Writing: September 2005 Archive Page

--MLA Citation Style (Long Island University)

It's got Star Trek.

It's got Flash Gordon.

It's in MLA style.

What could be better?

Usually once a decade an invention comes along that makes everyone revise the way they think about an accepted form of technology. In the first decade of the 21st Century the invention is Uni-Screw?.

Uniscrew? replaces Slotted, Phillips,? Pozi-Drive,? Torx? and Square Head style screws and offers significant advantages compared to these fastening mediums. As such, Uniscrew? represents the most significant development in fastener technology for decades! --What is Uni-Screw? (Uni-Screw)

I like hexagons quite a bit, and I happen to like fasteners and tools, so naturally this product appeals to me.

But the language of the website reminds me of this article from The Onion: "Amazing New Hyperbolic Chamber Greatest Invention In The History Of Mankind Ever.

Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

Update, 07 Jul 2008: Link is dead... Wayback Archive, uniscrew.com.

During the 1990's, Lorin Anderson (a former student of Benjamin Bloom) led a team of cognitive psychologists in revisiting the taxonomy with the view to examining the relevance of the taxonomy as we enter the twenty-first century.

REMEMBERING

Recognise, list, describe, identify retrieve, name ?.

Can the student RECALL information?

UNDERSTANDING

Interpret, exemplify, summarise, infer, paraphrase ?..

Can the student EXPLAIN ideas or concepts?

APPLYING

Implement, carry out, use ?

Can the student USE the new knowledge in another familiar situation?

ANALYSING

Compare, attribute, organise, deconstruct ?

Can the student DIFFERENTIATE between constituent parts?

EVALUATING

Check, critique, judge hypothesise ...

Can the student JUSTIFY a decision or course of action?

CREATING

Design, construct, plan, produce ...

Can the student GENERATE new products, ideas or ways of viewing things -- --Revised Bloom's Taxonomy (oz - TeacherNet)

Via Mike Arnzen's Pedablogue.

I've heard this revision mentioned at conferences, but I've never actually tracked it down. Thanks for pointing it out, Mike.

Leaving a comment on someone'sweblog is like walking into their living room and joining in on a conversation. As in real life, online there are some people who are a pleasure to converse with, and some who are not.

Good blog commenters add to the discussion and are known as knowledgeable, informative, friendly and engaged. Build your own online social capital and become a great blog commenter by keeping these simple guidelines in mind before you post. --Special: Lifehacker'sguide to weblog comments (Lifehacker)

Great link, courtesy of Clancy Ratliff, via the KairosNews blogs mailing list.

I am interested by "Don’t post when you’re angry, upset, drunk or emotional."

Don't post when you're emotional? Isn't that rather extreme, for those of us who aren't Vulcans, anyway? But maybe I should stop writing now, since I'm feeling a bit emotional about this.

Oh, tanj.

Discovering that the static that came through our phone could bring the dead, tv-looking thing on our table to life was one of the most fascinating moments of my youth and young manhood. Sadly, that tone is almost gone from our world now, as dial-up disappears in favor of broadband connections (and rightly so). But even better was discovering what kind of life lay in wait on the other end of the line.

[...]

Here was something big, bigger than school and sports and whatever synagogue I never showed up at for my rite of passage into manhood, and we were involved. My father was part of this thing that was happening, this thing that was cooler than men walking on the moon because it was right there in front of you and you could do it too. And I was doing it, and it was more than just pushing buttons. My own little 12-year-old's text-based programming adventures didn't come anywhere near what was happening in Adventure, but that wasn't the point. The point was that what was coming back to me in little green letters or smudged black ink was something I had brought into being, my contribution to the world. For me, listening to the static song of the modem carrier signal or sitting in front of that clunky, clacketing teletype meant that I was charged, for however many minutes I could get, with the responsibility of creating something cool. And there's no better drug for a pre-teen nerd than that, no more solemn burden to shoulder.

I never did make it to my Bar Mitzvah. But I'm pretty sure I learned some of the same lessons, thanks to dad and DEC and the big machines that did turn out to spark a revolution after all. --Mark Wallace --The History of My Adventure (Walkerings)

As much as I love both technology and games, I can't help but think of Henry Adams contemplating the dynamo.

But I'm not one to point a finger. I enjoyed Wallace's soulful, geeky hymn to the power of technology -- as mediated by text-adventure games.

ALGERNON Do you really keep a diary? I'd give anything to look at it. May I?

CECILY Oh no. [Puts her hand over it.] You see, it is simply a very young girl's record of her own thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication. When it appears in volume form I hope you will order a copy. --Oscar WildeDo you really keep a diary? (The Importance of Being Earnest)

When Cecily and Gwendolyn whip out their diaries in order to determine which of the two of them is really engaged to Earnest, I can't help imagining them typing "proposal" into a weblog search engine.

Also worth noting about The Importance of Being Earnest

[T]he theme of child abuse is picked up and parodied in Earnest. This theme was considered especially heartbreaking by the Victorians, and Wilde himself uses it at times to wring our hearts a bit, but in Earnest, even the abused child is manipulated to create an atmosphere of hilarity as Wilde has a good laugh at his earlier works.

Nassaar, Christopher. "Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest." Explicator, Vol. 60 Issue 2 (2002). 78-80.

I appreciated Naassar's comparison between this play and Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, which I teach for my Media Aesthetics course. Yet I think it's a bit dismissive to conclude, as Nassaar does, "all is laughable nonsense, even Wilde himself." As actors say, good comedy is hard to do. Wilde has created not just a work of nonsense, but a linguistically complex, layered set of puns and witticisms that spoof social class comedies in general and the well-made-play in particular.

In Drama as Literature, we have just read A Doll's House, and students predictably spent more time considering Nora's character and Torvald's motives than they spent examining the importance of Krogstad's letters or the backstory that makes Nora a forger and liar even before the story begins.

Earnest brings the "incriminating papers" prop to another level, where in fact the hero as a baby is mistakenly exchanged with the manuscript of a three-volume novel. Algernon and Jack play-act the role of Earnest, while Gwendolyn and Cecily write in their journals (though Cecily's work is more exaggerated and fictional than Gwendolyn, given the fact that Gwendolyn has been courted by a man calling himself Earnest, and Cecily has never met any such man).

Rami Chami, a graduate student entering Tulane University, was among those who sought refuge in the Superdome. Chami was formerly an editor at the Indiana Daily Student, and has written a three-part series for the paper about the experience.
"The field before us, which would have been ideal to lay down on was empty, but off bounds. The field was manned by National Guardsmen who would not allow people on it. I was told by those around me that it was a multi-million dollar field which the stadium management did not want ruined."
"Our first choices for a bed that evening were: a wet floor, damp chair or in the reeking but dry hallway."
"The atmosphere in the dome had gotten incredibly tense and the soldiers were walking around with shotguns, which I assumed was an ideal weapon for close quarter combat." --Rami Chami's Indiana Daily Student Superdome Reports (Metafilter)

If the Indiana Daily Student had an index page with links to all three articles, I'd send you directly to it. But instead, I'll send you to Metafilter's entry.

Together, the articles tell a gripping story.

Two secretaries at one of Sydney's top law firms have been sacked after a catty email exchange that was circulated around the city's legal and financial district. --Secretaries sacked after cyber brawl (News.com.au)

Think before you push "send". Think before you blog. Think before you write. Think before you talk.

Different technologies, same lesson.

I can't write about my work.
Why?
Because it is coming out in tomorrow's edition.

I can't write about my personal life.
Why?
Because I've already given away -way- too much.

I can't give my opinion about current events.
Why?
Because I'm supposed to be this objective journalist.

I've reached a point in my blogger career where I'm not sure what to write about anymore. I'm either treading on my personal or professional life, either now or in the future. --Amanda Cochran --I'm blogging that....maybe not. (Girl Meets World)

The Wikipedia, which has surged this year to become the most popular reference site on the Web, is fast overtaking several major news sites as the place where people swarm for context on breaking events.

Traffic to the multilingual network of sites has grown 154 percent over the past year, according to research firm Hitwise. At current growth rates, it is set to overtake The New York Times on the Web, the Drudge Report and other news sites. --Wikipedia Overtaking Major News Sites (CNN)

We're still covering the basic differences between print, online, and TV journalism in my news writing class, so I'm not ready to introduce this topic just yet. But I'll blog it so I can find it.

Cyril Griglak, 96, of Perryopolis, continues to add to his backyard plaster zoo of 22 creatures that he started in his early 80s. He said his hardest project yet -- a rhinoceros -- is in the making. It's difficult, he said, because "it's real big." --Amanda Cochran --Author finds success with 'Weird' tales (Tribune-Review )

I love it when a reporter uses a tiny little quotation like this. Much more expressive than putting a whole paragraph inside quotation marks.

Talk to teachers, review messages posted on e-mail groups and browse professional journals, and you'll find high school assignments that are long on fun and remarkably short on actual writing.

For example, someone who teaches an honors class for high school freshmen posts a short-story project that allows students 13 options, only a handful of which involve actual writing. Among the choices students are offered: create a map to illustrate the story's setting, make a game to show the story's theme, put together a collage from magazine photographs, or assemble a scrapbook or photograph album for the character.

Teaching Arthurian literature? Have your students design a coat of arms. Need an alternative to a book report? Have students draw the design for a book jacket.

While such activities may be more entertaining for students, and less work for the teachers in terms of grading the projects, kids are often showing up at college unable to write. --Donna Harrington-Lueker --'Crayola curriculum' takes over (USA Today)

This essay is from 2002. I tracked it down from a comment on JoanneJacobs.com.

In one of my classes, when I teach Margaret Edson's play Wit, I read from a copy of The Runaway Bunny, a children's book which is mentioned in the play. It's the last week of the class, and many of the students are just starting to get the hang of studying literature at the college level; so they seem happy and nostalgic for a time when teachers did most of the work for them. But I don't do this in place of asking them to do serious work. And since many of our English majors are double-majoring in education, it helps us talk about the playwright's full-time job as a kindergarten teacher, and the play's implicit anti-intellectualism.

Of course, high school teachers simply don't have the time to get students to write and revise college-length papers. So naturally, I don't expect all college freshmen to arrive on campus already competent in college-level work. But I'd really prefer that more arrive on campus ready to do such things as read and follow assignment instructions, and read a syllabus on their own.

Best response to this whole thing, from a commenter: "I'm so angry at this crap I feel like making a poster."

"Hyperbole researchers have arrived at, without possibility of argument or refutation, the single greatest moment in all of creation, now and forevermore," said the project's lead scientist, Dr. Lloyd Gustaveson, activating the hyperbolic chamber's gazillion-ultra-watt semantic resonator at a gala launch party Monday. "The divine flame kindled by our new hyperbolic chamber will cast its light down through the centuries, making the Promethean fire that brought forth life on earth seem like a brief and guttering spark. Behold—we recast the cosmos in the image of the ultimate!" --Amazing New Hyperbolic Chamber Greatest Invention In The History Of Mankind Ever (The Onion (Satire))

Another side-splitter.

Duane Grunfeld, a 44-year-old Hartford-area insurance-claims processor, experienced a passing moment of satisfaction in his otherwise agonized existence Tuesday when he purchased a new pen. --New Pen Brings Fleeting Moment Of Satisfaction To Local Man (The Onion (Satire))