Humanities: May 2007 Archive Page

Venus Redemption is a unique episodic casual game created for 30+ female gamers, with a rich plot written by a noted novelist. Unlike other casual games, it features powerful storylines, deep characters, emotion-based interactive conversations and exciting adventure gameplay. However, like traditional casual games, it's extremely easy to play, requiring only the ability to move and left-click a mouse, and it's playable in short bursts if you don't have much time.

Venus Redemption is written by award-winning author Kate Pullinger, who co-wrote the book, "The Piano" with director Jane Campion, and is one of the leading pioneers of interactive fiction. Additional storyline has been written by BAFTA nominated writer, Gordon Rennie, whilst a unique ambient-orchestral musical score has been composed by veteran musician Tim Wright, best known for his work on the Wipeout game series. --'Venus Redemption' (Worth Playing)

Interesting how this game is pitched at its target audience.

--Poems About Fathers (Poetry Foundation)

Having a father and being a father, I found this page interesting. When my own daughter is a teenager, I might not like "Fifteen" as much as I do now.

Are you a skilled programmer or Web developer? Are you interested in applying your talents to the challenge of creating a better-informed society? Do you want to learn how to find, analyze and present socially relevant information that engages media audiences? Do you see possibilities for applying technology as a way to connect people and information on the Web or new delivery platforms?

If your answers are "yes," consider coming to Medill for a master's degree in journalism. You can earn your degree in just a year. You will learn new skills that will open doors to new opportunities that might help build a better democracy. And a new program at Medill offers you a chance to win a fully funded scholarship. --Medill offers journalism scholarships to programmer/developers (Northwestern)

Sounds like a great program.

--Shakespeare hates your emo poems (Threadless)

Interesting cultural phenomenon... sell a T-shirt, then create a website that lets customers upload photos of themselves wearing the T-shirt.

The result turns the rebellious and snarky T-shirt designs into the uniforms of conformist consumer zombies.

--The civil war in four minutes (YouTube)

Though Ferguson couldn't figure out how to make his 1938 scenario work, there was a better expert who could: His 13-year-old son, who was a whiz at strategy games. Rather than rush out to attack Germany, his son carefully set up robust trade agreements with France first to make sure the country felt diplomatically obligated to go along with the fight. Presto: France fought, and Germany fell.

Ferguson became so delighted with Making History that he has joined forces with Muzzy Lane to design a new game. Due out in 2008, this one will model modern, real-world conflicts such as Iraq, Afghanistan and the nuclear confrontation with Iran.

It'll undoubtedly be controversial. But it will also, he expects, be humbling. The power of counterfactual thinking is that forces us to step outside of our comfort zones. When we think about historical events, we have 20/20 hindsight -- so we forget how confusing and uncertain they were at the time. In 1943, nobody really knew how strong Germany was, or what Stalin was thinking. In modern conflicts, we often have a similarly false sense of surety -- too much confidence in our ability to predict the outcome of major events.

When we play with sims, they knock us off our pedestals -- because crazy things usually happen we don't predict. Yet the chaos is useful, because we can run the same situation again and again, changing one little thing each time, until we've war-gamed it deeply and understand it better than ever. --Clive Thompson --Why a Famous Counterfactual Historian Loves Making History With Games (Wired)

We should be jumping for joy every time a student plagiarizes, because that means our existence as teachers of composition is validated, as we have something to teach them - citation, research, the need for critical thinking. We should get down on our knees and thank the Internet for making it easier to plagiarize, because it means we will be employed for the foreseeable future, stemming the metaphorical digital tide. We should be eternally glad that plagiarism is seen as a problem that needs fixing, because if all incoming students cited their sources fairly and accurately and did clever research out of the box, then there wouldn't be much for us to do. We should leap to the opportunity to teach here. Plagiarism is a blessing, not a curse. --Mike Duncan --Objections to Turnitin (Bad Rhetoric)

Plagiarism as the felix culpa of rhetcomp. I'm not very comfortable with the idea, but it did make me think.

I do use the service... recently I noticed a suspicious paragraph, and when I used turnitin.com to print out the documentation in support of the wrist-slapping I was planning to implement, I found four or five other uncited paragraphs from the same source -- something I wouldn't have caught otherwise.

I tell myself that this student has learned an important lesson, and that it's a good thing I caught this problem early, on an assignment that wasn't worth 1/3 of the course grade.

"As for my own point of view, I see creative writing not so much as a form of self-expression (or in the case of problem students, acting out), but of learning to express one's 'otherness,' in the sense of being able to use one's imagination to devise stories or poems out of, as Keats called it, one's 'negative capability.' That is the ability not to be yourself and not to put your own limited self-interested point of view into one's creative writing. And to hold contradictory emotions and ideas together in your mind at once without judgment. To be as Emily Dickinson called it 'a nobody.'"

"In that sense, a threat of violence directed specifically toward a member of the university community in a creative writing class represents a student's failure of imagination, and should be seen as cry for help or cry for attention," [Alan] Soldofsky [director of creative writing at San Jose State] said... --A Very Scary Story (Inside Higher Ed)

It's rare to find so much specialized language quoted in a publication with a general readership. I agree with his point, but even though the audience for Inside Higher Ed is more educated than the general reader, I were this reporter I'd have used a bit more summary as a buffer between shorter chunks from Soldofsky. (In passages near the beginning and end of the sequence that features Soldofsky, the reporter does summarize.)

This activity is set in a research group that is developing an antivenom for spider bites. In the opening scene, Nelson Pogline, a talented graduate student, dies unexpectedly at a university reception. As a detective, you must use chemistry concepts to determine if this was murder and if so, solve the case. You can interview suspects using Quicktime movies, investigate the crime scene for clues with Quicktime Virtual Reality images, and analyze the evidence from the crime lab. --Mixed Reception (chemcollective.org)

Haven't checked this one out yet.

DeSena presented solutions for teachers to prevent the plagiarism plague engulfing a Web-based culture. "All too often teachers emphasize the content (the information) students will cull and hopefully learn. But it is our obligation as teachers to encourage them to respond to the expert or scholar, to answer his or her underlying claim," she wrote. To do this, teachers need to emphasize primary sources over secondary, to embrace students freewriting, honing in and transforming the first draft into formal writing, cultivating a thesis, creating an outline, and learning how to paraphrase. --Meghan Gill
--Sparta teacher fights plague (Straus Newspapers)

There is little new in this article; nevertheless, I appreciate a pedagogy-based discussion of the root causes of plagiarism, rather than a commercially-supported, detection-and-punishment-based solution.

He said, "Mr. Moio, I have something that I would like you to have." Without hesitating, he handed me an old, leather-bound book with an embossed title reading, "English Poems." I thanked the student and opened the front cover to discover that the book was published in 1902. Explaining to my student that the book was more than 100 years old, I thanked him again and told him that I could never take such a valuable possession away from him.

"No, really, it was my grandmother's," he said, hands in the air in protest of my attempt to return the volume, "I told her how much you like poetry and she gave it to me and told me that she wanted you to have it to thank you for helping me in Language Arts." --David Moio --A Nice Little Story to Cap off EL312 (DavidMoio)

A wonderful teaching anecdote, from a student of mine who is about my age (with a bigger family to support).

It's stories like this that remind us why we love to teach.

According to Marmor, Monet's work began to show a yellowish cast as his cataracts developed. To reveal how Monet saw the world, Marmor darkened images using Photoshop and reduced the levels of blue to replicate a yellowing effect. He also used blurring filters.

The results suggest that Monet's vision corrupted his ability to see colors correctly. This -- and not a desire to reflect the growing expressionist style of painting -- may explain the abstract nature of Monet's later work. --Randy Dotinga --Photoshop Re-Creates Aging Impressionists' Eye on the World (Wired)

Here point your thunder, and exhaust your rage!
Yet shun their fault, who, scandalously nice,
Will needs mistake an author into vice;
All seems infected that th' infected spy,
As all looks yellow to the jaundic'd eye. -- Alexander Pope, "An Essay on Criticism"

In Japan, emoticons tend to emphasize the eyes, such as the happy face (^_^) and the sad face (;_;). "After seeing the difference between American and Japanese emoticons, it dawned on me that the faces looked exactly like typical American and Japanese smiles," he said. --Americans and Japanese Read Faces Differently (Live Science)

The Pentagon is setting up a civilian Language Corps, a cadre of some 1,000 foreign-language speakers who can help the government in times of war and national emergencies.

In a three-year pilot program, the Defense Department will recruit volunteers and do testing to see if such a program would work. If successful, a permanent corps could be developed, said Robert Slater, who heads the Pentagon personnel office's security education program. --Pauline Jelinek --Pentagon creating civilian Language Corps to help in times of war, emergenciesAssociated Press)

Via Language Log.

They came from all over the world, poles in hand, and feet ready to inch more than half a mile across a high wire strung over the Han River in a spine-tingling battle of balance, speed and high anxiety. --Bo-Mi Lim --Skywalkers in Korea cross Han solo (Yahoo! | AP (will espire))

This is a news article about a high-wire competition that involved crossing a body of water called the Han River.

A tip of the blaster-shield-fitted helmet to a very clever headline writer.

Imagine Gilligan's Island without the Howells and their paper dollars. Without money, commodities exchange directly: coconuts for fish, fish for bamboo, etc. But even with barter, some commodities are more "marketable" than others. Perhaps one of the castaways might eventually buy one of the Professor's books, but they will more often purchase Mary Ann's coconut cream pies -- or the coconuts themselves. Coconuts are more marketable than books.

Over time, the commodity that is most marketable becomes popular for indirect exchange: the Skipper trades his fish for Ginger's decorative shells, not because he wants shells, but because he knows he can trade them for Gilligan's coconuts. The price of a commodity is its exchange ratio for the most marketable good, e.g., 12 shells per coconut. The value of the shell money is based on the goods it traded for yesterday -- since we can't know what prices will be today. Right now, the Skipper is willing to trade one of his fish for two coconuts, and he knows that Gilligan was recently willing to trade his coconuts for a dozen shells each, therefore the Skipper wants to price his fish at two-dozen shells each: enough to buy two coconuts. Prices can change from day to day, but today's new prices will be based on the prices of other things yesterday. --B. K. Marcus --The Monetary Economics of Thurston Howell III  (Ludwig von Mises Institute)

Why can't anything fun ever be slouched toward? I mean, what about Slouching Towards Deliciousness, or Slouching Towards Balloon Animals? --Slouching Toward Something (Why Not Sneeze?)

When we refuse to "budge an inch," excoriate "rotten apples," or admonish slackers to "sink or swim," we speak in his voice. Although the arts sections of newspapers teem with products from self-anointed "artists" who will not survive their publicity budgets, Shakespeare after roughly four centuries still pleases general audiences, challenges intellectuals, and provokes academics. How can we not presume that such a stupendous orchestrator of character and insight operated with a coherent, multifaceted theory of human nature?

On the other hand, our ignorance of Shakespeare the man - he left no diaries or letters in his short life of some 52 years - and the clashing multiple versions of some of his texts, have always dovetailed with a contrary belief that his greatness arises precisely from utter openness to the varieties of human behavior, emotion and thought, his ability to render in concrete scenes and daring metaphors more non-reductionist nuances of the heart and mind than an army of writers centuries later.

This Shakespeare soars as the universal artist because his plays and poetry offer a kaleidoscope of the human condition while speculative bios, short on fact and long on inference, end up too dull an instrument to cut him down to size. He's a channeler rather than a source of wisdom. --The readiness to deconstruct is all (Philadelphia Inquirer)

I wish this article had come out a week earlier... I would have discussed it in my Lit Crit class. (It's still a good read.)

This article from The Week has statistics that bolster and weaken arguments frequently used by people on both sides of the debate. --How other countries deal with gun control (BoingBoing)

Blogging this for future reference. I'll be teaching a news writing course in the fall, and one of the most challenging units involves getting students to think critically about statistical claims made by advocates of a particular issue.

After reading The Tempest and reading a student's paper about Gulliver's Travels, I'm thinking about creating a unit that involves students writing reports about interviews with people from fictional countries. There might be a society that promotes free file-sharing and has a legal drinking age of 17, but where women can't vote. There might be glossy tourist brochures that offer one view of the country, but refugees and people from minority groups would offer a strikingly different view of the country. (And some of those minority views would be wildly inaccurate.)

The idea would be to get students to practice reporting about a complex subject where following the truth wherever it may lead is more intellecutually complex than getting the right answer on a multiple choice question. I want to force them out of the habit of doing what they've been rewarded for in high school -- stating their personal reasons for agreeing or disagreeing with a prompt.

Vetting Comments Strangers Post to Class Blogs (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I always enjoy telling my students when I start noticing comments that people who aren't in our class start posting comments on the course weblog or individual student weblogs.

Sometimes the poster is someone who took the course in the past and is recalling with fondness (or horror) a particular assignment. Other entries attract comments from other people on the Internet who happen to be interested in the same subject.

Here is an example of such a comment (posted to a 600-word blog entry that discussed the nature of heroism in Huck Finn) that I don't bother to approve:

im writing a paper why is huck the hero??

But here is an excerpt from a 700-word comment (posted to a student's entry about Flannery O'Connor's "The Life You Save May Be Your Own"), which I did approve:

My take was that it is blindingly obvious that he is a first draft of perfection, but like the Misfit, a flawed one. He talks the talk, but Jesus never said anything about the heart as a car or anything mobile - it was a mustard seed that grew IN PLACE, like a house, like the Kingdom of God.

See Also:

• Approving or Ignoring Comments on Old Student Blog Entries
  
• Blogging Now Begins Young

--Stephen Granade
--LOL Trek (Live Granades)

I was vaguely aware of the lolcats phenomenon, which involves remediating the famous "Hang in there, baby" cat poster as if the cats themselves were writing the captions.

Never did I expect it to be unleashed on the beloved Star Trek episode "The Trouble with Tribbles" (which has earned it a spot on my blog.)

A Chinese student was transferred from his high school to an "alternative education center" (?) after his parents found he had designed a Counterstrike mod with maps based on his school. Two parents learned of the map he made from their kids, and they informed his parents, who in turn reported him to the Fort Bend Independent School District administrators. --Fort Bend school trustees put off video game appeal (Houston Chronicle)

It's important to note that it wasn't just the fact that the student designed a game map that depicted the school, but that the investigation turned up swords. Further, the parents reported their own son and gave the police permission to search his room. Police found nothing worthy of a criminal charge, but without any evidence that this young man had any unusual (ore even typical) anti-social tendencies, I hope all parties can resolve this quickly.

The fact that this kid happens to be Asian wouldn't have anything at all to do with it, would it?

It does look like some members of the school board feel the body has overreacted. "He did it [designed the game level] at his house. Never took anything to school. Never wrote an ugly letter, never said anything strange to a student or a teacher, nothing," according to one board member. Other members stayed away from the meeting where the student was trying to get them to appeal the decision, so it seems that overreaction will stand for now.

Getting shot hurts. -- Ronald Reagan --Reagan diaries reveal president's private musingsYahoo! | Reuters (will expire))

As an American who started drinking tea the English way while in Canada (brewed in a pot and poured into the cup, not made in the cup with a single-serving tea bag), I enjoyed the anecdote about Prince Charles.

--Map of Online Communities (XKCD: A Webcomic of Romance, Sarcasm, Math, and Language)

Thanks, Josh, for the suggestion. (This is just an excerpt from the full map.)

I'm going to have to give this site some attention when grades are in... I wish the artist could draw people instead of stick figures, but the jokes are clever, sweet, and geeky.

A cameraman for the NBC affiliate in Houston was captured on home video sporting a Mexican flag on his camera while covering a rally in the Texas city that supported illegal immigrants, drawing angry shouts from counter-protesters.

In the first of two clips posted on YouTube.com, a counter-protester with a bull horn can be heard condemning the cameraman's flag.

"Why does Channel 2 News have a Mexican flag on their camera?" the man asked. --Art Moore
--NBC cameraman flies Mexican flag at march (WorldNetDaily)

In another clip, the cameraman is seen helping someone attach an American flag to his camera, too.

But the damage had been done. He was on duty, and should not have betrayed his bias.

"We believe the victim was assaulted after hours Friday by an unknown individual or individuals," a Columbia County sheriff's departmaent spokesman said. "Though autopsy results are still pending, we believe the victim suffered fatal head trauma after his face was immobilized against the glass of a photocopier and repeatedly struck with the machine's cover." --White-On-White Violence Claims Life Of Accounts Receivable Supervisor (The Onion (Satire))

I never thought the Kornfeld character was funny enough to deserve his own recurring column, but it looks like his untimely death might spark an enjoyable, long, drawn-out story.

One thing that I feel very strongly about since I began my post-secondary literary studies, is that high school teachers tend to teach the students all sorts of things that need to be un-taught when they get to college. It drives me crazy! Shouldn't we be teaching students skills they can build on when they get to college, not skills and habits they have to break in order to be successful in post-secondary education!?! So, one of my goals when I teach is not to teach my students things that they need to be un-taught later. That might mean expecting more out of my students than the average high school English teacher, but I think in the end it will benefit them greatly. --Lorin Schumacher --Lit Crit's Usefulness in Pedagogy (LorinSchumacher)

Lorin is a sophomore English and education student at Seton Hill. As part of a student Tiffany Brattina's blogging carnival on education, Lorin blogged this thoughtful essay.

The picture shows Stacy Snyder of Strasburg wearing a pirate hat while drinking from a plastic "Mr. Goodbar" cup. The photograph taken during a 2005 Halloween party was posted on Snyder's MySpace Web page with the caption "Drunken Pirate."

"The day before graduation, the college confronted me about the picture," Snyder said Thursday. "I was told I wouldn't be receiving my education degree or teaching certificate because the photo was 'unprofessional.' " --Brett Lovelace --Web photo haunts graduate (Lancaster Online)

The kicker? Snyder is 27 years old.

The denial of degree happened last year; the news hook in this story is that the former student has now filed a lawsuit.

Certainly she showed poor judgment by putting that photo on her profile. Since my only alcohol consumption is about one glass of wine per year, my own attitudes about drunken photos are biased.

Snyder surely learned in her education classes why parents hold the teachers of their children to such high ethical standards. It looks like the school system where Snyder was doing her student-teaching may have been involved. According to the lawsuit, "Conestoga Valley officials told the college their students wouldn't be allowed to perform student-teacher requirements there if Snyder was not punished."

For good reason, universities don't publish information about disciplining students; neither Millersville University nor a Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education would comment on this story. We don't know whether this were just the latest in a long string of unprofessional incidents, in which case it might have been the straw that broke the camel's back. If this were an isolated incident, then denying the education degree seems very harsh.