Rhetoric: May 2007 Archive Page

Playing a game may teach the player that he can optimize the game only in certain ways (or that the game is impossible to win, like Global Thermonuclear War); but it's open to question whether the optimal game strategy corresponds to an optimal real-life strategy.

As we see more of this kind of thing (and I think we will), we as consumers of educational and editorial games, are going to need to stay alert and savvy, conscious of the way a game's rules can look like they emulate real life constraints without actually doing so. A case in point is the way Electrocity lets me participate in a fuel market without experiencing any repercussions at all from the fossil fuel burning by the people in the next town over. Would it be better all around if I just kept it in the ground? Maybe, maybe not -- but within the game there's no incentive to think about that. --Emily Short --Educational and Editorial Games (Emily Short's Interactive Fiction)

Take the role of the FDA inspectors in a world of increasingly numerous food imports and increasingly unmanagable risk. Your charge: try to protect the country from contaminants in foreign food imports using extremely limited resources.

The first in Persuasive Games newsgame publication relationship with The New York Times, in which our editorial games are published alongside all the other op-ed content on TimesSelect. --Food Import Folly (Persuasive Games)

I'd wondered when the rhetorical potential of a current-events game would be recognized as a vehicle for critical commentary, rather than the occasional subject of a column or other traditional form.

When I go to the link on the NYT website, I get a header and footer, but no content.

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.

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.

Digg Takedown, Obama Takeover, Army Blog Squeeze (Jerz's LIteracy Weblog)

This is the last week of classes, and I've got deadlines galore (3 conference proposals, an annual report, a departmental proposal, and an article submission that I've been sitting on for a week).

So I won't have much to say, but I still thought it was worth noting the story of Digg's attempt to silence user-submitted articles about cracking HD-DVD security. Since Digg is made up of user-supported content, Digg users have responsed by submitting a flood of articles that express their unhappiness with the fact that Digg tried to suppress the HD-DVD security information (and most of those articles probably duplicate the protection information that Digg was supposed to be protecting by taking down the article in the first place).

I also note the story of how the Obama campaign was initially happy that supporter Joe Anthony volunteered to keep the Obama MySpace page. But then the Obama campaign pushed Anthony off the site, taking it over from and refusing to pay him what Anthony thought it was worth. (I don't know whether they offered a lower figure and Anthony was holding out for more, or whether they just figured it was their right to take over the site.) At any rate, Anthony says the campaign has lost his vote.

Just think of all the money that has gone into the development of complex software with digital content protection schemes that bloat the size and blunt the usability (Vista) , and that will go into litigation that will attempt to extend the economic lifespan of the 19-th century models of cultural production. Imagine if that money had instead been spent on think-tanks that aim to work with the cultural tide, rather than against it.

And while I appreciate the desire of the US Army to crack down on the possibility of leaking military secrets, wouldn't the blogosphere be a useful place to engage with public opinion and recruit new members? The military crackdown on soldier blogs suggests the public at large will lose a valuable avenue to interact with the men and women who make life-or-death decisions that affect global stability. If you think of what the US Army Corps of Engineers can do in an emergency, think of an online strike team that might be ready to swoop in the event of a Katrina-like crisis, or a Darfur-like morass, engaging the good will of people around the globe, drawing on their first-hand observations.

Am I naive? Probably. Regardless, today was not a very good day for social networking.

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.