March 2006 Archive Page

As children, we spend much of our time in imaginary worlds, substituting toys and make-believe for the real surroundings that we are just beginning to explore and understand. As we play, we learn. And as we grow, our play gets more complicated. We add rules and goals. The result is something we call games. Now an entire generation has grown up with a different set of games than any before it - and it plays these games in different ways. --Will Wright --Dream Machines (Wired)

Such pictures fill my weekday world at five.
The yellow crime tape flutters at the scene
Of yesterday’s event. You’re there, on screen,
Square-jaw’d Slick Goodhair, you’re reporting live.
But first, “Are you depress'd? Or weak, or dumb?
This pill, this car, this show, this boy, this chick,
This beer, this low-carb pizza on a stick
Will banish pesky thoughts.” Oh, bliss… I’m numb!
“Tonight! Police continuing their hunt
For signs of blue-eyed Dumpling Goldilocks;
But first, the Mayor Quoteworth talks and talks;
The traffic’s bad; no rain; replay that punt.”
That I may live in thee, secure and whole,
Stay on, TV, and teleprompt my soul.

--Dennis G. JerzSuch pictures fill my weekday world at five (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

My students are doing a Sonnet Slam tomorrow, and they asked whether I was going to contribute a poem. I hadn't planned to, but I figured what the heck.

I had my colleague, Al Wendland, peer-review it for me.

Fine example of a WW II Enigma cipher machine in a very good condition and a great history; full functional. Year of construction 1941 by Manufacturer Chiffriermaschinen Gesellschaft Heimsoeth and Rinke, Berlin. The Enigma machine is placed in an oak woodwork case. Three high-quality, all-metal, matched rotors and an Umkehrwalze ?B?. The rotors are continuous numbered; serial numbers has been removed. There are two spare rotors in an additional small wooden box. Plug board is lettered QWERTZU?, wheels numbered 1-26. 100% Original!!! No Copy!! --Enigma 3 Walzen Chiffriermaschine Chiper Weltkrieg 1941 (eBay)

Wanna buy an enigma machine?

Great photos of the German code machine.

Graham Nelson simulated one of these machines in his text adventure game Jigsaw, and as a result I feel like I've operated one of them.

Still unconvinced of my suitability, he reminded me that the job involved backbreaking work and that the average person could not hack it. He warned me that I would leave the job daily with various aches and pains. I countered that I worked out regularly and that I was not afraid of a strenuous job, though I must admit I was starting to worry.

To prove my point, however, I showed him scars on my hands. "Are these the hands of someone who is not used to work?" I offered, looking him squarely in the eyes. The part I left out was that the scars did not come from hard labor but from falling on glass when I was in the third grade.

I was working so hard at creating a working-class persona that I felt like a fraud. But my responses did the trick, and he asked when I could start. --Eugene Thompson --Moonlighting (Chronicle)

An academic takes a package-handling job to finance a research trip overseas. There's an office recruiting day laborers and telemarketers that I pass every morning on my way to work, and I confess I've sometimes thought about stopping in...

Universities and colleges, including my own, have made retention a priority, encouraging faculty members to rethink what they do in order to foster student success. However, this is only half the effort needed, and may come too late for many students. Like the musical Chicago’s Velma Kelly, colleges and universities cannot be a one-person act in the musical Retention; they need their K-12 partners to get in on the action. --Russell Olwell --We Can’t Do It Alone (Inside Higher Ed)

Professor June Entman says her main concern is that students are so busy keyboarding they can't think and analyze what she's telling them.

[...]

Student Cory Winsett says if he must continue without his laptop, he'll transfer to another school. --Law Professor Bans Laptops in Class (AP)

The 10-year-old winner of a children's poetry competition had to hand back her prize money after newspaper readers noticed that her poem was the work of a well known writer.

"It's a mini drama for her. She did not realize it had been written by someone else," a member of the competition jury said Tuesday. --Child poetry plagiarist unmasked (Reuters|My Way)

That's one way to get ahead in life. Let's hope the young poet has learned her lesson.

Because I was away at a conference all week, I didn't have much time. I had already found some good trees and begun work on the ceiling of my test room, but I figured I had played with that test room enough. But in about four hours today, I created this room from scratch. The textures were part of packs I had already downloaded, of course.

I'm working on trying to create a Half-Life 2 mod version of "Cloak of Darkness," a simple game that interactive fiction programmers use as a kind of universal translator. If you know how to create "Cloak of Darkness" in one programming language, then seeing how somebody else has created it in a different language can help you learn that language, too.

I have noted before that Half-Life 2 is set in a grungy dystopia, so there are a lot of textures for rubble and cement, but not a whole lot of gilt paneling, marble alcoves, etc. I was happy to find a texture for shiny brass, which with some marble tiles lets me make something approximating the opulence of an opera hall (which is where "Cloak of Darkness" is supposed to be set). I e-mailed the author of the "A Few Good G-Men" video, to ask whether he'd be willing to share the set for that piece, but I got no reply. I'd still like to use his courtroom set, but it will be good for me to learn this stuff on my own, so I'm continuing to slog away.

I rather like the ceiling, and the wall sconces, but I'd like to make the chandelier just a little bit more classical, like an upside-down wedding cake. While I would have liked elegant marble columns and arched alcoves, for the time being I'll make do with blocky shapes.

That's because "Cloak of Darkness" involves some simple interactions with objects, so I've got to finish laying out the rooms quickly so I can start investigating conditional actions and in-game feedback (perhaps through voice and/or text).

Half-Life 2 Mod: Week 5 -- Brass Columns, Detailed Ceiling, Chandelier in a Blocky Opera House (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

The decline of handwriting and the rise of e-mail and text messaging has been highlighted in a new survey of media consumption in the digital age.

It suggests that half of written communication is by e-mail, 29% by text message and just 13% by pen and paper. --E-mail and text 'replace writing' (BBC)

But take a look at this detail about methodology: "The IPA TouchPoints survey was based on 5,000 people who updated an electronic diary every half-hour for a week."

If the data gathering mechanism is online, that is going to skew the data in favor of electronic writing.

Calling All Bloggers (CCCC 2006 Chicago -- Day 3)

Mike Edwards and Clancy Ratliffe led a very productive special interest group on weblogs.

The project I had agreed to work on last year, seeking NCTE support for proposing some sort of official statement about the professional and pedagogial value of weblogs, fizzled. The NCTE had its national meeting in Pittsburgh in November, but this meeting had a very narrow focus. When I proposed a panel or workshop on blogs, I was told that it was not a good fit with the intended focus of the November conference. The sudden death of SIG member, blogger, and former CCCC chair John Lovas left me without access to the professional contacts I had been counting on. (Yes, I could have sent an e-mail to any number of peole, but the chance to work with John was one reason I picked this task to follow up on. So it remains incomplete.)

I'm not going to blog much more about this, because we asked Mike to post his notes (which he projected on the overhead as he wrote them -- very efficient) to KairosNews. I'll add a link to it when it appears.

Six of us went out to dinner afterwards, and raised a glass to jocalo. The tag line of his archived website says it all:

John Lovas resides here. Actually, he's a virtual John, a web clone, a cyber presence. John's work is teaching. "Education should help you make a life and make a living," he's wont to say. This virtual residence will tell you more about how John makes a living than the life he has made, but you'll find hints of that too.

Imagining a Transformed Reality: On the Web, Over the Airwaves, Around the Globe (CCCC 2006 Chicago -- Day 3)

In this panel, three experienced comp instructors from the University of Arkansas, Little Rock report their experiences getting students to think outside the box.

The presenters asked everyone to pull their chairs into a circle, and in that environment I felt uncomfortable typing away on a keyboard, so I only jotted brief notes on my PDA. So these notes will be a bit more sparse.

Last year, I attended what I thought was too many of the"Let me tell you what happened the first time I introduced my students to weblogs" talks. These talks were similar in structure, but the new details involved what I would call a traditional computer-assisted classrom (though it seems odd even for me to write of a ocmputer-assisted writing classroom as "traditional,") a business writing course that asked students to write an essay following the template for NPR's "This I Believe" series, and a research and writing course in which students studied the holocaust.

I came away with an awareness of models for good teaching in meatspace.


Betty Freeland. Rose-Colored Glasses are off. Students...

Integrating computer tech in comp classroom.

Universal design for learning helps not just disabled students but all students.

Problem 1 -- range of computing experience, enhanced the academic disparity between the haves and the have nots.

Problem 2 -- too much high tech, not enough high touch.

Freeland is probably the only comp instructor I've met at the Cs who has spoken uncritically about PowerPoint as a valuable composition skill. (Though plenty of engineering/tech writers recognize that the PowerPoint presentation is a rhetorical mode that technical professionals need to master.)

Ended with a joke about how introducing computers into her classroom is part of her strategy for "warding off Alzheimer's."

Andrea Hermann,"This I Believe: Students Join NPR's National Writing Community"

The "This I Believe" project invites essay of about 350-500 words, all of which will be archived by an NPR project on faith, and some of which will be broadcast on NPR. Hermann discussed the value of recovering the practice of the instructor writing all assignments along with students.

Herrmann says she thinks she didn't do a very good job on the assignment. Her essay was on long-term chronic illness, and on her interest in alternative medicine. She read it to us.


Cheryl Harris, "The Holocaust and First-Year Writing"

Began w/ account of a visit to the Holocaust Museum, and a quotation from Elie Weisel.

Harris introduced her class, "Reading, Researching, and Writing about the Holocaust."

The first assignment acclimates students to analyzing the rhetorical power of documentary evidence, by asking students to analyze a photograph of their family.

Next they write on four sources she provides (including two films).

Next, 5 sources -- 2 from the class, 3 from the outside. Read from a paper on Hitler Youth.

Next, a research paper. "very prescriptive" list of sources. Web resources seem to be excluded.

Students who selected into the special Holocaust section of the research course tended to stick with the course far more than a typical course. Something about their serious engagement with the subject matter gets them engaged.

Changing Literacies/Changing Mindsets: Communicating Across Digital Difference (CCCC 2006 Chicago -- Day 3)

I had written a different session down in my conference planner, but I’m glad I want to this one. Sally Chandler brought two of her undergraduate students from Kean University, and together they presented what they learned about the nature of research with a teacher who came of age in the world of print tried to teach students who had come of age in the digital world, as they all did ethnograhic research on video games.


I had written a different session down in my conference planner, but I’m glad I want to this one. Sally Chandler brought two of her undergraduate students from Kean University.


Joshua Burnett, Kean University, "Differences Between Insider and Newcomer Mindsets in Composition and Literacy Studies."

Yet another reference to James Gee, as part of a lists of books assigned by Sally Chandler to students Burnett and Lopez. But the students did not read the scholarly expertise first, as their teacher had expected. Instead, they considered the gamers themselves the experts, rather than academics who wrote books about gamers, and they were more interested in knowledge gained through interaction. In digital spaces, "the answer" is in a constant state of revision.

Illustrated two different approaches to research mindsets -- automatic orienting features make our own mindsets invisible to us, so that we expect others to see the world as we do.

These mindsets are inherently gendered, raced and classed. They are generally structured by the spaces in which they are acquired.

The Internet Generation and the Print Generation. Internet Gen understands online space in ways that the print generation does not. The print generation cannot understand online spaces in the same way. The print generation was already fully socialized before they encountered the internet, so their encounters with digital technology are informed by the paper-based concepts.

Student encounters with print spaces are, likewise, encumbered with traces of their encounters with digital spaces.

Categories of mindset differences in the internet generation and the print generation – the presentation worked through the criteria of space, knowledge, and self. Too detailed to reproduce the whole chart here, but it was well organized.

There is too much information in the unlimited virtual space, which requires structures for organizing information to help users find and understand what they need. New technology amplifies its powers as it is appropriated and redefined by its users. And how is the location of knowledge affected by the digital age? Student researchers expected to study games by playing games, talking to gamers, visiting gaming sites, participating in gamers' forums, and using print texts at points of need.

Internet generation authors will continue to be frustrated by the reaction of their print generation recipients. [But what about the obligations of print-generation managers to communicate in ways that their internet-generation employees can understand? --DGJ]

Jacklyn Lopez, "A Report from the Digital Contact Zone: Contact Zone Arts and the Hybridization of Literacy Mindsets."

Lopez began with a quote from Mary Louis Pratt on writing in the contact zone.

Lopez and Burnett played games and took notes on their work, and coded their own experiences. The generational difference between the researchers and their instructor led to a disagreement about the "right" way to research games. Lopez and Burnett successfully challenged and modified the print orientation of their collaborative project, suggesting that the digital experience the researchers have confers a kind of authority that balanced the authority of the teacher's position.

Lopez and Burnett developed a kind bilingualism, since they had to to teach her what they learned about game playing. [Of course, when Sally makes a mistake, her character dies immediately; but when she teases her students about not doing the assigned reading, the consequences of their misconceptions aren't as fully and immediately dramatized. --DGJ]

(Shortly after I wrote the above note, Lopez herself noted that her teacher also had to translate what the students couldn't get on their own, and notes that after the research collaboration, the print-generation teacher had picked up internet-generation techniques, and vice versa.)

[Much of Lopez's presentation involved explaining excerpts from the notes that the researchers took. I'm fascinated by the display of a student critiquing her teacher's research methods, and defining her own differences between her style and that of her peer researcher. This kind of ethnographic research is not what I'm personally familiar with, but since it's gamers who are doing it themselves, I'm finding it fascinating to watch. When I see Mary Ann Buckles doing this, or Life on the Screen, or Jim Gee, I'm conscious of what the researchers are missing. –DGJ]

Sally Chandler, "What's Different about Digital Difference?: Communicating across Differences in Technological Mindsets

The focus is really on how changing mindsets demand a response from us in the composition classroom.

Print is: linear, static, permanent, mostly linguistic, complete
Digital is: multi-dimensional, dynamic, in-process, ephemeral, multimodal, interactive.

When we contrast face-to-face communication and print communication, we see that online discourse often has more of the features of face-to-face communication than face-to-face communication does.

Digital writers expect more interaction, while print writers see that expectation of collaboration and feedback as "wrong."

Chandler remixed Lessig and Selfe, covering the ground I've heard being covered in many of the presentations I've chosen to attend. [I particularly like how she's applying it to ethnographic research, in a context in which the research was done by experienced gamers. The CCCCs certainly got its money worth when it invited Lessig to speak last year. Woe to the rhet/comp speaker who was at 4Cs last year but didn't attend the Lessig talk! --DGJ]

Chandler noted that initially, all her students opposed Lessig's concept of CopyLeft, but at the same time they admitted that they themselves had downloaded illegal material. (After a discussion with the students, more came around to seeing the value of Copyleft.)

How is teaching across this digital difference the same as teaching across the traditional categories of race, class, and gender?

At this point, the comparison points us towards the need for a new discourse, in a way that race/class/gender discourse is not new. Internet generation mindset is in many ways a product of white male military-indstrual modes, but the uses of that mode often actively contests and rewrites the dominant discourse that generated it.

In theory, the younger generation has been raised in this new culture, which leads to the possibility for (r)evolution. Digital tech is going to continue to be important, it's not clear who's going to control those concepts of communication.


As part of a lively discussion that followed the presentations, I was trying to say the world "e-mail memo" and it came out "e-mo." That’s not worth blogging as a separate entry, but it’s worth a footnote here.

The History of the Future of Writing (CCCC 2006 Chicago -- Day 3)

These are rough notes, typed as the presenters were speaking, and lightly edited back in my hotel room before being posted online.

Helen J. Burgess Washington State University. "Whatever Happened to My MOO?"

Administered Appalachia Moo, had fun building and coding, "absolutely no fun interacting with anybody in it." Likes coding objects.

Talking about how moos are disappearing. "I miss my moo, and I wish it would come back, but it won't."

For a while, it seemed as if Moos and VR were the next big thing. Lambda Moo, Diversity University. Usability problem, the geek problem, and the learning curve inherent in both teaching writing and teaching mooing. Blogs and wikis, in the post moo world, we're moving back towards text as narrative. "Even my mom has a blog. The question i want to ask today is, 'Whatever happened to my moo?'"

Made the intriguing argument that the motion away from moos and towards blogs is a conservative movement, a retreat from earlier attempts to consider writing as code. Blogs have become the medium of choice for journals, self-reflection.... sees blogs as a "conservative move." Said that "given that the mainstream media are pretty slow," blogs may look radical to MSM.

The truth is that "moos freaked us out." Asked to think of ourselves as objects as well as words. "We're no more or less important than any object in the moo." The move to blogs represents a retreat to familiar narrative, and expresses an anxiety about thinking of ourselves as coded objects. "We're moving back in time."

We still find narrative blogs so comforting because they don't force us to think in this manner.

"The retreat to the textual identity construction of the blog" is misleading. Blogs are composed of database objects, discreet chunks, that complicates this sense of blogs as narrative.

[In both cases, the fact that blogs have an easier learning curve means that more non-geeks access blogs than moos, so naturally the sense by which those blog authors think of their online writing will differ from the sense that smaller, more elite group of moo-ers had when they were coding their text. "Push-button publication for the masses," formerly the slogan for MovableType. --DGJ]

The blog objects can be tagged as a category and recategorized by editing a database.

The chunking and recategorization of the database-driven blog makes us relate to the blog as if it is object oriented -- though technically the databases are relational rather than object-oriented. Second Life -- in contrast, it is "true life action" animated. But the basics in Second Life are the same.

You can adjust your avatar according to sliders "so you can make your boobs go -- whoo!" – (gesturing out and in with hands… laughter).

"Looks suspiciously like The Sims Online." The Sims in Second Life are much more like MOOs than they are like games. There's no real point to them... the point is that you build. You can do anything you wanted.

For her, the interaction, building, describing and coding was more fun. "I've seen really bad implementations of writing classes inside Moos." MOOs viewed as the ancestors, not of writing environments, but coding and building environments. "And that's what happened to my moo."


Michael Day, "The History and Future of Machine Logic"

Day -- "I don't claim any originality for anything I'm going to say today." Two scenarios -- one's kind of doomsday, and one's kind of fun.

Doomsday. Most would agree writing has changed quite a bit, with students coming to us with a great deal of experience in digital media. As teachers of writing or composition, we're faced with the need to cover a lot of venues and territories, and the discipline of comp is struggling ot keep up.

Students are adept at social networking interfaces, video games, and informal e-mal. Referred to Kathy Yancey's past keynote, which emphasized the value of keeping up with student multimedia use.

Day referred to Youtube and Flickr and praised the mashups our students are producing.

Day referred to a number of automated processes for marking papers, with vendors claiming that the software does a good job of agreeing with the grades assigned by human assessors.

Software can be fooled by contentless writing that's gibberish but follows the semantic patterns expected by the software.

Day said the Texas Tech model is better, in that the human graders mark papers, though the computer makes that process smoothed. Day wonders what we're losing when students can no longer schmooze and sway their evaluators, since rhetoric is all about schmoozing and swaying.

Day paints a picture in which only the elite classes are marked by the instructors who actually teach the class. A second-tier would be a situation in which student writers are evaluated by Wal-Mart -- that is, humans who don't have personal relationships with the authors. A third tier will only be evaluated by machines.

But is it so bad to use computers to help us write?

It's not the technologies themselves, but the ways they are used to which we have to pay attention. Yes, they can be panoptic and oppressive, but what if we used it in the formative stages in their writing, not the final evaluative stage. Will ETS let us "play" with these tools?

What if the computer were "kind of a straight man, or a differently intelligenced entity" and what if the computer's role was to help us get beyond the limits of our own platitudes and reasoning, could force us out of the box, provide new word for us, new ways of saying.

What about the possibility that computers can help us find new mindsets? Help us create analogies, helping us break out of conventional writing and thinking.

Rob's Amazing Poetry Generator
Yong Poets "Just For Fun" Word Play

Echoed Lessig's consideration of your students as "The Remix Generation" and praised Lessig's talk from last year.

Computer software can help us make the stretch between the known and the unknown.

Voice recognition software and its role in the composition process... we've all had that moment when the student can say it, but can't write it out. "What if we deliberately programmed the computer to misunderstand" and transcribe something else, in order to force composers out of the box.

Introduced the concept of "Babbles" from RiverMOO -- a text game involving software that grabs a "markov chain" (? – sorry, I didn’t catch that) to construct automated orations. He amused the 20 or so in the audience with an emotive oral interpretation of this hilarious mashed-up drivel.

Like most people in the field, Day recommends that we pay attention to the ways computer evaluation can be oppressive, while being open to the ways that it can help us.


Laura Gurak, University of Minnesota, St. Paul. "Writing as Code, Code as Writing."

Began with a personal reflection on how she dropped out of school in her 20s, got an apprenticeship in the printing business, and worked in a small print shop where she learned the business just when computers were changing it.

Reflected on the time she realized she'd spend a lot of time typing. Notes that some people simply aren't meant to write. They may be wired differently, with an oral fluency that doesn't translate to writing.

Moved from a printing apprenticeship to software development.

We cannot figure out what happens under the hood in Word,. "You turn the thing on, and the Clippy comes up and asks, 'What do you want to do?' "

Suggests that for people whose primary genre is speech, it's a great thing to have the computer tell you what to do.

Of classical rhetoric -- most is dead, but ethos is still viable.

Template-driven literacy. "No technical writer really writes anything from scratch." In the real world, they will be expected to work on a huge database, writing in something called "controlled English" so it can be readily translated and localized.

Noted that the documentation for pacemakers was so expensive and wasteful because doctors in the operating room didn't want to spend time reading the instructions anyway -- they would open up the pacemaker and throw away the instructions, One solution was to put the documentation on CDs. Gurak comically mimed trying to boot up a computer while in the operating room. [I couldn’t resist, and called out: "Clippy says, 'What operation do you want to do today?' " Day chipped in with, "I can't do that, Dave." ]

Gurak says she hasn't done much on the aesthetics of code.

Conference on College Composition and Communication -- Day 3 (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I spent some time shopping for books and taking long coffee breaks (though I don't drink coffee), so the blogging isn't quite as detailed as last time. Still, today I got a good idea for the panel I'd like to propose for next year, and I found myself saying that someone needs to write an annotated bibliography of weblog scholarship, and I actually started thinking about doing it. (If someone else is already doing that, please, please tell me so I can do something else instead.)

I was intrigued over dinner, hearing Mike Edwards say that his students know that Xanga is for "asian kids" and LiveJournal is for "rich white girls." Clancy Ratliffe also passed on a tip she heard as part of the "Where are all the women bloggers" issue -- "Men are from MovableType, women are from LiveJournal."

This is the first time I've been to a conference and found that I've known somebody on the dias or in the audience of every single session I attended.

But perhaps even cooler was when a stranger who overheard me talking about interactive ficiton (as I am wont to do) came closer, peered at my name tag, and asked whether I had written a text-adventure game that was entered in the 2001 interative fiction comp. It was Mike Duncan, whose Fusillade tied my Fine-Tuned for 18th place that year. He asked if I ever released a bug-fix version, and I assured him that I had. We spoke a little about the pending release of Inform 7.

• The History of the Future of Writing
• Changing Literacies/Changing Mindsets: Communicating Across Digital Difference
  
• Imagining a Transformed Reality: On the Web, Over the Airwaves, Around the Globe
  
• Calling All Bloggers
  

See also CCCC 2006 Day 2.

In the past 24 hours, we learned of allegations that Ben Domenech plagiarized material that appeared under his byline in various publications prior to washingtonpost.com contracting with him to write a blog that launched Tuesday. --Ben Domenech Resigns (post.blog)

That was quick.

Gaming tends to be regarded as a harmless diversion at best, a vile corruptor of youth at worst. But the usual critiques fail to recognize its potential for experiential learning. Unlike education acquired through textbooks, lectures, and classroom instruction, what takes place in massively multiplayer online games is what we call accidental learning. It's learning to be - a natural byproduct of adjusting to a new culture - as opposed to learning about. --John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas --You Play World of Warcraft? You're Hired!: Why multiplayer games may be the best kind of job training. (Wired)

Why Plagiarism Makes Sense in the Digital Age: Copying, Remixing, and Composing (CCCC 2006 Chicago -- Day 2)

This was a jam-packed, no-downtime, hardly-time-to-breathe presentation. I'm posting the notes that I took while the presenters were speaking, very lightedly edited afterwards in my hotel room. I hope whatever inadvertent remixing I did while taking these notes doesn't distort their intended message too much. In many ways, this panel felt like the continuation of, and one possible fulfillment of, the discussion raised by a panel from last year's Cs, "Writing Teachers Writing New Media."

Jim Porter addressed the crowed room by noting that plagiarism is, in many respects, a normal part of the writing process. Especially normal in the realm of digital writing. “Composing in the digital age is different.” The technical functions of copy/paste change everything. Remixing makes sense. “We do believe in the ethic of fair use.” The issue of plagiarism is more complex than it’s typically portrayed. Playing copyright police supports the business practices of corporations that have a vested interest in the status quo.


Catherine Latterell, Penn State U, “What is Remix Culture?”

Latterell showed clips and examples of remix culture. “My presentation is very consciously a collage and a sample of other people’s work.” Streetwear movement of customizing sneakers; the tuxedo T-shirt. The remix uses media in ways independent of the original designer’s intentions. The Tangelo and “Sprite Remix.” Pets: Labradoodles. (Labrador poodle.)

Quoted Emerson on Quotation and Originality. “By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote.”

A State of the Union remix that chops up Bush’s statements.

Pete Rojas, “Bootleg Culture.”

Office Space meets Super Friends (classic mash-up).

Sampling assumes or recognizes a shared network of meaning.

“Sampling plays games with memory.”

DJ Spooky’s Rebirth of a Nation.

Sampling implies breakdown of boundaries – truth/meaning, author/audience.

MySpace: The Movie

Lessig: “Everyone in the life of producing and creating engages in this practice of remix.”


James Porter, Michigan State University, “Forget Plagiarism, Teach Filesharing and Fair Use.”

Reiterated what has been said by people in our field before. “If you don’t like what I say, you can blame all the immoral influences in my life.”

Brian Martin, “Plagiarism: A misplaced emphasis.”

Mark Rose, “The author as proprietor: Donaldson v. Beckett”

Lessig – “Many kinds of piracy are useful and productive, either to create new content or foster new ways of doing business. Neither our tradition, nor any tradition, has ever banned all piracy.”

“We are all pirates.” (“Image used without permission of Disney.”)

Criticizes the black and white view of plagiarism, which insists on some gray area, “context-dependent issues” where the answers is “it depends.”

“Be rhetorical about plagiarism.”

Copying without attribution and without permission is not always unethical.

Is it ethical to use somebody else’s design content for a web page, without attribution, if you plug in your own content?

Students – “well it depends on what course you’re doing it in.”

“We are all ‘plagiarists’ “ but in an ethical context.

Chris Dussold was fired for copying another professor’s teaching statement. University couldn’t make a sexual harassment charge stick, so they went after him for the boilerplate teaching. Have we ever plagiarized boilerplate syllabus text without acknowledging the source. Ever use an existing PowerPoint template? Cut and paste bibliography entries? Reuse paragraphs from your own presentations?

Much of our professional work involves reusing templates and boilerplate without attribution. A laboratory director who did little of the actual work may have his name appended to a list of authors.

Plagiarism not reduced to unattributed copying. The real issue is “taking someone else’s work and representing it as your own, in situations where it matters.”

Got a big laugh noting that “like you” he goes to Wikipedia for a definition of a term – in this case, “plagiarism.”

Teach not so much “what is plagiarism” but “how to you make the decision” of what’s right or allowable in which context.



Danielle Nichole DeVoss, Michigan State University. “Pastiche, Remix, the RIAA, and/in the Writing Classroom.”

IANAL

We are digitally literate technoretoricians. Not the hobby horse, but the bull in the china shop.

Our culture clings to an antiquated, romanticized notion of what writng is. Most, if not all writing takes place today in computer-mediated places. (Showed slides of people working together.)

The ability to compose documents with multiple media, to distribute, and to allow audiences to interact with that writing, changes many of the principles and practices of composition, which favors and privileges print-based notions.

(Included Leeroy Jenkins as an example of digital delivery.)

Offered 3 scenarios by “Amy Deel” a master’s student. If students translate and illustrate a piece of writing into a multimedia piece. Most students choose copyrighted material. Can you encourage them to publish their work? Can you publish it yourself in a conference presentation?

“When you’re downloading MP3s, you’re downloading Communism”

Copyright vs Copyleft.chart (attributed it to Jim.)

Puttign writing teachers on the grid almost squarely in the copyright domain.

Jack Valennti – “who’s just a rhetorical treat”

Mapped the values of composition instruction on top of the RIAA values of individual benefits.

Michael Day, once a student project goes public on the web, there is much more to consider. [I botched the 2nd half of the quote.]

Says it is “phenomenally difficult” to secure legitimate permission.


Johndon Johnson-Eilola, Clarkson U.

Begins with remixed movie trailer – Shining.

Plagiarism “as stealing” is about 12% of reported cases. Of more interest is cases where the concept of authorship fails to keep up with the creative processes. Defining “creativity” as the production of an original, unmixed text is a narrow view, idealizing the isolated genius. Take a problem-solving or problem-posing approach should push our students to use existing information to solve real problems. Composition hews pretty closely to those traditional views.

Shift the goal of writing from performance to action in context. Shift away from one extremely limited concept of reality, away from the hidden genius, away from writing as an isolated, de-contextualized process.

We tend to remain committed to that final artifact – original words, produced by the student. The ghost of the authorial genius remains between the lines, propping up what is becoming and increasingly unrealistic artifact in our digital age.

Thinking of composition instead of assemblage of parts, independent of what is original and what was existing. The distinction is “if not meaningless, at least secondary.”

Students recognize the hierarchical value of originality, causing students to hide their borrowed fragments. Focusing on problem-solving values assemblages.

Web design and design patterns – available from numerous sources. (Autocomplete, breadcrumbs, tabs.)

In theory, a web designer could create a new site only from assembling assisting material.

Ethical concerns. “Stop encouraging students to produce original texts all the time. Tell them to work, at least occasionally” on collages. We don’t want students to claim that they wrote something that they didn’t actually write. Honesty about authorship is honesty framed within a binary arrangement between original text and borrowed text… asking students to be “honest” about what they wrote and what they borrowed is simply a tool that helps us preserve the value of the original writing.

Creativity moves to the assemblage. Citation is no longer a way of making subordinate elements in text, but rather a way to reward students for their new skills, to situate texts in preexisting, but new contexts. Their goal should be to filter and remix existing texts in order to solve problems. Students are encouraged to make explicit their borrowing. Encouraging writing instructors to recognize the value of this compositional skill.

Technology, Play and Pedagogy: Video Gaming and New Literacies (CCCC 2006 Chicago -- Day 2)

As is always the case with a conference blogging exercise, these are my rough notes, typed as the speakers were talking, and lightly edited in my hotel room at the end of the day.

Matthew S. S. Johnson, Indiana University, Bloomington: “Communities in Playspace: Writing and Democracy in Online Communities.”

(I arrived a bit late… I’m going to ask Johnson to send me a copy of his paper so I can do it justice. He says that in the part I missed, he mostly went over composition theory, which is sort of presumed to be a priori knowledge at this conference, though there is only so much of the literary theory in which I was trained that translates into the world of rhetcomp. Thus, I wouldn't mind seeing what Johnson sees is important for laying the groundwork for the use of video game culture in the writing classroom. But since I heard him speak last night and went to dinner with him afterwards, I think I can piece it together reasonably well.)

Johnson was discussing the unique design model of Seed. Developers aren’t stopping their work once the game is released. They will continue to develop the game based on the decisions made by the players. The more players choose a certain mode of interaction (in this game, which has no single conclusion), the more likely the developers will go in that direction.

Johnson also noted the fact that the developers of “Oblivion” courted and encouraged fans to give suggestions for where the previous incarnations of The Elder Scrolls fell short.

Many developers are providing web kits that permit players to make fan sites easily. Gaming corporations do this to garner interest in the games, and even maintain some sense of control over those websites. But the consumers produce fan fiction and other related texts that enhance and build upon the gaming experience. That mass of fan-produced writing does influence the designers as they create the next iteration of the product.

Programmers stand by waiting to see what players will do, and the player actions (in the game and in the writing they do about the game) forms a feedback loop.

Gaming communities create openings that are potential merger points for compositions.


Erin Smith, Michigan Technological University. “Semiotic Domains Reloaded: Literacy and Localization in Video Games.”

An excerpt from a longer work in a publcation edited by Cynthia Selfe and Gail Havisher, with chapters co-written by scholars and gamers. Gee’s What Video Games Have To Teach Us about Language and Learning presents literacy as a social practice. We need different literacies to function in different semiotic domains. Video games, for Gee, are marked with certain characteristics, shaped by the internal and external design grammar. Within the game world, learners test their cognitive models. Video games provide an environment that can foster active learning.

The game industry provides an extraordinary example of Jameson’s claims about global communication forces. Exemplifies the logic, strategies, and contradictions of a force striving to balance global reach and local appeal. To what extent can we lay claim to cultural information in the world of the game, without considering broader contexts. Sony coined “global localism” rather than forcing local cultures to adapt to global culture. Can range from making sure you have the local slang right, to completely re-writing the narrative. Microsoft has a “geopolitical product strategy team” that pays attention to cultural factors that affect the way their products might be received.

Game developers design game from the outside, with localization in mind. Plot lines that would require too much revision to be localized in other cultures, may be scrapped, or only released locally.

Gee: cultural models are images, storylines, or metaphor that we recognize as “normal.” They remain invisible to us unless we are challenged. For instance, most military games penalize players for killing civilians, but in a game whose name I didn’t catch, settlers are considered combatants, and may be shot without penalty.

Quoted a scholar (the name sounded like “EE woo BOO key”) who notes that Japanese electronic products don’t carry a “cultural odor” that leads consumers to associate those products with Japaneseness. Schoolchildren perceive Japan as “cool” because it created Pokemon, but Japanese computer games and other characters don’t look Japanese. There’s a term for the non-Japaneseness of these characters. (Smith didn’t spell it, so I won’t even try to reproduce it here.)

Referred to a student, Eve, who wrote to the author of David Freedman, Creating Emotions in Games, to challenge his reading of Final Fantasy X. “You stray so far from the reality of the game that it makes me wonder whether you were playing it blindfolded with earplugs.” Eve has a “culturally aware” position, quotes from details in the gameplay in order to defend her critique of Freedman.

Differences in the Japanese voice acting and the American voice acting. The original team’s work on the Japanese game “could have been blown to hell” by a bad translation or a radically different voice interpretation.

If we’re going to start bringing games into the classroom, contextualize them, and it will serve our literacy goals more fully if we do.

During the Q & A, an audience member asked about the idea that the Japanese are using their electronic products to represent themselves culturally as westernized, that therefore their products do have a “cultural odor.”


Alice Robinson, University of Wisconsin Madison. “Videogame Design as a Writing Process.”

Works with Jim Gee. Robinson’s goal is to determine designer intent. Do designers intend the active critical learning results that researchers note when they study gamers?

Gunther Kress, “Design shapes the future through production.” Design is a cognitively higher activity than critique, which looks backward at a text.

As a linguist, Gee looks at rule systems. The “internal design grammar” is a “complex system of interrelated parts meant to engage and even manipulate the player in certain ways.” You have to go beyond the internal design grammar if you ever want to get good at the game, and reach for the external design grammar. Players become readers of the IRD, but also a writer, since nothing happens unless you do something first. Players are demanding a lot more from game designers, demanding more from their interactive experiences with games as texts. Genre molding, mixing genres is part of the future of games.

Robinson repeated the designer/player, writer/reader, teacher/student slide that was a central part of her SIG presentation last night. Her research focus separates designers from marketers, artists, sound engineers, etc.

Quotes from one designer shows he is thinking very clearly about what people say, in a social environment, about the games they played. I think the audience responded meaningfully when Robinson invited us to imagine what our own authorship process would be like if we thought first and foremost about what our readers will say to each other. Paraphrasing the designer’s goal, Robinson said, “I want students [probably Robinson’s Freudian slip for “players” … speaking energetically from notes, she actually made this substitution several times] to have memories about playing my games, and I design my game to create those memories.”

The designer is not creating individual activities, but rather the environment. Killing a dragon is an isolated task, much like doing a worksheet. The task itself is part of a larger problem-solving effort. Designers want players to outsmart them.

[I like how Robinson moves back and forth between the designer/player relationship and the teacher/student relationship. I wonder if “problem solver” makes sense.]

If the end statement is “I can’t believe you can set everything on fire!” that means something different from putting a flamethrower in the game. In curriculum design, starting with “I want students to write a research paper” is akin to putting a flamethrower in a game.

In response to my question about the function of pedagogy in game design, she admitted that she is focusing on “the most progressive designers,” whose games are instantiations of the new literacy studies theories.


During the Q & A, Cynthia Selfe expressed concern that English teachers are “going to muck it up.” She thought about that phrase, and came up with instead the delightfully oxymoronic notion that we will "muck it up" because we, as English teachers, “tidy up” the genres that we pull into the classroom. She encouraged us to think about this genre as the students’ space, and encouraged us to respect this genre and learn from the students.

Johnson noted that he’s very careful about writing about the gaming communities that he doesn’t participate in, so that he doesn’t “take the data” that belongs to the game world.

Using Genre to Help Students Envision Themselves as Writers (CCCC 2006 Chicago -- Day 2)

I volunteered to chair this session, so I wasn't taking copious notes, just jotting down possible discussion prompts.

Scott Whiddon, Louisiana State University, "From Cellblock to Center: Literacy, Identity and the Angolite."

The Angolite is an award-winning news magazine produced by the inmates of the Lousiana State Penitentiary. He noted that criminality and illiteracy are often taken as synonymous. This publication lets its contributors and editors transcend their role as "prisoner" and lets them participate in the outside world that their circumstances and mistakes have denied them. He also mentioned the Angola Prison Rodeo, in which prisoners particpate before a sold-out crowd. [I asked whether the print-only Angola might perpetuate some of the power differentials that we see eroding in the outside world, with the rise of digital distributed culture. I also couldn't help but think how both the magazine and the rodeo are attempts by the prisoners to take control of and even invert the panopticon. Instead of being subjects, observed by the invisible eye of authority, they become performers, interacting for and with the public who has paid to come see them. Whiddon noted that the articles in The Angolite feature redemption stories -- precisely the kind of thing that the general public wants to hear from inmates.]

Lisa Bickmore, of Salt Lake Community College, prestented "Writing 'Just on Paper,': Genre, Exigency, Situation." Since I've taught web design and writing for the web, I had to bite my tongue when she showed a slide featuring a mockup of a student website. The students had cut and pasted colored paper to indicate buttons and menu bars on a piece of poster board, and pasted what looked like an 8 1/2 x 11 paper printout in the center of the board.

My own biases made it hard for me to see beyond the paragraphs of plain text, poured into an approximation of a web design. You can put your boots in the oven, but that don't make 'em biscuits.

I can certainly understand the value of a paper prototype, and of course I know nothing about the technical literacy or access to computers that Bickmore can expect from her students.

At any rate, Bickmore applied Jim Gee's definition of literacy as social action, and presented samples from two student projects who chose to write on progressive topics. During the Q & A, I noted that as a journalism teacher, I make it perfectly clear that no human endeavor is ever perfectly objective, and I briefly described how I use the story of an article that appeared in the student newspaper when I was an undergraduate. An article reported that two demonstrations of equal sides took place at the same time, with pro-choice demonstators on one side of the downtown mall, and pro-life demonstrators on the other. The student reporter included four direct quotes and one paraphrase from protestors on one side of the issue, and merely quoted the slogans shouted and carried by demonstrators on the other side of the issue. I tell my students that, if they're waiting for me to tell them which side of the issue this reporter favored, then they're missing the point of the story -- it's bad journalism, no matter which side it favors. Students don't have to adopt a neutral tone of voice in the composition classroom, but still, in light of the activist framework she supplies to this wriiting assignment, I asked her whether her conservative students felt comfortable expressing themselves in the same way. (She answered that she was glad somebody asked that question, and noted that one group of mostly male students wrote about their opinion that Title IX was unfair.)

How Writing Centers Respond to Writers? Needs (CCCC 2006 Chicago -- Day 2)

Deborah Burns, Merrimack College. “Taking Care of Business: The Writing Center as a Site of Curricular Reform.”

Burns said that for years, the writing center had little impact on the business school. But a recent new program encouraging communications skills in business mandates inclusion of extensive writing activities, as well as other skills that can be learned effectively in a tutoring environment. Most of the faculty in business had no experience with writing-related pedagogy. Writing center provides “business writing fellows” for every writing-intensive business course. The most problematic area centers on business writing assignments – group composition. In a course “Business Enterprise,” a written analysis and PowerPoint presentation was required. Overwhelming majority of students (first-semester freshmen) found the work very challenging.

Students placed in a 3-5 member work group; meet with “business writing fellow” in group tutorials. Often only 1 or 2 of the group members would actually show up; some became frustrated by the idea that the writer had to be present in order to get feedback. (They wanted to delegate to the “best writer” in the group.) Not all students participated during writing tutorials – some IMed, took phone calls, or just sat there. Business faculty didn’t have a problem with the “best writer” model, since that was the model they all used themselves when in graduate school. (This works against the course goals, that expected all students to demonstrate writing proficiency.)

Burns explained her efforts to work more closely with the instructor. I’m sure her business colleagues can, with her guidance, easily see the benefits of apprenticing, scaffolding and the practical functions of group tutorials. She ended with an anecdote from a tutoring session following the new, improved integration of the writing center’s resources. During that session, a non-participating student answered his cell phone for the second time. His classmates turned to him and said, “Come on! We need to get this done.” I enjoyed hearing her success story, since it reminds me of the progress I saw happening during the years I spent at the University of Toronto, in what was then the brand-new Engineering Writing Centre.


Mary Zdrojkowski, Eastern Michigan University. “Laughing Matters in Writing Centers.”

Zdrojkowski’s dissertation is on institutional uses of laughter. Started out with “I’m Mary Zdrojkowski, and you’re not,” but didn’t smile. Then she commented on the fact that some of us thought it was funny, but most didn’t. She also invited those in the audience who might have expected a talk on how to use humor might instead be interested in going to Deborah Tannen’s talk.

Showed a video clip of a tutoring session where a student and tutor discuss whether to indent paragraphs. The student told the tutor that the tutor is wrong about something, but it came out easily and both were laughing about it. Literature studies of irony, sarcasm; philosophical questions of humor (superiority, incongruity, aggression). Tutors, when speaking to each other, can be sarcastic. Zdrojkowski noted that tutors who inadvertently offend students during a tutoring session might backtrack and recast their comment as a joke.

Made a distinction between humor and laughter. Things can be funny without laugher, and people can laugh at something that’s not funny.

Notes that doctors rarely laugh, but that patients laugh regularly in the initial interview when they tell the doctor where their pain is. Students will also laugh, at the precise moment when they “lay their souls naked” and express their feeling that they can’t write.

It found it easier to make sense of the heavily marked-up transcripts (with symbols indicating “smiley voice” or pause in seconds than it was making sense of most of the videos (because the video was unclear and it wasn’t always clear to me at first who was the student and who was the tutor), but I did enjoy seeing the contrasts. One very nervous student makes jokes at her expense, and before long the tutor and student have bonded over laughter; a hostile student leans back in his chair and complains about the professor, and keeps complaining (and laughing) while the tutor responds with stony silence.

I’m feeling tantalized, since I’ve always been interested in linguistics. But we’re going through the clips so quickly that I’m not sure I’m absorbing what I’m supposed to be getting out of watching these clips, or how she herself uses these. She answered that in response to a question from the audience. I think I would have rather watched fewer clips and heard more of her evaluation and conclusions. Nevertheless, her presentation made me think very carefully about the power imbalance when a student comes to me for tutoring. (Of course, I also sometimes hear students complaining about the writing center.)


Laura Patterson, Seton Hill University: “Let them Do Research! Two Uncommon Approaches to Teaching Research in a First-Year Writing Course.”

Patterson began by discussing the context of the panel. She feels she is the odd woman out because of the four panelist, she is not a writing center coordinator. Patterson noted some of the problems associated with getting students to do research on cultural identities. The students felt overwhelmed when being asked to consider cultural identities for the first time, much less asking them to think about it on a critical level. Students were so stressed that instructors felt they were pushed into a counselor role. She noted that for the 3-page research project that was the culmination of the first semester of the course, she asked students to choose a stress-release activity, and to research that activity, in order to address the question, “How does this activity reduce stress?”

The assignment was very structured, more than Patterson would have liked, but she finds this structure necessary for this particular project. She noted that the project is not really about cultural identities; some students resisted, with one student claiming not to have any stress in his life. (Patterson’s response: “I want to be you!”) Some students found that a particular activity didn’t reduce their stress. Perhaps due to the self-help culture, students “did buy in from the outset.” Practicing that stress-release activity was a kind of primary research. The project requires ongoing analysis. Requires the first-person voice; students wrote far more than 3 pages; reported benefits in other classes; were eager to share their results; students felt they had “done something purposeful with their research.”

Patterson remembers this as a “very positive time in the classroom.” Ended with the image of her on the floor with her students, during a student presentation on yoga.

Kim Pennesi, Seton Hill University. “Let them Do Research! Two Uncommon Approaches to Teaching Research in a First-Year Writing Course.”

Her biggest challenge as writing center administrator is getting students to buy into the writing process. Students who expect to drop off a paper and get it proofread, or they are interested in the superficial mechanics of the process, without worrying about the underlying principles. Student attitude to research: “After writing my paper, I always have a hard time trying to plug in my sources.”

Pennesi had students do the prewriting, but instead of actually writing the paper, they simply wrote and presented a reflection paper on their experience. She shared a detailed checklist of what she asked her students to do. Pennesi noted that, since SHU is switching to a one-semester first-year course model next year, she’s not sure what to do with what she’s learned about replacing the research paper with a reflection paper.

Publish, Plagiarize, and/or Perish? (CCCC 2006 Chicago -- Day 2)

Lila Harper, Central Washington University, Ellensburg. “What Can We Learn about Plagiarism from Master’s Theses?”

Is often asked, “Why in the world are you reading so many of these theses?” For the past 3-4 years, she has read, copy-edited and checked the references of every completed MA thesis. Not normally on the grad committee, nor directing student research. With the help of a half-time assistant, she checks theses for correctness. About 50-60 theses a year. Also teaches in composition, has cross-disciplinary experience.

Initially assumed that plagiarism would not be a problem. Found a student’s thesis that included an unexplained acronym, and when searching to see whether it should be spelled out, she found the student had plagiarized several pages from someone else’s website. While communicating expectations about plagiarism is very important for foreign students, she finds problems across cultures. Graduate students often fail to clarify indirect or secondary citations. (Some faculty argued that there is no need to differentiate between direct and indirect citations.) Some students assume that one only needs quotation marks when the student quotes the entire sentence. She notes that some of this confusion is tied to the kind of style manual the student refers to. Plagiarism at the MA level is particularly troubling, since students are no longer considered outsiders who are being asked to write in the discourse mode of the insiders. By completing an master’s thesis, the student is demonstrating membership in that scholarly community.

She focuses not on the theft of knowledge, but on the value of transparency and accuracy that is threatened when full citations are considered a last-minute formality. Poor citations damage reproducibility. She noted that faculty members in the humanities often assume that handbooks from other disciplines do a good job teaching the rules surrounding citation. She found that style manuals were prescriptive (direct, emphatic guidance – thou shalt do this, focused towards researchers), permissive (which emphasizes options; Chicago Style Manual is much more optional that MLA – these are focused towards editors, describing general practices in particular journals); descriptive (in the sciences, where students are given different examples and presumably left to their own devices).

She showed examples from the MLA Style Book and Diana Hacker’s Rules for Writers, in which Hacker was more strict than the MLA. While she had to cut considerably from a longer article, she concluded with a list of practical guidelines. Her final statement was the suggestion that introductory textbooks use the citation style that students will be expected to demonstrate.


Joel Bloch, The Ohio State University, “Blogging about Plagiarism: Dealing with the Problems of Generation 1.5 Students in an Academic Classroom.”

Bloch began by referring to his earlier work, in which he argued for the abolishment of the criminal metaphor for plagiarism, and instead suggests a games metaphor, in which there are rules that have consequences, and the rules must be discovered through active efforts. He focuses on immigrants who came to America during their school years. He described a course that is “all plagiarism, all the time.” He describes the plight of ESL students strangled by the 5-paragraph essay they were forced to write in high school. The metaphor “we stand on the shoulder of giants” reminds us that literacy is important in learning new information. The organizational patterns of academic writing force student to make abstractions. Vernacular literature achieves cohesiveness with “and,” but academic literacies require writers to show a wider variety of connections, and to make those connections more explicit. A writing sample showed a combination of “and” and more complex linkages (I didn’t catch the technical term he used to describe those connections).

I was fascinated by his discussion of how the military leadership of Somali positioned a literacy program as a weapon against foreign influences, but I’m not typing much because I’m still waiting for the “blogging” part of the talk. I’m not quite sure what to make of his references to the movie Girl, Interrupted, which seemed unnecessary. (Of course, maybe I missed something, since I'm multitasking, listening and writing at the same time. I'm not just taking notes, I'm composing complete sentences and correcting typos, so perhaps I missed something because my attention is divided.)

He uses blogging as a way to give students the opportunity to develop their ideas in the classic process-oriented classroom, but also a way they can express themselves using the vernacular. He also has students cite each other (a strategy I also use for informal class discussions). He asked students to blog about their personal lives, with the understanding that whatever they write can be read by anyone. He compared the work ethic and family importance of the blogs his generation 1.5 students write, the social blogs written by students who attend his daughter’s “wealthy” private school. [But those girls are not writing for academic credit. Certainly the generation 1.5 students have a cultural perspective that may distance themselves from the boys/friends/pop culture topics one expects to find in an adolescent girls’ weblog community, but I’m sure that when those girls become college women writing for their professors, they will change the topics they write about for class.]

Students either worked so closely with primary texts that they plagiarized, or they moved so far away from them so quickly that they barely mentioned them. (He also asks students to blog responses to an article before contributing a more formal reflection.)

Indicated that building a whole course around plagiarism was designed to let students write from a position of expertise. Presented an example in which a West African student drifted away from the text completely, contrasted with Asian students who stuck very closely to the text.

“By using blogs as a form of continuous online discussion,” it was hoped students would use them “any way they wished.” The study focused on a single student, so he was cautious about conclusions.


Mike Palmquist, Colorado State University, Fort Collins. “Beyond Twentieth-Century Paradigms for Scholarly Publishing.”

Palmquist says the scholarly publishing crisis is “overblown.” In fact, there is so much demand for scholarly works, there isn’t enough capacity to meet it. [There was a bit of a buzz in the audience at that, but we resolved to save our questions until he’s finished. He says there are more books being published now than ever before, but of course they’re expensive, small runs.]

Noted that a small press can be put out of business if it misjudges the market for the book. “Academic publishing is essentially a barter system. We do the work, they take the risks… it works out pretty well.”

Notes that the acquisitions editors may only have MAs, which calls the system into question. A really successful book has 3000 copies. Printing and distribution technologies require 9-14 months, so books are already out of date when they hit the shelves.

Sympathy for junior colleagues in the humanities, where books are so central to the faculty evaluation process.

Argues for adopting a digital publishing model that enhances, rather than replaces, the traditional model. No change at the initial analysis (is the idea good), but drop the market analysis, replacing it instead with a faculty analysis. If it’s a good book that only 400 people would be interested in, a digital publication model can do a better job. Instead of in-house publishers doing all the editing of a book, shift that responsibility to the editors of series. Shift the copyediting to faculty, in collaboration with students. Cut down the publication time to as little as a month. “I’ve actually done it in a week.”

Estimated 10-20 thousand people see a very successful book.

He proposes a model of publishing a free digital web version, and also a print-on-demand version. Example – wac.collegestate.edu “Writing Selves and Writing Societies.” A PDF of the entire book downloaded 21,000 times. 67,000 visits to the site, 31,000 unique individuals.

“Legitimacy should be a reflection of the strength of the editorial review board.” Says there’s a fundamental flaw in the system if commercial viability is such an important part of the publications winnowing process.

Benefits of a distributed, collaborative publication mode.

1. Reduces distributed costs.
   
2. Authors retain copyright.
   
3. Supports publication of work that would not be commercially viable.
   
4. Ensures scholarly merit is the most important factor.
   
5. Reduces amount of time to get work out there.
   
6. Increases access to published work.
   
7. Ensures that the work is easily accessible for longer periods of time.

Mike Edwards (sitting next to me as I type) asked the speakers whether they had any concerns about people blogging their presentations. Harper said she hadn’t had much experience with conference bogging. Bloch said he blogged last year, so he’d be hypocritical if he complained. Palimquist said it depends on what the bloggers are writing. [I joked, “Oh, I’m slamming you completely!” and he said “Then I’ll come after your website!”]

Another audience member noted that the elite quality of opera is what gives it its cultural cache. Palimquist noted that Stuart Moluthrop and Nancy Kaplan’s earlier promises that everyone will be a publisher is a bit misleading, since “I don’t have time” to be my own publisher.

Palimquist ended with an invitation to anyone who has an idea for a good book to send it to him.

Jay Wootten's CCCC 2006 Address: ''Riding a One-Eyed House'' (CCCC 2006 Chicago -- Day 2)

I won't try to blog this in detail, since this talk will eventually be published by the CCCCs. A moment of comedy occurred when the other presenters on the dais started slipping out so they could see the screen, and Wootten turned around to see them all on their feet slipping away.

Wootten began her talk by noting that as a community, we can't agree on the name of our profession. (Matt Johnson, sitting next to me, whispered "Rhet/Comp!")

She noted that in our profession, we don't read trees.. but we do read "Trees" (the poem by Joyce Kilmer) and moved into an ecological critique of the rhetorical discipline. An extended metaphor throughout her talk is the fact that even a horse that is blind in one eye can comfortably jump fences, as long as you approach the fence from the side with the good eye.

The title of her talk comes from a poem by Henry Taylor. She noted that prey animals have a much wider field of vision, but they don't worry about consciousness.

"When we choose what to teach, there is always the allure of the new, but the new is always a re-naming, a refocus." Thus, "visual literacy" has been around in the field of technical design. The study of film is visual literacy, and both of these areas began in English. Artists and graphic designers may know way more than we about visual literacy. There is no coherent theory of visual literacy. We argue that our students are visually literate and technologically advanced, and that we need to tap into those strengths.

She reflected on "the tyranny of the visual image" that she first became aware of while watching the local TV news. The TV news man was saying something about trees. However, it had become so necessary to fill that image spot to the right of the anchors head with SOMETHING, so a cartoonish representation of a tree appeared on the screen -- as if they didn't think we would know what a tree was without a picture. (She compared this to linguistic objectivists in Gulliver's Travels, who first abolished all words but nouns, and then replaced all words with things. "It kind of reminds me of PowerPoint presentations." The women, in conjunction with the vulgar and illiterate, objected. Gulliver refers to sages carrying large packs of things weighing them down, leading to a universal language. Wotten suggested our modern packs of things are computers.

"I don't like reading into things," said a young woman (studying medicine?).

Wootten: "Have you heard, 'diagnose'?"

Students don't like cognitive dissonance and they don't like examining fences.

Showed the "Bush: One of the worst disasters to hit the US" vid cap. (The slide popped up early.) Introduced, with some uncertainty, the pressure comp teachers are feeling about the importance of preparing students to work in multimedia environments. [I personally agree that PowerPoint is not conducive to the kind of thinking I want my students to demonstrate in my classes.]

"Having students use computers as typewriters won't create empowered users. Multimedia presentations for their own sake are not empowered users." Showed a photoshopped spoof "Absolut Corruption" ad that showed a bottled collage of political leaders.

She described her own freshman writing experience thus: "Here, read this essay by E.B. White, or Rachel Carlson, or Mark Twain, And for the next class, write such a thing." [Laughter.]

"I don't see any new people coming into the profession who are luddites. I do worry about the students our aging luddites are teaching."

Her call for professional development for all who teach received another burst of applause.

Opening General Session (CCCC 2006 Chicago -- Day 2)

Two huge projection screens flank the dais here in the grand ballroom. One screen shows a video close-up of the program chair, Akua Duku Anoyke. The other screen shows a textual transcript of her words. There is a soft chuckle in the room when she mentions a name – Rosanne Cook – that appears on the screen as “roast Ann cook.”

As is always the case with conference liveblogging, these are the rough notes that I took while the presenters were speaking. I've lightly edited them, but please don't consider them a professional transcription.

The announcement that there are 900 newbies led to applause.

The word “pedagogy” came across on the transcript as “pedestrian Gojy.”

(I should note that the transcripting is really working very well – just because I note the amusing glitches shouldn’t be taken as criticism. I just enjoy pointing out the limitations of the technology.)

Joyce Rain Anderson introduced the Scholars for the Dream awards, a program to bring under-represented groups to present at the CCCCs for the first time.

The 2006 Exemplar Award was presented to David Bartholomae, who got a standing ovation. Bartholomae says he told his brother, “It’s like a geezer award.” “I’m of that generation that says the 4Cs was our graduate school.” His graduate training offered no coursework in composition or pedagogy, and it did not take education of freshman seriously. Bartholome points to the successful growth of CCCCs, but worries that in the focus on creating graduate programs and rhetoric and composition theories, perhaps the central importance of freshman writing education has been lost. Why should freshman English remain an area of primary importance: By turning our energies to the upper divisions, and research, we are confirming the deans’ bias towards research, rather than teaching. Freshman comp asks us to ask, what is the place of reading and writing in a general sense, as they might be practiced outside the canons of advanced study? IF we turn away from freshman English, we lose the opportunity to think about the relationship of being accountable to the public. Bartholomae notes that one can make a successful career focusing on lower-division classes and freshman writing. (Another standing ovation.)

Rebecca Burnett presented the 4Cs Memorial Scholarship, honoring former CCCC chairs who have passed away, and supporting four graduate student conference presentation.

Joe Janangelo, the local arrangements chair, introduced and recognized some of the key people who worked to organize the conference. He spoke touchingly of mentors past, encouraging us to thank the mentors who surround us, including people we encounter in the elevators, the assistants who do our photocopying, the people who clean our offices, our partners, and children.

Kyoko Sato, NCTE president, recalled the “thin, white, diaphanous material wafting up from the concrete floor” that partitioned the convention hall last year. She spoke of the commonalities between secondary education and college teachers. She noted “slight edginess” of the CCCCs personality as opposed to the general NCTE personality (but quickly qualified that as a good thing), and expressed her interest in encountering theoretical terms. Her mention that NCTE has opened a satellite office in Washington, D.C. in order to make NCTE concerns more visible to the government. (There was a short burst of enthusiastic applause, which seemed to surprise her.) As part of the NCTE efforts, the states are being encouraged to look at Reading First, and to create a range of assessments, decreasing the testing burden. (Louder applause.) Sato invited us back to Chicago in 2011, to celebrate CCCC’s 100th birthday.

Sharon Mitchler, chair of the 2-year college commission, noted that community college “is where the action is.” (Applause.) She previewed panels of particular interest to 2-year college teachers. She also asked members who are currently teaching in 2-year colleges to stand, and then asked those who had taught there in the past, to stand. A small but significant number stood. Then, she invited everyone who has ever attended a 2-year college to stand – and by this time, half the room was on its feet.

Conference on College Composition and Communication -- Day 2 (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Here are links to the blogs I wrote on the second day of the confernce. I'm posting them past midnight -- all this took place on March 23.

• Opening General Session
  
• Jay Wootten’s CCCC 2006 Address: ‘’Riding a One-Eyed House’’
  
• Publish, Plagiarize, and/or Perish?
  
• How Writing Centers Respond to Writers’ Needs
  
• Technology, Play and Pedagogy: Video Gaming and New Literacies
  
• Why Plagiarism Makes Sense in the Digital Age: Copying, Remixing, and Composing
  
• Wiki SIG (Special Interest Group)
  
• Dinner with Engineering SIG

See Conference on College Composition and Communication Day 1.

Based on Shatner's book "I'm Working on That," in which he explored the connections between "Star Trek" technology and real science, "How William Shatner Changed the World" takes the tongue-in-cheek approach the actor often applies to what he considers the over-serious fandom of the TV shows and movies. --'Star Trek' inspired real inventions (AP | The Cincinnati Post)

I've always got time for some Shatnology. Shatnolotry?

1UP: Perspectives from Scholars/Practitioners of Video Games (CCCC 2006 Chicago -- Day 1)

I arrived early at this session and spent some time reconnecting with Matt Barton, whom I know from previous conferences. Barton is working on a book on graphic adventure games, and gave me some suggestions on what I might do with my interactive fiction work. I really enjoy his work on Armchair Arcade.

Another early arrival was Matthew S. S. Johnson, a dyed-in-the-wool narratologist. I told him that Jesper Juul, whose dissertation slammed interactive fiction and the mythology surrounding it, has moderated his position in his new book, Half Real, which works towards integrating narratology and ludology.

The three of us discussed our hopes that the CCCC video gaming community, which is just beginning to form, will last.

The first speaker, Alice Robinson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, spoke on, “What Videogame Designers Can Teach Writing Instructors.” She works under James Gee. She began with some statistics from a recent Pew study demonstrating how pervasive computer games are in mainstream popular culture. Since students are often casually gaming in one window while they are doing homework in another window, Robinson discussed the relationship between what happens in the brain when one plays a game, and what happens in the brain when one writes a composition. Finishing a four-hour session with Civ IV involves reviewing the charts and data that the game displays as part of the end-of-game debriefing. She touched on the “embodied cognition” aspect of video games, which I presume refers to the fact that people learn in many ways, and that the direct manipulation of the simulated environment ties into our hard-wired system that lets us learn through interaction with the real world. Robinson noted that good games have a “design grammar,” and compared the “designer/player” relationship to the “teacher/student” and “reader/writer” relationship. All the theory that identifies positive ways that the teacher/student and reader/writer dichotomy can interact with each other and enrich our understanding of texts, the designer/player relationship is perhaps even more suited to helping us understand the many positive ways that that barrier is transgressed (I’m using my own words here – she is going very quickly through the introductory material.) Her research involves interviewing professional game designers. She spoke positively about the connections between creating a world and teaching; notes that designers are interested in the metaskills their players develop. [But when I attended the Serious Games summit, it was very clear that the “fun vs. pedagogy” debate was alive and kicking, with the designers feeling pushed around by the authority that serious games projects gives to the curriculum designer.] that writers often fail many times, and games can help motivate us to try again.

Mark Mullen, from The George Washington University, presented “Designs on the Future: Student-Authored Game Design Documents in the First-Year Writing Class” looked at student-authored design documents (including help files). He taught a course called, “I’m Game: Exploring the Art, Science and Economics of Electronic Games,” as part of a first-year writing and research course, and spoke of it as a pre-disciplinary critical thinking course. (A little later he spoke of it as a technical writing course, and contrasted it to the literary analysis one finds in most other writing courses.) One of the two sections of this course was entirely female, the other was with two exceptions all male. While about 45% of women acknowledge playing games, women wouldn’t consider Solitaire or Freecell as “games,” when the dominant cultural paradigm for “computer games” involves combat and killing. The students also developed the criteria they used to evaluate their own assignments. All the students played American MaGee’s Alice, a nightmare version of Alice in Wonderland. Students developed a group contract, a design treatment, a “pitch meeting,” prep of the final draft, and the students scored each other’s proposals based on the criteria they had set up. AR2076 – a “horrifically violent” first-person shooter proposed by three women. Players had to recover each of the 10 original amendments in the Bill of Rights, and each level was themed on each of the original amendments. Bringing George Washington back from the dead to spew wooden teeth, etc. In writing classes, we only ask students to do simulation activities… asking them to create a design document pushed them beyond that paradigm. “Some of the best writing I’ve seen freshmen produce, bar none.”

Matthew S. S. Johnson, of Indiana University Bloomington: “Revisiting Rivalry: Computer Game Competition as an Invention Strategy.” (Matthew, do you have a home page?) The competitive spirit of gamers can encourage and inspire in online environments. Johnson noted that in the last 20 years, rhetoricians have lauded motions away from competition and “victor and vanquished,” towards a more nurturing model. But in MMORPGs, the competition is not the point – the point is personal improvement; such a game never “ends,” so nobody is ever a “loser.” All those who keep playing keep improving. Competition is seen as negative because of the victor/vanquished dichotomy; Johnson notes that there is joy, forgiveness, strength, action, and nobility in computer games. Competitive elements in MORGs are in the background, motivating characters, while players write to each other in forums, blogs, walkthroughs, guides, etc. The gamer community includes a way for players to give feedback to modders, whether feedback to aid in revision, or a review intended for other potential players. Mod contributors compete with other modders, but they also benefit. Collaboration is not opposed to competition; can serve as a valuable incentive to discuss and write.

Matthew Barton turned the discussion over to the audience of about 10. “Why are you here?”

The first comment from the audience was from a 1st year comp teacher at Fresno State Calif; he says that video games are legitimate texts that have been “completely ignored, almost to the point of humiliation, by academia,” and praised CCCC for scheduling such a session.

Another audience member said he was interested in methodology. “We want to teach them to look at things critically,” and was using for methods to integrate games rather than just show video clips. [I should look up Kurt Squire’s dissertation, on games in education.]

I piped up to invite attendees to look up “New Games Journalism,” and recommended “Bow, Nigger.” (Obviously, there's offensive language on the other end of that link.)

Samantha Blackmon Somebody sitting near Samantha Blackmon mentioned her research on Second Life, and strongly recommended the wikis being written by gamers.

Another speaker says she has used games in intermediate comp classes. She says some students say they don’t really play games. [Chatter from the audience: I’m not a gamer, but… I’m not a writer, but… I’m not a feminist, but…] Her focus is on rhetorical representations of otherness in video games. (Race, gender, and sexual orientation.) Robinson asked this speaker to comment on what to do when the public expects all research on games to focus on the media effects, particularly on children. “Try to move them away from, ‘This is evil, and it must die.’” [Mullen’s ornery response: “Why are you so afraid of your children?”]

While everyone hadn’t yet had the chance to speak, Barton noted the time was nearly up, so we shifted briefly into strategizing mode, as group members ponder the challenges we will face from colleagues who don’t see videogames as legitimate.

When the event broke up, those of us who hadn't made other plans met up with Charlie Lowe and Bradley Bleck, and went out to get some Chicago pizza. (I could've used a third slice, but Brad looked very, very hungry.)

The dress code at CCCCs varies. Matthew S. S. Johnson looks like The Man (though the pastel tie and the ponytail work against that image). Matthew Barton said the shirt he didn't bring was even geekier:

load "*",8,1

I'm proud to say I'm geek enough to recognize that as a Commodore 64 command. (Back then, we didn't need no steenkin' icons.)

Newsweek Educational Program (CCCC 2006 Chicago -- Day 1)

A big part of the CCCC convention is the exhibit hall, where publishers offer their latest titles. I peeked in before the exhibit hall opened, and found the chaos very interesting. The exhibitors work for hours to set up booths that I might spend 2 seconds glancing at as I walk by. The scene reminded me of how much goes into preparing this convention.

While chilling out in the lobby, I spent some time talking with the rep from Newsweek, who is here to exhibit materials from Newsweek’s education program. I liked what I saw of their current unit on popular culture and an older unit on innovation. My initial sense is that the materials don’t really represent the way students really work. It makes perfect sense that Newsweek would want to introduce students to samples of its work (the same company also publishes The Washington Post). Newspapers have a vested interest in the literacy of a population, since in addition to all the other benefits literacy brings to a society, more readers means more subscribers, which means more ad money.

But students don’t start their research with Newsweek or The Washington Post – they start with Google. The rep at this conference admitted he couldn’t show me very much evidence that the Newsweek educational program was taking advantage of new media.

The Newsweek materials include stand-alone subject guides that anthologize recent articles on a particular theme. It also includes a newsletter that presents study questions, vocabulary guides, and current events quizzes, keyed to each week’s issue of Newsweek. (Apparently the woman who writes that newsletter gets a FAX of the magazine over the weekend, just before it goes to press, and she’s supposed to have her newsletter finished by Monday, when it’s sent out to teachers.)

When I teach journalism, I do have students read current issues of the paper, and as part of the discussion about sources, bias, and credibility, we have wandered into topics such as nuclear proliferation in North Korea, the Swift Boat Veterans’ attacks on John Kerry, and the Danish cartoon controversy. But I don’t really teach those events. That news writing class had 33 students, which is huge by Seton Hill standards, and very large for any writing class. While I’d like to see students engaging intelligently with the world around them, the only part of that course I think I could cut to make room for more current events would be the exercises I assigned that had them covering events on campus. But that first-hand reportage taught important lessons that students simply would not be able to get out of a book. Getting out there and doing their own local reporting fits perfectly with the educational practices that serve millennials best.

Still, that doesn’t mean there is no place in my curriculum for a current events-based resource. I never assign students the kind of rhetorical persuasion that asks them to use current news reports to support a particular stand on a hot issue. Some students choose to write those kinds of essays on their blogs, of course, in which case I will help them out. But it’s not a genre that I actively teach.

Looking at these materials makes me wonder whether I should give it a try.

900 Newbies (CCCC 2006 Chicago -- Day 1)

According to one of the Newcomers’ Orientation Committee volunteers, there are 900 first-time attendees signed up for this conference. A staff member at the registration desk said there are 2800 people already registered, and they expect about 3400 in total.

I think it’s a great idea to have a table in the registration area, specifically to make first-time attendees feel welcome. My first time at the CCCCs, I was part of a panel that included three members of the writing center where I worked at the University of Toronto’s engineering school. Sorry, that should be “centre,” not “center.”

Leeroy Jenkins Meets the CCCC Program (CCCC 2006 Chicago -- Day 1)

The wireless internet access at the Palmer House Hilton charges an hourly rate, so I’ll batch-post my notes to my blog when I get back to my hotel. As is always the case with live blogging (or near-live blogging), these will be rough notes that I took during the speaker’s presentations. These notes will be colored by my own subjective opinions of what is blogworthy.

Looking through the program for this year’s 4Cs in Chicago, I’m annoyed to see that Clancy Ratliff’s talk on “Coalition-Building on Weblogs” and Stephen Krause’s talk on “Using Podcasts to Build Community and Connections” are scheduled at the same time.

But I won’t be going to either of them, because instead I’m going to “Technology, Play and Pedagogy: Video Gaming and New Literacies.”

Not only have these three sessions been scheduled at the same time, they’re listed one after the other in the program.

But wait – that’s not all. At the same time there’s a “Computer Connection” session on “Usability and Remediation,” and the same session also includes, “Leeroy Jenkins! Gaming and Visual Argumentation.”

Leeroy Jenkins is a character in a machinima video taken from within the MMO World of Warcraft. The video shows an over-eager gamer completely ruin the meticulous plans that his guild formulates while he was not paying attention. It’s pretty clear to me that the whole thing was staged, but it’s still hysterical.

Here in the lobby of the Hilton, people are gathering in small groups, looking through the conference program. We’re managing our resources, planning our strategy, and networking.

But I don’t want to have to plan. I don’t want to have to choose. At least, not at 3:15 on Thursday, when, in order to bring home all the treasure I really want, I’d have to run around checking out four different sessions at the same time, waving my PDA stylus and threatening everyone with my digital camera, firing off questions, perhaps screaming like Leeroy Jenkins himself.

Oh, well. At least I have chicken.

Conference on College Composition and Communication -- Day 1 (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

It's a little after midnight on March 23. The fancy-schmancy hotel where the conference is taking place charges an hourly rate for internet access, so I didn't liveblog. But here are my entries for the first day of the conference.

• Preface
  
• Leeroy Jenkins Meets the CCCC Program
  
• 900 Newbies
  
• Newsweek Educational Program
  
• 1UP: Perspectives from Scholars/Practitioners of Video Games

See Conference on College Composition and Communication Day 2.

Victims of poor high schooling, of whom we have plenty at my university, often come to my classes asking, "Is this an 'opinion paper' or a 'research paper'?" I tell them that that is a spectacularly bad question based upon a false dichotomy; that I'm interested neither in mere feckless opinion nor in the random accumulation of facts, but rather in reasoned argument based upon a secure empirical and philosophical foundation. --John D. Arras --It's a Simple Game (Chronicle)

A great quote: "I generally believe that PowerPoint is the spawn of Satan. It breeds passivity in the students and it disconnects the speaker from the audience."

I use slide shows only rarely -- when I want to show students a typographical mistake in a sign, for instance. I'm working on a special slide show that uses images to teach the difference between active and passive verbs. I've probably put far too much effort into it, which means I'll feel motivated to use it again in the future to justify the effort I put into it, even if it turns out to be no more effective as a teaching tool as a traditional workshop with a pre and post quizzes.

Next slide, please.

CCCC Chicago 2006 (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I'm in Chicago this week for the Conference on College Composition and Communication. I had a very hectic weekend doing some emergency blog maintenance, working an article I had promised and a story pitch for which I've got high hopes, and working ahead so my students can work on their own until I get back.

I got in to the hotel about 9pm last night, and though I had my laptop with me and a good wireless connection, I didn't get much work done.

I slept in until about 10am.

I'll mosey out of here and head over to the conference hotel in a few hours. I'll try to liveblog the conference, if I can.

Update, 23 Mar: Here is Day 1 of the CCCCs blogged.

They're meant to educate people by simulating real-world events and are often created with the best of intentions. Problem is, education, science and health care aren't exactly the stuff of exciting entertainment, let alone video games. --Daniel Terdiman --What's wrong with serious games? (C|Net News.com)

Okay, but I'm uncomfortable with the word "entertanment," since that carries the idea that the entertainer is doing the work, and the entertained just sits there. Sitting in front of a TV may require mental work to connect the dots in the plot and understadnd the jokes, but a game that involved doing nothing but watching a plot unfold would be boring. I'm not implying that Terdiman doesn' t know what a game is. It's just the choice of the word "entertaining" grates on me.

Finally Upgrading to MoveableType 3.2 (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I've had a rather hellacious weekend. I upgraded the MovableType installation at blogs.setonhill.edu to version 3.2 on Friday.

The actual upgrade went very smoothly, but it took most of the afternoon for me to get the anti-spam protection to work decently.

The spam-blocker I had been using, MT-Blacklist, did just what I said -- it blocked unwanted spam. But the built-in spam filter in MT 3.2 simply marks the spam as "Published, "Unpublished" (awaiting moderation), or "Junk." But there's no easy way for me to print out the last 10 "Published" comments that have been added to the system.

If you ask the system to give you a list of the n most recent entries that have been commented on, that list does not exclude the "junk" comments. The end result is that list is pretty much useless, because we're getting hundreds of junk comments for every legitimate comment. The system works pretty well from the perspective of the individual blogger, but at the moment the upgrade has killed the "Recently Commented" feature of our blogs.setonhill.edu portal.

Well, not actually dead... but it takes so much time to wade through thousands of comments each time I want to update the main page, that I fear it will make people think the main page has frozen. I'm sure there's some way to do solve this problem, but as much as I like that "Recent Comments" feature, it's not crucial.

When I get some more time, I'll submit an MT support ticket.

Far more frustrating was the realization that my curricular websites are broken. I finally tracked down the problem... in the past, it was apparently acceptable to use the MTEntryDate template tag in an archive template. Thus, when I wanted to print the date of an entry that appears in a list of all the entries that appeared in a certain month or on a certain day, I used MTEntryDate. A little time with Google revealed that MT 3.2 now requires me to use MTArchiveDate in those archive contexts. This took me several hours of work to recover.

My parents are in town this weekend, so fortunately I've had help with the kids, and I've been able to throw a lot of time into this problem. I even managed to get away with the family to a Slovenian dance hall for some polka dancing.

But on top of all this, I've spent even more hours this weekend working on two projects related to Colossal Cave Adventure.

One is a chapter on Adventure that I promised to submit to a collection of essays being published in honor of a former mentor of mine. I would have sworn that I sent in a rough draft of that essay weeks ago, but I got a very polite, very urgent letter asking me to please, please, pretty please submit something as soon as possible.

The other project had been on the back burner since classes started in the fall. Last summer I went to the real Colossal Cave, and while I wrote up some of those experiences in an article I submitted last fall to a forthcoming book on ecocriticism and videogames ("Playing with Mother Nature"), I have also wanted to publish some material online in venue that is readily accessible to online researchers. A few days ago, I learned that Will Crowther and Don Woods (creators of Colossal Cave Adventure) will be honored at the Game Developers Conference this week. Sadly, I haven't been able to update my curricular website since January, so I won't be able to update my own Adventure resources by then, but I figured this is a good time to start getting my notes together, just in case I encounter something in the press coverage that needs correction.

Oh newfanglenesse! Y have learned the privitees of the manye abbreviaciouns ywritten on the internette. OMG: "oh mine ++DOMINUS++". ROFL: "rollinge on the floore laughinge". IRL: "in reale lyfe." WTF: "whatte the swyve?"

Beinge somethinge of an innovator myselfe, Y presente to yow, churles and gentils alle, the followynge abbreviaciouns. May they serven yow welle in your internette communicacioun:

GP: gentil person

WC: woole customes

XC: Exchequer

BATJG: biggere arsehole thanne john gowere

BSL!: by seinte loy!

OTPBRB: Offe to parliamente, be ryghte back

SNAPFU - BYXCA: supposedely nyce annuitie paymente fuckede uppe by the XC againe

KRBMA: Kynge Richarde II buggynge me againe

AOMSHJDOTBD: anothere of myne servauntes hath just dyede of the blacke death

EISBYMIWATCHDNSTHD: eftsoon I shall be ycleped mad if worke atte the customes house doth not settle the helle downe --abbreviaciouns (Geoffrey Chaucer Hath A Blog)

Protagonist --> click --> a regional Canadian airline
Protagonist = pilot
Setting --> click --> some African herd animal
Setting = a savannah
Problem --> click --> some antidepressant drug
Problem = need to acquire medicine
Antagonist --> click --> some historical doctor
Antagonist = a doctor who won't dispense the medicine (nice synch on that one)

Now adapt the above to a Fantasy setting. The protagonist is a dragon rider. He's been sent afield to acquire some healing herbs for his dying king. He seeks out a Druid on the savannah who is reluctant to part with the herbs. He must talk the Druid into trading the herbs, or fight him and take them. --[Using Wikipedia to Conquer Writer's Block] (PartiallyClips)

Use Wikipedia's's "random article" link to generate story ideas.

The 6th annual Game Developers Choice Awards will devote a portion of the ceremony to honoring a group of individuals whose efforts stand out in the advancement of the interactive entertainment industry. The ceremony, which is produced and hosted by the Game Developers Conference (GDC) and presented by the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), will take place on Wednesday, March 22, 2006 at the San Jose Civic Auditorium.

Will Crowther and Don Woods, creators of the text-based game Adventure, will receive the First Penguin award for leading the path to unchartered grounds by creating the first text-based Role Playing Game (RPG). --6th Annual Game Developers Choice Awards

Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

There never has been a better time to get into Web journalism. We are making money, we are hiring, and we are actively searching for new, innovative ideas. After ten years, there are no veterans in this field. This is your chance to be among the first. --Anthony Moor --Go to the Web, young journalist! (Online Journalism Review)

Then one night Lisberger went to visit his in-laws, and everyone was crouched around the TV, playing Pong.

"They kept referring to the games, 'Play the game,' and since I had been working on a project called "Animalympics," the idea of games to me meant more than that. It meant Olympic or gladiatorial games," the director said. "Then I thought, 'Well, our warrior should be in a gladiatorial game setting.' From there the whole thing started to snowball." It seems only fitting, then, that a film like Tron was conceived while playing the first video game ever created. --David Konow --Tron's World: The Dawn Of Tron  (Tom's Hardware Guide)

Pong was certainly an early video game, but it was not "the first video game ever created." Tennis for Two was made in 1958, some 14 years before Pong.

Singer says he plans to use the late Marlon Brando in the new film. Brando, who played Superman's father, Jor-El, in the 1978 Superman and died in 2004, will return in the same role.

Singer says he found stock footage of Brando shot by director Richard Donner in 1978, which will provide Brando's voice. Special-effects crews will digitally re-create Brando's image, Singer says. --'Superman' torch is passed (Yahoo!)

Stella! I'm gonna make you an offer you can't refuse! This is no fantasy, no careless product of wild imagination. The horror! The horror! I coulda been a contender!

“Oh, no,” I exclaimed several years ago, when a student in a composition class stepped out afterwards to explain that she had been absent because her grandmother had died. “Another dead grandmother!”

The girl immediately burst into tears.

Of course I wished I was dead. The student’s grandmother really had died. Or else her granddaughter was a good actress. But you want to try to avoid being too cynical about excuses, especially those involving death. Question these particular excuses and you may as well be questioning respect for the dead or the suffering of those left behind. --Terry Caesar --The Time of Dead Grandmothers (Inside Higher Ed)

No, not Nachos, Naches. That's yiddish for...naches. Ok no good English translation (as usual). Not quite pride. More like a feeling of ease or peace for the spirit. Something that makes you go, "..ahhh..." Though it's usually meant as pride. Specifically, the pride you get from one of your kids when they do something good. --Naches (Psycho Toddler)

I just had a visit from an excited student who's just been accepted to a new media MFA program.

A few days ago, a different student who'd answered a conference CFP (call for papers) as part of a homework assignment for Video Game Culture and Theory told me his paper had been accepted. I've already blogged about a student whose term paper for one of my lit classes was accepted at an undergraduate lit conference.

Such naches ..ahhh...

It's Not Monday, but I Hate Garfield. (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I started writing this as an example, on the paper of a student who put a bit of plot analysis in the spot where an academic thesis should have been. While this isn't quite as good as the story of J.R.R. Tolkien writing down the opening of The Hobbit on the back of a student paper, I still thought the result was worth sharing.

A lit crit paper uses scholarly sources to support a non-obvious claim. What you’ve presented as a claim is really data taken from plot events. It’s a bit like saying “'Garfield' is a comic strip about a fat cat who loves lasagna.” Of course that's what "Garfield" is.

But I'd much rather read a paper that argues, “'Garfield,' a comic strip that began in the late 70s (the “me decade”) and became wildly popular during the consumerist 80s, takes a lightly satirical approach to American suburbia’s self-centered complacency, obesity, and social dysfunction. While many Americans happily enjoy the inoffensive, bland humor of the Garfield comic strip, when compared to the biting social commentary of Bill Watterson (“Calvin and Hobbes”) or the contemporary realistic approach of Lynn Johnston (“For Better or For Worse”), creator Jim Davis appears little more than a merchandising master, whose staff of hired writers and artists supply new material for the character while Davis himself spends most of his time negotiating business licenses. Far from satirizing weaknesses in the American psyche, “Garfield” is a prime example of the mediocrity and anti-intellectualism that American pop culture celebrates.”

Woah.. I had to go to Wikipedia to find some material for that, but you see what I mean – I exaggerated just a bit, but now I’ve probably gotten your attention.

Taking our previous analogies for punctuation, what happens when it isn't used? Well, if punctuation is the stitching of language, language comes apart, obviously, and all the buttons fall off. If punctuation provides the traffic signals, words bang into each other and everyone ends up in Minehead.... The reason to stand up for punctuation is that without there is no reliable way of communiating meaning. Punctuation herds words together, keeps others apart. Punctuation directs you how to read, in the way musical notation directs a musician how to play. --Lynn Truss, Eats, Shoots & LeavesDash It! We're All Trussed Up: Eating, Shooting, and Blogging (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

When I first taught this book in Intro to Literary Study last year, some student responses were negative. Truss adopts an insider tone, preaching to a choir of fellow "sticklers." I worried that, since many of my students already feel inadequate about their punctuation skills, perhaps they felt that Truss was mocking them -- and that, through my selection of a book, I, too was mocking them.

There are other books that speak more directly to a young American audience, but I liked this book so much I wanted to give it another try.

On Monday, when I introduced the students to the book, I gave a little speech about the importance of punctuation, and noted that it's not their fault that they've gotten this far without being forced to learn it. I tried to reassure them that I understood this was new and challenging material, and I reassured them that even if they don't know all the rules explicitly, they've developed an intuitive sense of punctuation. So most of the rules will simply codify knowledge that they already know on somelevel.

Still, I pointed out that if SHU were to graduate English majors who can't punctuate, then I'm not doing my job.

As students blogged about their reading, Elyse paid me a high compliment when she asked, "Does this NOT remind you of Professor Jerz?" Amanda and Denamarie said they had steeled themselves to hate the book, but they found themselves pleasantly surprised. Andy said the book "does an excellent job of making 'boring material' (no offense) something fun and interesting."

Kevin even made a paper badge that said "U.S. Punctuation Patrol" and wore it to class. Erin and Sarah both said they wanted to keep reading, and Amanda actually did keep reading.

A few students reported feeling paranoid about punctuation mistakes they might make on their blogs. That led to a discussion of formal and informal writing rules, and my expectation that a blog is somewhere between formal and informal. I'm pleased to stand by and observe as they notice their own proofreading skills sharpening. Nobody has ever accused me of a lack of enthusiasm, but I think I was even more enthusiastic than usual when I related the release of endorphins in the brain when one catches a punctuation error to the rush that one gets when besting one's own score in a race or finishing a really good book. I said something like, "If you're an athlete and you beat your own record, you feel a little rush of pleasure because your DNA is telling you that you've just done something that's likely going to increase your chances of survival and making it more likely you'll pass on your genes to your future children. If you feel that same little rush of pleasure when you catch a punctuation mark or finish a really good book, that's your cells telling you that the literary skills you're developing in this class are making you more likely to be successful in the world."

Somewhere in there I managed to co-opt the lizard-brain hunting instinct (as opposed to the lizard brain-hunting instinct) and connect it to proofreading. I saw heads nodding, so I think it went pretty well.

Now I wish I had given them more chapters of Truss to read back-to-back. As I said, last time I got a bit of resistance when I introduced this book, so when I put the schedule together this year I figured I'd give them some time to absorb the first part of the book, and I'd gradually start increasing my expectations in the area of accurate punctuation. Now I worry it might be harder to restore the momentum, since Truss was hilarious in the introduction, but the body of the book doesn't sustain quite that level.

I tried to shift the last part of class time to a discussion of their literary criticism papers, but coming down off of that punctuation speech, it was a bumpy ride. I ended up letting them go early.

Think back to John Henry racing a steam drill and forward to Garry Kasparov trying to outmaneuver IBM's Deep Blue in 1997 to the Onion tweaking the genre with its accountant battles Excel story.

But the latest twist on the meme takes it to the meta-level by raising the question: in the future, will you find your man vs. machine story relying on a human-edited source or from an algorithm? --Ryan Singel --Man vs. Machine in Newsreader War (Wired)

The opening to this article is more creative than the body, but it's still a useful overview.

When former Gizmondo executive Stefan Eriksson wrecked his million-dollar Ferrari on the Pacific Coast Highway last month, it simply seemed like a fitting metaphor for the death of his hapless handheld - the destruction of one expensive piece of machinery to mark the end of another.
--Gizmondo Bizarro (Game Revolution)

If all the news reports are accurate, the Gizmondo game system seems to let you race a Mercedes SLR, crash a Ferrari, manage the careers of special agents as they rise from eldertransport rent-a-cops to homeland security agents, and elude the authorities via a luxury yacht.

Thanks to a comment a former student added to last week's post, I found some pleasant, lush models of trees, along with numerous other realistic residential items. I've added the fluorescent light fixtures and wall sconces inside, and some pretty trees outside. I also started working with a street model (curbs and sidewalks), but ran into some file-name snags. Nothing major -- I just didn't feel like doing a lot of renaming manually. (There's got to be a way to batch process this kind of thing.)

Since this past week was Spring Break, my wife scheduled a lot of family activities. I still got to the office three days during the week, but much of that time was taken up with writing a letter of recommendation for one student, helping a different student apply for funds, and working on a new website for one of the campus units. I enjoy doing that stuff -- it's the kind of thing that gets squeezed out of a typical day during a typical week. I wouldn't exaclty say I enjoyed looking over 10 folders from applicants who don't meet our SAT admissions requrements, but it is important work that I take seriously; we actually have 20 folders to look at by Tuesday, but I wanted to get a head start on the stack. In addition, the pending release of an update to the interactive fiction programming language Inform has gotten me to pay more than the usual amount of attention to the world of contemporary text-adventure gaming.

So I haven't fired up Hammer (the Half-Life 2 world-building tool) for several days.

I have laid the groundwork for some future accomplishments. I had to leave my work computer on overnight, but it finally downloaded Steam. I confess I didn't get much modding done, since I took the opportunity to replay the beginning of Half-Life 2, marvelling at the graphics (which look great on the screen of my tiny Dell 700m laptop, but which look even better on my more powerful work computer). But theoretically, now I can test out the FacePoser (which crashes when I try it at home).

I also asked my university for the funds to buy a few copies of XSI, a powerful 3D model tool. For the purposes I have in mind, each student won't need an individual copy. In a note I wrote to my dean, I likened XSI to a kiln, and noted that when I did a ceramics project in the third grade, I didn't need my own kiln. I molded my clay and gave it to my teacher to bake. Later, I put on the glaze, and she baked it again. Okay, that metaphor sort of messes up the whole Steam/Hammer/Forge thing that Valve Software has going, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.

I also let our networking folks know about my desire to teach with Steam this fall. I'll need to find out what computer lab I'm going to have to use, so I can book it now.

Also in the "planning ahead" category, I've got to put together a syllabus for a games programming course that a nearby college has asked me to teach online.

From my server logs, I've noticed that my modding diary is starting to attract hits from search engines. I can't imagine that I'd be of much help right now, but I plan to keep chronicling my progress, so that people who are even greener newbies than I am might learn a thing or two, and people who've been so kind to post helpful online tutorials can bask in the link love I shall bestow upon them.

Next on my modding to-do list: Probably working a little more on the lighting, adding a working light switch and some exterior light fixtures. Maybe some grass, too. I'd also like to figure out how to get bright sunlight to come down from the sky -- right now the only light comes from artificial sources I've placed around my model.

I don't know that I'll get to it in the coming week, but I'm eager to figure out how to get my NPCs to respond to my actions. I'd also like to record some original dialog and get an in-game NPC to speak it.

Half-Life 2 Mod: Week 3 -- Trees, Wall Sconces, Ceiling Fixtures (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

"We also wanted your cubicle to give you a little shred of dignity and recognition and acknowledge you exist because you're probably not getting that from your co-workers or your boss. So we've built in a mechanical flower that's acoustically activated. When you're gone, it's wilted. But when you come in, it's acoustically activated and pops up to attention, might even shudder a little bit with happiness.

"Even your wastebasket will kind of vibrate with happiness when trash is thrown into it. So you want the cubicle to love you and care for you, kind of a womb experience." --Scott Adams --Scott Adams: Dilbert's Ultimate Cubicle (CNN)

From 2001. Still pretty amusing.

The cubicle was not born evil, or even square. It began, in fact, as a beautiful vision. --Julie Schlosser --Cubicles: The Great Mistake (CNN Money.com)

Welcome to World of Warcraft: The Text Adventure.

You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully. There is an elf with an exclamation point above her head here.

>Talk elf

"Alas," she says. "There is a great darkness upon the land. Fifty years ago the Dwarf Lord Al'ham'bra came upon the Dragon Locket in the Miremuck Caverns. He immediately recognized the ..."

> Click Accept

"Hey," the elf protests. "This is important expository. Azeroth is a rich and storied land, with a tapestry of interwoven ..."

> Click Accept

"OK, fine. Bring me six kobold tails."

> Shout "Where are the Kobolds?" --Lore Sjöberg --WOW: the Text Adventure (Wired)

Apparently, World of Warcraft is getting too texty.

The Food and Drug Administration today approved the sale of the drug PharmAmorin, a prescription tablet developed by Pfizer to treat chronic distrust of large prescription-drug manufacturers. --Wonder Drug Inspires Deep, Unwavering Love Of Pharmaceutical Companies (The Onion (Satire))

Colleges keep complaining that students are coming to them unprepared. Instead of raising admissions standards, however, they keep accepting mediocre students lest cuts have to be made in faculty and administration. --Patrick Welsh --For once, blame the student (Yahoo!/USAToday (will probably expire))

This essay is written by a high school teacher frustrated by the lack of motivation many of his students show.

Every year, I have had parents come in to argue about the grades I have given in my AP English classes. To me, my grades are far too generous; to middle-class parents, they are often an affront to their sense of entitlement. If their kids do a modicum of work, many parents expect them to get at least a B. When I have given C's or D's to bright middle-class kids who have done poor or mediocre work, some parents have accused me of destroying their children's futures.

While the excerpt above is the quote that got me to read the rest of the article, it was the "Colleges keep complaining" quote that made me want to blog it.

I regularly have to un-teach the survival mechanisms my students learned during their high school English classes. Because they come into my classroom expecting to rely on their proven ability to summarize the plot or relate the protagonist's experiences to incidents in their own lives, I emphasize the idea that they should think of those skills as a useful base, but that they will need to move beyond those skills if they want to demonstrate the ability to think and communicate at the college level.

I know I’m assigning far less reading to my students than I did as an undergrad, and giving far more personal attention (in the way of paper consultations, revisions, and in-class affirmations) than I ever received from my professors. I feel guilty when I drop two novels from the syllabus and replace them with a short story anthology and a writing workshop, but I have to keep reminding myself, I am not teaching at the same kind of institution where I was educated. I went to a big, state, research institution (where the professors were expected to be brilliant lecturers who put most of their time into making an international name for themselves in their chosen subfield), and I am working at a small, private, teaching institution (where the professors are expected to put most of their time into their students, via a dynamic student-centered curriculum in a wide variety of subjects, including some outside our chosen specialty). The literature survey courses I took were packed with 300 students who were majoring or minoring in English; the courses I teach are capped at 18, and less than half of them will be majors.

What I face as a teacher is not bad, it’s just different.

As I continue to gain experience as a teacher, I continue to adjust my delivery and expectations to meet the reality. While I’d love to think of the small upper-level majors-only courses as the “norm,” most of the time I will be teaching a mixed population that includes non-majors who are being asked to look at the world in a strikingly different way than any of their other classes required, and majors who have sat through my “what is a peer-reviewed academic journal” speech four or five times already. Throw in a few students who are my age or older, and a significant number who are training to be the very English teachers whose training I am implicitly challenging, and no class meeting is ever routine.

This year, I have a new perspective, because I’m on the academic standards committee. If an applicant doesn’t meet the university’s standardized-test admissions requirements, I'm one of the people who looks carefully at class rank, academic transcript, letters of reference, and information we can gather from the personal essay, in order to determine whether this particular student is worth making an exception.

A few days before the committee meets, the members individually read through applicant files. Then, the seven or eight of us sit around a table, with a list of names in front of us. For each name, we each vote whether to accept the student, accept the student on the condition that they participate in a developmental program, defer their application to see how their senior year grades are holding up, or deny admission altogether.

We're really not doing students much of a favor if we recruit them to campus in the fall, only to have them drop out the next semester. And to that end, part of our function as a committee is not simply gatekeeping, but rather to identify those students who will likely need additional academic support in order to succeed in college. I'm constantly reminded of the fact that if I vote to offer a student admission, I'm telling my colleagues that I think I would be able to teach that student in a freshman comp course.

I welcome the occasion to reflect on the role of college admissions. Colleges admit students on the basis of their academic records, and sometimes it’s impossible to tell whether the student who got a 2.7 average and ranks 25th out of 500 students is better prepared than the student who got a 3.5 average and ranks 250th out of 500 students – especially when both students earned the same SAT scores.

What kind of a school has a B- student in the top 10% of the graduating class? What kind of a school gives out an average score of A-? There’s such a huge range of factors that we can’t with confidence predict which student is more likely to succeed.

Whenever I find myself reminding students that "Plot summary was enough to get you through high school," I remind the students (and myself) that their high school teachers have to deal with a situation that is very different. Teachers deal with more discipline problems, they can rarely choose their own textbooks, and they may have to deal with 150 or 200 students in a total of six or seven classes each day (on top of advising a club or coaching a sport). I don’t expect high school teachers to have the time to make college composition classes obsolete.

On a busy day, I deal with 45 students in three classes, and maybe 30 students in two classes on a typical day. Fridays, I have only one class of 12 students. Because I teach writing-intensive courses that are capped at 18, I have the time to read student drafts, and comment on them in detail. High school teachers simply can't devote that much time to marking papers – not when they have so many other things to deal with. I’m not trying to paint a picture of leisure here. Since we’re also expected to serve on committees and publish original research, my days are pretty full. (With committee work, lately, rather than research, which I’ve started doing at night after the kids are in bed.)

So, while I was nodding my head in silent agreement when I started reading the article, I still ended up dissatisfied with the “blame the students” thesis. Welsh also blames middle-class entitlement, “busy parents guilt-ridden over the little time they spend with their kids,” guidance counselors who let students drop difficult classes, and the colleges who admit the resulting mediocre students.

Of the share of blame to be shouldered by high school teachers, he merely asks rhetorically, “Who among us would say we couldn't do a little better?” Yet I can’t shake the feeling that the teachers who let unmotivated students pass from one grade to another are a bigger part of the puzzle than Welsh seems to want to admit.

Am I pointing the finger at teachers? Of course not. But I do feel Welsh is very generous to teachers when assessing their role in this complex puzzle.

In complex reading passages, organization may be elaborate, messages may be implicit, interactions among ideas or characters may be subtle and the vocabulary is demanding and intricate.

The ACT isolated reading complexity as a critical factor by analyzing the results of the 1.2 million high school seniors in 2005 who took the well-known ACT college entrance test. Based on that test, only 51 percent of students showed they were ready to handle the reading requirements of a typical first-year college course.

The literacy of today's high school graduates has become an enormous concern for colleges and employers.

In the United States, reading is largely treated as an elementary school subject, with diminishing focus in later grades. But with each alarming report on college readiness, adolescent literacy is gaining attention. --Ben Feller --Study: Reading key to college success (AP|Boston.com)

In late 1982, my best friend had a Sony TCS-310 Stereo Cassette Recorder. Audio cassette tape was the affordable recording media at the time and one wintery November day while on our way to the arcade 'Just Fun' in Ithaca, NY, we came up with the idea to record video game sounds. --Daniel P. Hower --Classic Arcade Sounds: Hear for Yourself (CoinOpVideoGames.com)

Visuals, schmizuals! We don't need no steenkin visuals! Thanks to Mike Sichok for pointing out this little piece of heaven. Mike writes,

I love that you can also hear adjacent games in the background.. such as if you pick "Zaxxon," you can also hear "Berzerk" and "Frogger" being played nearby. I forgot how ear shattering loud games were back then.. I remember a ton of bass, such as in "Tron," and "Asteroids," but geez. Hardcore.... kill the lights, turn on the blacklights, and turn this up.. I am in vintage bliss.

The first fully-automated performance of the 1924 Futurist/Dadaist/Cubist composition "Ballet mécanique" by George Antheil takes place this weekend in the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art, on the Mall in Washington, DC--in conjunction with the larges exhibit in history on Dadaist art.

Programmed by composer/author/music technologist Paul Lehrman, and using robots built by the League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots (LEMUR) under the direction of Eric Singer, this will be the culmination of eight years of work bringing Antheil's almost-forgotten work-for xylophones, bass drums, electric bells, siren, airplane propellors, and 16 player pianos-back to life. And it will be LOUD.

Featuring computer-driven player pianos by Gulbransen, and software from Mark of the Unicorn running on a Macintosh G5 computer, the installation will reside on the Mezzanine of the Gallery through March 29, playing a ten-minute version of the Ballet mécanique at 1:00 pm every day, and additionally at 4:00 pm Monday-Friday.
The grand opening of the Ballet mécanique installation will take place at 1:00 pm on Sunday, March 12. JUST ANNOUNCED is a special PRESS EVENT at 4:00 pm on Saturday, March 11, when the piece will be previewed to CBS News, PBS, and other news organizations. The public IS INVITED!

More information about the Ballet mécanique can be found at http://antheil.org. LEMUR's website is http://lemurbots.org. The National Gallery of Art is at Fourth Street and Constitution Avenue. Admission is always FREE. Their website is http://www.nga.gov.

In other exciting news, BAD BOY MADE GOOD, the documentary film by Paul Lehrman and Ron Frank about George Antheil and the Ballet mécanique, will have its broadcast premiere on WETA-TV Channel 26, Washington's PBS station, on Sunday, April 9th at 3:00 pm. Dates for other broadcasts will be announced soon.Bad Boy Made Good (http://antheil.org)

I just got this e-mail. I wish I could see this! Someone in the DC area, please go to this and let me know what it's like!

If you think steam punk is cool, it looks wimpy next to Ballet Mechaniqe, which was punked out on steam long before steam punk became retro.

My Half-Life 2 Mod, Week 2: Custom Textures, Glass Window, Tree (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

A week after I began a serious attempt to create a Half-Life 2 mod, I've made some good progress.

Early last week, I did manage to add the hinged door that was the next thing on my agenda. I'd been going crazy because I had turned off "helpers," which means that I couldn't see the blue sphere that all the tutorials mentioned was supposed to mark the site of the hinge.

Half-Life 2 is set in a grungy urban dystopia, so the image files that depict stock materials (wood panels, plaster ceilings, brick walls) all look pitted and rough. While I don't want to spend forever fiddling with images, I began to realize last week that the image files really aren't just window dressing. The availability of appropriate images really does affect what items I choose to work on.

I found a few texture packs that expand the number of materials available to Hammer (the 3D world tool I'm using), but I was having trouble following a tutorial to load just one custom texture. The comments at the end of the tutorial indicate that I'm not the only one suffering from similar problems. After several hours and several tries, I finally figured out where the custom textures should go, and how to find them within the 3D editor when I wanted to use them. (Those textures came in an "rar" archive. While I already had a tool that was supposed to deal with "rar" files, when I decompressed the file the target folder was always empty. So I had to upgrade to the 30-day trial version of Power Archiver. When that runs out, I'll have to take a look at open-source archiving tools.

With that under my belt, I downloaded a pack of hundreds of new textures, including the tile floor, panel walls, and wood beam that you can see in the image. In this model, I added a ceiling, though now the lights are just emanating from nowhere. I'll have to create some light fixtures.

The tree visible outside the window comes with Half-Life 2, and I guessed correctly that it was possible to change its "skin" to add a few leaves. Not many. I'll have to keep looking if I want to use some healthy trees.

I took the gun away from the NPC Alyx, so now she's a little less aggressive. I'm not sure how to adjust her behavior, but at least she fits in slightly better in the realistic office setting I'm trying to create.

The wood panel walls are actually too fancy for the generic office settings, but I do want to create a courtroom at some point, so I don't mind experimenting with this design scheme.

The next big "proof of concept" for me is to import models of ready-made furniture. The desk visible in the photo comes with the game. I've seen textures that I can apply to simple cubes in order to get bookcases, file cabinets, bulletin boards, and the like. While I love adventure games, with secret panels containing keys that unlock more secret panels, the mod I'm working will need few functioning props (other than doors). Still, I've seen ready-made models of computer desks, TV sets, kitchen appliances, and even a collection of SWAT vehicles (that might be very useful for the police station that I hope will be in the mod).

I had to hack the URL at Wadfather in order to get past the ridiculously complex navigational system. (The link goes directly to the "Real World" textures I'll need.)

"He'd tell us, 'Now, 20 rows down, the accounting's hard as granite?it's the hardest thing an office man can stand,'" said Huddie Ledbetter, one of Peters' former trainees, "'but you keep your pencil sharp, and you keep your pencil working. It's the life of a numbers-crunchin' man.'"

Sources say Peters, who was born to poor temp workers in eastern Virginia, would often go to offices where his mother worked and sit on her knee. According to his family, he once took up her pencil and said, "Pencil be the death of me. Oh, Mommy, this pencil be the death of me." --Modern-Day John Henry Dies Trying To Out-Spreadsheet Excel 11.0 (The Onion (Satire))

Brilliant. Utterly brilliant.

"The Excel spreadsheet started off to working, with its hourglass running hard there on the screen," Broonzy said. "But old Wally Peters had his pencil filling columns, throwing graphite off like locomotive steam."

To be a true Cookie Monster vocal, said Mr. Conner, who signed some of the subgenre's biggest bands, including Sepultura and Fear Factory, "it's got to be really, really guttural. It should sound like they're gargling glass." --Jim Fusilli --That's Good Enough for Me: Cookie Monsters of death-metal music.  (Opinion Journal)

New to me.

By always placing the most recent version of its articles at a static URL, Wikipedia concentrates the power of its inbound links on a particular topic to a single URL. A reader searching for information on Hurricane Katrina who clicks through to Wikipedia from Google gets Wikipedia's latest information on the storm and recovery efforts (or lack thereof). They don't get a months-old dispatch with no clear link to the latest news.

What if a news organization, employing professional journalists, wrote their news website like a wiki? I'm not taking about turning over the page to readers. I'm suggesting that -- instead of distinct daily takes -- news stories could be covered with encyclopedia-style articles that staffers would update with new information whenever available. How many more inbound links would such an approach get? --Robert Niles --Search and you will find ... an old news story? (OJR)

This is an excellent introduction to an issue that's bothered me for some time. At one point, The Onion used to publish its new articles in a root directory, and then move them to a new archive directory to make room for new stuff. Thus, if I linked to a story with the URL "news1.htm," a week later that article would be replaced by some other news story with the same name, and the content that I wanted to send my readers to would be in a different location. I could get around that problem by linking directly to the archive location in the first place, but webmasters who didn't understand why moving URLs is a bad idea also don't understand why they should bother changing the way they do things. (I once tried to explain it to the editor of a newsletter, and got a snippy response, to the effect, "Why should we bother to do this work for you?" I stopped reading, and linking to, that publication.)

Blogs essentially publish the same material so that it is visible in multiple ways. You can see this entry at the top of my blog home page as soon as I publish it; you can see it categorized along with other entries with a simliar content, and you can see it as a stand-alone page at an URL that will not change. Other blogs also sort content by day, week and/or month.

I use Wikipedia whenever I come into a story late, and I'm looking for context.

The study by the new McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum found that 22 percent of Americans could name all five Simpson family members, compared with just one in 1,000 people who could name all five First Amendment freedoms. --Study: Few Americans Know 1st AmendmentYahoo!|AP)

I'm blogging this with my students in mind (*fake cough sounding like "pop quiz"*), in the service of the pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowledge (*fake cough sounding like "pop quiz"*), with which we can all work towards bettering society for all its members (*fake cough sounding like "pop quiz"*).

D'oh!

I have noticed many people at fest, such as shopkeepers, pull out what they believe is their most formal language when the royalty visits them. This often means they struggle along with "thee/thou" in addressing the King & Queen when they should properly be using "you" (the phrase "Thy Majesty" doesn't make sense, does it? It's "Your Majesty."). We don't criticize them--they are putting forth an effort. But now you all know that it's (grammatically!) easy to address the nobility--just use the modern "you" form. --Renspeak Language Guide (Rosalily's Renfest Regalia)

Soon my students are going to write a sonnet, and some of them are going to want to echo the antiquated language.

If they do, this guide will help them avoid the cringe-inducing mistakes one often hears at Renaissance fairs.