February 2007 Archive Page

I recently crushed the dreams of about 400 high school students. I was asked to give them career advice, and so I told them to stop believing that they can achieve anything they want simply by wanting it. "I Believe I Can Fly" may be an uplifting song, but it's a stupid life philosophy. You can't fly. If you study about ten times harder, and have an ounce of common sense, and work really long hours, then perhaps you can build yourself a plane, and then you can fly. Otherwise, get used to walking.

[...]

People knock homeschoolers for not exposing their children to "socialization," but maybe it's a good thing. Being socialized into a society of idiots is not exactly great preparation for life success.

We have allowed our children to spawn their own personalized societies, worshipping as we do at the altar of individuality and personal space (the very name of the most popular social networking site reflects it: MySpace). To be sure, teenage years are a tribal time, when the overriding desire is to belong. They are called to their species like bees to honey. But this is precisely why we have to channel this impulse; given his druthers, the average teenager would like nothing more than to spend every scrap of time with other teenagers. But that's not a model for learning, or for maturation; it's Lord of the Flies.

The social impulse is a good thing, but as families disintegrate, and churches become less community than fleeting social club, we seem to offer our children little in this regard. Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised that they cling to each other like shivering animals. --Tony Woodlief --On the Spread of Stupid (Sand in the Gears)

Too harsh for my tastes, but blogworthy for several reasons. I'm about to start a brief professional development unit in one of my classes, and that will involve a challenging reality check for some students.

Yes, we're supposed to be nurturing at Seton Hill, but the Disney mantra of "When You Wish Upon a Star" and "Some Day my Prince Will Come" and "I've Got No Strings to Hold Me Down" and "You Can Fly" and "A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes" (and on and on the list goes) does seem to omit the "I'm Working My Butt Off So I Can Call My Successes My Own" part of the equation.

My wife dropped the kids off at work today (well, yesterday -- it's past midnight now), so that they could come to my Intro to Lit Study class and recite some of the "short poems" that I assigned. I've already had Peter (who just turned 9) recite all the rules for active and passive verbs, and grilled him in front of the class: "Peter, give me an active voice, past tense sentence. Now give me a passive voice, future tense sentence." I stood little Carolyn up on the table and held onto her while she recited poems about mud and turtles. She than said she wanted to sing Twinkle Twinkle and London Bridge.

Because they are missing out on the socialization that happens in the "school building," my children will have less experience spending seven hours a day with a group of 30 kids who are precisely their age, learning exactly the same material as they are, doing exactly the same tasks that someone else tells them to do. We sign the kids up for every library craft event, zoo class, nature reserve outing, and county rec program that we can fit into the schedule. Peter went SCUBA diving for the second time last week, and the week before that Carolyn floated on her back in the pool all by herself for the first time. We're scheduled to do a sleepover at the Carnegie Science Center (where we are members). Peter has far more experience being around other adults than other children. While they aren't always perfect angels to each other, Peter and Carolyn are each other's best friends.

Neither will sit still for more than a minute. Recently I was in a waiting room with two children who were about five and six, and I watched in stunned silence as these children sat next to their parents and colored quietly instead of marching around being a Greek spearman defending his city against Godzilla, or telling knock-knock jokes endlessly, or (for Peter) asking to be quizzed on the technical specifications of Star Wars craft or en passant move in chess or the atomic weights of the elements, or (for Carolyn) exploring what's under the table or behind the lamp or on that shelf while making up her own words to a Wiggles tune.

I have started shifting from praising my children less for being clever (which they are), to praising them more for being hard-working (which they are not always). Of course, hard-working for a four-year-old translates to putting away the toys she took out and not dumping her bathwater out when I go answer the telephone. Hard-working for a nine-year-old means following the instructions in his textbooks and continuing to do his homework when we're not sitting down right next to him in order to keep him on task. But I think many college students equate "being smart" with "not having to struggle," on the assumption that only stupid people have to work hard.

But, as I said, Woodlief has a harsher view on the subject. Today, my intro to lit students noticed that I put a line about careful revision at the climactic turning point of my sonnet about hating the strictures of sonnets, which I told them was a tribute to the new synapses that sonnet-writing will grow in their brains. Will they internalize that lesson? Most of them will, but at this early stage it's too early to tell just how many. Still, the message is out there, and they have a career research exercise that is designed to get them thinking about what they'll need to do while at SHU in order to be competitive for their dream job (or, more immediately, for a summer job or internship).

I've been thrilled by the level of energy my Lit Crit students have thrown into their work, and the past week I've been helping smooth out some backstage problems on The Setonian, so I've gotten a more extended look at how the current batch of students are managing themselves.

Video games DID NOT make this kid who he was, and it's unfortunate that the correlation is there.

The thing that really gets me with this whole thing is that the kid knows full well that by equating what he's done to a video game, that he will generate controversy and media coverage. It makes me sick that the media is jumping all over this, because that is exactly the result that he wants. --Anonymous stepmother of teen accused of beating homeless man --A rare opportunity (Penny Arcade)

Good fodder for the reaction to mainstream media's vilification of games. I've asked the Penny Arcade contributor to invite the author to contact me. I'm interested in hearing a little more, but relying on anonymous sources is always a bit tricky.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act provides that "[no] provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider," and that "[n]o cause of action may be brought and no liability may be imposed under any State or local law that is inconsistent with this section."  A recent decision of the First Circuit has reaffirmed the broad protection this statute provides to bloggers and message board administrators. --Federal Court Reaffirms Immunity of Bloggers from Suits Brought Against Commenters (American Constitution Society for Law and Policy)

This is good news. Since I often blog about cases in which bloggers get in trouble for what they post online, it's only fair to use this space to publicize legal precedents which support the blogosphere. Note, of course, that this ruling is about people who post comments on blogs, not about the people who post the initial entries.

--Pictaps (Roxik.com)

Thanks to the Flash power of Roxik's Pictaps, I can draw an effigy of the great Captain Kirk, and make him dance!

Dance, captain dance! Your puny phasers are no match for my superior intellect!

Bwahahaha!

Man, it's been a long day.

[...]

'So in the church-yard she was laid;
And, when the grass was dry,
Together round her grave we played,
My brother John and I

'And when the ground was white with snow,
And I could run and slide,
My brother John was forced to go,
And he lies by her side.'

'How many are you, then,' said I,
'If they two are in heaven?'
Quick was the little Maid's reply,
'O Master! we are seven.'

[...] --We Are Seven (Bartleby)

This poem is a bit creepy, since the speaker has some morbid desire to crush a little girl's enduring love for her dead siblings.

An earlier stanza reads thus:

'You run above, my little Maid,
Your limbs they are alive;
If two are in the church-yard laid,
Then ye are only five.'

Yet, at the conclusion of the poem, the speaker doesn't ask "How many be alive?" Instead he says,

'But they are dead; those two are dead!
Their spirits are in heaven!'
'Twas throwing words away; for still
The little Maid would have her will,
And said, 'Nay, we are seven!'

He fed her a line that ended with "heaven".
It's not much surprise that she answered with "seven".

However, the speaker doesn't seem to notice that... from the outside perspective as the receiver of the poem, we know full well that the little girl won't change her mind. The last stanza adds a rhymed couplet that stretches out the tension -- but it's only the tension of seeing the banana peel on the floor or seeing the cream pie in someone's hand. We know exactly what's coming, and the fact that the speaker is calling attention to the stubbornness and short-sightedness of the little girl means that we can see that the speaker is just a stubborn and short-sighted. The speaker doesn't even try to muster up the power of the poetic structure of the poem, because if he did, he could at least ask "How many be you alive." The speaker is just as out of sync with the form of the poem as he is with the conventions of sentiment, which would cherish and celebrate the little girl's devotion.

The speaker does not learn a lesson in this poem, but we do.

The British people have a different type of English language. In some ways it's the same as yours, but in other ways it's quite strange. Learn here how to communicate with British people.

You may have heard some British people talking in movies. The men are the posh baddies who often drink to much; the women are the posh ladies who live on their own and have too much money. You may not think so, but your Americans have got 100% right! We are like that! --John Hopkin --Britain for Americans (Home)

Not a very informative home page on the site, but a hilarious send-up of American ignorance.

Your retro, old-skool little song enshrines
The unrelenting jackboot five-stress beat
Of heel-toe thumping heel-toe bumping feet
In fourteen rigid rhyming goose-step lines.
What talent's there? I'll never march; I swarm!
I curse your foolish rules, your chains that bind,
That dare to organize my off-beat mind;
For truly I don't need no steenkin' form.
Why pack and prune, revise, rework, rephrase
My unproof'd laundry list of angst or hate?
In beatless bliss I'll blurt and bloviate
And vent my emo vices in cafés.
From boxy vises freed, such verse as mine
Shall flow like so much screw-top Wal-Mart wine.
--Dennis G. Jerz (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I don't think of myself as a poet, but I do teach a basic prosody unit in my Intro to Literary Study class, which includes many creative writing majors. So I write poetry from time to time just to sweep the cobwebs out of that part of my brain.

So far nobody has ever stepped forward and claimed to prefer writing anything but free verse, but students have a hard time analyzing poetry critically (beyond "I liked it" or "it was boring") if they don't understand the raw materials of poetry -- the rhyme, assonance, meter, metaphor, and all those other good things that must work together to make a poem. (The root word of "poem" means "to make".)

When students write first-person short stories, it often seems to me that they are describing a movie in which the narrator is the main character. The story contains references to the protagonist's facial expression ("A big smile spread across my face"), which implies an external vantage point that a first-person narrator shouldn't be able to access.

A short story author can't rely on a camera showing a picture of character's faces, but the solution is not to explain facial expressions in more detail. Movies are a much better medium for conveying emotion through facial expressions, but short stories have other advantages -- they are cheap to produce and distribute (so just about anyone can do it); it's not possible for bad casting or horrible incidental music or the shadow of a boom microphone to ruin a short story (all the technical errors that threaten to derail a short story are fully within the responsibility of the author to fix); and narrative can communicate both the spoken words and the internal thoughts of the characters with equal fluidity.

I suspect that students who follow the model of song lyrics when they think of poetry are similarly thrown off. In a song, it's possible to get away with adding extra beats into a line by substituting, say, two eighth notes for one quarter note. The verses of a song, therefore, don't have to follow the same metrical pattern in order to sound regular. And a pop song generally has a refrain that's repeated with increasing musical intensity, so that the music and the visuals that go along with the official video contribute to the emotional power of the song.

Back in ye olde days, before technology brought mechanically identical copies of professional performances to the mass audience, the easiest way to hear a song was to sing it yourself.

For a good many decades, thick fumes of incense have been wafting from the English literary establishment in the general direction of TS Eliot. The latest offering by the acolytes to the high priest is this study by Craig Raine, which admits that some of Eliot's drama isn't up to much but otherwise won't hear a cross word about the great man. --Terry Eagleton reviews Craig Raine's TS Eliot --Raine's sterile thunder (Prospect)

Eliot himself wrote, "It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting." In truth, some poets are extremely interesting because of the events in their lives, and others are good poets despite them.

--The Steampunk Workshop

Link via boingboing.

Reminds me of Thomas Jefferson's PAA (personal analog assistant).

Still, what could be better than a crocheted stuffed Dalek, the greatest nemesis of Doctor Who?
--EXTERMINATE! (Shigella)

Via boingboing -- though it's described there as a "cozy" (that is, a decorative insulator that keeps a teapot warm).

My tenure story is the all-too-familiar tale of the assistant professor hired to start a new program. That program becomes wildly successful, beyond anyone's predictions. Someone has to administer the needs of the program, so the new assistant professor (aka me) handles it. As the program grows, she handles more of its administration. She and another new hire in her field handle the details together, working in remarkable agreement and cooperation.

The program is a runaway success, drawing in half of the majors in the department. The assistant professor, however, is taking it for the team. Every year her evaluations admonish her to do more research and less service, but no one steps up to help with the increasingly crippling service load.

Finally, after four years, the two assistant professors make a major public cry for help, and the department grants both of them release time from teaching a course in exchange for running the program.

By then, though, it is too late to help... --Lynne Murphy --At Your Service (Chronicle)

This story doesn't exactly apply to me. I was hired to take a leadership role in the new media journalism program, a position that includes advising the school paper. And our program is successful. Just the other day, my division chair was walking down the hallway with his nose in a printout, and he poked his head in my office to tell me that our journalism enrollment was "outstanding." The next day I heard from a former journalism major who said she regretted changing to a journalism minor, and a different student who, after her coach told her to quit the paper to spend more time at practice, quit the team instead.

Murphy is talking about being worked to death through service. Regular readers of my blog will, I hope, forgive me for mentioning yet again that SHU gives me a course release every semester to advise the paper. I do teach a 1-credit "Media Lab" course, but most students who work on the paper don't take that course. So, advising the paper includes dropping by when the students are working, just so I can see them interacting with each other; and of course, I am available via e-mail and phone.

When I attended a workshop for new advisers of college newspapers, I was the only tenure-track faculty member in the group; others were part-timers, administrators, or even members of the residence life staff.

Whenever the paper is in production, I make sure to schedule my week with several hours of puntable work, so that I can drop it and help troubleshoot whatever problem may come up. The students are handling issues of journalism ethics and quality just fine on their own, but technology glitches and personnel issues have been some areas where I thought the students welcomed my intervention.

While I always block out time expecting to have to deal with a crisis, the truth is often the students just want to talk about what they did when they solved a crisis on their own. It's easy to be a mentor on those occasions! If I don't need to intervene, then my office gets cleaned, my inbox gets sorted, my blog gets a few extra entries, and my students get their papers returned a little faster.

I can take all this in stride because my job isn't to put out a paper... my job is to teach a rapidly-rotating group of students how to put out a paper.

A core group of students expressed significant interest in putting out a summer issue of the paper -- something that we could give out to incoming freshmen when they visit the campus during the summer. We already have magazine-length articles that a previous group of Media Lab students wrote last year, so I'd love it we could have a glossy cover and -- who knows -- maybe even color.

I do need to carve out some time for making revisions to my latest article (still under review, but the editor has been very positive). This is the time of the year when the workload starts to pile up and students stop smiling at me when I see them in the hall (particularly if they've just skipped my class). And then it's time for midterms and a conference in New York.

Whoops, my daughter's nap is over, so my blogging time today is, too.

While computer and (especially) console games are just discovering the delights and benefits of community, board games have always been a social experience. And unlike the enormous teams required today for game development, board games can still be created by one or two people at a cost of next to nothing. (Admittedly, board games have a higher cost of goods.) As a result, board games are relatively free to experiment and innovate. Sure, a successful game like Carcassonne will still spawn expansions, and even an attempt to stretch the franchise by applying the brand to a marginally-related game like Carcassonne: Hunters and Gatherers. But the vast majority of games the industry produces are wildly original, in a way that those of us in the electronic games industry can only look at with sadness and envy.

Not that there aren't many glimmers of hope in electronic gaming. The arrival of casual games as a viable market is bringing a whole new demographic to the game-playing world. The growing indie games movement offers a venue for experimentation that the big publishers have long since abandoned. The rise of academic programs in game design and game development brings with it the promise of myriad student projects, which can help lead the way toward new genres and new types of gameplay (go to intihuatani.usc.edu/cloud/flowing to see a great example). The growth of "serious games" -- games meant to teach and heal and spread ideas in the arenas of government, industry, medicine, political action, and many more -- are already bringing new understandings to interactive entertainment. And the Internet continues to serve as a marvelous way to distribute low-budget but often wonderful little games. Let a thousand flowers bloom. --Steve Meretzky --What We Could Learn From Board Games  (GameDaily)

About one in seven of the Shakespearean atoms in your body originated from his excrement. --An Estimate of the Number of Shakespeare's Atoms (Jupiter Scientific)

Deep thought of the day.

I had not expected students to care only about their high grades (A or A- are the only acceptable "good" grades) and about getting work done so they can get on with their partying or video games ("relaxing") or even sleeping. I had not expected that students would dash off a first draft and think it should get that desired A. I had not expected that students at a first-rate university -- because you should know that the institution offering me a coveted sabbatical is a generous, well-endowed one with high admission criteria, unlike some of the other universities where I taught -- would know so little of books and the intellectual tradition.

And the real whammy, the genuine shocker, was all the other stuff: I turned out to be a conscientious committee member and an imaginative administrator in running an underfinanced center. Then my life began to fill up with what I consider mental spam: meetings, strategies, proposals, reports that go unread or even missing when they are finally needed, lunches with candidates, time spent lobbying colleagues for support for votes, informational meetings about how to work the computer program that keeps track of student activities, and scheduling for all the meetings, lunches, and committees. --Susan Blum --Sleep and the Sabbatical (Chronicle of Higher Education)

What will I do if I get a sabbatical?

Let's dream a little here. For me, a one-semester sabbatical would mean release from four courses, plus a semester worth of committee work. I could ask to teach a 2/2 load for one year... could I ask to teach a 3/3 load for 2 years? A 3/4 load for four years? Maybe I could teach a summer section of basic comp, and end up with a 3/1/3 load for four years... but would I become accustomed to that level, and would I hit a wall when I had to go back to the regular schedule?

If I stretched it out that much, would I even notice that I was on sabbatical?

Oh, well... it's been fun counting these chickens.

[W]e all know that many actual rappers and hip-hop identities are in fact middle class computer geeks from nice suburbs (or indeed public school educated sons of bishops). Is the converse true? --Rich --Armed and dangerous (ObservatioNZ)

An interesting reflection on nerdcore hip-hop. (I prefer geeksta rap, but that's just me.)

-- Matthew White
--[White]-o-Glyphics:Introduction (White-o-glyphics)

These glyphs translate as "It was a dark and stormy night."

Fascinating stuff.

It reminds me of a long bus ride that I spent sitting next to a hearing-impaired woman. I had learned the American Sign Language alphabet in third grade, but after spending several hours with this woman I figured out the grammar, and was able to generate my own signs based on the rules I had internalized, and she was able to understand me. Of course, if there was ever a word I didn't understand I would start to spell it and she would provide me with the proper sign, so our ability to communicate didn't depend solely on what I learned.

Meanwhile, colorless green ideas sleep furiously.

I'll probably be teaching a "Media in Culture" course next spring, and everywhere I look these days, I've found another wonderful nugget.

My barely-used, barely-2-year old SCD103 is giving me the black screen in Camera mode but appears operational in Playback mode. I have called Samsung twice and was fed much the same story as I've read on this post. Please add us to the lawsuit too! --Another SCD103 victim (Camcorderinfo.com)

My camcorder recently went out while I was recording my daughter's preschool recital. Actually, it flickered on and off, so I was able to get some sections... I'd really rather it have cut off completely, so I wouldn't have felt obligated to wrestle with it during the show.

I had a voice recorder and my tiny hand-held digital camera, but neither of those really match the quality of the segments that I got off of the dying camcorder.

Looks like Samsung settled a class action suit related to this problem... one poster on the forum reports Samsung reluctantly agreeing to a free repair.

Step Afrika, the first professional company in the world dedicated to the tradition of stepping, performed at Seton Hill on Thursday, February 8. Step Afrika is critically acclaimed for its efforts to promote an appreciation for stepping, an art form born in African American fraternities and based in African traditions. Step Afrika serves as a model for the use of stepping in educational settings, espousing themes such as teamwork, academic achievement and cross-cultural understanding. Step Afrika reaches tens of thousands of Americans each year and has performed on many stages in North & South America, Europe, Africa and the Caribbean.

--Step Afrika Performs at Seton Hill (Seton Hill University)

The girl on the far right is my daughter, Carolyn.

Magazines - like television and other Old-Guard media - are seeing readers and advertising dollars follow consumers online. --Paul Tharp --Mags' Circ Sags: Top Titles Down (NY Post)

While "Mags' Circ Sags" is a very efficient headline that lets the typesetter print it out in huge, eye-catching letters, a more informative title doesn't take up any more space on a web page. Another instance of something that works well in the world of ink and paper not translating very well into the world of bits and pixels.

--Introducing the book (YouTube)

New media anxieties are nothing new.

The space-age technology of mobile phones has allowed us to return to the more natural and humane communication patterns of pre-industrial society, when we lived in small, stable communities, and enjoyed frequent 'grooming talk' with a tightly integrated social network. In the fast-paced modern world, we had become severely restricted in both the quantity and quality of communication with our social network. Mobile gossip restores our sense of connection and community, and provides an antidote to the pressures and alienation of modern life. Mobiles are a 'social lifeline' in a fragmented and isolating world. --Kate Fox --Evolution, Alienation and Gossip: The role of mobile telecommunications in the 21st century (Social Issues Research Center)

With the ides of February comes lots of snow and Teaching Carnival #20. --Teaching Carnival #20 (Revisionspiral)

I just noticed that Revisionspiral included my to do list in Teaching Carnival #20.

I'm still not finished with that list, but I've made good progress.

"MySpace knows its Web site is a playground for sexual predators. Because of that, MySpace should be doing some very basic safety precautions."

In a statement, MySpace officials applauded the judge's decision that the company isn't responsible for "wrongdoing committed by individuals who visit our site."

The lawsuit was brought by the Austin girl, who alleges that Pete Solis, of Buda, lied in his MySpace profile about being a high school senior to gain her trust and phone number. --Judge Tosses $30M Suit Against MySpace (Wired | AP)

--Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson --2014 EPIC, by Google''Museum of Media History'')

Via cac.aphony.org. A great companion piece to Web 2.0: The Machine is Us/ing Us.

Even if the animation of Star Trek was limited, it becomes clear that the creativity of the animators working under such conditions was not. In fact, there are more than a few instances where the animators managed to turn their weaknesses into strengths in some unexpected ways.

In this article, we'll take a look at some of the tricks of the trade that Filmation animators used throughout the Star Trek animated series to save money or time on animation. Think of it as a mocking appreciation, like the way you'll give your friends crap for their weird personal habits while realizing that it's those weird personal habits that make them your friends in the first place. --Ace the Bathound
--A Note of Recognition for: Filmation's ''Star Trek'' Animators (Toon Zone News)

Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

I mourn the great quotes I've lost to indecipherable notes and the quotes abandoned when speakers simply outran my note-taking ability.

And it's not just me being left in the dust by fast talkers. When I peer over a reporter's shoulder at some freshly recorded notes, the mess I see never inspires confidence.

Yes, a tape recorder can help. But try juggling tapes for three multi-source stories, all of which are due in two hours. The benefit of the recorder is usually sacrificed to the reality of the daily writing load.

Thus the question I recently posed to a variety of journalists and journalism educators here and abroad: If taking notes is so important, shouldn't journalists know shorthand? --Rex Rhoades --Should reporters learn shorthand for notes? (American Society of Newspaper Editors)

Recent Seton Hill journalism graduate Amanda Cochran directed me to this one. (I love this quote from her reflection on interviewing: "I am a biologist with a butterfly net, a miner in a hole, a detective at a fresh crime scene. The only difference from story to story is the size of the holes in the net, the depth of the mine and the number of clues.")

I agree completely that you can't depend on tapes or digital recorders. I have developed my own kind of shorthand, but it's illegible to me unless I immediately go back and transcribe it into longhand. I wonder whether familiarity with IM speak gives the younger generation of journalists an edge.

A good quote from the piece: "No journalist ever regrets mastering shorthand, but probably the majority in Britain now have not done so". I feel very similar about touch-typing. As a senior in high school, I took a typing elective. At times I felt like I was the only student in that class who actually wanted to learn touch-typing. No, it didn't give me any college credit, and my senior class rank would have been a few notches higher if I'd piled on another AP course, but even in 1985 I was putting in a lot of time in front of a computer keyboard, and the two-finger hunt-and-peck just wasn't cutting it.

I have recently installed an expansion to my PDA that turns the keyboard into a freaky grid that is optimized for PDA input, and I was surprised at how easy it was to learn another system.

I'm filing this under technology because the written language is perhaps the most powerful invention.

We think of precociousness as an early form of adult achievement, and, according to Gladwell, that concept is much of the problem. "What a gifted child is, in many ways, is a gifted learner. And what a gifted adult is, is a gifted doer. And those are quite separate domains of achievement."

To be a prodigy in music, for example, is to be a mimic, to reproduce what you hear from grown-up musicians. Yet only rarely, according to Gladwell, do child musical prodigies manage to make the necessary transition from mimicry to creating a style of their own. The "prodigy midlife crisis," as it has been called, proves fatal to all but a handful would-be Mozarts. "Precociousness, in other words, is not necessarily or always a prelude to adult achievement. Sometimes it's just its own little discrete state." --Eric Wargo --The Myth of Prodigy and Why it Matters (Association for Psychological Science)

Of those praised for their effort, 90 percent chose the harder set of puzzles. Of those praised for their intelligence, a majority chose the easy test. The "smart" kids took the cop-out.

[...]

Having artificially induced a round of failure, Dweck's researchers then gave all the fifth-graders a final round of tests that were engineered to be as easy as the first round. Those who had been praised for their effort significantly improved on their first score--by about 30 percent. Those who'd been told they were smart did worse than they had at the very beginning--by about 20 percent.

[...]

In follow-up interviews, Dweck discovered that those who think that innate intelligence is the key to success begin to discount the importance of effort. I am smart, the kids' reasoning goes; I don't need to put out effort. Expending effort becomes stigmatized--it's public proof that you can't cut it on your natural gifts.

[...]

The only difference between the control group and the test group were two lessons, a total of 50 minutes spent teaching not math but a single idea: that the brain is a muscle. Giving it a harder workout makes you smarter. That alone improved their math scores.

[...]

In one [study], students are given two puzzle tests. Between the first and the second, they are offered a choice between learning a new puzzle strategy for the second test or finding out how they did compared with other students on the first test: They have only enough time to do one or the other. Students praised for intelligence choose to find out their class rank, rather than use the time to prepare.

[...]

But it turns out that the ability to repeatedly respond to failure by exerting more effort--instead of simply giving up--is a trait well studied in psychology. People with this trait, persistence, rebound well and can sustain their motivation through long periods of delayed gratification. Delving into this research, I learned that persistence turns out to be more than a conscious act of will; it'salso an unconscious response, governed by a circuit in the brain. Dr. Robert Cloninger at Washington University in St. Louis located the circuit in a part of the brain called the orbital and medial prefrontal cortex. It monitors the reward center of the brain, and like a switch, it intervenes when there's a lack of immediate reward. When it switches on, it's telling the rest of the brain, "Don't stop trying. There's dopa [the brain's chemical reward for success] on the horizon." While putting people through MRI scans, Cloninger could see this switch lighting up regularly in some. In others, barely at all.

What makes some people wired to have an active circuit? ... "A person who grows up getting too frequent rewards will not have persistence, because they'll quit when the rewards disappear." --Po Bronson --How Not to Talk to Your Kids: The Inverse Power of Praise. (New York Magazine)

Praising children for being intelligent led them to choose easier work.

Praising children for their effort makes them more willing to take on more challenging work.

At some point, of course, the student has to produce a final product. At my previous job, I sometimes encountered students who protested that they have come to class every day, they have done all the reading, and they have submitted all the assignments on time, and who seem to feel that simply being a good citizen should earn them the A.

I don't know whether the students here are different or whether I just do a better job dispelling that notion early in the semester. But I don't see any more students who expect to coast to an A.

I had never really seen such a clear description of the connection between success and persistence. I'm about to introduce a fiction-writing unit for a freshman English class, and I'm conscious of the fact that some students will have been told by their high school teachers that they are "good writers," and that some of these students may translate that praise to mean "Because I am a good writer, I won't have to work very hard on this assignment." But I'm getting ahead of myself... I still have papers to mark from the last set of exercises, so I should probably cut this off and get on with the routine stuff. (Persistence! I will feel great when I finish that stack of papers! Hold on brain, dopa is coming!)

Sometimes lawyers contact me about a case featuring URL hacking (or, as one such lawyer called it, "URL typing"). I haven't yet been interested enough in a case to offer to do any writing or testifying for free. But I'll summarize my position here.

• If a company built a private warehouse, not intended to be accessed by the public, and I broke through the door and saw a secret, I would be in the wrong; the problem here is breaking and entering.
• If a company built a gallery that was open to the public, and put its secrets out on the walls along with the material visitors are supposed to see, and I walked in when the gallery was open for business happened to see a secret, I have done no wrong; the problem is the company's non-existent security.
• If a company built an archive, where all visitors were expected to write down a catalog number and wait in the library while the clerk fetches it, and I ask the clerk to bring me "documents/2008/annual," the clerk will probably first go to the shelf and see if such a document exists.
  • If it does exist, the clerk will check to see whether the document has a "Top Secret" tag on it, or an "Embargo until Dec 2007" sign, or a note that says "Only Bill, Sally, and Freddy are permitted to read this document."
  • If the owner of the item has placed it in the archive without any restrictions whatsoever, the clerk would be expected to treat this request just like any other.
• The problem is once again the company's non-existent security.

In the archive example above, if I bombarded the clerk with hundreds of random requests, hoping to come up with something unexpected, that's a very different matter from actually typing the URL out of a desire to get to a page that deductive reasoning suggests ought to exist.

Since some web pages are dynamically generated from URLs that include complex parameters, there is not a clear line between what counts as simply typing the URL and manipulating complex parameters in a deliberate attempt to alter the way the site's designers expected the site to behave.

Of course, manipulating a system may be against the terms of an end-user license, student handbook, employment contract.

Just because a company's website permits a hack does not automatically excuse all the actions carried out by the hacker. Most hackers are simply curious, seeking a faster, more powerful way to do something that seems slowed down by an unnecessarily tedious newbie-friendly process. URL hacking won't help a user bypass a simple .htaccess password, and it won't let user see sensitive material unless the webmaster has already placed that material on the website. --URL-Hacking: Do-it-yourself Navigation (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I just added this section to an old handout.

The BBC televised a 38-minute adaptation in 1938 - probably the first ever example of science fiction television. --My Science Fiction Life: The Story of Science Fiction in Britain (BBC)

The excerpt is from the entry on one of my favorite plays, Rossum's Universal Robots.

Pundits have been predicting the arrival of "interactive fiction" for decades -- dating back at least to the clunky, campy Choose-Your-Own-Adventures of the 1980s. Video games ploughed some of this terrain: Some of the first, like Zork, were text-based adventures, which themselves were born out of the storytelling vibe of Dungeons and Dragons. But Hotel Dusk is one of the first games to pitch itself more as book than a form of play, which made me wonder: Is it really possible to make reading into a game? --Clive Thompson --Hotel Dusk: Novel or Game? (Wired)

I don't have a Nintendo DS, so I won't be able to play this. The structure of the essay is a little bit like a freshman comp essay -- "Some people say A, others say B, but in conclusion, the truth is somewhere between A and B." I'd rather he start with a thesis that posits the truth being somewhere between, and spend the essay developing that idea, rather than save it for the conclusion. And, of course I would have preferred interactive fiction to get more than a cursory mention.

Nevertheless I still welcome a thoughtful review that treats the general subject of reading-as-games.

As I stared at the screen glassy-eyed, reveling in this whole new subculture I did not even know about, I stumbled across a Web site for Inform 7, http://www.inform-fiction.org, a design system for interactive fiction. Much simpler than a programming language, Inform 7 is a free, easy way for nerds like me to create their own games, albeit after investing endless hours of time and forgoing many nights of sleep.

I now had in my grasp a way to create my own world -- to play God. --Chuck Pizar --Hidden in the shadows of towering 3-D graphics, text games still survive (Home Tribune News)

I forgot--on the way out Z, at w-l=Z-1, Rick Olsen, at great cost to his body, entered the tight canyon heading south with the great water sounds. It turned out to be a 1' high 9" wide waterfall. The canyon continues as a very bad lead '2'h X 1'w with a 1" stream in the floor. Rick lost a sock in this one--it came off and he couldn't backup to recover it. Why did he have his shoe off? I told you, it is. a very tight canyon. --Will Crowther
Will Crowther Caving Anedcote (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Will Crowther, the creator of "Colossal Cave Adventure" and the grandfather of the adventure game genre, filed this anecdote as part of a Cave Research Foundation expedition report, dated May 17, 1975.

From this passage, we can glimpse both Crowther's subtle sense of humor and the caver's attention to resource management -- both of which are evident in "Adventure."

Note that the caving term "canyon" simply means a passage that is taller than it is wide.

In a bizarre attack, a well-known author and Holocaust scholar was dragged out of a San Francisco hotel elevator by an apparent Holocaust denier who reportedly had been trailing him for weeks. --Adam Martin --Elie Wiesel attacked in S.F. hotel (Examiner.com)

He wasn't hurt, but this is scary.

It's just 12 hours. (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

When I told a colleague that I was planning to stay at work until midnight in order to work on an abstract, her eyes bugged out.

"I didn't come into work until noon today," I said, "so I'll only spend 12 hours in the office."

Her look of pity was very touching.

I submitted that abstract at 17 minutes after midnight, after spending 20 minutes on a new title that I thought I could live with.

Now I'm going home to bed.

"I really don't know whether we'll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don't care either," he says. --NY Times publisher: Our goal is to manage the transition from print to internet (Haaretz.com)

Friday the entire Field Camp crew went to the Bedquilt Entrance to remove the debris from that project. This consisted of the old gate, a steel monster that took four people to haul up the hill, the broken concrete from the former gate base and the tools used on the project. We formed a chain gang part of the way up the hill and passed the broken concrete from person to person till we reached the end of the line. Then we moved on up the hill and repeated the process until the top was reached. The debris was loaded into a waiting trailer and removed from the area. --Mammoth Cave Restoration Field Camp [1994] (Mammoth Cave Restoration Group)

I'm working on a new article on "Adventure," and while trawling the net for new gems, came across the fate of the locked 3x3 steel grate that the Nameless Adventurer must unlock in order to begin exploring the wonders of Colossal Cave.

The thought of that famous grate -- which I have opened hundreds of times on dozens of different computers (including the other day on my PDA) -- hauled away and dumped somewhere almost makes me weep.

Colossal Cave Adventure was itself an entrance of sorts; bits and pieces of it may be found in games far and wide, even games played by people who have never seen a command-line interface.

Let's hope that the metal from that entrance was recycled and that bits and pieces of it are reinforcing new structures spread far and wide.

I have fired out several e-mails to the MCRG, seeking photos or other contacts.

They call it 'iPod oblivion' -- when you're talking on a cell phone or listening to an iPod while crossing the street.

"It can be a distraction you know but most times I stay alert ... I'm aware of my surroundings," iPod user John Palmer said.

But Albany thinks it's a problem, and so Senator Carl Kruger of Brooklyn is proposing a law that if anybody uses any kind of electronic device while crossing an intersection, they may face a fine of $100 dollars. --A fine for using your iPod, cell while walking? (WABC)

Note that this is a state senator from Brooklyn proposing a bill. This will get the senator some face time, but I doubt it will go anywhere.

The newspaper, founded in 1645 by Sweden's Queen Kristina, became a Web-only publication on Jan. 1. --World's Oldest Newspaper Goes Digital (Guardian)

Yes, you read that right. 1645.

You currently have no blogs. (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

When my students and I log into MovableType, we get the message "You currently have no blogs."

(I've put in a support ticket, and can't do anything until they respond.)

I'm supposed to be taking items off my to-do list...

--Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us

Fantastic content. No time to comment on it -- not until my to do list is clear. But this is definitely worth a link.

I will say that this is a far more optimistic depiction of The Machine than E. M. Forster had in "The Machine Stops" (1909).

To Do List (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

No recreational blogging for me until I'm done with everything on this list.

• Write letter of ref for recent grad (deadline was Feb 1; turned in letter Jan 31)
  
• Finish new article on a classic work of interactive fiction (deadline was Feb 1; I'll have it done in a few days) 11 Feb 2007 (A week and a half late, but I hope the editors will feel it was worth it. 85 pages, scores of pictures. This last week I was mostly just writing captions.)
  
• Write abstract for special issue article (deadline was Feb 1; already received extension until Feb 8) (17 minutes after midnight on Feb 9 -- after spending 20 minutes trying to think up a halfway decent title and failing miserably)
  
• Write encyclopedia article (deadline was Feb 1; will have to request long extension or back out of project)
  
• Supply feedback to article draft submitted by a blogs researcher seeking advice (been sitting on this since December; will get it done by Feb 5)
  
• Supply feedback to undergraduate submitting an abstract to a conference (student's deadline is Feb 5; aim to send feedback today or tomorrow) Feb 4
  
• Supply feedback to undergraduate's revised independent study paper (been sitting on this for several days; will get to it soon after Feb 8)
  
• Finish internal grant proposals for travel to 4Cs (I've got my funding, am still seeking funding for 3 undergrads)
  
• Eat lunch with faculty colleagues at least once this week Feb 06 (yes, that was a lame one to strike off...)

Oh, yeah, and mark papers and that sort of stuff.

Should I just go cold turkey on my blog until I get through these items? Or should I reward myself by permitting myself to blog for fun each time I cross an item off the list?

Should I stop using this blog entry to procrastinate, and just focus on knocking items off this list?

It's snowing now; I'm going to head home now before the roads get any worse.

Busy, busy, busy...

Oh, look... an interesting e-mail arrived while I was writing this.

(Later) Okay, I've replied. And now I really am going home.

New item for list: Find new ISP host for blogs.setonhill.edu. (Nothing urgent, my host tells me, but he did advise me to start looking.)

To gather up a few logs, it might seem like lunacy to deploy the same kind of sophisticated and pricey ROVs used to explore the Titanic or investigate 9,000-foot-deep geothermal vents along the mid-Atlantic seafloor. But do the math and Godsall's method starts to make good financial sense. Operated by just one person, a so-called feller buncher--the fastest and cheapest way to harvest timber on land--can cut at least 500 trees a day. But then it takes an additional three-member crew up to three weeks to trim and load the trees for transport. A single Sawfish is more efficient. --Michael Behar --Reservoir Logs  (Wired)

Logging has never looked cooler than this.

--Boston Ad Prank Suspects Talk About ... Hair (Fox | Youtube)

I sense these two fellows might be worried their 15 minutes of fame might be receding faster than my hairline.

It was a nice try by the reporter who asked a question about whether the suspects felt their hair would be safe if they went to prison.

What makes Ledonne think that a video game is the best way to try and deconstruct the tortured minds that led to Columbine? Gaming is essentially escapist entertainment and while there are plenty of violent games out there to help you get off, if that's what gets you off, no one has ever confused a Sony console with a social laboratory.

With all due respect, I think this is the wrong medium for this sort of soul searching.

Don't misunderstand. I'm not suggesting that the game should be banned, not from Slamdance, not from the store shelves. Where I come from, freedom of expression is an unalienable right, which means tolerating pretty much everything.

But there is also the matter of self-restraint and good taste, and I lament their passing from American society. --Tony Long --Shoot to Kill, Shoot to Thrill (Wired)

Some interesting thoughts, but the argument does not hold together for me. Long notes that he is not himself a gamer. He comes down in support of artistic freedom, but does ally himself with "hand-wringing moralists" and calls for "[s]elf-restraint and a little good grooming."

He lumps Super Columbine (a free indie game) with Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and concludes:

If we were the kind of society we like to believe we are, there would be no need to ban a tasteless video game from an independent movie festival. These things wouldn't exist because you wouldn't buy them, so there would be no market for them.

Is it splitting hairs to note that the Columbine game is free? While I credit Long for admitting that he is not a gamer, can you really judge a game based on what you read about it?

A front page article about the sexual assault appeared on the front page of this week'sstudent newspaper, The Argonaut. The paper was distributed Thursday and sometime before Friday morning nearly 500 copies of the paper showed up with the article snipped out. The papers were apparently stolen, vandalized and returned to the display boxes, said Editor Emeritus Erik Oeverndiek. --Vandals strike student news (The [San Mateo County] Daily Journal)

So I admit it. I got caught up in all the hype about blogs -- about their potential for communication, for creating global connections, for expressing oneself, for extending face-to-face discussions, and for building community in online environments. In most cases, my initial excitement has not borne fruit.

I don't fault my students. I am the instructor. And given my background in pedagogy and education, I should be a good leader. But when it comes to blogs, I have not been.

Still, I am not going to give up on blogs. What I am going to do is become a much more critical user. And so I offer some thoughts as I prepare to revamp the integration of blogs in my courses. --Kara M. Dawson --Blog Overload (Chronicle)

Most of my students treat their blogs like any other homework assignment. Now that most students are doing their social networking on Facebook or MySpace, the blogs are fairly business-oriented. I have faced many of the problems Dawson mentions. One way I have responded is to get students to prime the pump early by posting a very brief entry that contains a direct quotation from the assigned reading, and then ask them to bring to class a half-page reflection paper that responds to something they read on a peer blog. I invite them to post that half-page reflection on their blog, but most don't. And that's fine, since if they just think of it as a homework assignment, it probably won't make gripping reading. I also ask students to post two to four comments on peer blogs. Since students can choose to stop at two, every comment after the second is a gift. That cuts down on the number of "I agree" posts that count as comments.

The blogging portfolio rubric I use is very open ended. It has a category for "timeliness" and a category for "depth," so that students may approach their blogging by posting it early and getting it over with, or by posting thoughtful reflections after the class discussion is over. There's a category for being the first post on a peer blog entry, and there's a category for participating in a discussion on a peer's blog.

While I do occasionally teach small upper-level major courses where all the students are dedicated and involved, in most large classes about a third of the students will do their best on just about any assignment they get; about a third will do the bare minimum, if that; and about a third could go either way. Some students who are painfully shy and don't like speaking up in class can find a way to express themselves through blogs. Some students do their best work in the comments they post on peer blog entries. And the small minority of super-dedicated bloggers quickly gain an audience within the class; even if only three or four students carry on the discussion after the class is over, those students can still feed off of each other's enthusiasm, and the whole class can benefit.

Just as some students can't stand group work, or oral presentations, or revising multiple drafts, or face-to-face draft consultations with the instructor, or discussion prompts, or lectures, or workshops, some students won't like blogs, no matter what the instructor does. It took me a while to find a structure that I could fit into the structure of the course, and it took me longer to teach that structure to students in such a way that they aren't too overwhelmed by how different it seems at first. I'll keep making adjustments and seeking ways to improve the experience, and I'm glad to see Dawson is doing the same.

Quite bluntly, if your web application can't easily be adapted as a classic text adventure, your application has serious problems on multiple levels. Applications that can't be easily adapted likely suffer from application structure and design problems and UI dependency, to organizational politics and bad decisions. --Michael Buffington --Your Web App as a Text Adventure (ETech Emerging Technology Conference)