August 2006 Archive Page

I know I sound completely backward, but please do not dumb down or slow down the class for me. As time goes on, I know I will become much more proficient and I am sorry if I am off to a clumsy and bumbling start...As I said before I learn fast and once I get into the swing of things I know I will be fine...I just hope I don't make you batty [with] questions in the meantime. -- Anonymous Student''[P]lease do not dumb down or slow down the class for me''

A student who sent me a routine "Did I do this right?" e-mail followed up with this message. What a great attitude. Now, I'm not going to ramp it up and deliberately leave this student behind just because I've been given permission not to slow down. In fact, I'll be watching this student even more carefully, now that I've seen this evidence of self-reflection and engagement.

It's the first week of classes. All my classes have met once or twice, I've already got the first homework to grade, and I've started to notice the classroom dynamics form.

My dean asked me to pick up an additional section of basic comp, so every day I'll see plenty of new faces that don't look particularly thrilled to be there. I tried to pitch the course as being a vital tool to prepare them for the future, and their first writing assignment was their response to hearing the words "college writing." So perhaps they can vent their angst usefully, and we can get focused on revision right away.

There are also a lot of new journalism majors in Media Lab (the course students take when they want to get credit for working on the student paper), and a good mix of familiar faces and new ones in "Writing for the Internet."

Of course, "a lot" is a relative term -- we're a small school, but this year we have as many freshman English majors as there are English majors in all the other 3 years. In a minute, I'll explain why that makes me feel a bit nervous.

I'm particularly excited about "New Media Projects," a 400-level class that's required for new media journalism majors, but has also attracted almost as many non-journalism majors. We'll be creating interactive fiction, 2D games, informational Flash sites, and 3D objects for a Half-Life 2 mod. I've been preparing for that one all summer long, and while some of the students who are in the class are wary of the game-heavy content, others are excited about the class precisely because it does focus on games.

My wife is teaching a course for the first time since the stork first paid us a visit.

So why am I nervous? And why did this student's e-mail message inspire me to blog it (with the author's permission, of course)?

It's been a rough couple of weeks for me. A few months ago, I learned that one of the senior English faculty was changing her schedule so that she will only be part of the graduate program. Another senior member is out on medical leave, and the one who's been here a few years longer than me is enjoying his well-earned sabbatical.

That leaves, as the senior member of the English faculty... me. Since I came on board, three additional full-time faculty have been hired.

No momentous decisions are looming, and the two colleagues who are on leave are available for consulting if there's a problem. But there are routine things that other people used to take care of, and now I'm taking a bigger chunk of the responsibility. Since things are actually going pretty smoothly, I'm enjoying the experience. (Knowing it's only temporary really helps.)

So let me echo the words of my student: As time goes on, I know I will become much more proficient and I am sorry if I am off to a clumsy and bumbling start...As I said before I learn fast and once I get into the swing of things I know I will be fine...I just hope I don't make you batty [with] questions in the meantime.

--books.google.com

Google's latest offering is the ability to download full-text versions of out-of-copyright books, and to sample the contents of many other books.

In a picture widely distributed to the media last month, a normal-looking Couric wore a frumpy light gray suit and her trademark smile.

But thanks to Photoshop, the popular editing software, the same photo, printed in a CBS magazine, shows her looking much, much thinner - and her suit has become a few shades darker.
--Weighing Anchor: CBS Photo Trickery Takes a Load Off 'Slimmer' Couric (New York Post)

I've blogged before rather flippantly about Adobe's attempts to fight the generic verb "photoshop," but this article credits the software as a proper noun. But there's no source for the implicit claim that Photoshop really was the software used, rather than, say The Gimp.

The conventions and standards of a PR department differ from those of the news department. I think it's reasonable to assume the news folks had no idea this would happen, but the before and after photos really do remind us how much the TV personality cult is driven by image, rather than talent (accuracy, insight, depth, etc.).

Ibsen.net is the official Internet site for Ibsen year 2006 and is by far the largest website about Henrik Ibsen on the world wide web, as regards both sheer volume of information and number of users. --Ibsen 2006 (Ibsen.net)

A portal for world-wide activities recognizing the 100th year of Ibsen's death. A theatre faculty member just called me up to ask whether I'd be interesting in participating in an evening program on Ibsen. (I said yes.)

Despite claims from the TV news outlet to offer "nonstop news" and "coverage you can count on," an Onion investigation has uncovered hundreds of instances in which KAMR Channel 4 10 O'Clock Eyewitness News team relied almost exclusively on news reports, weather forecasts, and even special-interest features already generated by the station's 6 O'Clock Eyewitness News team. --10 O'Clock News Team Relying Heavily On Work Of 6 O'Clock News Team (The Onion (Satire))

Among the dark corners where Dr Baker's thesis - titled Broadcast Space: TV Culture, Myth and Star Trek - shines light is the changing link between the starship Enterprise's intergalactic adventures and the real world's space race.

Shatner's monologues were inspired by the visionary speeches of JFK, advocating greater exploration. Thirty years on, the roles were reversed, with astronauts from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration guest-starring on Star Trek spin-offs to promote their underfunded existence. --Adam Morton --Star Trek's a thesis (The Age)

Come on, headline writer. You can do better than that.

Of course, students already know how to read the highly emotional and symbolic language of television. They learned it informally by clocking in an average of 5000 hours in front of the set before they reach school age -- the same amount of time it takes to jet around the world 148 times, or orbit the moon 30 times. But just because students are sitting slack-jawed and motionless in front of the set, it doesn't mean their minds aren't hard at work. Contrary to popular wisdom, television watching is not a passive activity.

It takes concentration to make sense of contemporary television. Narratives are broken by commercials, flying graphics, rolls and crawls, fast cuts and fades to black. Students may not have the vocabulary to articulate to adults how they make a story out of this hodge-podge of images, but on a rudimentary level, they already have a firm grasp on the grammar of television. In order for them to be fully aware that television is carefully constructed with specific codes and conventions, someone has to talk to them about the way tv works. --Kathleen Tyner --Can Your Students Read TV? (Media Literacy Review)

While I agree with Tyner's main point, that students should be trained to think critically about TV, I don't agree with the phrasing "television watching is not a passive activity." Yes, a viewer's brain is active, but there's no way for the viewer to change the experience based on reactions.

You can shout questions or challenges to a live speaker, you can applaud or boo, or sit in stony silence, or whisper a comment to your neighbor. Good speakers can pick up on such cues, and if they don't the audience will.

You can write back to a weblog.

All you can do to a TV is turn it off. It's binary. Or, in the case of those call-in contests, at best it's multiple choice. It is of course possible for live TV to respond more subtly to audience input, but didn't Ray Bradbury cover that pretty thoroughly in Fahrenheit 451?

Perhaps Tyner could have said "TV need not be a passive experience, if you are a critical viewer." I'd agree with that -- but it's probably fair to say that most of the slack-jawed teens aren't tuning in because they want to exercise their minds.

"It's disappointing in a way, and confusing," said Patricia Tombaugh, the 93-year-old widow of Pluto discoverer Clyde Tombaugh.

"I don't know just how you handle it. It kind of sounds like I just lost my job," she said from Las Cruces, N.M. "But I understand science is not something that just sits there. It goes on. Clyde finally said before he died, 'It's there. Whatever it is. It is there.'" --Dinky Pluto loses its status as planet (Yahoo! News (will expire))

I think reporters call something "dramatic" when they have already reported something else -- in this case, the astronomer's trial balloon of calling Pluto a "pluton planet" and thus not completely kicking it out of the planetary canon. Pluto is now a "dwarf planet".

Next we'll hear about Pluto losing its job as Mickey Mouse's sidekick.

Loosely related: I will check out this Palm astronomy application later: http://www.aho.ch/pilotplanets/

Update:

My kids had a "Pluto party," where they ate cold chocolate and sang, "We love you Pluto, oh yes we do..."

I blogged earlier about how upset my children were about Pluto's demotion. To make them feel better, I composed this new acronym:

Meddling
Villanous
Eggheads
Mercilessly
Just
Stomped
Upon
Nostalgia.

The computer was how I wrote! My attachment was dangerous as it now threatened to derail my progress on numerous projects, not the least of which was a manuscript I hoped to finish editing by the end of August. Losing time seemed impossible. I had to push through and figure out a way to adapt, to change the way I was working. I had to challenge my fixed thinking about my writing.

As my initial panic subsided, I saw what I could do alone, independent of my favorite technology. --Amy Wink --Going Solo (Inside Higher Ed)

I actually enjoy developing a syllabus in fits and starts, as ideas and inspirations strike me, and I jot them down in my Palm computer accordingly, when I'm in line in the grocery store, or when the kids are playing together nicely and I can spare a few moments.

Everything feels very different when I'm hunkered down in front of my keyboard in my office.

There are certain brainstorming and editing activities I prefer to do with pen and paper. I'm not so sure I'm interested in writing a hymn to the quill pen, but this article might be useful in my "Writing for the Internet" course, since my general assumption in that class is that most of the students have a long history of composing with computers, and little or no history of doing serious writing with pen and paper.

PDK Question (n=500) "Do you favor or oppose allowing students and parents to choose a private school to attend at public expense?" Results: 37% Favor 55% Oppose 5% Neither Favor or Oppose 2% Don't Know/Refused

Adjusted Question (n=500) "Do you favor or oppose allowing students and parents to choose any school, public or private, to attend using public funds?? Results: 60% Favor 33% Oppose 5% Neither Favor or Oppose 2% Don't Know/Refused

--New Evidence Calls PDK School Choice Poll into Question (Friedman Foundation)

This is a great example of how a subtle change in the wording of a question can significantly affect the way the public responds.

Think of that the next time you hear a politician or a TV talking head recite the numbers from a poll.

Jenny Jenny, you should know better;
This is not just another Greek letter.
It's a term that relates two important parameters;
If you know the circumference, you can find the diameter.

Jenny, you need this number;
You should keep it in mind.
Jenny, plug in this number:
Three point one four one five nine.
(Three point one four one five nine.)
Three point one four one five nine.
(Three point one four one five nine.) --Greg Crowther --3.14159/Pi (Science Songs)

From a great collection of science songs.

The singers have heart. In this recording, the backup singer is clearer and louder than the lead singer, so it's a bit disorienting...

1. Andy Warhol, Liberace, Jackie Gleason, and Lee Marvin have always been dead.

2. They don't remember when "cut and paste" involved scissors. --Mindset List for the Class of 2009 (Beloit College)

Always worth a read.

When I watched "Sesame Street" in the '70s, the human cast and the Muppets were quirky adults who didn't talk down to me with baby voices. Now the human cast gets almost no airtime, and the show is dominated by Elmo, Baby Bear and, now, Abby Cadabby -- preschoolers enamored by their own adorable stupidity.

The lesson they teach -- in opposition to Oscar, Big Bird, Grover or Bert -- is that bland neediness gets you stuff much more easily than character. --Joel Stein --Elmo Is an Evildoer (L:A Times)

E is for Elmo evil. F is for flamebait.

Is Elmo the Jar-Jar Binks of the Sesame Street franchise?

Still Tweaking Comment Filter (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Evan Reynolds and Josh Sasmor have both reported that the comments they tried to post got rejected... my apologies. Yesterday and today are mostly taken up with university and committee meetings, so I've had very little time to maintain the blog... it will all work out eventually, though.

A euphemism like "decision-based simulation" maybe, but rarely a "game." To many, video and computer games represent an adolescent diversion, a parental annoyance that thwarts homework, chores, and all things productive. So when FAS and others stump for games as an educational or training tool, they begin by stating the problem: "You oversee a very complex system," or "You want to reach a new audience." The notion of a game providing the solution comes later. Such is the way when establishing a new medium. --Josh Schollmeyer --Games get serious (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists)

Rescue workers and staff at the Debelis Corporation used cocoa-butter to thin out the chocolate and pull him free. --US man survives chocolate ordeal (BBC)

Thanks to Rosemary, who notes the final line: "The accident involved dark chocolate. "

Those discovered before 1900 would be called simply "planets" while a new sub-category of "plutons" would be introduced as a compromise between those who want to banish Pluto from the planetary club and those who want its status maintained.

The move would result in three new "pluton" planets being created along with Pluto: Pluto's moon, Charon; Ceres, an asteroid that for several decades after its discovery was described as a planet, and the so-called "object 2003 UB313", which was discovered in 2003 by an American astronomer and goes by the unofficial name of "Xena". --Solar system expands as astronomers redefine planets

I had no idea when I blogged this that it would cause my children so much stress. My son (age 8), who rather notably a few years ago chose to demonstrate his sensitive side while listening to On Top of Spaghetti, reacted very strongly to the news. His nose was deep in Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone, when I came in to read him the article.

His face grew red, and he started shaking. "If they are going to kick out Pluto, they should kick out Mercury too!"

My daughter (age 4) quoted Mr. Rogers, saying of Pluto, "I like it just the way it is. I like its coldness in the snow. The snow reminds me of Pluto, and I want it to be just the way it is. When I'm in the snow, it reminds me of Pluto."

I am a very visual and active learner. I draw circles around words or phrases, highlight pertinent passages, make marginal marks and notes, or draw small doodles so I can visualize a concept. I make arrows that connect similiar ideas, draw stars next to passages that I hope I'll be able to find again, or stick post-it notes on pages I want to visit again. This method of absorbing information does not work with online texts. --Moira Richardson --Bound for Glory - the future of print (Literary Tease)

Once upon time, in a galaxy exactly like this one, hard-core gamers spent hours staring at screens of tiny text and laboriously typing commands to move characters to the next level.

That era -- approximately 1979 to 1985 -- marked the golden age of interactive fiction, when games commonly consisted of text adventures tailored to run on personal computers capable of storing only about as much data as contained in a single digital photo. --Joanna Glasner --Text Games Get Film Treatment (Wired)

I'm glad to see that Jason Scott's Get Lamp feature is getting some publicity. The IF Comp is mentioned, too.

Comments are Back (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Let the commenting recommence!

I had to disable all my comments due to an ongoing attack, which I'm able to manage now, thanks to some expert guidance and unbelievable patience from Will Gayther, my former UWEC student who built this inidie blog software. He designed it in such a way that he can create the heavy-lifting modules that do something brand new, and I can build off of the hooks he creates in order to fine-tune the way they work.

I also had to delve into MySQL seriously for the first time, to figure out how to delete over 7000 sequential spams.

It's a shame that I'm going to have to stick with an approved-comments-only basis, but I had already made the switch earlier in the summer.

Get into the action of creating words with falling letters in WORDTRIS. Letters drop from the top of the screen, and you must form words horizontally and vertically. When the words form, the letters disappear, and the pace begins to quicken as you complete levels. As the letters continue to descend, look out for the letter to create the magic word that will clear all of the letters from the screen. Test your reflexes and your vocabulary with WORDTRIS. --Flash Game: WordTris (QuickFlashGames.com)

Great little word game.

Among the video news releases uncovered were an item on ethanol plants aired on a Louisiana station that was created by a public relations firm on behalf of Siemens AG, a corporation with a financial stake in the construction of ethanol plants.

In another case, a Boston station edited and re-voiced a video segment produced by an outside company on behalf of Toshiba, Fisher-Price and Scholastic, whose kids' products were featured in it.

The item ran at Christmas, without any indication to viewers it had been created as a news release. --FCC probes 'fake news' at U.S. TV stations (CBC)

--Crisis in the Middle East: Mapping the Conflict (Truth Laid Bear)

While the computer-generated flyovers do help give me some sense of geography on those rare occasions when I watch TV news, I'm really never satisifed unless I can click, click, click.

Try out this map -- it's really very useful for making sense of the conflict.

In science, feeling confused is essential to progress. An unwillingness to feel lost, in fact, can stop creativity dead in its tracks. A mathematician once told me he thought this was the reason young mathematicians make the big discoveries. Math can be hard, he said, even for the biggest brains around. Mathematicians may spend hours just trying to figure out a line of equations. All the while, they feel dumb and inadequate. Then one day, these young mathematicians become established, become professors, acquire secretaries and offices. They don't want to feel stupid anymore. And they stop doing great work.

In a way, you can't really blame either scientists or editors for backing off. --K.C. Cole --Weird Science: Why editors must dare to be dumb (Columbia Journalism Review)

I'm hearing Weird Al Yankovic in my head... "Dare to be Stupid! Dare to be Stupid!"

Within a year of birth, boys and girls also prefer different toys. Boys prefer cars, trucks, balls and guns. Girls prefer dolls and tea sets. Although evolution has clearly not had the opportunity to mould a preference for tea sets, there is evidence from another species which suggests that human infants might be predisposed to prefer toys that have particular adaptive significance to their sex. Several years ago, Melissa Hines, of City University in London, and Gerianne Alexander, of Texas A&M University, gave some vervet monkeys a selection of toys, including rag dolls, pans, balls and trucks. Male monkeys spent more time with the trucks and balls. Females played for longer with the dolls.

Obviously, cultural stereotyping is an improbable explanation for this. Nor could male monkeys have evolved a preference for fire engines. The theory put forward to explain what happened -- and the similar innate preferences of human children -- is that the toys preferred by young females are objects that offer opportunities for expressing nurturing behaviour, something that will be useful to them later in life. Young males, whether simian or human, prefer toys that can be used actively or propelled in space, and which afford greater opportunities for rough play. --The mismeasure of woman (The Economist)

A zoo in the Netherlands plans to set up a webcam to help its orangutans form long-distance relationships with potential mates in Indonesia. --Dutch plan orangutang web dating (BBC)

Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

Amazon used to be a large river in South America - but that was before the world wide web. This month the web is 15 years old and in that short time it has revolutionised the way we live, from shopping to booking flights, writing blogs to listening to music. Here, the Observer's Net specialist charts the web's remarkable early life and we tell the story of the 15 most influential websites to date. --Websites that changed the world  (Guardian Observer)

The the author's introduction is a bit puffy, but the actual list of web pages is pretty interesting.

Just over 60 percent of respondents were able to name Bart as Homer's son on the television show "The Simpsons," while only 20.5 percent were able to name one of the ancient Greek poet Homer's epic poems, "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey."

Asked what planet Superman was from, 60 percent named the fictional planet Krypton, while only 37 percent knew that Mercury is the planet closest to the sun.

Respondents were far more familiar with the Three Stooges -- Larry, Curly and Moe -- than the three branches of the U.S. government -- judicial, executive and legislative. Seventy-four percent identified the former, 42 percent the latter. --Snow White's dwarfs more famous than US judges: poll (Reuters)

Of course, this article is cherry-picking the juiciest quotes that make the best contributions to a "Let us all weep for the future of the country" article that publicizes the services of the pollsters.

If there was any question that Americans did well on, it's not reported in this little shocker story.

The house that Gates built will be launching XNA Game Studio Express, a set of (dumbed-down) development tools that will allow hobbyists and their ilk to develop games for both the Xbox 360 and the PC. Initially, these homebrew (is it still considered "homebrew" if you're using official tools?) games will only be playable to other coders part of a so-called "Creator's Club," a nice way to say that Microsoft will charge you $99 for a one-year subscription to play such games. --Microsoft to Let Regular Joes Develop Xbox Games (Gizmodo)

I'm not surprised Microsoft wants a piece of this pie.

Bloggers have been making fun of the examples Google's lawyers deem acceptable. They included: "Appropriate: I ran a Google search to check out that guy from the party. Inappropriate: I googled that hottie."

Web veterans have also been taken aback by Google's suddenly humourless approach. The eight-year-old company has previously cultivated an image of youthful non-conformity, from the jeans and T-shirts often worn by its billionaire founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, to the scooter lanes and volleyball courts at its Palo Alto headquarters. --To google or not to google? It's a legal question (The Independent)

The word google has recently joined words such as photoshop and xerox, as a generic term for an activity once tied to a specific product. Google's copyright lawyers have to demonstrate that they have acted to defend the copyright, or else the word can fall so far into the common domain that the company wouldn't be able to defend its name against competitors who try to use it. But I'm filing this as another example of why lawyers don't live on the same planet as the rest of us.

Some have appealed to Gingerich's group not to downgrade Pluto, saying it would disappoint children and throw our understanding of the universe into chaos.

Others say let the chips fall where they may and seem to relish the idea of overturning our current view of the universe. -Alan Crosby --Pluto's status attacked (Boston.com)

The debate over stem cell ethics... the politics and science behind the global warming issue... we're not all that different from the people who appealed to emotion and tradition when confronted with the theories of Gallileo and Darwin.

More than a dozen accusations of staged or doctored photographs have made their way through various Web sites in the past several weeks. None has been treated by the news outlets as seriously as the original Reuters incident, which saw the photographer Adnin Hajj fired and over 900 of his photos removed from the Reuters wire list. But numerous other outlets - including the BBC, The New York Times and AP - have been forced to recall photos or change captions following inaccuracies pointed out in online forums. --Sheera Claire Frenkel --Reutersgate strikes other news outlets (Jerusalem Post)

It looks like the mainstream media have learned from Rathergate.

It's important to understand that there is not just a single fraudulent Reuters photograph, nor even only one kind of fraudulent photograph. There are in fact dozens of photographs whose authenticity has been questioned, and they fall into four distinct categories.

The four types of photographic fraud perpetrated by Reuters photographers and editors are:

1. Digitally manipulating images after the photographs have been taken.

2. Photographing scenes staged by Hezbollah and presenting the images as if they were of authentic spontaneous news events.

3. Photographers themselves staging scenes or moving objects, and presenting photos of the set-ups as if they were naturally occurring.

4. Giving false or misleading captions to otherwise real photos that were taken at a different time or place. --Reuters Commits Four Types of Fraud (zombietime)

Because I don't follow the political blogs, this subject kind of crept up on me.

Warning -- some of the photos on the page are disturbing, but it's precisely the emotional impact of the photos that makes the issues of digitally altered and staged photos so important.

Note the two different shots of the same Lebanese woman lamenting the loss of her home in the immediate aftermath of attacks two weeks apart. It's possible that someone misidentified the photo, or that an entrepreneurial freelancer misrepresented the facts to make an additional sale. But the New York Times sequence that in one picture shows a dust-free young man clutching his hat under his arm, with no visible injuries, lying in such a manner that he appears to be pinned under a small metal pole, looks very interesting when contrasted with other images from the same sequence, showing what looks like the same man wearing his cap on his head, assisting with the rescue efforts.

Then there is "The Passion of the Toys," the dismissive title critics have given to a series of photos showing some remarkably undamaged and dust-free toys in the foreground of photos that show the aftermath of military attacks. A similiarly dramatic photo shows a mannequin wearing a wedding dress in the midst of the destruction.

The author writes, "Now, of course there is a real war going on, and there is real damage, and authentically tragic scenes. No one is denying that. So, with all the actual honest footage of unstaged war imagery floating around, why is Reuters resorting to supplementing its coverage with obviously fake photos?"

Here's an interesting quote, credited to a comment posted on the conservative blog Little Green Footballs:

Every time, if an Israeli is hurt, it was a "rocket" that did it; if a Lebanese/Hizb is hurt, "Israel" did it. Humans hurt Lebanese, but inanimate objects hurt Israelis, according to Reuters.

I didn't check the Reuters captions myself, but this is a good example of where bias can creep in. A similar controversy erupted in the aftermath of the Katrina disaster, when photo captions from one news agency described black people as looting, while a different news agency described a different scene with subjects who are not black (it looked like a white man and a Hispanic woman) as having taking food that they found. (See "You Say 'Looting,' I Say 'Finding'"

I'll also mention that "mute point" is an "eggcorn" -- a new category of writing mistake that linguists have identified and my fellow college teachers might find useful in responding to student writing. I'm certainly glad to have a new tool that helps me climb down from the high horse I have occasionally mounted in 10-plus years of teaching creative writing, essay writing, business writing, and you-fill-in-the-blank-here writing. It's nice to have a way of explaining mistakes that doesn't make students feel stupid.

[...]

All eggcorns makes sense on some level. For example, the eggcorn "girdle one's loins" is far more understandable than the archaic "gird one's loins." "Free reign" -- an extremely common misspelling -- expresses a similar laxness to "free rein," and there's a kind of exclamatory kismet between "whoa is me!" and "woe is me!" --Mark Peters --Like a Bowl in a China Shop (Chronicle)

I just recently used "free reign" in a blog entry. Whoa is me!

You could cure a toothache or make snowshoes using the original Britannica, of 1768-71. (You could also imbibe a lot of prejudice and superstition. The entry on Woman was just six words: "The female of man. See HOMO.") If you look up "coffee preparation" on Wikipedia, you will find your way, via the entry on Espresso, to a piece on types of espresso machines, which you will want to consult before buying. There is also a page on the site dedicated to "Errors in the Encyclopædia Britannica that have been corrected in Wikipedia" (Stalin's birth date, the true inventor of the safety razor).

[...]

Wikipedia is an online community devoted not to last night's party or to next season's iPod but to a higher good. It is also no more immune to human nature than any other utopian project. Pettiness, idiocy, and vulgarity are regular features of the site. Nothing about high-minded collaboration guarantees accuracy, and open editing invites abuse. Senators and congressmen have been caught tampering with their entries; the entire House of Representatives has been banned from Wikipedia several times. --Stacy Shiff --Know It All: Can Wikipedia conquer expertise? (The New Yorker)

Dodge Intrepid is hammy and satirical, following the adventures of a Beaver County librarian and his Sancho-like intern. The mode is decidedly retro, and the company has eschewed any kind of seriousness. If there's a blue note, Rubino says it's this: "My ulterior motive is to promote the library system, really." --Radio Serials Revived Via Podcast (Back Stage)

I've gotten a big kick out of Dodge Intrepid, a retro podcast that pokes fun at -- and does a great job recapturing the fun of -- 40s radio serials.

One of my favorite bits is when Dodge gets punched, and has to deliver a line that tells the audience what happened. He'll shout "My square jaw!" I burst out laughing while listening to that one in an airport. Other characters with different physiques will deliver variations of that line.

In one scene, our heroes have been captured by an Italian Futurist, who leaves them to be executed by a Rube Goldberg contraption (the operation and progress of which has to be conveyed through dialogue).

I do feel that in places the pace could be tightened, and the story is starting to run into the same problem that science fiction shows have when a technological plot device (in this case, time travel) is used inconsistently. But the point of the series is to have fun with the adventure genre, so I'm not about to start geeking out on the time travel plot holes. (I did take an undergraduate elective course on the philosophy of time travel... Nooo! Must... resist... urge... must... not... parade... obscure... knowledge....)

Okay, I'm feeling better now.

The characters are developing nicely, and that's what's the read draw for me. Oh, and the fake commercials that break up the action (most of them featuring characters from the show enjoying the various fake products) are themselves worth the download.

Avid SHU blogger Mike Rubino is the narrator and voices most of the recurring characters (other than Dodge himself, that is).

Computers & Composition: An International Journal invites contributions for a special issue, Reading Games: Composition, Literacy, and Video Gaming

While video gaming has been a strong cultural force since the advent of the popular coin-operated arcades of the 1970s, it is only within the last few years that video/computer gaming has been an academic focus: there is a lot of catch-up work to do. The average age of gamers has been steadily increasing, as has the number of dedicated players. Inevitably, this dedication to gaming will have -- if it does not already -- a profound impact on learning and literacy. Video/computer games are historically- and culturally-situated texts that operate in particular social contexts significant to composition theory and praxis. --CFP: Computers & Composition -- ''Reading Games: Composition, Literacy, and Video Gaming''

Matthew S. S. Johnson sent me this via e-mail and asked me to help publicize it. I posted the full text on KairosNews.

The following list is made up of a few things I've noticed in a lot of the interactive fiction games I've tested or tried out. I've tried these games for reasons I can't entirely fathom; admittedly, it's easier and leaves fewer disfiguring scars than self-flagellation. It is not necessarily any less painful though. --Michael J. Coyne --First-Timer Foibles

From a string of good narrative-related links on Grand Text Auto.

You rarely see, for example, a faculty member from an Ivy League university alongside one from a community college on a Modern Language Association panel, regardless of any research interests they might share. That shows the dangerous classism that pervades academe, something I admittedly did not see for myself until I began teaching at a "second tier" institution.

That classism is dangerous not because those of us who are categorized as less elite may be slighted at conferences or by journals or seminar leaders. It is dangerous because it divides us -- faculty members and students alike -- at a moment when financing for higher education is eroding, when grants for professional development and research are shrinking, when even the largest and most prestigious universities are still cutting faculty positions.

It is critical for the well-being of the academy and the students we serve that faculty members find common ground and work together. One way to do that is to work together locally; that is, for institutions -- public and private, large and small -- in a given area to capitalize on their proximity and benefit from one another's strengths. Hence my immodest proposal: Professors within a given region would swap jobs for a semester or a year with colleagues at institutions with different Carnegie ratings. --Lisa Bothson --A Cure for Academic Classism (Chronicle)

Not very practical, but an interesting suggestion. I've blogged before about the life I might have had if certain job interviews had gone better or worse than they did, and I had ended up somewhere very different from where I am teaching now.

Until recently entertainment reporting was in the hands of respectful, publicist-friendly titles such as Vanity Fair and The Los Angeles Times. Indeed, the latter recently opened one of its celebrity articles with this gem of a sentence: "One doesn't so much interview Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne as sit back and watch as their friendship, wordplay and enthusiasm for their craft plays itself out."

The internet has changed all that. Today the real stories are more likely to appear on the websites of The Smoking Gun, the Drudge Report or the TMZ (which got the Gibson scoop). These websites deal in tips, not interviews. They owe no favours to publicists. And they have more in common with (and more respect for) the British red-top press than The New York Times. --Chris Ayres --Be shocked! Be amazed! See Hollywood on a website near you (The Times Online)

The blog hurt the administration in two key ways: First, administrators were unable to focus on correcting the problems that led to the creation of the blog, and second, the administration's clumsy and futile efforts to combat the blog simply compounded the anger and contempt on campus. --Daniel W. Barwick --The Blog That Ate a Presidency (Inside Higher Ed)

Good analysis of an administrative train wreck that started because a college board responded poorly to a controversy started on a blog.

To be fair, anonymous complaints are hard to deal with, but ignoring a forum -- even an unfair forum -- is a sign that those who wish to abuse it will have free reign rein.

Barwick has a good solution: "Clearly what Alfred State needed (and other colleges probably need as well) is a blog that is confidential, accessible, not regulated for content, and yet not completely public."

Of course, if anything in the "confidential" blog becomes contentious, it's a simple matter for warring factions to copy and paste material to other forums, so it's probably better to think of such a community as gated, rather than the content as confidential.