June 2006 Archive Page

Murphy is launching PayPerPost.com, which will automate such hookups between advertisers and bloggers and thus codify a new frontier of product placement. Advertisers pay to post details about their "opportunity," specifying, among other things, how they want bloggers to write about, say, a new shoe, if they want photos to be included, and whether they'll pay only for positive mentions. Bloggers who abide by the rules get paid; heavily trafficked blogs may command premium rates. --Jon Fine --Polluting the Blogosphere (BusinessWeek)

A look at the documented deaths at Disney's two theme parks in Florida and California since 1989: --Boy, 12, dies after riding Disney World roller coaster (Herald Today.com)

Thanks for the link, Rosemary. Considering the number of people who go through the park, it's not suprirsing that people die when they happen to be there.

Adorno once wrote "it would be barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz". Based on what we previously described, it seems that it would definitively be barbaric to create videogames about Auschwitz. However, if we could find a kind of environment where actions are irreversible, some of the main obstacles for designing "serious" videogames would disappear. -- Gonzalo Frasca --Ephemeral games: Is it barbaric to design videogames after Auschwitz? (Ludology.org)

In this article from 2000, Frasca asks why it is that the only computer games to deal with the Holocaust are neo-Nazi propaganda games. (I haven't seen or played any such games, but the Anti-Defamation League has an article on hate games in general.) In A Theory of Fun for Game Design, Ralph Koster dismisses the idea that plot and moral context does not affect gameplay. He imagines a game that is played entirely like Tetris, except that "You the player are dropping innocent victims down into the gas chamber... they grab onto each other and try to form human pyramids to get to the top of the well.... I do not want to play this game. Do you?"

Graham Nelson's 20th Century time-travel romp, Jigsaw (a game from the early years of the post-commercial interactive fiction renaissance), features a brief non-interactive narrative sequence in which the player is placed in the role of a Jewish child watching what appears (to the child) to be a parade. In an interview with XYZZY News, Nelson described the creation of Jigsaw: "I felt that overmuch social history would be undramatic. But the largest element I (mostly) omitted was genocide. The Holocaust was not fair, the victims had no winning line."

Certainly playing WWII military strategy games would have little entertainment value if the winner of the simulation was always the winner of the historical event being simulated. The same can be said of the instructional value of such a game.

According to a widely-distributed set of teaching guidelines from the U.S. Holocaust Museum:

Even when teachers take great care to prepare a class for such an activity, simulating experiences from the Holocaust remains pedagogically unsound. The activity may engage students, but they often forget the purpose of the lesson, and even worse, they are left with the impression at the conclusion of the activity that they now know what it was like during the Holocaust. Holocaust survivors and eyewitnesses are among the first to indicate the grave difficulty of finding words to describe their experiences.

I agree completely that asking school kids to role-play guards and concentration camp victims would be problematic. The guidelines I quoted above do recognize the value of simulations that focus on general concepts (like solidarity and altruism), rather than specific Holocaust scenarios. But how much can we really learn about the holocaust from reading a story or watching a movie? Any representation of the Holocaust is going to be simplified. The question is, what do you choose to simulate, and is it possible to move from that simulation to a discussion of what the real system (the one being simulated) is like?

We have more vivid, first-person Holocaust stories from people who survived than we have from those who died. Might that fact give a skewed impression about survival?

A few years ago, blogger and columnist James Lileks recalled the joys of shooting bad guys in the morally unambiguous, simplified world of the first-person shooter, but used it in order to frame a different, more subtle question:

In "Wolfenstein," every room you enter has Nazis. You never enter a room full of startled film editors piecing together an anti-Jew screed, family men who've been incrementally co-opted by three years of occupation. You never find that room.

And what would you do if you did?

Regarding poetry in the aftermath of Auschwitz, Adorno later had second thoughts, writing in Negative Dialectics "Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living - especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living."

(I'm going to have to end this in progress and get back to it later...)

It's a few hours later...

On the same blog entry, Lileks says about realism in games: "I came up with a good definition of a 'realistic' war game: they ship 45,000 copies, and only 15,000 of the games allow you to proceed past the beach. That's it. No refunds, either. You get off the landing craft; your screen goes black; your computer seizes up and cannot be rebooted. Game over, man."

A little Googling brings me to an update, of sorts, as Frasca reflects on Remember the Children: Daniel's Story from the US Holocaust museum (a spatial narrative for children, in which the visitor walks through a series of representations of life under Nazi Germany). Of Martin Niemöller's famous "First they came for the Jews/and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew," Frasca writes, "Right there, you have the rules for a simulation that analyses how your everyday actions affect the system, the big picture. In such a complex system like the Holocaust, the key element for understanding is how minimal discrimination may allow the emergence of the ultimate horror. And that'swhere simulation can be an excellent rhetorical tool. Museums generally deal with the past, but just because we want to look forward."

Frasca has elsewhere invoked Augusto Boal's distinction between oppression and aggression, and the Theatre of the Oppressed (which is designed to simulate oppressive acts, and to invite the audience to interrupt, forcing the actors to improvise their way towards a collaborative solution). (Next on my reading list -- Frasca's Videogames of the Oppressed.)

The former vice president's movie -- replete with the prospect of a flooded New York City, an inundated Florida, more and nastier hurricanes, worsening droughts, retreating glaciers and disappearing ice sheets -- mostly got the science right, said all 19 climate scientists who had seen the movie or read the book and answered questions from The Associated Press.

The AP contacted more than 100 top climate researchers by e-mail and phone for their opinion. Among those contacted were vocal skeptics of climate change theory. Most scientists had not seen the movie, which is in limited release, or read the book.

But those who have seen it had the same general impression: Gore conveyed the science correctly; the world is getting hotter and it is a manmade catastrophe-in-the-making caused by the burning of fossil fuels. --Seth Borenstein --Scientists OK Gore's movie for accuracy (Yahoo! News (will expire))

But the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works released a statement that said,

The June 27, 2006 Associated Press (AP) article titled "Scientists OK Gore's Movie for Accuracy" by Seth Borenstein raises some serious questions about AP's bias and methodology.

AP chose to ignore the scores of scientists who have harshly criticized the science presented in former Vice President Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth."

In the interest of full disclosure, the AP should release the names of the "more than 100 top climate researchers" they attempted to contact to review "An Inconvenient Truth." AP should also name all 19 scientists who gave Gore "five stars for accuracy." AP claims 19 scientists viewed Gore's movie, but it only quotes five of them in its article. AP should also release the names of the so-called scientific "skeptics" they claim to have contacted.

If a reporter called up 100 scientists to ask them whether they had seen the latest Jim Carrey movie, there's a good chance that those scientists who were fans of Jim Carrey would be among the frst to see that movie. Just imagine a headline that uses the same numbers: "Four out of five scientists surveyed ignored Gore movie" or "Survey: 19% of Scientists Support Gore's Doomsday Flick."

Protecting the environment is important, but can we do it without the alarmist and armageddonist factoids?

A Jacksonville man says he was duped and robbed by two girls after attempting to meet with a woman he met on the internet. --Teenage Girls Rob Man they Met on MySpace (WOAI.com)

I'm uncomfortable with the hype that presents the internet as dangerous (as opposed to the predictablity and passivity of TV). Even this "man bites dog" story, which is newsworthy because it reverses the expected formula, still invokes and reinforces the understood worldview.

This semester, I presented my undergraduates with a challenging course. I expected them to participate in class and keep up with assignments. I told them straight out that if they were not to come prepared, stay home. I did not coddle them.

The best students thrived on the regimen. The lazy students of course hated it. Naturally, I just got whacked on evaluations this semester by my darling undergraduates. The lower scores are just enough to drop me into a lower "category" for raises.

I ran the numbers, and my decision to teach a rigorous course just cost me about $2,000 spread over my teaching career. That does not include the lost money from summer courses, which are based upon my full-time salary, which in turn in part is influenced by my teaching evaluations. If my evaluations really drop, the cost increases dramatically. The worst case scenario is that really bad evaluations in a given year can cost me as much as $7,000 over the course of my career. Students will impact my salary like this each year, every year.

Thus, I have a strong incentive to keep those numbers up however I possibly can. The obvious solution is to make my course so incredibly easy that even the laziest, whiniest undergraduate can't help but do well. I am tempted to flood them with wonderment for poor answers and shower them with praise for undeserved effort. I just cannot bring myself to do this -- I just can't I care too much about teaching quality -- and it will (literally) cost me. --Untenured --Evaluations are serious business (Chronicle Forums)

I'm certainly not blogging this because I think evaluations aren't important, but it is important to see how pandering to student approval can result in watering down the educational system.

Standardized tests like the SAT don't really measure a student's academic potential -- they instead measure a student's ability to complete standardized tests. The same goes for standardized teacher evaluations, which are very good at measuring what students think they've learned.

I have never bought doughnuts or shown a movie in order to get my students in a good mood before passing out evaluation forms, though I certainly avoid passing out the forms on days when they'll be affected (positively or negatively) by their most recent grades.

At Seton Hill, my division chair sits in on a class session once a semester, and the academic dean sits in on a session once a year. By doing so, they get a good sense of what the class dynamic is like, which provides context for the numbers.

If you believe the hype, blogs are as significant as the invention of the printing press for their ability to change the way the world will be seen. If on the other hand you believe the counter-hype, blogs are a self-indulgence which pander to dull people's misguided beliefs that they have something interesting to say.

Journalists have their own takes on blogs - broadcaster Mark Lawson, for one, says that "although the word blog suggests attitude and subversion, it's really just a hi-tech kind of diary and carries the identical risk of Pooterism".

Some believe that only journalists should really be allowed to write endlessly about themselves. Others believe blogs soar to beautiful new interactive heights. A third group don't understand blogs, but are terrified of being left behind. --Giles Wilson --Down with blogs... so here's another (BBC)

An unusually broad, inclusive assessment of blogs, recognizing that the kind of blog that the pundit blog -- the kind of blog that journalists are most intersted in, and therefore the kind of blog that gets most coverage in the mainstream media -- is only part of the picture.

That "Pooterism" is a reference to Charles Pooter, a literary character whose fictional Diary of a Nobody lampooned middle-class self-importance and obliviousness.

Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

Complete with the Bernie Mac perfect afro the redguardsman stared back at me in 1080i. His racial description?

The most naturally talented warriors in Tamriel, the dark-skinned, wiry-haired Redguards of Hammerfell seem born to battle, though their pride and fierce independence of spirit makes them more suitable as scouts or skirmishers, or as free-ranging heroes and adventurers, than as rank-and-file soldiers. In addition to their cultural affinities for many weapon and armor styles, Redguards are also physically blessed with hardy constitutions and quickness of foot.

Lisa looked at me and said "Oh my God!" The first thing that popped into my mind? "Run, Nigger, Run" (followed by a whole slew of other equally offensive stereotypical quips). I dropped the controller and jotted down some thoughts. Lisa told me to stop taking notes and just play the damned game for once. So I finished my character and tried to forget Jimmy the Greek, the middle passage, the history of African Americans as "scouts" (what gamers now call tanks ) in the military, and the sickness in the pit of my stomach that was either caused by too much coconut rum or just too much damned ignorance. --Jimmy the Greek Made Oblivion (Dr. B.'s blog)

This class is unique in many ways, the most prominent is that students learn how to create new media resources for education. As Gee noted, "When people learn to play video games, they are learning a new literacy" (2003, p. 16). In this course students must develop an instructional game where all game elements are integrated with stated learning objectives. This theory of "alignment" is both a design requirement and guideline for the design and development of the game. We will use a design experiment approach to study how students follow this theory, how it manifests itself in the IF game, and the process of how instructional designers build an educational game around specific theory. --Teaching with Technology: Using Interactive Fiction to Teach English Students (Creative Learning Environments Lab @ Utah State University)

Sounds like an awesome project.

Reflections on Keys for Writers (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I'm paging through Ann Raimes's Keys for Writers, which I used to use when I taught freshman comp at my previous job, and which I'm coming back to in the fall as Seton Hill offers a new "Basic Composition" course for the first time. (Our freshman writing offering used to be a two-semester course that included content on cultural identities.)

While we are charged with teaching students to compose in words, many students of this digital culture will be experts at composing with sound and images; their hairstyles, fashion accessories, piercings and tattoos may be carefully coordinated to project a "main idea." The placement of a tattoo -- where it can be easily covered up for job interviews, and easily revealed in more relaxed settings -- shows an awareness of audience. While I have no intention of turning Basic Composition into a new media course, I do feel much can be gained from working with the strengths that students bring into the classroom.

As part of her early advice to students, Raimes observes that a blank screen can be daunting; quite frankly, I think some students would be better served if they did contemplate that blank screen a little longer, before they started churning out words to fill it. That is, of course, the purpose of prewriting and brainstorming. But because young people who socialize on the internet are so used to composing their thoughts in short bursts, and getting immediate feedback from their peers, that they can use to develop their thoughts a little further, the composition classroom becomes a bottleneck if the instructor positions him or herself as the most important authority of feedback.

I hated discussion groups when I was in school, but as a teacher I've become to see how necessary they are. Today's students are far more peer-oriented than students of my generation were. Today's students learn in a hive environment, sharing notes and ideas and abilities on multiple levels. When I assign students to post comments on their peers' webogs, they will coordinate and collaborate that public feedback via private text messages. Rather than complain about work ethic and confiscating students' cell phones so they can't collaborate during class, I'd much rather embrace the new peer-to-peer environment and incorporate it into the writing process.

Raimes's "Key Points" (1a) ask students to do close readings, to question what they read, to "[i]nteract with a text by highlighting points," to keep a reading journal, and to critique their own writing. I am eager to ask students to develop that critical voice when they confront peer writing, and eventually their own writing. From a karaoke sing-along, to calling in to vote for or against a "reality show" contestant, our students will be familiar with multiple ways of interacting with cultural artifacts. Some will have written fanfic of Harry Potter or the role-playing they do in video games. Even listening to the director's audio commentary on a DVD is a form of metatextual criticism. In keeping with my desire to get students to think of the social networking they do as an important task (intrinsically valuable in its own sphere, and involving communication skills that are transferable to other communication contexts), I imagine I might ask students to write a list that compares an old TV show they might be familiar with (such as Gilligan's Island or a Warner Brothers cartoon) with a new show with a similar theme or genre (such as Survivor or the Simpsons). I might ask them to separate facts and observations, and come up with a main idea.

I'll have to work to ensure that the students don't feel like they're being asked to jump directly to argument -- I want them to explain the differences, not argue for one over the other. But if I back up too much, the class will be front-loaded with dry definitions and abstract concepts, so I should be clear with the goals of this media awareness paragraph.

Ah, well -- this is a work in progress. Got to log off...

When a young St. Paul boy got to pick the theme for his third birthday party, he didn't pick Nemo or the Wiggles or Dora the Explorer. He didn't even pick his favorite sports team.

Henry Schally picked "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer".

His mother, Jennifer Schally, designed party hats complete with pictures of the PBS news program's regular contributors. --3-Year-Old's Birthday Party Theme: 'NewsHour' (WCCO)

Yes! There is hope for the future! The world needs more Henry Schallys!

Here's the money quote: "Outside of 6 to 7 o'clock every weekday night, he's pretty normal," [the boy's father] Troy Schally clarified.

Teenagers, in particular, provide a moving target for Internet researchers, remarks psychologist Kaveri Subrahmanyam of California State University in Los Angeles. "By the time you publish research on one type of Internet use, such as blogging, teenagers have moved on to something new, such as myspace," she says, with a resigned chuckle. --Bruce Bower --Growing Up Online: Young people jump headfirst into the Internet's world (Science News Online)

Another quote: "Still, text-heavy online sites seem to have provided reading experience that translated into higher reading scores and grades, the researchers suggest. Although participants remained below-average readers at the end of the study, their improvement showed promise, according to Jackson and her colleagues."

Keillor's humor has always been a bit of a puzzle: What is its irony/sincerity ratio? Is he mocking Midwesterners or mocking the rest of us via Midwesterners? In 1985, when Time magazine called Keillor the funniest man in America, Bill Cosby reportedly said, "That's true if you're a pilgrim." A decade later, a cartoon version of Keillor forced Homer Simpson to assault his TV and shout, "Be more funny!" -Sam Andeson --A Prairie Home Conundrum: The mysterious appeal of Garrison Keillor. (Slate)

A great quote from later in the piece: "Without saying it outright, Keillor projects himself as a sage -- a kind of Wobegon Obi-Wan spreading the revolutionary creed of premodern simplicity."

A 14-year-old girl who says she was sexually assaulted by another user of MySpace.com sued the social networking Web site Monday, claiming it does not take sufficient steps to protect underage members. --Girl, 14, Sues MySpace.com Alleging Assault (AP|MyWay)

"The number of term papers assigned over the years has decreased significantly," said Herman Clay, director of history and social sciences at Los Angeles Unified School District.

Instead, Los Angeles teachers are assigning more in-class written exams, oral reports with visual aids and PowerPoint presentations, said Clay, a former principal of Van Nuys High School.

It's unclear how many teachers nationwide are doing the same, but it's enough that some educators worry that kids are missing an important educational experience -- one that requires them to seek out facts and then assemble them into a cogent, sustainable argument.

In-class writing assignments are, by necessity, much shorter exercises that can be as brief as a couple of paragraphs and rarely more than a few pages.

"Kids these days have difficulty writing in depth about anything," said Nancy Willard, executive director of the Center for Safe and Responsible Internet use. "They are used to doing PowerPoint presentations, and the level of superficiality is great compared with term papers." --Terril Yue Jones --Teachers Adjust Lesson Plans as Web Fuels Plagiarism (LA Times (will expire))

In mid-May, the difference between the student summer and the professor summer seemed vast to me. One approaches the student summer the way Evel Knievel approaches a line of Ford Mustangs -- a burst of frenzied acceleration as one heads up the ramp of stress and procrastination, a brief moment of giddy release as one floats tantalizingly close to success in the course of an all-nighter or three, and then a crash-and-burn landing in which one turns in the finished product which earns one notoriety but isn't quite as successful as you had hoped it would be.

Entry into the professor summer is much more apocalyptic. You announce to your students that the end times are coming. Panic ensues as all and sundry suddenly realize -- despite your jeremiads to the contrary throughout the entire semester -- that they shall all be judged when the last days come. What follows is typically a period of intense activity as students undertake the scholarly equivalent of cashing in their lifetime savings and spending it on kerosene and canned goods (or, to keep the metaphor straight, jumping over a line of Ford Mustangs). Are there extra credit assignments available? Can papers due months ago still be turned in for credit? --Alex Golub --Summer Thoughts -- I (Inside Higher Ed)

DUBLIN -- Professor Hanlon O'Faolin, once called "mad" at the Royal Irish Academy for attempting to reanimate the traditional body of Celtic folktales with the power of elcectic multilingual puns, is readying his apoplectic Bloomsday Device for activation on June 16. "Yes! Yes, they laughed at me yes but now yes I will make them pay and yes!" O'Faolin wrote in a letters to the Irish Times, promising the destruction of Dublin on the same day portrayed in Joyce's Ulysses. "When the sun first strikes the Martello Tower, the first notes of 'The Rose of Castille' shall ring out, the streets shall run with rashers, kidneys, and sausages, and I shall forge in the smithy of Dublin's soul the uncreated conscience of my race!" Dublin police say they are working around the clock from profiles to create a portrait of the professor as a crazy man. --Mad Lit Professor Puts Finishing Touches On Bloomsday Device (The Onion (Satire))

That's the whole item, but it's a delightful one.

The whole idea of episodic stories was born in the 19th century when the printing press made cheap magazines possible. Writers like Charles Dickens hit upon the idea of delivering a big story in weekly chunks, each with a cliffhanger to keep the audience in anticipation. (The cliffhanger is essentially a technological invention -- a direct result of the movable-type press.)

Dickens soon discovered that he could now do innovative things with his story. His characters' personalities could be developed not through single, central scenes, but through a dozen glimpses over a long stretch of time. Serial narrative also changed the way audiences relate to characters. When we focus on movie characters for two solid hours, they become epic heroes; when we encounter TV characters every week for years on end, they become old friends. There's an intimacy to episodic stories, and it's all the more intensified in a game because you literally go through hell with these folks. --Clive Thompson --Tune in Next Week for Gaming Fun (Wired)

I'm watching this closely. Last summer I had time to play a whole bunch of video games (well, four or five commercial titles, which is a lot for me). But I got stuck in HL2, and though I've read few walkthroughs that tell me what I should do, I just simply haven't felt motivated to get back into the game. HL2 taxes my computer system pretty heavily, and although I want to use the HL2 mod creator as part of my "New Media Projects" course this fall, I'm worried that the hardware requirements will make the project more stressful than it should be. (While I definitely want to use the HL2 engine to create my own educational mods down the road, I'm still not sure whether this is the 3D platform I want to introduce to my students.)

Because Valve is experimenting with selling games online, bypassign the retailers altogether, I'm not surprised that the company is putting out more frequent episodes.

Perched on the edge of a white grand piano and decked out in a full-length evening gown, the former CBS and CNN anchorwoman [Connie Chung] warbled a farewell song that put down Dan Rather (with whom she co-anchored the CBS news in the early 1990s), her husband and cable TV - all at the same time. --Michael Shain --Connie Croaks Adieu (New York Post)

I watched a little of the YouTube video of Chung allegedly singing, and had to shut it off. That was terrible.

Hollywood knows that it needs new ideas. The games industry doesn't know. Hollywood goes out of its way to provide itself with a seed stock of new talent and ideas, the games industry doesn't. Hollywood spends an enormous amount of money supporting colleges and universities, and training programs at those settings. The games industry does not. Hollywood has a system for honoring weird ideas that aren't necessarily commercial. The games industry really doesn't. That is, Hollywood actually backs these things up with real money.

There's an awful lot of Hollywood money that goes to supporting oddball ideas, because Hollywood has learned the hard way that entertainment is a high risk business that requires innovation. --Chris Crawford --Video Games are Dead: A Chat with Storytronics Guru Chris Crawford (Gamasutra)

I'm definitely curious about Crawford's concept of Storytronics, but it's hard to get too excited about something that isn't available even in an alpha release.

--Weblog: een doe-het-zelf medium -- Chronologische ordening in de informatiechaos?

I'm assuming the language of this site is Dutch.

At the bottom is a list of over 100 early articles about blogging, most of them popular (rather than academic) and most of them in English. Just blogging it for future reference. Lots to learn here.

Do you have what it takes to create a LiveJournal? Well, ask yourself this question: Are you able to put words together? Not in complete, grammatical sentences, mind you. Are you able to take a word and another word and place them one after each other? Then you're set! --Lore Sjöberg --You and Your LiveJournal and You (Wired)

By the way, if you're reading this and you think you've escaped being the target of this satire because you've already moved on from LiveJournal to FaceBook, then You're Missing The Point.

Mr. Wales said that he gets about 10 e-mail messages a week from students who complain that Wikipedia has gotten them into academic hot water.
"They say, "Please help me. I got an F on my paper because I cited Wikipedia'" and the information turned out to be wrong, he says. But he said he has no sympathy for their plight, noting that he thinks to himself: "For God sake, you're in college; don't cite the encyclopedia."

Mr. Wales said that leaders of Wikipedia have considered putting together a fact sheet that professors could give out to students explaining what Wikipedia is and that it is not always a definitive source. "It is pretty good, but you have to be careful with it," he said. "It's good enough knowledge, depending on what your purpose is." --Wikipedia Founder Discourages Academic Use of His Creation (Chronicle)

My chief problem with Wikipedia is not that it's online, or even that it's authored by volunteers. It's that an encyclopedia is supposed to present a very broad overview, without arguing a particular point of view. That means it records the knowledge that is accepted and orthodox. While it might point out internal disagreements among experts, an encyclopedia article is not the place to find striking new opinions or alternate ways of thinking that challenge the reader's perceptions.

Critical thinking at the college level involves moving beyond chewing up a bunch of spoon-fed facts and spitting it back on demand. When students deliver oral presentations with Wikipedia printouts in their hands, I want to beat my head against the wall. For crying out loud, if I wanted the rest of the class to know what Wikipedia has to say about something, I'd just assign the article. When I ask a student to deliver an oral presentation, I'm looking for an honest-to-goodness opinion -- something that a reasonable person might disagree with, so that we can have a discussion that leads us to delve more deeply into our assigned reading.

Of course, "don't cite the encyclopedia" may be aggressively misinterpreted as "use it without cititng it," but I think if we point out that the purpose of an academic essay is to present a particular author's point of view, and the purpose of an encyclopedia is to present a very broad, opinion-free overview, they'll see that it's hard to argue with an encyclopedia, and it's harder to argue with Wikipedia, since anyone who doesn't like it is free to change it, and the text will keep changing until it finds a way to please the most people. An article that expresses an opinion that challenged or offended those who see the world differently would immediately get sliced and diced into a very different thing if it were submitted to Wikipedia.

I don't mind their linking to a Wikipedia article as part of a routine blog entry (I do the same thing myself). I don't mind their backing up a point in a classroom discussion by referring to a Wikipedia biography of an author or overview of an historical time period. But the encyclopedia -- any encyclopedia -- should be a first stop, not the last stop, and certainly never the only stop. (See also SHU student Karissa Kilgore's latest essay about Wikipedia.)

My son's piano teacher sometimes assigns research papers for homework. I've seen high school kids come in with Wikipedia printouts. When it's their turn to present, they just read from the page (often losing their place and stumbling over words). While my son, at age eight, isn't quite ready to write a research paper on his own, my wife will check out three or four books on the subject, have him read the kid-friendly books aloud to her, and she will read passages from the adult books to him. Then she will ask him what facts he remembers, and they'll make a list. Again, since he's just eight he's not ready to move from facts to composition -- not yet. But she will dictate sentences that he will write down, and then he will practice the speech numerous times.

In that way, he's delivered speeches on Sinichi Suzuki (founder of the Suzuki School of Music) and on Edward Alger (who wrote the piece that American academics know as Pomp and Circumstance, or informally as the graduation march). I can't honestly say he enjoys being walked through all these steps, but he loves delivering the speeches.

Curious about the candidate, Ms. Homayoun went to her page on Facebook. She found explicit photographs and commentary about the student's sexual escapades, drinking and pot smoking, including testimonials from friends. Among the pictures were shots of the young woman passed out after drinking.

"I was just shocked by the amount of stuff that she was willing to publicly display," Ms. Homayoun said. "When I saw that, I thought, 'O.K., so much for that.'" --Alan Finder --For Some, Online Persona Undermines a Résumé (NY Times (registration; will expire))

What McGuirk said he'd rather see is administrators using Facebook to get students thinking about how they want to craft their public persona.

One picture McGuirk displayed was from the profile of a Fitchburg student pointing a gun at another person. The gun turned out to be a water gun, but McGuirk said he had a conversation with the student about the image he was projecting. Ultimately, the student decided to remove the picture.

Some students aren't so lucky. In March 2005, a University of Oklahoma student was investigated by the Secret Service for making assassination references about President Bush on Facebook. In May 2005, two swimmers at Louisiana State University lost their scholarships for making disparaging comments about their coach on Facebook. --David Epstein --The Many Faces of Facebook (Inside Higher Ed)

This article says 2/3 of college students have a Facebook profile.

This image, modified from John Speed's map of Yorkshire, England shows the walled city of York -- the site of the brilliant annual spectacle known to its medieval performers and spectators as the "Corpus Christi Play".

Dozens of short plays, mounted on pageant wagons, began with a performance at the Trinity Priory (red dot, lower left) and moved through the city streets, stopping at pre-arranged performance locations known as stations (white dots). --PSim: York Corpus Christi Pageant Simulator (jerz.setonhill.edu/(Re)Soundings 1997)

According to the liturgical calendar, tomorrow is the Solemnity of Corpus Christi (the body of Christ). During medieval times, it was an important feast, especially in England, where the colder climate didn't exactly encourage outdoor celebrations during Easter.

This site, the first version of which was published in the online journal (Re)Soundings in 1997, presents a Java simulation of one component of the outdoor celebrations that the medieval town of York, England used to present during the late middle ages.

I'm pleased to see that -- on my version of the Java Virual Machine, anyway -- the program still seems to run just fine.

I had originally written the simulation from scratch, for a PC, as a final project in a course on the York Corpus Christi Play. I ported it over to Java as part of a non-credit course I took on humanities computing. My first presentation at an academic conference and my first peer-reviewed publication both came from this project, so I have a special fondness for it.

The York Corpus Christi Play (also known as the York Cycle) is a series of short religious plays that were performed as part of a very complex outdoor festival in the late middle ages. They were wildly popular in England until the Protestant Reformation. Performed back-to-back, the cycle takes about 12 hours. Since these plays were performed at staggered intervals along numerous stations in York, the whole event from start to finish took about 19 hours.

There are lot of variables to consider when you try to estimate something that complex, which meant that

Vaporizing VR Hardware (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Last year, my brother-in-law asked me what I would do with a bunch of virtual reality gear his employer had packed in crates in a warehouse.

VR headsets, sensors, software to get them working together, and computers to run them all -- enough to fill "a big closet."

I started seriously thinking about all kinds of things, from working with a facutly member who teaches a mind-and-body class, to perhaps seeing whether the athletics department was interested in using such equipment to get athletes to study their form, or perhaps working with dance students on some kind of VR-ehanced interactive new media project. Thinking about what I might do with this equipment led me to put more effort into Half-Life 2 modding (and I've been pleased with the results).

The long and short of it all is that, unfortunately, that company was recently burned for releasing comptuers that contained sensitive client data. They were only willing to release the equipment if the computers were wiped clean. Andy couldn't find any CDs that contain the required software, and the VR company itself has gone out of business.

I'm sure the right techncial team wouldn't have any problem hacking something together. But because I don't have any contact with the CS majors at Seton Hill, and Seton Hill doesn't have an engineering program, I don't think the situation looks very hopeful -- not with the resources that are available to me, as a generalist (journalism, new media, literature, freshman comp) working at a small liberal arts college.

So I thanked Andy for his time. I know he jumped through a lot of hoops before getting that final answer.

As it happened, when Inform 7 came out last month, pretty much all of the spare time I'd been putting into Half-Life 2 modding got sucked into familairizing myself with Inform.

It's just a cruel shard of reality working its way into the soft tissues of my dreams.

I've already got more enticing leads than I can juggle right now, so in a way maybe I'm like the kid in the candy shop who's been waiting in a long line at the soda machine only to find that it isn't working. Yes, there's momentary disappointment, but then the kid notices that the lines for all sorts of other goodies are actually moving faster.

Onward!

Programming games is an activity. A programming language is a kind of thing. Inform 7 is a kind of programming language. It is either the single-most important advance in interactive fiction in a decade, or an interesting idea doomed to fail. --Liza Daily --Natural Language Game Programming with Inform 7 (OnLamp.com)

I've been teaching myself Inform 7 by translating, room by room, object by object, conversation tree by conversation tree, a work-in-progress that I started in Inform 6 in 1998 (when my CD-ROM drive died and I had to go retro in order to have any fun).

I've been taking a break from my Half-Life 2 modding, having first played with The Games Factory and Game Maker (point-and-click tools for creating arcade games).

One of the early benefits of interactive fiction (during the 80s) was that a company's back catalog of text adventure games didn't go stale as quickly as the arcade/graphics-heavy games, because the new year's text adventure games looked pretty much like last year's, at least to the customers in the store.

That was also part of commercial IF's downfall, since improved parsers and a more realistic world model didn't necessarily always translate into an obviously better product (or better sales). Infocom and Adventure International streamlined the production process, so that their designers could churn out decent products more efficiently (reusing code and architecture). But a brilliantly-executed NPC, a greater number of in-game objects, more complex behavior -- these developments in the IF medium weren't immediately visible.

By the mid 80s, text-adventure games were regularly incorporating images, but the point-and-click graphical adventure made the hybrid obsolete.

In the best history of Infocom I've seen, a student project from MIT, the authors note that Infocom's developments were evolutionary, rather than revolutionary. Consumers simply didn't notice improvements in IF as quickly as they noticed improvements in graphics and sound.

TADS is an adventure programming language that includes support for hyperlinks and a robust world model, an Inform game and a TADS game and a Hugo game and an Alan game all pretty much look the same.

While I haven't seen what kind of an IDE these other folks might have come up with recently, Graham Nelson's Inform 7 is a beautiful piece of work.

Recent developments in interactive fiction -- more complex NPCs, self-conscious tension that works against the conventions of the medium (and explores new ones), and literary aspirations -- still depend on textual transactions that occur in a world in which the game can say "there is a bunkbed here" but refuse a command such as "examine bed" because the author didn't think of "bed" as a synonym for "bunkbed."

Computer users today are used to textual chat sessions with real people who understand typos and emoticons. They're not as willing to work hard to make the computer understand them. Short of dumbing down IF games though the inclusion of a "Clippy" character who tells you exactly what you should do (Nick Montfort beautifully spoofs that idea in his game "Book and Volume"), there is little an IF author can do to get around that barrier.

Novels are long, heavy metal is loud, operatic performance is bombastic, and text adventure games force you to think. Of course, some novels would be better if they were shorter; but IF games that include random puzzles (such as the obligatory maze) can be downright annoying. I like dialogue trees and long NPC conversations, but only when the "He doesn't have anything to say about that" messages, or other features within the game, give you some hint as to what you're supposed to be doing. Other IF players prefer puzzlefests, and dismiss the more literary works as pretentious. One-room mind-benders that call for numerous replays, rich landscapes, and the quality of the error messages are among the other criteria IF players consider.

Will Inform 7 inspire a rush of great new IF games? I don't know.

IF design requires both writing talent and programming ability. An extremely well-written game that didn't ask the player to do something interesting and unusual would be very boring. And, while it should be very easy for non-programmers to create rooms and scenery to explore, you sill have to think like a programmer in order to add any complexity to a world built with Inform 7. Further, I7 is in beta right now, so there's a real possibility that code I'm writing now will be broken by the time the final release comes out. (I'm more than willing to risk that.)

On the surface, contemporary IF looks exactly like the classical stuff (from the 1980s). And a significant handful of amateur authors is today producing IF works that easily outshine those created by professionals working during the medium's commercial heyday.

Those professionals didn't have Inform 7.

We do.

I'm still only beginning to understand all the features of the new system.

Daily puts her finger on a problem I've been facing: "Note also that there are no procedure names; there is no reason to name a function when you can instead describe the conditions under which to call it."

So much of the code I wrote for I6 is simply there to produce pretty paragraphs of prose that describe events in the real world. But in Inform 7, you can make complex decisions right in the output text, like this:

After dropping the priceless fragile vase:

say "The vase shatters into a zillion worthless pieces. Scattered amidst the shards are [is/are list of things in the vase]."

Of course, you'd still have to create the code that handled destroying the vase itself, and moving its contents to whatever place the vase occupied before it was destroyed, but that's easy. What takes so much time in IF is presenting, in human-readable prose, a representation of the changing status of the game world. Here, the "is/are" automatically chooses the right verb based on whether the "list" results in one or more items. (Though here, Daily's example is incomplete. First, there's an "are" that's hard coded in text, so you might get "is are" or "are are," and further... what if the vase was empty?)

I can't wait until I've finished translating my existing code, so that I can get away from thinking in terms of the functions and procedures that make up my I6 code, and start really exploring the close connections between the output text and the code in I7.

New media have always met with suspicion: As The Economist editorialized a while back, a "neophobic" tendency dates from antiquity, with Plato's argument in the "Phaedrus" that the relatively newfangled medium of writing corrupted the memory-building powers of oral culture. Of course sometimes the new is bad. Yet the critics of video games are not only conjuring up a threat where none exists; they're ignoring the positive moral lessons and cognitive benefits that many of today's sophisticated games offer. --Brian C. Anderson --The Brain Workout: In Praise of Video Games (Opinion Journal)

--The Song Tapper

Tap out the rhythm of the lyrics on your space bar, and this website will try to guess the song. It will serve up a set of pre-loaded links to where you can buy the song.

I was unsuccessful in getting it to recognize "Lola," but I had more luck with "Happy Birthday" and "The Theme from Star Trek" (yes, it does have lyrics, and yes, I know them by heart).

A nifty little tool-toy, but the design is hardly visually stunning.

The story, "University Police Monitoring Facebook," hit the street last Thursday. Many copies didn't stay long, and not because eager readers were snatching them up. Some time between about 8 and 10 a.m., Tropolitan staffers estimate, 1,500-2,000 of the 3,000 copies distributed vanished. (The papers that remained were those in highly trafficked areas, like the student center and the library.) --David Epstein --The Case of the Missing Papers (Inside Higher Ed)

A great narrative news story, with snappy writing.

Every student will soon be a blogger at the University of Pennsylvania's College of Arts and Sciences -- and the authors won't just be filling their pages with party anecdotes.

As part of summer registration, members of the class of 2010 are receiving from the college personalized "academic blog" pages, where they are asked to fill out what amounts to an online questionnaire. The students' first online journal entries will focus on their intellectual interests, academic concerns and educational experiences. Many bloggers will outline their strengths and weaknesses, and create a personal mission statement.

The academic blogs aren't meant for mass consumption. Only the student, an academic adviser and authorized university officials will be able to see the content. The idea is to formulate talking points for when freshmen first meet their faculty mentors in the fall. --Elia Powers --An Academic Blog for Students (Inside Higher Ed)

I wonder if the students will have the option to share their entries with each other.

I agree with what Steven D. Krause wrote in his comment... I wouldn't call this a blog. It's really just a private advising journal that happens to live online.

Words: Redfield Clarke Music: J. Bodewalt Lampe
Lyrics:
As I sit here in my office chair and watch the dying fire,
I think of all the messages that flash along the wire.
I hear the constant clicking, the clicking of the key,
And while in the mood I'll tell you what the wires tell me.

Click, click, click, a message of sorrow and pain,
Click, click, click, a message of profit and gain,
Click, click, click, a monarch is hurled from his throne,
Click, click, click, click, mother is dying, come home.

This is a sad or merry world, we each one have our own,
Yours filled with friends and happiness, I live in mine alone.
Be his tidings sad or joyous, my small friend never tires
As he clicks to me the messages that flash along the wires.

Click, click, click, a good ship's gone down in a gale,
Click, click, click, close the switch for the limited mail,
Click, click, click, a man worth ten millions is dead,
Click, click, click, whole nations are praying for bread. --What the Wires Tell to Me, (1893) (Once and Future Web)

A song about the telegraph, presenting a rather melodramatic glimpse into the privilged position of an almost monastic telegraph operator, whose work makes possible a communictions event that was at the time still a very unusual experience.

Consider the very different, chatty tone of the 1936 "The Telegram Song (STOP)," which was written for a culture that had fully integrated the telegraph in daily life:

My darling, I miss you tonight - STOP -
I wish I could kiss you tonight - STOP-
Want to let you know just how I am,
So I'm sending you this telegram.
The weather is rainy and cold - STOP-
The next house to our house was sold -STOP-

Audio for these songs, and several others, are available on the site.

The way I see it, there are three basic tasks that journalists do:

1. Gathering information. This involves talking to sources, examining documents, taking photographs, etc. It's reporting.

2. Distilling information. This involves applying editorial judgment to decide what parts of the gathered information are important and relevant.

3. Presenting information. This involves shaping the distilled information into a format that is accessible to the readership. Some examples: writing style (inverted pyramid, etc.), photo color-correction, newspaper page design.

"Doing journalism through computer programming" is just a different way of accomplishing these goals. Namely, the technique favors automation wherever possible. --Adrian Holovaty, in an interview by Robert Niles --The programmer as journalist (Online Journalism Review)

In general, we can slip up in a verbal conversation and get away with it. A colleague may be thinking, "Did she just say 'irregardless'?", but the words flow on, and our worst transgressions are carried away and with luck, forgotten.

That's not the case with written communications. When we commit a grammatical crime in emails, discussion posts, reports, memos, and other professional documents, there's no going back. We've just officially gone on record as being careless or clueless. And here's the worst thing. It's not necessary to be an editor or a language whiz or a spelling bee triathlete to spot such mistakes. --Jody Gilbert --10 flagrant grammar mistakes that make you look stupid (Tech Republic)

I'd call these copyediting errors rather than flagrant grammar mistakes, but that's quibbling.

Of course, I make mistakes, too. (My sister regularly alerts me to typos on this blog.) As an English teacher, I'm very conscious of the way that class makes its mark in our language. I'm personally interested in correct grammar because I not only love the English language but make my living off of teaching about it, so there's a heavy dose of self-interest surrounding my grammar vigilance.

While I did tell a group of English majors "The world's hamburgers need to be flipped" when they were frustrated by a lesson on the passive voice, threatening my students that their writing makes them look stupid is not really part of my pedagogical philosophy.

A conservative estimate from the study says 17 percent of overall media is consumed via the Internet, and Horan notes that other researchers like Forrester have placed that number even higher.

[...]

Yet, studies have shown that only about 8 percent of advertising goes to the Internet, Horan said. --Candace Lombardi --Study: Web is the No. 1 media (C|Net News.com)

The robot in the classroom, which displays a live picture of Achim, provides what its inventors call "telepresence": It gives the boy an actual presence in the classroom, recognized by teachers and classmates. It can move from class to class on its four-wheel base and even stop at the lockers for a between-periods chat.

"The robot literally is embraced by students in the classroom as though that is the medically fragile student," said Andrew Summa, national director of the robot project, which is in use at six other hospitals around the country. Achim's teacher, Bob Langerfield, said his other students had become used to the robot -- and were treating it as if it were Achim -- after just a few days. --Robot Rep Goes to School (Wired | AP)

This article combines geekery and empathy, painting a very positive (one-sided) picture of technology. It's a natural for a reprint in Wired. If I had a child who could benefit from this technology, I wouldn't spend much time fretting about whether this is the best way to spend educational dollars.

Summa said one student used a robot so fully that it joined the boy's classmates to sing a song at a school show. He said a child in the audience asked, "What's that thing up on stage?" to which a friend of the student replied, "That's no thing. That's Jimmy."

The Internet is popularly perceived as either a definitive and government-created (and controlled) international computer network--as if "The Internet" is an official and closed system, not unlike "The Post Office"--or as a free-wheeling, uncontrolled, chaotic, and unruly frontier. Neither one of these perceptions is entirely accurate because the Internet is, in fact, the result of conscious and controlled governmental efforts as well as independent and anarchistic actions.

Ironically, as most of the histories point out, the Internet originated in the early 1960's as a proposal from the Advanced Research Projects Agency (part of the U.S. Department of Defense) and RAND Corporation to create a computer network that could survive a nuclear attack. A centralized communication network--like telephone networks, where information is shared between users through a centralized switching station--is obviously vulnerable because one successful attack on the center would destroy the system. According to Bruce Sterling's "Short History of the Internet," the RAND proposal (authored by Paul Baran) hypothesized a communication network with no centralized point. Rather, the network would be made up of "nodes" (more or less the equivalent of a single computer) that would each have equal authority and ability to create, pass along, and receive information to other nodes. --Steven D. Krause --Defining the Internet: What is it and who is it (The Immediacy of Rhetoric: Definitions, Illustrations and Complications)

Just bookmarking this for future reference.

I'll be teaching "Writing for the Internet" again in the fall, and while I'm fairly sure the vast majority of my students will be digital natives, many of them won't have thought much about the history and development of the internet.

Efforts are afoot to not only make IF more accessible, but to make it more modern and attractive in appearance. Along with all of the other innovations of Inform 7, for instance, a facility has now been added by which the author can easily include a "book cover" of sorts for her work, which is automatically displayed when the player begins the game. Thumbnail versions of this art could also be displayed in another application that has aroused considerable discussion in the community, even if it is a project still far from fruition: the creation of a sort of IF "I-Tunes" application that would allow the player to browse the Archive's immense database of games, and to open any one of them on her computer with just a couple of clicks. A meta-data standard for IF is under discussion which could make this dream a reality by providing a standard format for storing basic information -- copyright date, author name, brief description, etc. -- about every game to facilitate easy searching and browsing. These projects have a long way to go, but the community seems increasingly committed to shedding the retro-gaming label once and for all and embracing the future. I believe a larger audience for IF is out there, and I believe an improved presentation for the genre as a whole is the best way to reach it.

Some see IF as suffering something of a directional crisis in the last few years. The wild experimentation with form that marked the late nineties has now largely subsided. One could argue that we have a pretty good sense of what the genre is capable of now, at least unless and until we see some quantum leap in artificial intelligence technology, or until something else occurs that shifts the paradigm of IF development. This is does not mean that the exciting phase of IF's history is over, however. It may in fact be just beginning. Authors are now free to use the techniques that the experimentalists pioneered not as formal exercises but in the service of the stories they are attempting to tell. Some recent games, such as Jason Devlin's Vespers and Chris Klimas' Blue Chairs, have displayed just this ascendancy of substance over form that is the mark of a mature artform. There are many, many stories still to tell, and I believe that a substantial upswing in IF's popularity could be just around the corner if the community stays the course with current efforts, even as increasing academic interest brings the genre a respectability it could never have dreamed of in the days of Infocom. Interactive narrative will be the literary form of the twenty-first century, and IF has every chance of continuing to be an important part of that movement for years to come. --Jimmy Maher --Chapter 11: The State of IF Today (Let's Tell a Story Together (A History of Interactive Fiction))

In the US, "Chapter 11" is the section of legal code dealing with bankruptcy, but I'm sure that's just a coincidence.

Especially notworthy is the "Suggested Works of Modern IF" page, which includes a brief essay on canon.

666 is the occult "number of the beast," also called the "sign of the devil" (Wang 1994), associated in the Bible with the Antichrist. It has figured in many numerological studies. It is mentioned in Revelation 13:18: "Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is 666." The origin of this number is not entirely clear, although it may be as simple as the number containing the concatenation of one symbol of each type (excluding M==1000) in Roman numerals: DCLXVI==666 (Wells 1986). --Beast Number (Mathworld | Wolfram Research)

I know it sounds nerdy, but I jumped at the chance to tag along on my husband's business trip to Hartford, CT last weekend so that I could re-walk the 2 miles that Wallace Stevens used to walk to and from his home on Westerly Terrace to Hartford Accident & Indemnity each day. I took along my EL 267 text and read some of his work as I walked along through a slightly dicey section of town... --Brenda Christeleit --Baby Blackbird and Wallace Stevens (BrendaChristeleit)

A student who was in my American Lit class this past semester posted this to her academic blog.

While I fully realize that blogs aren't equally beloved by all students in my classes, what other instructional tool gives students a platform to share their thoughts even after the class is over?

Well done, Brenda.

A quarter-billion copies sold worldwide as kids raced to discover lost civilizations, navigate black holes, and go in search of ... the Yeti. This summer, eight of the original titles return to bookstores, revamped with 21st-century references (cell phones!). Will they become popular again? -- Michael Reilly

• If you think nostalgia will help the books find an adult audience, click here.
• If you think a new generation of readers will pick up the books, click here. --Choose Your Own Adventure Returns  (Wired)

Don't call me "Honey." Call me "Smart Girl." --Carolyn Maureen Jerz (age 4).Cute vs Brainy (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

How perceptive children are, at an early age.

Of course, next week she'll be back to "My name is Sally. My family was killed in a car crash. Can I be your new girl?" or "I want to be a boy."

--Online chess video about two pawns that fall in love (Chess Maniac)

This was a cute computer-generated story. It's about six or seven minutes long. I wish I knew more about it.

It's only made worse by the lame assignments many comp instructors assign (or are forced to assign): 1. A turning point in my life! (Get ready for five hundred essays about, "The time I got drunk? And almost had a wreck? And now I realize how precious life is?" or 2. My personal hero! (Get ready for another five hundred essays about, "My mother is my hero! Because she's always there for me! Even though I can't say what exactly I mean by that! And even though, duh, that's what mothers do!") Anything--ANYTHING--you say about a freshman comp essay will immediately be taken as a personal assault on the student her/himself. In a math class, no one takes it as a personal critique if an answer is marked as "wrong;" in a freshman comp class, any grade less than a "A" is taken as a slam against the student, since after all he/she is just "expressing myself." And when you assign a "personal turning point" type of assignment, it just compounds the issue: "So sorry, Bubby, but your essay on fire safety and the tragic burning death of your grandmother only merits a 'C'! Now, if gramps had died, too, that might merit a 'B'!" --didmycomptime --Re: Is freshman comp really a chore? (Chronicle of Higher Education Forums)

Seton Hill used to have a required, two-semester "Thinking and Writing Seminar," that included cultural identity topics (education, race, gender, class, family) and built up to a research paper. There were a few academic papers in the common reader, but there were also plenty of essays that were argumentative without being academic (a very entertaining Michael Moore essay comes to mind). But the students who emulated that kind of nonacademic persuasion were not prepared for the researched essay that was supposed to be the culmination of the two-semester sequence. As a result, some students who aced the cultural material bombed the writing component, and some good writers who didn't do all the culture-related assignments had to take the class over again. Add to that the fact that some of the instructors were more interested in the cultural material than in the writing component, and some (like myself) were more interested in producing good writers than in getting students to explore and express their cultural identities.

This fall, thank goodness, the STW course has morphed into a one-semester composition basics course -- sentences, paragraphs, main ideas, that sort of thing. Students can test out of it, or they can retake it as many times as necessary. Then they'll move on to what is now a one-semester course that's still called "Seminar in Thinking and Writing," where the instructors can proceed on the assumption that their students have been taught how to write a paragraph and how to revise.

Last year the faculty voted to approve a new writing-intensive component, in which every major will have at least one course designated as writing intensive. While some faculty have expressed unhappiness because they feel that writing is not their area of expertise, it's very clear to me that I know nothing about the writing one is supposed to do in a French class, or a psychology class, or a math class. Who does know about that kind of writing? Naturally, the French, psychology, and math teachers.

Didmycomptime should add "The day my team won (or lost) the big game."

Another great comment, from a different poster: "I also have a low opinion of marijuana legalization papers--too many of them were written while high."

There are still people who think disposing of the trash in a regular, professional and safe manner is more important than writing deep and penetrating pieces of literature - which nobody reads anyway. They admire carpenters who can build good houses to live in, gardeners who can make trees and flowers grow, farmers who can deliver good produce, primary school teachers who manage to teach and inspire. And so do I, matter of fact. I almost revere them.

And somewhere, in the increasingly growing gamer population, there are people who think being a game researcher is the coolest job in academia, and designers of great games should have a place at the right hand of the Goddess herself. --Torill Mortensen --Games and Status (Thinking with my fingers)

"In the twenty years since the Chernobyl tragedy, the world's worst nuclear accident, there have been nearly [FILL IN ALARMIST AND ARMAGEDDONIST FACTOID HERE]," the sheet said.

The Greenpeace spokesman who issued the memo, Steve Smith, told the Web site that a colleague was making a joke in a draft that was then mistakenly released. --Greenpeace Just Kidding About Armageddon (Washington Post (will expire))

I frequently find freshman research papers that uncritically cite "facts" found on activist websites. The simple fact that a Greenpeace employee made a mistake does not invalidate the environmental concerns of the entire organization, but it does hint at the set of rules that activist groups are not playing by when they choose facts for press releases.

A journalist's job is to look at multiple sides of the issue. A PR person's job is to put the most positive possible spin on one particular side of the issue -- the side that signs the PR person's paycheck.

Katharine Close, an eighth-grader at the H.W. Mountz School in Spring Lake, N.J., is the first girl since 1999 to win the national spelling title. She stepped back from the microphone and put her hands to her mouth upon being declared the winner. She recognized the word as soon as she heard it.

"I couldn't believe it. I knew I knew how to spell the word and I was just in shock," said Katharine, who tied for seventh-place last year. "I couldn't believe I would win." --Darlene Superville --13-year-old N.J. girl wins spelling bee (Yahoo! News (will expire))

The codes, called captchas, are also showing up more often amid a boom in new Web services, ranging from blogging tools to social-networking sites. The trickiest ones "make you not want to go to those sites anymore," says Scott Reynolds, a 29-year-old software architect in Ocala, Fla., who lambasted the devices on his blog last year. --David Kesmodel --Codes on Sites 'Captcha' (Wall Street Journal)

I've been considering adding a catpcha to the blogs.setonhill.edu website. The anti-spam protection there is pretty good, but the site is hit with so many spam attempts that the spam-filtering software sometimes crashes the server. (My ISP has been understanding and creative about it, though.)

Over the past six weeks a Western security force has effectively taken over the small African nation of Namibia. A beach resort in Langstrand in Western Namibia has been sealed off with security cordons, and armed security personnel have been keeping both local residents and visiting foreigners at bay. A no-fly zone has been enforced over part of the country. The Westerners have also demanded that the Namibian government severely restrict the movement of journalists into and out of Namibia. The government agreed and, in a move described by one human rights organisation as 'heavy-handed and brutal', banned certain reporters from crossing its borders.

However, this Western security force is not a US or European army plundering Namibia's natural resources or threatening to topple its government. It is the security entourage of one Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, the celebrity couple better known for living it up in LA than slumming it in Namibia. --Brendan O'Neill --Brad, Angelina and the rise of 'celebrity colonialism'  (Spiked)

"It shows that these forgotten people of the '90s had many of the same concerns as modern man, such as b-days, and slow periods at work," Caspari said. "The presence of the archaic slang verbalization 'what's up' appears to indicate that they cared about the immediate welfare of others in their closely knit community, much as we do today."

But the artifact reveals differences as well. According to Caspari, the find indicates that people from that era spoke a much earlier form of e-mail language alien to our own, employing the full spellings of most words, and lacking the versatility and advanced expression of smiley-face or frowny-face emoticons. --Recently Unearthed E-Mail Reveals What Life Was Like In 1995 (The Onion (Satire))

Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom is a very exciting book. It captures an important set of developments --- how new information technologies make it easier for individuals to collaborate in producing cultural content, knowledge, and other information goods. It draws links across apparently disparate subject areas to present a theory of how these technologies are reshaping opportunities for social action. Finally, it presents a highly attractive vision of what society might be like if we allow these technologies to flourish, as well as the political obstacles which may prevent these technologies from reaching their full potential. If you're interested in debates on Creative Commons, on Wikipedia, on net neutrality, or any of a whole host of other issues, this is an essential starting point.

We've put together a seminar on the book, which we hope will help spur discussion around it in the blogosphere. --Henry Farrell --Introduction: The Wealth of Networks seminar (Crooked Timber)

I've just ordered The Wealth of Networks thorugh interlibrary loan.

In "Are Elite Universities Losing Their Competitive Edge?," the scholars examine evidence that the Internet -- by allowing professors to work with ease with scholars across the country and not just across the quad -- is leading to a spreading of academic talent at many more institutions than has been the case in the past. --Scott Jaschik --Losing Their Edge? (Inside Higher Ed)