July 2006 Archive Page

--Wintergreen ''When I Wake Up'' (KeithSchofield.com)

Is this for real?

I'm not so sure the song goes with the images, but it's still awesome.

"It would have been a major oversight to ignore this portentous anniversary," said Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, whose site now boasts over 4,300,000 articles in multiple languages, over one-quarter of which are in English, including 11,000 concerning popular toys of the 1980s alone. --Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence: Founding Fathers, Patriots, Mr. T. Honored (The Onion (Satire))

Infocom, king of the text adventure and the first behemoth of American computer game development, began not with a bang, but with an internet meme. --Lara Crigger --The Short, Happy Life of Infocom (The Escapist)

There are some details about Infocom culture that are nicely placed.

I like what Jeremy Douglass wrote about the genre of the interactive fiction magazine article.

To be fair, there is a fairly constrained set of talking points about IF that most features feel they need to include:

1. Remember IF? I loved them. IF...
2. ...started the computer game industry
3. ...were killed by graphics cards
4. ...are still being made!
5. ...are still fun!
6. ...are being sold by 1-2 individuals/companies
7. ...are being created by a vibrant indie community
8. ...are available on any computer imaginable
9. ...might have some future in the cell/ipod/pda convergence
10. ...can be downloaded like this

I haven.t yet written an IF Article Generator, but the code is, I feel, strongly implied by copious example outputs to be found in periodicals. I personally enjoy the 2-4-7-8 articles, and the 4-7-8-10s. I am indifferent to the 1-3-4-5s, and thoughtful about the 4-5-6-9s.

Capitalizing on youthful passion for video games, school leaders hope to keep more kids in school by offering the chance to conceive, design, build -- and sell -- their own video game.

"That's what they love," said David White, the school's chief academic officer. "That's the hook." --Scott Elliott --Reading, writing and video games (Dayton Daily News)

Sounds pretty good to me.

--Blender Basics, 2nd Ed (pdf) (Central Dauphin High School)

Where was this book during the last 3 weeks when I was struggling with random half-finished tutorials?

Thank you, James Chronister!

In hiring, I look for individuals who demonstrate insatiable intellectual curiosity, critical thinking and analytical skills as well as firm control of the English language. Today, it is important for journalists also to have a sound grounding in science and business/finance. Sadly, I find that it is common to find journalism grads that lack all of these. --J Lawn --Journalism Schools, Degree Requirements and Job Prospects

This is from a comment appended to an article by David Epstein, called "The J-School Boom."

RideMax is a computer software program guaranteed to help you save time waiting in line at Walt Disney World and Disneyland.

RideMax allows you to specify the attractions you wish to ride during your visit, then uses a sophisticated scheduling algorithm to order your attractions so that the amount of time you spend in line is minimized. --Experience Disney Without the Long Wait! (ridemax.com)

What a great niche market! A classic entrepreneurial example of finding a void, turning it into a need, and filling it.

Thanks for another great suggestion, Rosemary.

The report, written by Senior Research Specialist Amanda Lenhart and Associate Director Susannah Fox, says that bloggers are avid consumers and creators of online content. They are also heavy users of the internet in general. Forty-four percent of bloggers have taken material they find online -- like songs, text, or images -- and remixed it into their own artistic creation. By comparison, just 18% of all internet users have done this. A whopping 77% of bloggers have shared something online that they created themselves, like their own artwork, photos, stories, or videos. By comparison, 26% of internet users have done this.

"Blogs are as individual as the people who keep them, but this survey shows that most bloggers are primarily interested in creative, personal expression," said Lenhart. "Blogs make it easy to document individual experiences, share practical knowledge, or just keep in touch with friends and family." --Blogging is bringing new voices to the online world (PEW Internet & American Life Project)

Just quickly blogging this press release about the report.

There are serious logical problems posed by any attempt to prove conclusively that a person does not (or did not) exist. No matter how many searches fail to prove the existence of someone, that failure does not negate the person's possible existence. However, when a specific person's specific occupation or background are made relevant as they are here, it is possible to disprove such a person's occupation or background, simply by the absence of official records. (For example, if someone claims to be a Navy SEAL, that claim can be verified or debunked, and there are websites devoted to doing just that.)

The burden of proof, though, normally falls on those asserting that the person exists. In the case of George Harleigh, virtually all quotations and references to him originate with Doug Thompson, a self-described journalist ["newspaperman"] who runs the Capitol Hill Blue web site. -- Eric --Where's George? And Where's Doug? (Classical Values)

I was looking in my server logs and noticed this post from Classical Values is driving some traffic to an old blog entry of mine, about Doug Thompson (of Capitol Hill Blue) admitting that he has been mistakenly publishing quotations -- for 20 years -- from a well-placed source (Terry Wilkinson) that he says turned out to be a hoax. At the time I applauded him for admitting that he made a mistake, though questioned the ethics of erasing the tainted stories (rather than leaving them up with a disclaimer, or at least a notice that says they've been edited to remove references to an unverified source).

Now it seems that another of Thompson's sources, "George Harliegh" might be a fake too. I used Google to search Capitol Hill Blue for "George Harleigh," and found scores of hits; but I clicked on a handful of those links and found no reference to Harleigh on those pages. Capitol Hill Blue's main search engine returns zero hits for "Harleigh," but a search of the Capital Hill Blue forums returns nine references to "Harleigh".

Commenters on Thompson's website report that they found no reference to a George Harleigh in academic databases.

Harleigh, who has been identified by Thomson as a retired political science professor who worked in the Nixon and Reagan administrations, has been providing quotes that are deeply critical of George W. Bush. Quotes that originally appeared on Capitol Hill Blue are reproduced all over the internet (Google returned over 30,000 quotes), but Thompson seems to be the only source for quotes by Harleigh.

Did you hear that Bush called the Constitution "just a goddamned piece of paper"? I've seen that all over the blogosphere. But the only source for that claim is Capitol Hill Blue, as Thompson notes in an article called "In the end, all we have is the truth."

One of things that make you go "hmmm..."

Update, 22 July: Doug Thompson apologizes and quits Capitol Hill Blue.

Summer Blogging Slowdown (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I'm going on a little family vacation, and won't be back until Tuesday. We're visiting my brother-in-law in New Jersey, and plan to visit Philadelphia, too.



I hope this trip goes better than last year's.

--Knights of the Round Table -- Star Trek TOS (YouTube)

Amusing. Not side-splittingly funny, like that Bush/Blair mashup that was circulating last year. But still amusing.

Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.

--Blender for the Faint Hearted -- 06: Material Basics, Part 2 (SciFi Meshes)

I've been working with the open source 3D design tool "Blender." It's powerful. Very powerful. It's got an overwhelming number of buttons, and the existing documentation is incomplete.

I have asked Seton Hill to purchase a handful of copies of a professional 3D design tool, but even the student copies of that cost hundreds of dollars, so I'm not asking my New Media Projects students to shell out that much money.

I've just spent hours trying to figure out how to create multiple materials that are attached to a single object. Right now I'm working on a chair, and I want the base to be one color and the cushion to be a different color. Actually, "color" isn't the right term -- I want the base to be hard plastic and the cushions to be shiny leather. This means that, instead of just determining the color, I'm also determining the glossiness of the surface. If I wanted to create transparent or reflective objects, I can do that, too.

By clicking buttons at random, I managed to create several different materials for a project I've been working on last week, but at the time I really didn't know what I was doing, and I couldn't reproduce what I did when I tried just now.

At any rate, this tutorial expalains what I was trying to do.

I'm a strong supporter of open source software. The Blender Foundation is fully aware that people find its software bewildering and its documentation incomplete. The "Summer of Documentation" is a project designed to tackle that -- experienced Blender users are writing tutorials to fill the gaps. I'm looking forward to reading those tutorials as they come out, but unfortunately for me I've got the time now, and won't have much time to learn Blender once the semester starts.

I do plan to contribute to the existing wiki documentation, so that others will benefit from my struggle.

I do wish there were an "easy mode" interface that turned off features that newbies won't need... and then maybe the documentation could tell you which features to activate as you progress through the tutorials and need access to more powerful features. But it's also probably fair to say that most users of Blender probably have significant computing experience. They won't be thinking of writing comprehensive tutorials for non-programmers.

Ah, well. Back to work.

Angry mother to preteen girl: "Don't ever tell me to shut up again. That's totally disrespectful. Now go and fill your damn water."Overheard at Soccer Camp (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Although professors may hope to remove obstacles to success, innate personality and other environmental factors may influence learning more than what we are able to offer with the short number of hours we are in contact with students. Yet, there are some tactics that seem to encourage real engagement in undergraduate core classes: --Shari Wilson --Moving Past Survival (Inside Higher Ed)

The 28-year-old, identified only as D.M., took a photo of his speedometer showing 170 km (100 mph) on a back road in northern Croatia and then put it on the Web site of his local municipality.

Police found him three days later. --Hey! Who turned me in? (Reuters)

Qui ne se souvient pas du SPACE INVADERS, lun des premiers jeux vidéo -- Aux commandes d'un vaisseau, il s'agissait de défendre la Terre contre des escadrilles d'envahisseurs venus de l'espace... Et bien, la plus grande partie de SPACE INVADERS de la planète a eu lieu le 24 juin 2006 au festival Belluard.

--Space Invaders (notsonoisy.com)

A beautiful film project, that challenges our notions of spectatorship by reversing the gaze of the video screen, turning each pixel into a human being who gazes back at us, all of them powerless in their participation in the enactment of a space battle simulation that always ends in destruction.

Or I don't know... maybe it's just cool.

--Maize: the final frontier (ABCnet.au)

A Star Trek cornfield maze.

I'll spare you the fanboy analysis, which would hinge on the fact that it looks like that's the original series Enterprise, firing what looks like a phaser from the secondary hull (should be coming from the base of the saucer) at a Borg cube, but the Borg weren't encountered until the Next Generation era.

Thanks for the very strange link, Rosemary.

The Facebook is truly a killer app for incoming freshmen - as they prepare to start a new life in a new place, surrounded by a new social network, the Facebook presents a highly interactive way to explore this new space. For those of us who sent snail-mail letters to our freshman year roommates, Facebook is everything we could have dreamed of and then some - not only can students know everything about their new roommates, but they can learn everything about their suite, their floor, and their dorm. This is information students need to know, and it helps them get situated in their new social networks. --Fred Stutzman --Adopting the Facebook: A Comparative Analysis (Unit Structures)

And yes, Liz's face registers the shift between thinking Jon is sweet and deeply weird, but the sudden retraction of her hand from Garfield's back seals the deal: she wants so little to do with Jon that even touching his cat feels wrong. --''Uh...'' (Garfield: Permanent Monday)

The world needs more daily critical analyses of Garfield cartoons. No, really.

They sliced a piece of tough beef in two, bagged half of it in plastic, and dropped it into the bottom of a 50-gallon paperboard drum of water. Then they suspended conventional explosives in the water and retired to a nearby bunker. From there, they watched in safety as a television displayed the ensuing detonation.

"The drum totally disappeared. There were just little pieces of paper fiber all over," Long recalls. The meat, ejected to the side of a nearby hill, was missing for fully 15 minutes.

Once the treated meat had been retrieved, Long cooked it, along with its untreated counterpart, on a grill he had lugged to the site. --Ka-Boom! A shockingly unconventional meat tenderizer (Science News)

Tenderizing meat... with explosions! What an awesome job! Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

--Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Beginning Tips (Wikibooks: Blender 3D)

This is just what I was looking for.

I'm still trying to decide whether I should go for broke and introduce my "New Media Projects" students to 3D design for Half-Life 2, where the results will be stunning but the process more fragmented, or be less of a trail-blazer and take advantage of the existing EduFrag community (using Unreal Tournament 2004, which features a more advanced IDE that integrates the design tasks, thus cutting down on the number of times students will have to use little stand-alone applets to convert graphics files and such).

I still want to use the Half-Life 2 system for my own work, but I'm beginning to think that the less-complex UT2004 system will still teach the concepts I want to teach.

Today's peer-production machine runs in a mostly nonmonetary economy. The currency is reputation, expression, karma, "wuffie," or simply whim.

This can all sound a little like, well, '60s-style utopianism. After all, Marx himself believed that the industrial proletariat would revolt against the bourgeoisie, creating a state where the workers own the means of industrial production. It's easy to see an echo of that in blogosphere triumphalism. --Chris Anderson --People Power  (Wired)

--Muppet Wiki  (Muppet.Wikia.com)

Too much information on the muppets. Way, way too much.

As citizens of a highly technological culture, our students see (and often use) technologies as a daily experience. Because of their proliferation, these technologies become are often taken for granted and unexplored. This lesson plan asks students to pay attention to these technologies explicitly. In this activity, students brainstorm lists of their interactions with technology, map these interactions graphically, and then compose narratives of their most significant interactions with technology. By writing these technology autobiographies, students explore what their stories reveal about why we use the technologies we do when we do. --Paying Attention to Technology: Writing Technology Autobiographies  (Read Write Think)

I've got an early in-class assignment in my "Writing for the Internet" class in which I ask students to estimate the date when various technological innovations were invented (such as the CD-ROM, the mouse, the ball-point pen, etc.).

I might modify that assignment to include some elements of this one.

Via Doctor Daisy .

So, why do you want to study literature, knowing what you now know?" I wondered if studying a century of cynicism had altered their motives in the slightest.

They were all considering graduate school, but their answers had little to do with what I knew they would need to write in their application essays. Sitting in a circle in the grass, backed by purple hydrangeas, they offered the following motives:

• Formative experiences with reading as a child: being read to by beloved parents and siblings, discovering the world of books and solitude at a young age.
• Feelings of alienation from one's peers in adolescence, turning to books as a form of escapism and as a search for sympathetic connection to other people in other places and times.
• A love for books themselves, and libraries, as sites of memory and comfort.
• A "geeky" attraction to intricate alternate worlds such as those created by Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and George Lucas.
• Contact with inspirational teachers who recognized and affirmed one's special gifts in reading and writing, often combined with negative experiences in other subjects like math and chemistry.
• A transference of spiritual longings -- perhaps cultivated in a strict religious upbringing -- toward more secular literary forms that inspired "transcendence."
• A fascination with history or science that is not grounded in a desire for rigorous data collection or strict interpretive methodologies.
• A desire for freedom and independence from authority figures; a love for the free play of ideas. English includes everything, and all approaches are welcome, they believe.
• A recognition of mortality combined with a desire to live fully, to have multiple lives through the mediation of literary works.
• A desire to express oneself through language and, in so doing, to make a bid for immortality.
• A love for the beauty of words and ideas, often expressed in a desire to read out loud and perform the text.
• An attraction to the cultural aura of being a creative artist, sometimes linked to aristocratic and bohemian notions of the good life.
• A desire for wisdom, an understanding of the big picture rather than the details that obsess specialists.

Those answers defied everything they had been taught in my theory seminar. Nevertheless, they were all, in different degrees, the answers I would have given as an undergraduate. --Thomas H. Benton --Goodbye, Mr. Keating (Chronicle)

An interesting personal essay, that begins as a reflection on Dead Poets Society, a film that I confess I've never seen.

I blog almost every one of Benton's Chronicle essays, though sometimes he lays it on a bit thick. Still, it's not so much the elegiac tone for his idyllic undergraduate experience that attracts me, but the intensity of his self-scrutiny: "You have to spend so many years conforming that, by the time freedom presents itself, you don't know why you became an English major in the first place. You might even have contempt for your seemingly naïve students, who represent the self that you had to repress in order to be a professional."

I remember the time at my previous job where I asked each student in a small, intensive upper-level seminar to prepare a demonstration of an unusual cybertext artifact. I asked one student if she was ready to demonstrate a particular text, and she said she was. After she spent two or three minutes fumbling with the computer to get it started, it became clear she didn't know what she was doing. This was the very first time she had even looked at the text, and she was supposed to carry a class discussion for the next twenty minutes. And she just didn't care. She didn't come to me for help outside of class, she didn't send me an e-mail asking for an extension, she didn't blurt out an apology. And I felt like the bad guy for asking her to sit down.

It's not the naïve students who trouble me -- though I confess I'm glad I don't teach creative writing courses, since I've seen plenty of talented but undisciplined beginning creative writers become paralyzed when they realize just how much time and effort goes into revising, polishing, and proofreading a creative work at the college level.

If students are naïve about their own talents, and if they've complacent and puffed up by the easy As they received in high school, they can burn out and become alienated (especially when, at the same time, they realize the competition is so stiff that they get cut from the team, they don't get called back after auditioning, they run for office and lose, and so forth). So here, the quote from Mr. McAllister seems worth reflecting on -- that asking students to apsire for greatness can be risky: "When they realize they're not all Rembrandts, Shakespeares, or Mozarts, they'll hate you for it."

But underlying that warning is the notion that Rembrandt, Shakespeare and Mozart had so much talent that they didn't have to work hard like the mediocre slobs whose work they outshone. That's getting it all backwards, of course. Of course education, class, the political machinations of patronage and sponsorship, and dumb luck all combine to affect an artist's career, but few people have achieved anything of value without working hard at it. Talent isn't a ticket to easy street. We waste those talents if we don't work extra hard in the very areas where we're primed to succeed.

In an online advertising market increasingly dependent on the Net's ability to precision- target ads, MySpace offers no sure way to hit the bull's-eye. Google decides which ads to show based on search terms and page content. By contrast, a typical MySpace pageview doesn't offer much of a clue about anything. What conclusions can you draw when kid A bounces onto kid B's profile and leaves the message "Wazzup"? That's why a top-priced Google ad -- say, one that appears with search results for the word "refinance" -- is valued in dollars per click, while a MySpace ad clocks in around a hundredth of a cent per view. In theory, all those millions of lovingly, often exhaustively detailed personal profiles ought to make it possible to deduce a user's interests. But no one knows how to do it, certainly not on an industrial scale. --Spencer Reiss --His Space (Wired)

Rupert Murdoch, who purchased MySpace for $580 million dollars, is an old media mogul whose head is not in the sand. Should peer-to-peer idealists worry about the commercialization of "their" internet?

Dunn, now 40, grew up in suburban New Jersey where most of her friends dreamed of marrying their high-school sweethearts and settling down. She, however, was obsessed with music, and one day in 1989 walked into the offices of Rolling Stone. Despite a bad perm and a lack of street cred, her detailed knowledge of new and old bands got her a job as an editorial assistant.

Dunn says her job has evoked "equal parts self-loathing and excitement" and in her book writes with bravado about her experiences: "On rare occasions, celebs will veer from their carefully bland, publicist-approved sound bites and make a blundering comment that exposes them as vapid or foolish. If this happens, do not examine your conscience. Print their transgression..." --Melissa Whitworth --Barry, Brad, Beluga, and me (Telegraph)

The best students will learn, retain and understand the material they are taught in class no matter how it is presented. However, there are many students in the class who do not have the attention span to concentrate for the whole lesson, who get distracted or do not do the required reading because they are simply not interested. It is these students who benefit from the circus approach to teaching. --Marc Zimmer --Life in the Circus (Inside Higher Ed)

This observation of Zimmer's isn't presented as a complaint; instead, he sees the situation as an audience awareness issue, and analyzes the various ways that professors can meet the students' desire for inspiration and spectacle.

Mouse potatoes joined couch potatoes, google officially became a verb and drama queens finally found the limelight on Thursday when they crossed over from popular culture to mainstream English language. --Jill Serjeant --Mouse Potatoes and googling go mainstream (Reuters)

--Troy Sterling and the Active and Passive Verbs (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I created this with Impress, the Open Office slideshow presenter, and exported it as a Shockwave file. I'm amazed at how tiny the resulting file is. It looks like a few effects didn't make the transition, but they were just eye candy.

I designed this as a simple linear slide show, for me to present in the front of the room. In this online version, all you can do is click to advance to the next page. It should at least have multiple-choice questions, in order to ensure that a bored reader isn't just clicking through on autopilot. (At any rate, it's more entertaining than my more traditional online guide to Active and Passive Verbs.)

This is just a bit of practice, as I continue to experiment with various media production tools.

I've also downloaded Jahshaka, an open-source video editing tool, but it crashed on my little wimpy laptop. I'll try it again when I get some time at the office.

Looking at the last two semesters taught by the author before the text adventure game and the most recent two semesters, every measure of student satisfaction is better. The only measure that might be troubling is perceived student workload.

This project is very large. Even with high-level architectural design and many useful snippets of code presented in class lectures, students work very hard in this course. The amount of work and new material requires a considerable time commitment from the instructor for office hours and other outside-class contact time. It also requires the selection of a good teaching assistant to provide additional time for questions to be answered. We are examining using a Wiki or similar shared editing space to assist students in asking, answering, and finding previous answers of questions; the efficacy of such a system is pure speculation at this point.

The integration of writing, oral presentation, program design, and coding makes this course a fantastic introduction to software engineering. This helps to overcome students? tendency to compartmentalize, thinking writing is for English class, coding is for computer science, and never the twain shall meet. --Brian C. Ladd --The Curse of Monkey Island: Holding the Attention of Students Weaned on Computer Games (Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges)

Fascinating article on a computer science course that uses a text-adventure project as a way of meeting liberal arts curriculum demands.

The interactive fiction concept might be spreading. Next year, HarperCollins plans to release Pretty Little Mistakes, a 600-page Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-type novel for adults by Heather McElhatton. Depending on the decisions made by the reader, the main character's options include becoming an actress, an art thief, a cult member, or a murderer. --Aman Batheja --Choose-your-own-adventure novels making a comeback (Star-Telegram)

Well, that's not how I use the term "interactive fiction," but I still enjoyed this author's take on the series.

I was a huge fan of Lucasarts' adventure games (Loom, The Monkey Islands and so on), and the fact that they were primarily word driven. There were graphics - and what graphics! - but for the most part they presented the player with an interesting dichotomy - nothing ever really happened, but you were responsible for it all. You would chat to somebody who would tell you that they wanted a compass, for example, and it was up to you to get that compass. Only, they would never just say "Get me the compass". Instead, it would be a conversation that could take up to twenty minutes, where you found out about the character's history, family, likes and dislikes, and, above all, the reason for them wanting the compass in the first place. --The Encyclopedia Frobozzica (Progression: Following Myself)

A well-done personal reflection on the graphical adventure genre.

So which is more sacred? The right to have your dog crap where it pleases? Or the right to privacy? You be the judge. --Puppy Poo Girl (Japundit)

I think we've all fantasized about somehow "getting back" at people who are rude or inconsiderate in public. Did the young woman in question lose her right to privacy because her dog had an accident on the subway, and because she didn't clean up? Did she really extend her middle finger like that, or is that a Photoshop job?

Pitchfork-wielding mobs don't stop to ask such questions.

--The Information Machine (YouTube)

A fascinating vintage piece of rhetoric. It skips a bit in the opening, but settles down quickly.

The images of room-sized computers and stacks of punch cards made me swoon. The narrator's patient voice and the final image -- of a rose fading into a heart -- show an concerted effort to make computer technology into a continuation of the human effort to make functional and beautiful order out of the world, rather than something to fear.

Note the gender-specific roles assigned to the cartoon characters -- a room full of white-coated female operators of some sort is followed by a very white, very male boardroom. We can't fault the film too much for being a product of its time, of course.

The content is visionary for 1957, the year of Sputnik, when science fiction heroes were battling giant mosters and robots that looked like walking water coolers. It's also interesting to see how computer scientists introduced the idea of mathematical simulation to the general public.

"Had you entered any village on Earth in around 3,000 B.C., the first person you would have met would probably be your ancestor," Hein marveled.

It also means that all of us have ancestors of every color and creed. Every Palestinian suicide bomber has Jews in his past. Every Sunni Muslim in
Iraq is descended from at least one Shiite. And every Klansman's family has African roots.

How can this be? --Matt Crenson --Roots of human family tree are shallow (Yahoo | AP)

Some excellent science writing.

Nowadays, when I sit down to read a book it is so hard to like it. I have forced myself to stare at a page for as long as it takes before I could grasp what I was reading. My attention span for slow paced readings and a teacher standing at the front of the room lecturing is lessening by the minute and I am determined to get it back.

I love technology and what it has done in my lifetime but I have suffered the consequences of constant stimulation. (Whenever I do Homework, the TV is on, my cell phones going off; I'm looking up movie times and the radio's blasting.)

Back then, my mom says she was happy and proud to put herself through college..."not everyone was as privileged as I was," she said...and receive such a reputable degree...I hope I feel that same way when I end this chapter of my life and in the meantime I will respect my professors as if they were doing me favor and spread the word. --Juli --College Etiquette (from a college student's perspective) (Juli's Views)

Even if Juli hadn't ended with a Valentine to the teaching profession, I'd have been very interested in the content of this essay. I've been thinking a lot about attention spans lately.

Both my children are lively and energetic, which means it's hard for them to sit still. All through the month of June, I've been going to the office just one or two days a week, and the rest of the time I've been doing the family thing.

Peter is well into that magical age of childhood when he finds almost endless amusement in a diverse range of activities such as burping, farting, and making up songs (about burping and farting). While I used to worry about his short attention span, now I find he gets fixated on something. ("Can I have a root beer now? I really want a root beer. Daddy, I really want a root beer. Can I ask mommy for a root beer? Did you forget about my root beer? Okay, while I wait, I'll pretend I'm drinking a root beer.")

He has picked up my interest in "god games" (like Sim City, Civilization, and lately, Black and White), and will sit for hours with a book on animals, chess, or robotics (he's eight, by the way). He's also becoming quite an expert on his scooter. He is very quick to lecture his sister when she's not being cooperative, and that can be a problem (since we have to keep reminding him that the best way he can help Carolyn learn to behave properly is to behave properly himself, so that she has a good example to follow).

For the last few days, I've been spending time playing board games and card games with my four-year-old, in part in order to increase her attention span.

She can't quite sit through a full game of The Magnificent Race, but that's okay, because Peter and I just alternate taking her turn for her when she has to wander off to do other things. But a hand of go fish or concentration is much more her speed. (I'm also teaching my daughter to read, which is a pleasure. I've been spending about a half hour a day with her, usually in two chunks. It's a challenge to get her to sit still, it's great to see her progress, and my wife looks on me with love whenever she sees me working so diligently with Carolyn.)

We were all sitting on front of the TV, ready to watch the space shuttle launch. Leigh had space books spread out in the living room, and we had freeze-dried ice cream ready for an afternoon snack. After Peter read her a book about space travel, Carolyn announced, "I don't want to be grow up to be a painter any more. I want to be -- an astronaut painter!" Or maybe she meant "astronaut-painter."

At any rate, we have been working hard to give them experiences that are richly linked, so that instead of flitting from subject to subject, they develop the ability to make connections that are both broad and deep.

Last week, I was participating in a faculty training session, and I was really interested in the material being covered, so I opened up a blank word processor page, and started typing notes. The facilitator, hearing the typing keys, politely asked for "us all" (meaning me) to pay attention. I switched to my PDA, where I tapped away more frantically in order to keep up. I'll keep this in mind the next time I presume that a student who is clicking keys or pushing a button is not paying attention.

Nevertheless, my favorite classroom at Seton Hill (Admin 405) has about 25 computers around the outside of the room, and tables in the middle. That means there's a physical break between lecture/discussion and online work.