree am I "intervening" with human subjects when I grade their personal essays and confessional writing? It's not research that I would ever report, but I wonder to what degree I am treading on fuzzy privacy matters as a teacher when it comes to grading my "human subjects"? Should I get a student's "informed consent" to participate in a class where they are expected to share their life stories with me and with other classmates? To what degree does "creative non-fiction" bring the fuzziness of language and discourse theory into play regarding these issues? --Mike Arnzen --Is Discourse Human Research? (Pedablogue)

I was at the meeting that prompted my colleague to write this blog entry. A social scientist faculty member gave an off-the-cuff definition of "research" that seemed to suggest that any student interviewing another human being for a student paper was conducting "research" that would need to be cleared through the university's human research committee.

When I used to teach technical writing at my previous school, I had to clear the syllabus every two years with a committee, and students had to put a certain phrase into the surveys and usability tests that they conducted. The key information they needed to communicate was that the volunteers were just that -- volunteers -- and that they could stop at any time. The fact that the university required this language was a good opportunity for me to get them to pay attention to the creation of their survey instruments, since all too often students would survey 100 people and then realize they hadn't collected any useful data. (I actually had a student who said she mailed out 1000 surveys but got zero responses back.)

I've just introduced my Writing for the Internet class to the basic concepts of usability. Since many students in this class are doing creative projects, rather than informational projects, I am being less rigid about teaching usability testing methods. (In addition, I used to teach usability as part of a 300-level course, and this is a 200-level course that is mostly taken by freshmen, so I had do adjust the goals and methods of the course.)

But as Mike notes, better safe than sorry...

Colleges have good reasons for not exposing their flaws, scholars said. Mark D. Soskin, associate professor of economics at the University of Central Florida, said, "Establishing standards or even publishing measured learning would reveal that the emperor, if not naked, has a much skimpier wardrobe than commonly presumed."

Once inadequate teaching and learning are revealed, Soskin said, colleges have to face a number of difficult choices, such as making campus life less sociable, flunking more students and forcing faculty to undergo more training in how to teach -- rather than just lecture -- in their specialties. --Jay Matthews --Gauging, and Improving, How Colleges Teach (The Washington Post (Registration, will expire))

--Computers and Writing (George Mason University)

The online syllabus for what appears to be a graduate level course -- that's a hefty weekly reading list, that covers a broad range of topics. The next time I can't think of a blogging topic (which is admittedly rare), I'm coming back here. Compiled by Byron Hawk.

--Writing (in) Cyberspace Hyperpacket (Arizona State University)

A good collection of resources, compiled by Katherine Heenan.

Meetings are often routine if not downright boring. How many journalists have counted up the number of hours wasted in a career sitting at night week after week, month after month, with a bunch of dull politicians? As opposed to the worthwhile hours they might spend in a local tavern engaged in lofty conversation over a beer with truly interesting people? --Bob Wyss --A ''Waist'' of Time? (Poynter Online)

Covering city council meetings and school board meetings was hardly the most exciting memory of the time I spent as a radio news intern, but learning how to tie your shoes isn't necessarily "fun," either.

Students who want to go right into the anchor desk have a very romantic notion of what journalism is all about.

As Cicero put it, Socrates was always "pretending to need information and professing admiration for the wisdom of his companion"; when Socrates? interlocutors were annoyed with him for behaving in this way they called him eiron, a vulgar term of reproach referring generally to any kind of sly deception with overtones of mockery. The fox was the symbol of the eiron.

All serious discussions of eironeia followed upon the association of the word with Socrates. --Norman D. Knox --Irony (The Autodidact Project)

Part of an interesting collection of essays that deserve some attention from me as I prepare to teach "Media Aesthetics" next term.

The combination of prolificacy and inattention to accuracy that characterizes this process is highly suggestive of the modern pedagogic technique known as "journaling." For decades, (following, we are probably meant to assume, some breakthrough research at a school of education somewhere) young students have been not merely encouraged but required to fill pages of their notebooks with writing. Not stories, nor essays, nor any other defined genre of writing; just writing. The writing is judged solely on bulk: So many pages are required per week or semester, but the writing on those pages need not be grammatical or even intelligible. Even the "talented and gifted" program at my own sons' school employed journaling as a principal activity, merely raising the quota over that of standard classrooms. It may well be that the practice of journaling in the schools, along with the acceptance of "creative spelling" as a form of personal expression not to be repressed, underlies much of the success of Wikipedia. --Robert McHenry --The Faith-Based Encyclopedia (Tech Central Station)

I tell my students that they shouldn't cite Wikipedia in their academic papers, but I find its coverage of certain cyberspace issues to be current and useful. Accurate? Not always. Free? Very.

I've also edited a few of those articles, and my Writing for the Internet students were required to start a new "topic" on Wikipedia and see what happens.

Wikipedia won't and shouldn't replace traditional sources of information, but rather than tell my students to stay away from such sources completely, I'd rather they develop the critical skills to use the digital resources that are available to them. Students should know how easy it is to alter a Wikipedia document, so they will understand how easy it would be to plant false information. And the majority opinion isn't always right -- history is full of scientific discoveries that were laughed at and silenced by the majority.

--Daniel Radosh
--The Powerpoint Anthology of Literature

Via KairosNews.

But can IF ever be great art, the type which people go back over and over to read or play? A similar question would be: can computer games ever be as evocative or lasting as cinema? While these forms have undeniably not produced anything as transcendent as a Bergman film or a Nabokov novel so far, one has to remember that interactive fiction is still in its infancy.

There is no reason why well-written interactive fiction cannot equal or beat traditional ludic literature, such as the spy novel or the detective story, in quality. Complex literary worlds created in IF may convey moods and feelings, an end in itself. There is also no intrinsic reason why stories cannot have great characters and let choices from the reader shape them? The short answer is that it is too early to answer these questions. The jury is deliberating, and looking to the future. --Swarat Chaudhuri --Tales That Let You (The Statesman)

Via Grand Text Auto.

The title of the article seems to be truncated on the website, and the formatting is choppy in other ways... but if you can get past the sloppy presentation, Chaudhuri's article is a good introduction to the literary issues behind my favorite digital genre.

--IF Comp 2004 Results (IFComp.org)

Luminous Horizons, by Paul O'Brian, is the winner.

From then on, I never had another forlorn afternoon. And to think, from that first fateful day when I decided I would be known as the half-elf wizard Vendel, I was joining a revolution. But what exactly were we transforming?

To put it simply, Dungeons and Dragons reinvented the use of the imagination as a kid's best toy. The cliche of parents waxing nostalgic for their wooden toys and things "they had to make themselves" has now become my own. Looking around at my toddler's room full of trucks, trains, and Transformers, I want to cry out, "I created worlds with nothing more than a twenty-sided die!"

[...]

My generation of gamers -- whose youths were spent holed up in paneled wood basements crafting identities, mythologies, and geographies with a few lead figurines -- are the filmmakers, computer programmers, writers, DJs, and musicians of today. I think, for the producers, the movie version of "The Lord of the Rings" was less about getting the trilogy off the page and onto the screen than it was a vicarious thrill, a gift to the millions of us who wished we could have dressed up as orcs and ventured into catacombs and castle keeps ourselves. Only a generation of imaginations roused by role playing could have made those movies possible.--Peter Bebergal --How 'Dungeons' changed the world (Boston.com)

An emotional celebration of a game that gave many players an outlet for their creativity.

This glossary is an ongoing volunter project that aims to define terms that have developed special meaning among those who write, play, and study interactive fiction (which in this case means a specific kind of parser-based computer game, not literary hypertext). The wiki philosophy is that any page in a wiki text is part of a discussion, and no page is ever finished. --Interactive Fiction Glossary (IF Theory Book)

This glossary has been neglected lately, mostly because my new job took up much of the time I had been devoting to interactive fiction. I'd love to see some activity on the IF glossary again.

I know that Ms. J.K.Rowling provided the approximation of the value of a Galleon ("about 5 pounds, but the exchange rate varies"), in an interview, but I think it is off a tad. This is not Ms. Rowling's fault, but it is the fault of Scholastic Books. The price tag on my copy of Quidditch Through the Ages, states that the book sells for "$3.99, or 14 Sickles and 3 Knuts". As a math teacher, looking for anything to interest my students, I made a math problem out of this. Perhaps people might appreciate the "arithmancy" a little more.

Dr. Joshua C. Sasmor

From Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone, chapter 9:

Hagrid helped Harry pile some of it [Harry's money] into a bag.

"The gold ones are Galleons," he explained. "Seventeen silver Sickles to a Galleon and twenty-nine Knuts to a Sickle, it's easy enough."

--Joshua C. Sasmor --An interesting question, ''What is the value of a Galleon?'' (Sasmor | Seton Hill University)

While I haven't taken a math class since 1987, for some reason while I was studying for my Ph.D. I got into creating 3D vector graphics for pleasure, so I looked up equations for plotting points in space and projecting them onto a 2D surface.

There is no software that could read my thesis and tell me "logical fallacy on line 656" or "undefined term used in ambiguous context on line 4203". So, when my C++ program compiled without generating any errors, I felt validated and comforted.

So, is the academic attention to blogs the same as "selling out," the way punk-rockers sold out when they received public acclamation rather than evoke the sensation of disgust? The attention given to weblogs in the media, elevating blogs to journalism or at least commentary, is one way of colonizing the field. If blogging can be defined within the known genres and boundaries, it can also be restricted and controlled according to known rules and made to submit to already predefined aesthetics. --Torill Mortensen --Personal Publication and Public Attention (Into the Blogosphere)

This year, a significant number of students in my "Writing for the Internet" class had kept their own personal blogs. One had kept a public journal since she was thirteen. These students were immediately aware of the differences between the kind of journaling they were used to doing, and the kind they were expected to do as students at Seton Hill University.

Although I have given students instructions about polite discourse, ad hominem attacks, and the ethics of changing entries after they have been posted, I have never told students what language they should or should not use. Nevertheless, the students recognized that four-letter words were not in casual use on the blogs of other students active in the SHU blogging community. Several of these students responded by continuing to blog on their own personal sites.

Occasionally, online friends follow links from the personal sites to the "academic" sites, and leave comments that feature instant-message-style abbreviations and syntax, as well as in jokes.

A similar thing happens in reverse when students post comments here... strangers respond to what I said, calling me "Dennis," but the students respectfully call me "Dr. Jerz" (even though I am invariably simply "Jerz" when students speak to each other informally offline).

Here I was about to reach back into Mortensen's article for another quote, but since I've met the author, and of course because I read her weblog and see the daily tracks she makes in my server log, my first instinct was to call her "Torill". Perhaps today I'll call her Dr. Mortensen.

Dr. Mortensen asks whether the academic desire to categorize and define will kill the development of a weblog as a living medium.

[H]ow do we imagine a way to study blogs not colonized by the dominant culture? This is a matter of conviction. To a certain degree all cultural criticism is a matter of belief. Those who find that society is gendered will claim that the solution can be found in studying gender-differences, while others find that the alternative to the hegemonic study lies with the non-dominant ethnicities.... Ultimately, communication happens as human beings create meaning from a set of signals which we can call signs (or any other arbitrary collection of symbols we choose).

Firefox 1.0 has excellent bookmark-management features, some of which were present in earlier versions of the browser. Users can, with one click, sort bookmarks according to site name, location, date last visited, etc. The newest bookmark feature is Live Bookmarks, which allows users to browse RSS feeds from their favorite websites directly from the site's bookmark or in sidebar in the browser window. --Firefox 1.0 Makes Flashy Debut  (Wired)

Some kind of spyware got into my laptop computer sometime last month. It very cleverly closed the browser window when I tried to search Google for certain keywords (including, I presume, any keyword that would help me remove whatever virus it was). I loaded Firefox in order to find a good spyware removal tool, and haven't gone back to "Internet Exploder".

Students reared on Internet Explorer look at me blankly when I talk to them about "bookmarks". IE calls them "favorites." But the verb "bookmark" is so much more handy than "add to your favorites" or "favoritize".

I have the version 1.0 preview, and I won't upgrade until the big rush is over. I love the tabbed browsing feature. The search bar is awesome -- when you hit CTRL-F, a search bar appears at the bottom of the screen, and you can immediately start typing. The browser starts searching with the first letter that you enter, so that you don't have to type in a search term and press "Find". For example, to search for "immediately", the page will automatically scroll to the first appearance of the string "i", "im", and "imm" as you type. If there is no word with the string "imm" on the page, you get a soft, blunt burping rejection noise, and part of the search bar flashes red.

I also like that your browsing isn't interrupted by a nagging message saying that you don't have a plug-in required to view the page. Firefox delivers that message in a bar that appears at the top of the browsing window.

While some pages optimized for IE don't work so well (the web page access to Microsoft Outlook offers only a subset of the features available to IE users), my only other complaint is that the firefox logo doesn't look anything like a firefox -- it looks like a little tomato.

After Nixon crushed McGovern in the 1972 election, the film critic Pauline Kael made a remark that has become a touchstone among conservatives. "I don't know how Richard Nixon could have won," she marveled. "I don't know anybody who voted for him." While the second sentence indicates the sheltered habitat of the Manhattan intellectual, the first signifies what social scientists call the False Consensus Effect. That effect occurs when people think that the collective opinion of their own group matches that of the larger population. If the members of a group reach a consensus and rarely encounter those who dispute it, they tend to believe that everybody thinks the same way.

[...]

The problem is that the simple trappings of deliberation make academics think that they've reached an opinion through reasoned debate -- instead of, in part, through an irrational social dynamic. The opinion takes on the status of a norm. Extreme views appear to be logical extensions of principles that everyone more or less shares, and extremists gain a larger influence than their numbers merit. If participants left the enclave, their beliefs would moderate, and they would be more open to the beliefs of others. But with the conferences, quarterlies, and committee meetings suffused with extreme positions, they're stuck with abiding by the convictions of their most passionate brethren. --Mark Bauerlein --Liberal Groupthink Is Anti-Intellectual (Chronicle of Higher Education)

This article is in a subdirectory marked "temp," so I don't know if it's permanent.

I think this aspect of academic culture that leads to the impression that academics live in the ivory tower, isolated from the outside world. Baurelein mentions what he calls the "Common Assumption," which is the unspoken expectation that "all the strangers in the room at professional gatherings are liberals."

I was consciously aware of a variation of this phenomenon when I was studying in Canada. Polite cocktail party conversation and small-talk at graduate social events typically included anti-American sentiments that were not offered for debate, but were instead intended to solicit silent nodding and sighs of assent. For instance, I recall one student, puzzled by a fellow Canadian's use of a particularly vulgar racist phrase, speculating that since there was a U.S. military base near where this vulgar Canadian grew up, that must have been the source of this Canadian's vulgarity. When nobody in the room laughed at the outright silliness of this display of "logic," I had to speak up.

In my role as a journalism teacher, I am increasingly aware of the effect that my own biases may have in the classroom.

A colleague of mine posted a printout of the "States with Higher IQ Vote Democrat" meme, but according to The American Assembler, which published it as a humor item, it appears to be a hoax.

Some students who were willing to give interactive fiction a chance felt frustrated by the postmodern structure of Photopia. Others who reported being extremely frustrated by IF nevertheless put in significant effort trying to solve the game.

For the next exercise, students were asked to choose four games, play each for just fifteen minutes, choose one of those games to play for another hour, and write a reflection on each game. Because I gave them permission to give up on games that didn't meet their expectations, overall I think even the students who disliked IF went into the exercise knowing there was a time limit, which led them to respond better than I expected. --Dennis G. Jerz --Interactive Fiction Review Sampler

After repeating some of Wonkette'snumbers, Sullivan mused, "A Kerry landslide? Could be. Could be." He cautioned the numbers could be misleading, even as he was publicizing them.

This is the kind of stuff we used to run in my aforementioned school paper, when the speculation surrounded who was going steady. The difference is that the bloggers aspire to being a force in our public life and claim to be at the forefront of a new political-media era. It was clear to me, from following their efforts that night, that, unlike journalists, some blog operators who are quick to trash the MSM not only don't care about the veracity of the stories they are spreading, they do not understand when there is a live hand grenade on their keyboard. They appear not to care. Their concern is for controversy and "hits." --Eric Engberg --Blogging As Typing, Not Journalism (CBS News)

And, of course, the big conclusion:

One of the verdicts rendered by election night 2004 is that, given their lack of expertise, standards and, yes, humility, the chances of the bloggers replacing mainstream journalism are about as good as the parasite replacing the dog it fastens on.

While I wouldn't have put it quite so viciously, I think Engberg is right to point out the flaws in the "blogging equals journalism" meme.

Blogging is a good thing. Journalism is a good thing. Journalists can blog. Bloggers can do journalism.

Bloggers need not be parasites on journalism, and journalism need not scorn blogging.

Nevertheless, the essay makes a good case for the dinosaurs.

Colleges have spent millions on "smart classrooms" packed with the latest gadgets to assist teaching -- computerized projection systems, Internet ports at every seat, even video cameras with motion detectors that can track the movements of a lecturer. But colleges have spent far less time and money giving professors the skills to use even the simplest technology effectively.

The result: Students say technology actually makes some of their professors less effective than they would be if they stuck to a lecture at the chalkboard. --Jeffrey R. Young --When Good Technology Means Bad Teaching (Chronicle)

An excellent observation from a student: "Sometimes overheads are better because you can draw on them, and that's kind of an interactive feature that's gone away with PowerPoint."

I very rarely use PowerPoint. I am much more likely to blog on a topic related to an upcoming lecture, and then during class use the links embedded in the blogs as an outline. I ask my students to do the same, though I do find that students seem to have written a conventional paper on a word processor, then pasted it into their blog... it can be rather dry listening to someone read word-for-word what your eyes can scan much more quickly.

I do occasionally load up the word processor, and type examples and thoughts as they occur to me... I sometimes do this on the blackboard when a good discussion is going, but I can take the word processor file with me.

This strategy is an implementation of the "just-in-time teaching" method, which I've found very useful, since my curricular material just keeps getting longer and longer, with more links and more examples, with every year that I teach... and all that information can be overwhelming to a student who sees it all laid out on the first day of classes.

Another student complaint from the article, referring specifically to discussion forums: "Students don't read other students' responses, only those posted by the faculty member. They write responses in order to fulfill the participation requirements of the class."

A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt. If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake. -- Thomas Jefferson, cited all over the Internet --Patience and the Reign of Witches (1798)

Have you seen this quotation popping up all over the Internet?

I thought I'd look it up, and here's the sentence that immediately precedes the selected passage:

They are circumscribed within such narrow limits, & their population so full, that their numbers will ever be the minority, and they are marked, like the Jews, with such a peculiarity of character as to constitute from that circumstance the natural division of our parties. A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over...

Jefferson is speaking of a particular political faction -- the Federalists -- that won votes from the people by choosing General Washington as their candidate. If more people knew about the casual anti-semitism immediately preceding the popular passage, I wonder if this quote would be so useful right now for liberals seeking consolation over the US election results.

Of course, Jefferson was writing in a very different world than ours. Still, how ironic to see on so many liberal websites this passage from a slave-owning anti-semite who was writing it to defend the Republican Party.

That statement is factually correct, but very misleading. Just doing a little Michael Moore on ya to see if you're paying attention.

Jefferson did own slaves. I'm not an expert on Jefferson's relationship to Jews, but I gather that he, as a product of his time, was probably no more anti-semitic than the rest of his society, and quite possibly much less. He wrote in an age before society at large began to frown on language that needlessly highlights racial differences. But it's a stretch to fault this statement with any excessive hatred -- he was just reaching for a metaphor that had power in his time and age, and the metaphor of the Jews as outsiders, while not exactly a sensitive choice when judged by today's standards, fit the bill.

As for Jefferson as Republican -- he was calling for patience, counseling that secession was not the answer, and affirming his belief that the nation would eventually return from the "anti-republicans" into the hands of republicans, because, as he put it, "The body of our countrymen is substantially republican through every part of the Union."

Language is a funny thing... a fact can be accurate, but terribly misleading without proper context.

Jefferson was writing in defense of a party that was at that time called "republican," (as opposed to the "federalist" alternative). It shared the name, but little else, with the modern Republican party. The GOP wouldn't form until the middle of the following century. (Ironically, it formed in part as a response to Democrats who not only wanted to secede, but did -- chiefly over the slavery issue).

Jefferson was undoubtedly a brilliant man, but history is always much more complex than a quotation or slogan repeated like a mantra.

Since I've criticized what I see as a shallow rhetorical response to the election (seeking consolation in a misapplied, out-of-context quotation), I'll link to another that I found more rhetorically interesting: "An Open Letter to Unhappy Democrats."

Each year, on the day after Christmas, scholars and teachers of Modern Languages convene for their annual North American conference.

At that conference, countless job interviews take place -- an early step for some toward achieving a coveted academic position.

9interviews.com documents the progress of nine such scholars, each one committed to attaining a place among the professoriate. --9 Interviews

Via Culturecat. I haven't had the chance to view them yet (not over my slow home modem, that is.) Still, they look very promising.

Many people come here, just as many people seek out the stage, because they know it is a place where they won't have to grow up too quickly, where the fickleness and irresponsibility of youth are a way of life. Pasts and past relationships are shed like so much old luggage. The unspoken, winking conviction among the nubile ingenues and underwear models who sprout from the hot pavement like whack-a-moles is that fidelity is cute but impracticable. (Note that while many romantic comedies come out of Hollywood, none take place here.) And in the city that first brought you silicon, the commingling of technology and romance has always been encouraged. --Out of site  (Guardian)

I started reading this article because the lead mentioned how actors use the Internet Movie Data Base to size up potential dates. But I kept reading because of the writing. Enjoy a high-tech look at romance in Tinseltown.

And for roughly thirty years, almost any description of mailing lists of any length has mentioned flaming, the tendency of list members to forgo standards of public decorum when attempting to communicate with some ignorant moron whose to stupid to know how too spell and deserves to DIE, die a PAINFUL DEATH, you PINKO SCUMBAG!!!

Yet despite three decades of descriptions of flaming, it is often treated by designers as a mere side-effect, as if each eruption of a caps-lock-on argument was surprising or inexplicable.

Flame wars are not surprising; they are one of the most reliable features of mailing list practice. --Group as User: Flaming and the Design of Social Software (Shirky.com)

Shirky extends the well-trodden ground of flamewar analysis to weblog and wiki environments, and touts the Slashdot user moderation solution (and the meta-moderation, which polices the moderation system).

Part of the appeal may be that, unlike many of its antecedents, I Love Bees could not be played just by sitting in front of a screen. Over the Internet, players were able to work together on puzzles, usually hidden in corrupted image files on ilovebees.com. Those answers were just starting points, however. Players then had to use them to respond to the mysterious calls that rang at hundreds of pay phones across the country every Tuesday. --Noah Shachtman --Sci-fi fans called into an alternate reality (NY Times | C-Net)

Reflections on an Emerging Academic Weblog Community (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

The Seton Hill blogging community has a small number of dedicated bloggers who generate the vast majority of the activity (at one point I estimated that 5% of our bloggers generate 50% of the activity, though that number changes based on how close we are to a blog portfolio due in one of my classes). This year, it seems that more of the most committed bloggers already had blogs elsewhere, and still keep up their old blogs. One of the new crop of bloginators actually transferred to SHU after she started spending time on the SHU blogs. She wouldn't be here if she didn't have a tendency to blog elsewhere, so naturally she brings a different kind of approach to her blogging.

As the number of points in a network increases arithmetically (1, 2, 3, 4) the number of possible connections increases geometrically (1, 4, 9, 16). Already this year I get the sense that the blogging community is not as tight as it was last year, but that is probably simply because we have 160 weblog authors now (though most of those who aren't currently taking a course requiring them to blog aren't touching their blogs).

We have more experienced bloggers in Writing for the Internet than I've ever taught in one place before, and many of them brought with them a network of blogging relationships, which means that the limited energy they have for blogging is shared.

If I were to measure the blogging activity at blogs.setonhill.edu, and draw conclusions about what blogs are and what bloggers do, we would end up with an incomplete image of blogging. When the Perseus data first came out, lone wolf bloggers (those who don't use ready-made packages) were quick to point out the flaws.

Still, the Perseus report put forth this observation:

Blogging is many things, yet the typical blog is written by a teenage girl who uses it twice a month to update her friends and classmates on happenings in her life. It will be written very informally (often in "unicase": long stretches of lowercase with ALL CAPS used for emphasis) with slang spellings, yet will not be as informal as instant messaging conversations (which are riddled with typos and abbreviations). Underneath the iceberg, blogging is a social phenomenon: persistent messaging for young adults.

If you place it in the proper perspective -- most blogs hosted at large centralized blogging hosting services fit this description -- it all makes sense. Some media figures reacted with such disdain that I wonder if they themselves feel that a teenage girl's social blogging isn't really "blogging". We've discussed several times in "Writing for the Internet" that social blogs, academic blogs, political blogs, and fictional blogs all serve different purposes.

Lampa is right to question that concept of the blogosphere by noting that most blogs, and most bloggers, don't fit that category. But, in the case of SHU, where about 5% of the bloggers generate about 50% of the activity, it's probably still fair to say that most of the *blogging* does fit that category.

It's simply the nature of the medium. A certain kind of blogging perpetuates itself on the Internet. Other kinds don't.

The teenage girl who doesn't link to outside sources and who doesn't read other blogs isn't doing anything wrong -- of course she should feel free to blog however she wants. But she's only engaging in a subset of the activities usually understood as part of blogging. (See Jill Walker's definition of blogging, which was itself generated on her blog, via comments collected from bloggers.)

Bloggers who like reading other blogs, who leave comments on other blogs, and who engage in what I call "xenoblogging" tend to get more comments. If you happen to be someone for whom getting comments is a satisfactory reward for blogging, then you will be encouraged to blog more. If you happen to blog the kind of entries that attract comments, then the more comments you get, the more you will blog. At system that rewards behavior that sustains the system is healthy.

If, on the other hand, you don't particularly care whether anyone comments on your blog, or you don't even blog with a system that permits comments, or you don't track inbound links or other signs of interest from the outside world, then you won't have any incentive to adjust your writing style in order to encourage interaction. We don't tend to come across systems that don't perpetuate themselves or can't adapt, simply because those systems die out. (See "Emergence.")

The writing on such weblogs isn't necessarily worse than the writing on weblogs, it's just less... well... it's less bloggy. If you don't really gain any bloggy benefits from posting an online diary, you won't be motivated to go to the extra trouble to publish your writing online.

At the core of the blogosphere lies a minority of active and engaged bloggers who post, comment, and link frequently, creating a kernel of conversational community based on personal networks facilitated by blogging tools and associated technologies. However, for the vast majority of users who blog casually, infrequently, and for the benefit of their real-world friends and family, the blogosphere does not exist in the ethereal, hyperlinked connections that bind blogs to one another; rather, it resides in the mind of the individual blogger as an online imagined community resulting from the shared experience of instant publishing. -- Graham Lampa --An Introduction to the Imagined Community of Instant Publishing (Into the Blogosphere)

In the 80s, the popular Boderbund software PrintShop made it easy for anyone with a printer to make huge banners (on fan-fold computer paper, of course). People who had never designed a banner or flyer before were suddenly able do it easily -- though not necessarily well. Lampa begins his article by noting statistics taken from the Perseus Development Company survey that labeled two-thirds of weblogs found on large hosted websites are classified as "abandoned". Data from these blogs also show that less than 10% linked to traditional news sources, and 20% don't contain outbound links at all. The survey challenged the notion that weblogs are all (or mostly) updated daily, that they contain political commentary, and that they link to each other and outside sources frequently.

I have some idea of who reads my blog, simply because some of them comment, and others link in. But I get the idea that many more people read my blog than comment on it, simply because frequently when I blog on a topic that has drawn comments from certain people in the past, those people quickly comment on the latest entry, even if they haven't commented on anything else in weeks or months. But I'm not sure what to make of Lampa's claim that

for the vast majority of users who blog casually, infrequently, and for the benefit of their real-world friends and family, the blogosphere does not exist in the ethereal, hyperlinked connections that bind blogs to one another; rather, it resides in the mind of the individual blogger as an online imagined community resulting from the shared experience of instant publishing.

Because I don't see hyperlinks as ethereal, maybe I'm tripped up by the implication that an imagined community is somehow less ethereal (insubstantial, intangible) than what the "typical" social teenage blogger generates in her mind regarding her audience.

If, as the Perseus report concludes, the "typical" social blogger writes casually for a small audience of friends and family, then she probably has a fairly concrete idea of who those friends and family are. That makes sense. But where, then, does "imagination" come into play? How does "imaginary" equate to "less ethereal"? Lampa quotes Benedict Anderson, who writes, "all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined." Marshal McLuhan observed that media technology, which extends the reach of the human senses and expands the capacity of our memory, has the potential to turn the world into a "global village." Lampa also notes the importance of the link economy (where amateurs give their work away for free) as contrasted with the market economy (where experts disseminate their works to the masses). He also notes that consumers of traditional news are only consumers, while bloggers are producers as well as consumers... this alone marks a huge shift in the power structure. This conception of the blogosphere has been examined fairly thoroughly.

Lampa's section on "Filtering Community" covers the basics well, and observes that because bloggers tend to link to and discuss what interests them, "[i]nstead of deciding what will be most profitable to promote, the blogosphere promotes what its members find to be most interesting". Of course, he pretty much means the top 5% of bloggers are the ones with the power, though of course if enough low- or mid-ranking bloggers talk about something, they are bound to attract the attention of one of the A-listers.

Lampa pushes the point as he works to his conclusion: "[T]he community represents a relatively small number of global elites who have the luxury of time, talent, and expendable wealth." I balked for a little bit upon reading that, since the existence of all those dead free blogs on central hosting agencies should be evidence enough that creating blogs are so cheap that they are expendable. But a homeless person can use a computer in a public library in order to maintain a blog, but one has to be homeless in a society that has access to technology. The filtering characteristics of the blogosphere will naturally reward the kind of talent that is required to create content that appeals to the taste of bloggers, but that is little surprise. And, of course, maintaining a blog takes time.

Lampa's conclusion does not dismiss the vast majority of bloggers who blog below the waterline, and ends on an optimistic note that "the imagined blogging community created by the mass ceremony of instant publishing will continue to produce previously unimaginable quantities of indexed, archived, and hyperlinked material that impacts people's every day lives."

I'd like to echo his observation that the nature of blogging necessarily changes as it increases in scale, from a small group of technically-savvy pioneers to a much more diverse and more loosely connected network.

News organizations promised Wednesday to look into why their Election Day exit polls showed an initial surge for John Kerry, but also blamed bloggers for spreading news that gave a misleading view of the presidential race. --Blogs Blamed for Exit Poll Fiasco  (Wired | AP)

The headline is a bit incendiary, but the article makes a good point. Any blogger can post a knee-jerk reaction. I speculate that perhaps bloggers who don't usually read or write about politics dipped their toe into that pool the other day, which means that the production and consumption of political blogging was skewed a little bit more towards newbies.

Thomas Jefferson said that if he had to choose between a nation without newspaeprs or a nation without government, he'd ditch the government and keep the newspapers -- but only on the condition that every man receive a newspaper, and that every man know how to read.

I don't suggest that blogs should or could replace government, but it does take a bit of practice to be able to "read" blogs as pointers towards official and credible information, rather than take every under-supported opinion or unsourced claim as if it were true.

Tim Russert's Electronic Whiteboard (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

"Florida, Florida, Florida," wrote Tim Russert on his famous whiteboard during the 2000 presidential election.

Russert has levelled up to a fancy schmancy digital whiteboard. He filled up the columns with data in red and blue, which was a nice touch, but the displays seemed more static than I remembered them from 2000. Back in the day, Russert had several different whiteboards, which gave the illusion that he was scribbling very rapid changes.

This time around, it seems that Russert felt he had put so much work into creating the one page with the red and blue column, that he didn't want to change it much. I watched NBC from about 11am until the wee hours of the morning (I drifted off for a while as dawn approached), and although he said "Ohio, Ohio, Ohio," at one point, I didn't see him write it.

I seem to recall that one of Russert's Election 2000 whiteboards is preserved in a museum somewhere. While his digital tablet is very cool, I think it was underused. Still, whoever managed to get it on camera tonight is probably going to be very happy about the sales it generates.

Update: See a photo on Engaget

Videogames vs. Television (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

He's done his homework, taken his bath. The six-year-old boy has an hour or so before bedtime. He's already read a book to his little sister, and plans to listen to a book about elections as bedtime reading.

What to do in the meanwhile? Watch a TV show or play a computer game?

His mom would like to sit in the living room and watch a show.

His dad would like to sit in the den and play a game.

The boy gets out his "Electronic Spider Stompin' Game" and pits mommy against daddy. Winner takes all.

Daddy wins by one stomped spider.

Online Syllabus Not "Official" Enough? (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I just got an e-mail from an administrative assistant who wanted a copy of the syllabus for one of my current courses. I sent her the URL of the "syllabus" page of the course website, as well as links to the "outline" and "projects" pages.

She responded that she couldn't get the documents to print without the navigation bar at the top and the URL at the bottom -- did I have a "clean" version that I could send as an e-mail attachment?

While I did some of the early drafting in a simple word processor, I didn't design those syllabi as print documents that I then posted on my curricular weblog.

I did work on a special print-specific stylesheet, since printing from the default Movable Type template results in the rightmost inch of each page being cut off. I recognize that students will print pages in order to mark up and ponder, but I designed the whole site to be consulted and used online.

When I explained this to my correspondent, she cheerfuly said that she would just cut, paste, and photocopy in order to construct a paper-ready document out of the printed web pages.

Problem solved... though I'm still uncomfortable that the presence of navigation buttons at the top of a printed syllabus and a URL at the bottom seem to be challenges to the authority of a syllabus.

"Our mission is to look at how such a robot should be programmed to respect personal spaces of humans."

The research also focuses on human perception of robots, including how they should look, and how a robot can learn new skills by imitating a human demonstrator.

"Without such studies, you will build robots which might not respect the fact that humans are individuals, have preferences and come from different cultural backgrounds," Professor Dautenhahn told BBC News Online.

"And I want robots to treat humans as human beings, and not like other robots," she added. --Robots learn 'robotiquette' rules (BBC)