Media: December 2004 Archive Page

You awaken to news of a morning traffic jam. Leaving home early for a doctor's appointment, you nonetheless arrive too late to find parking. After waiting two hours for a 15-minute consultation, you wait again to have your prescription filled. All the while, you worry about the work you've missed because so many other people would line up to take your job. Returning home to the evening news, you watch throngs of youths throwing stones somewhere in the Middle East, and a feature on disappearing farmland in the Midwest. A telemarketer calls for the third time, telling you, "We need your help to save the rain forest." As you set the alarm clock for the morning, one neighbor's car alarm goes off and another's air conditioner starts to whine.

So goes a day in the life of an average American. It is thus hardly surprising that many Americans think overpopulation is one of the world's most pressing problems. --Phillip Longman --The Global Baby Bust (Foreign Affairs)

Bloggers at the scene are more deeply affected by events than the journalists who roam from one disaster to another, said Xeni Jardin, one of the four co-editors of the site BoingBoing.net, which pointed visitors to many of the disaster blogs.

"They are helping us understand the impact of this event in a way that other media just can't," with an intimate voice and an unvarnished perspective, with the richness of local context, Ms. Jardin said.

That makes blogs compelling - and now essential - reading, said Dr. Siva Vaidhyanathan, an assistant professor of culture and communication at New York University and a blogger. Once he heard about the disaster, "Right after BBC, I went to blogs," he said. --John Schwartz --Blogs Provide Raw Details From Scene of the Disaster (NY Times)

I also found Wikipedia's entry on the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake impressive.

For way too long, it has been the mainstream media (MSM) that's played God with the American public, telling everyone what's news and what's not, what to play up and what to downplay. But 2004 was the year the power started shifting, that the Little People, if you will, started to tell the gods of media what the public really wanted. -- Mark Glaser --Bloggers, Citizen Media and Rather's Fall -- Little People Rise Up in 2004 (Online Journalism Review)

In the bowels of the British Library, the first object the conservator showed Seales was a manuscript that was so mangled, he says, "We almost ran screaming from the room, because there was nothing we could do. We had no tools that could help."

Seales tells me such manuscript fragments exist in the nooks and crannies of almost every archive. "Exactly how many? It's hard to tell," he says. "In the old days, these kinds of manuscripts were cracked open and painstakingly laid out on paper with tweezers and a magnifying glass. Libraries stopped doing that with all of these damaged objects because they didn't have the manpower to do it, and they weren't getting the results they wanted." --Alicia P. Gregory --Digital Exploration: Unwrapping the Secrets of Damaged Manuscripts (UK Odyssey)

Via MGK.

Washington Post Co. on Tuesday said it would buy Microsoft Corp.'s online magazine Slate, whose mix of politics, news and culture has built a loyal following but failed to yield significant profits. --Martha Graybow --Washington Post to Buy Web Magazine Slate (Reuters)

"Sometimes you do everything right and you still die," Mr. Wade said. "So you pick yourself up and start again."

I can live with that message, even though I can't shake the feeling that it was designed to sell books to conflicted parents like me. --Learning Early That Success Is a Game (NY Times)

An interesting review of Got Game: How the Gamer Generation Is Reshaping Business Forever.

My son used to hate losing any game... but that changed when I introduced him to a "how to play chess" CD, that uses cartoon characters and creates an epic quest, not just for a single game, but for the whole goal of improving your skills so you can defeat King Black.

Peter will often hit "reset" when a game -- almost any game -- isn't going well for him. When he invited me to race against him in Lego Stunt Rally, he found it difficult to resist the urge to "reset" automatically when one of the computer-controlled drone cars passed him (I didn't even come close to threatening him... he's got a lot of practice time on that game). The trial-and-error method works for some professions, but students who turn in five polished pages of a rough draft, then jettison their whole paper topic when I suggest revisions, aren't really learning the writing process. (I've attempted to compensate by splitting the larger assignments up into many small ones, but in my lit survey course, with 30+ members, students sometimes objected to being asked to sit through so many oral presentations from peers who either still roughing their ideas out, or reading directly from their previous draft.)

This link was suggested to me by my boss's boss (who is not a blogger herself, but must like having them work for her.)

Tips

• Using blurbs with headlines rather than headlines-only seems to help disperse interest throughout a homepage (down the page). Recognize that a list of headlines-only high on the page might not get people to look as much on lower portions of the page.
• The use of blurbs does not appear to affect the number of clicks per headline -- it just redistributes the clicks. If you have some stories that you want to get people to more than others, you might want to use blurbs with those headlines and place those stories near the top of the homepage.
• If you're going to use blurbs, remember that the first few words may matter most. Our findings indicate that very few people go to the trouble of reading all of even short blurbs. Most people don't invest much time in deciding whether or not to click through to an article, so keep head/blurb combos succinct.
--Eyetrack III (Poynter)

On my to-do list: update my "blurbs" page with results from this study.

On both micro and macro levels, drawing from the research of others and my own, this proves true for both teachers and students: for some, particularly those with access, the blog is relevant to their lives both within and outside the classroom; for others, though, the medium remains irrelevant. This means that the quest for literacy cannot end with or be subsumed by any one medium. This extended but heavily revised entry represents a moment or opportunity for discovery. --Austin Lingerfelt --The (Classroom) Blog: A Moment for Literacy, A Moment for Giving Pause (Essence Renewed)

A well-done, richly linked graduate student project.

You've heard of "Myst," "Quake" and "Tomb Raider," but how many people remember "Obsidian," "Grim Fandango" and "Under A Killing Moon?" --Gene Emery --A Visit to the Museum of Underappreciated Games (Yahoo|Reuters (will expire))

One presumes this museum is somewhere near The Island of Misfit Toys. Of course, there is also The Underdogs, a site devoted to games that have disappeared from commercial shelves (or games that never were released commercially... there's a healthy section on interactive fiction, including recent releases from the present, post-commercial era.).

Grim Fandango is on my list of "games I've read about and really should take a look at," because I've seen it mentioned in games scholarship.

I've got "Obsidian" in a small stack of retro CDs in my office. "Under a Killing Moon" must be in a box somewhere.

Just hearing the name of the latter two titles makes me think of the taste of the Keebler wafer cookies that my sister and I would load up on when I spent a weekend away from graduate school, at her apartment, catching up with her and playing games.

According to an e-mail sent today to Harvard students, Google will collaborate with Harvard's libraries on a pilot project to digitize a substantial number of the 15 million volumes held in the University's extensive library system, which is second only to the Library of Congress in the number of volumes it contains. Google will provide online access to the full text of those works that are in the public domain. In related agreements, Google will launch similar projects with Oxford, Stanford, the University of Michigan, and the New York Public Library. --Google to Digitize Much of Harvard's Library (Slashdot)

During the fall semester of 2004, I drew from my previous experiences in Writing for the Web with Dr. Jerz from the Fall 2003 semester. The class has changed, and so has my perception of what writing for an internet audience entails.

This section assesses what I have learned working with the class, as both a student learning new concepts that were implemented this year, and as an instructor, drawing from my freshman experience in Writing for the Web with Dennis G. Jerz. --Amanda Cochran --Writing for the Internet: Independent Study Fall 2004 (Girl Meets World)

I'm very proud of Amanda's work. She's been in more than half of the classes I've taught at Seton Hill, including the version of "Writing for the Internet" that I taught last year.

I've been carefully ramping up my expectations for Amanda with each encounter. She continues to prove that she's up to the challenge.

More links to Writing for the Internet student projects coming soon...

"When I told my daughter that I was going to a presentation on blogs, she said 'NO! You can't do blogs in schools! Blogs are OURS!'"
--Barriers to Entry (Weblogg-Ed)

While I still encounter many students who have never heard the word "weblog" before I introduce it in class, I've been increasingly encountering students who already use LiveJournal or some other blogging software for social purposes, and who encounter a brief "woah!" moment when they are asked to use a familiar medium in an unfamiliar way.

Journalism, Education and Failure (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I blogged about Ailee Slater's Oregon Daily Emerald student entitlement essay before reading any of the discussions that raged on the internet.

Clancy was moved to react against the gendered response to Slater, and invoked sympathy for Slater based on her [Slater's] apparent alienation from university culture.

The sexist and ad-hominem attacks on Fark and elsewhere on the internet were unhappy reminders that there are far worse sins than writing an incoherent editorial.

But I was far more struck by the following comment on the Oregon Daily Emerald site:

The funniest thing about this article is that someday you will apply for a job and your potential employer will google you to see what you've done and they will find this. Then they will laugh heartily and throw your resume in the recycle bin.

The student journalism I wrote when I was an undergraduate is not available online. One would have to look it up somewhere in the library stacks at the Unviersity of Viriginia. I'm sure my own early work included a fair share of howlers. For instance, I remember once suggesting the headline, "Virginia Valley Vinters: Veni, Vidi, Vino."

Students -- even student journalists whose work gets spashed across the internet -- should be permitted to make mistakes and to learn from them.

I think most employers understand that producing a student paper is an educational venture. Slater is a textbook example of a sophomore -- the "wise fool" who has had just enough experience to begin noticing patterns, but not enough wisdom to understand fully their significance. This is not a bad thing -- this is part of education, and part of being human.

So, future potential employers of Ailee Slater, don't throw her resume into the trash -- at least, not until you've seen how she responds to the public attention her editorial receives.

Will she become bitter and defensive, lashing out at opinions that differ from hers?

Or, faced with new evidence and new perspectives, will she investigate the issue fully, modify her views to account for her findings, and report the truth fairly, without bias, to the best of her ability?

In a follow-up editorial, will she look into the fate of institutions that have actually tried a grade-free education plan?

Will she examine and critique the connections between her own consumerist mindset and the culture that creates a market for services that will sell an MBA to a cat?

Will she reflect on why she did not do this kind of research herself in the first place, before she published her article?

Does she get a grade for her work on the Oregon Daily Emerald? Does she think the quality of her articles would go up or down if an instructor graded her contributions?

(The school paper I worked on at the University of Virginia paid commission to its ad sales staff, but eveyrone else was a volunteer; the older, larger, and more financially secure paper against which we competed paid its contributors a small amount for each article. Nobody got course credit for their work. I don't know what the system is like at the Oregon Daily Emerald.)

On other occasions, students have surfed the Net during class and found Web sites that supplement the discussion - though Jones also jokes that he's never had his students' undivided attention thanks to the laptops, cell phones and other gizmos they carry.

"There is a real power there, a kind of technological power. But also I think there's a kind of intellectual power that can be harnessed. They are so curious about using these technologies. And I'd really like to be able to regularly marshal that curiosity," Jones says, noting that students - not necessarily universities - are the ones who often drive the use of technology on campus.

He also thinks that young workers will continue to push technological advances in the corporate world, partly because they are able to handle "multiple conversations and juggle better than the previous generations." He says the Internet - and other forms of communication - play very much into this generation's wish for flexibility at home, work and during down time. --Martha Irvine --Generation Raised With Internet Grows Up (AP/My Way)

Young people may know that just because information is plentiful online doesn't mean it's reliable, yet their perceptions of what's trustworthy frequently differ from their elders' - sparking a larger debate about what constitutes truth in the Internet age.

Georgia Tech professor Amy Bruckman tried to force students to leave their computers by requiring at least one book for a September class project.

She wasn't prepared for the response: "Someone raised their hand and asked, "Excuse me, where would I get a book?'" --Anick Jesdanun --Online Research Worries Many Educators (AP/My Way)

Collier has never met most of his guild mates in person, but he knows two of them very well. They are his roommates, Adam Traum and Owen Nelson, both buddies he met in art school in Florida a few years back who are now his compadres in the real and virtual worlds.

In real life, the threesome lives in what Collier jokingly refers to as the "nerd tree house," an apartment chock full of mismatching furniture, stacks of pizza boxes, ashtrays crammed with cigarette butts and empty bottles of beer and Diet Coke. The walls are mostly empty, save the Jesus action figure that's tacked up near the kitchen - plus an Elvis cutout, a girlie calendar and a poster of martial arts star Jet Li.

Amid all of it, the focal point is the hardware: four TVs lined up in front of the couch - and 11 computers, with various computer parts scattered about. A cardboard box near the TVs holds just about every game console ever made - and a few duplicates, just in case. --Martha Irvine --Web Gaming Changes Social Interactions (AP/My Way)

For a librarian who has even a modest sense of either posterity or professional responsibility, entertaining any thoughts about a decline in the importance of books is painful. After all, books are how we speak to one another across generations, and one of the ways we can subvert the limitations of culture, class, gender, and personality.

But not all books are priceless additions to our heritage. Bad books cascade off the world's presses in a torrent of never-ending intellectual sewage. Amid the constant babble, the best books have trouble attracting attention. --Dennis Dillon --College Libraries: the Long Goodbye (Chronicle)

In the universal, ritualistic adulation, it was no surprise that Google's latest service received publicity that was as wide as it was shallow. The blogorrhea and avalanche of e-mail was as if a free, magical cure for cancer had been announced by the National Institutes of Health. I like and use Google a lot, but not with the "nothing-but-Google" zealotry of its fans. --Google Scholar Beta (Review) (Gale Group)

A critical review of Google Scholar. My former student Matt Hoy notes the review is hosted by Thompson Gale (which sells, among other things, online resources, some of which may see Google as competition).

The Sims 2 now has a patch that fixes a few bugs. If only real life was debuggable like this. Here's a few highlights:

• Fixes a problem with Sims' jobs not functioning properly when 3 or more Sims go to work in a helicopter.
• Visitors will no longer kidnap a baby or toddler by leaving the lot while carrying them.
• An adopted baby no longer snaps to the ground when the social worker that delivers it puts it in a crib.
• A Sim whose fiancé dies can now become engaged again.
• Fixes the problem where the teddy bear would occasionally float after being put down.
• Teens no longer get the unsatisfiable "Write a Novel" want.

-- Andrew Stern --In Debugging the Sims, Fiction is Stranger than Truth (Grand Text Auto)

Minorities who complain of underrepresentation might want to consider this still rather arcane problem. Television doesn't just represent you; it usurps you. In this respect, to be underrepresented might be seen as a kind of privilege. It means that those bright and literate tv people haven't really discovered you yet and set you going like a windup doll on the screen. You - as an individual, a family, a community - remain outside the soul-consuming vise of video.

I find the demand for ?positive role models? on tv funny too. Of course plenty of these already exist, and other writers on this subject have pointed out that it'sa sign of maturity to tolerate some negative racial and ethnic representations. But this is beside the point. The
point is that the bright and literate tv people will be only too happy to accommodate you here, and soon enough all significant American subgroups will find not only compelling but also flattering versions of themselves all over the screen. --Margaret Soltan --Tragedy of Addiction (University Diaries)

At home, dads read to their daughters and throw footballs to their sons. In elementary school overwhelmingly female teaching staffs naturally teach in ways that connect better with girls. Fidgety boys are quickly defined as suffering from reading disabilities. In middle school, teachers - still unattuned to the boys' disadvantages - take no action to correct swelling reading gaps.

That brings boys to the pivotal ninth grade, the first year when they run up against the heavily verbal, college-track curriculum that school reforms demand of most schools. And the boys flounder.

The trend holds through the remaining school years: Girls shine; boys fade. --Pay closer attention: Boys are struggling academically (Yahoo/USA Today (will expire))

My son is doing his best to pay attention to a collection of Beatrix Potter stories that my wife wants to read to him. Naturally, the Peter Rabbit tales are of interest to my son (whose name is Peter), but in the latest story in the Beatrix Potter collection, a little girl who has lost three handkerchiefs and a "pinnie" goes looking for them and encounters a hedgehog who does laundry for all the forest animals. Thrilling. Peter listened dutifully, but didn't ask a single question.

Halfway through the story, I realized that a "pinnie" is probably a "pinafore," but that didn't really help Peter understand the story very much.

I'm much more interested in reading to him from the Young Jedi Knights series (which is pure entertainment, but deals with character issues such as friendship, loyalty), or adventure/education hybrids like The Magic Treehouse or The Magic Schoolbus.

While the teacher in The Magic Schoolbus books is Ms. Frizzle, she is a science teacher, which breaks the stereotype somewhat. And all these books, including the Jedi books, feature problem-solving boy/girl teams (two friends, a brother and sister, a whole class) as protagonists.

During an English faculty meeting at my previous school, when some female faculty members were promoting a program to make the sciences more interesting to girls, I offered the suggestion that one way to get more girls in the sciences is to make English and the humanities more interesting to boys. What followed was an awkward moment of silence.

--MSN Spaces = soylent green (BoingBoing)

A good introduction to the online reaction to MSN Spaces, Microsoft's new blogging service.

Note particularly the terms of service that says anything you post using the service becomes a product that MSN can sell without reimbursing you.

Lycos Europe has shut down its screensaver, makelovenotspam, which delighted many Internet users with the opportunity to flood spammers' Web sites with junk e-mail. ISPs and anti-virus developers objected to the tactic, and at least one spammer found a way to turn the tables.... One Web site reportedly spammed by the screensaver simply forwarded its traffic back to makelovenotspam.com, according to security Latest News about Security firm F-Secure. --Lycos Shuts Down Controversial Screensaver (CIO Today)

Well, that was quick.

How indulgent is World of Warcraft? The game actually rewards you for not playing it. If you log out of the game in an inn, you get double experience for a while when you return later. According to the documentation, staying away from the game for a week should give you about a level and a half worth of experience point bonuses, the better to catch up with your more obsessive online friends. --Lore Sjöberg --A Kinder, Gentler Type of War  (Wired)

A fascinating concept... I've never tackled EverQuest becuase I'm intimidated by the time requirements (that is, if I want to keep my job and have a family at the same time).

--Subjects > News > Colleges and Universities (Alexa)

The web indexing service Alexa rates my academic site (jerz.setonhill.edu) as the fifth most popular in the "News > Colleges and Universities" category.

Then again, there are only five sites in that category... so "Alexa puts my site in last place" is another way of looking at the data.

I remember the story about the Russian news service that supposedly reported "Soviet car finishes second, American car finishes next to last" when covering a race that had only two entrants. The statements were true, but deliberately misleading.

Three major network television stations - NBC, CBS and ABC - have provided news and entertainment to American television viewers for decades. Each network broadcasts the evening news at 6:30 p.m., and for many American families, gathering around the television set to watch NBC anchor Tom Brokaw, CBS anchor Dan Rather, or ABC anchor Peter Jennings has become a tradition. But some media experts say that era may be coming to an end, with the retirement of NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw on December 1 after more than 40 years on the air, and the recent announcement by CBS anchor Dan Rather that he plans to step down early next year. --NBC News Anchor Tom Brokaw Retires (Voice of America)

I'm not sure that the Voice of America's description of the centrality of the nightly TV news is as true today as it used to be, but the international audience that listens to VoA would benefit from that bit of cultural information.

"Troops crossed the line of departure," 1st Lt. Lyle Gilbert declared, using a common military expression signaling the start of a major campaign. "It's going to be a long night." CNN, which had been alerted to expect a major news development, reported that the long-awaited offensive to retake the Iraqi city of Fallouja had begun.

In fact, the Fallouja offensive would not kick off for another three weeks. Gilbert's carefully worded announcement was an elaborate psychological operation -- or "psy-op" -- intended to dupe insurgents in Fallouja and allow U.S. commanders to see how guerrillas would react if they believed U.S. troops were entering the city, according to several Pentagon officials. --Mark Mazzetti --PR Meets Psy-Ops in War on Terror (LA Times (registration))

A spokesman for the Oxford University Press said that the word was now being put into other dictionaries for children and learners, reflecting its mainstream use.

"I think it was the word of last year rather than this year," he said.

"Now we're getting words that derive from it such as 'blogosphere' and so on," he said.

"But," he added, "it's a pretty recent thing and in the way that this happens these days it's got established very quickly." --Why 2004 was the year of the blog (BBC)

Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.

Worth noting: Blood's Law of Weblog History: The year you discovered weblogs and/or started your own is 'The Year Blogs Exploded'.