Literacy: June 2007 Archive Page

What is it for? Why is it there? Did whoever put it up realize that if there were no sign, there would be no need to warn about it? Is this a joke from the developers? Is it a lesson in recursiveness? Is it a philosophical prop? --Bizarre Sign (Lushlush)

Does it mean "Don't forget to knock your head here?" Obviously, it would be much less painful to bang into a light sign hanging from a chain than to bang into that horizontal bar right behind it. So I guess, in a way, they do want people to bang into the sign. It's just like those "low overhead" signs hanging outside garages -- it's better if the top of your vehicle makes that sign wiggle than if your vehicle gets wedged under a support.

(I flipped the image and cropped it to emphasize the effect. Not something one would do as a journalist, but that sort of thing is frequently done in the context of design.)

The books Amazon will offer will include many rare volumes -- some that are hundreds of years old and others that are too brittle to be handled by people day after day. With digital scanning and printing technology, such books can be reproduced for anyone who wants to buy them. --Dan Carnevale --Amazon Will Digitize Universities' Books and Sell Print-on-Demand Copies (Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription))

I wonder if they will reprint books with personal annotations -- that is, if Thomas Jefferson scribbled notes in the margins of a book, would it be possible to get your own copy of the book, with Jefferson's notes reproduced along with the book text?

The division is cleanest in communities where the predator panic hit before MySpace became popular. In much of the midwest, teens heard about Facebook and MySpace at the same time. They were told that MySpace was bad while Facebook was key for college students seeking to make friends at college. I go into schools where the school is split between the Facebook users and the MySpace users. On the coasts and in big cities, things are more murky than elsewhere. MySpace became popular through the bands and fans dynamic before the predator panic kicked in. Its popularity on the coasts and in the cities predated Facebook's launch in high schools. Many hegemonic teens are still using MySpace because of their connections to participants who joined in the early days, yet they too are switching and tend to maintain accounts on both. For the hegemonic teens in the midwest, there wasn't a MySpace to switch from so the "switch" is happening much faster. None of the teens are really switching from Facebook to MySpace, although there are some hegemonic teens who choose to check out MySpace to see what happens there even though their friends are mostly on Facebook. --danah boyd --Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace (danah.org)

I personally find boyd's use of a lowercase logo for a name to be be right up there with Prince's use of an unpronounceable symbol and the star in "Wal*Mart," but I gather it makes her seem more approachable to the young people whose online habits she observes so carefully (and analyzes so well).

I handed my notes over to the class and gave them directions to plan the next three weeks of class. They had to schedule one project and one exam. The project has to run five days straight, and they'll need the information from chapter seven to do the project. They had to make sure that they leave enough days to cover chapter five and prepare for the final, which is July 16.

Then I left the room.

It was a breath-holding heart-pounding moment, one where I wasn't sure if walking out was the right move. However, I'd done it before and -- truth be told -- I was stood right outside the door, shamelessly eavesdropping. Leaving was the only way I could teach this lesson in strategy and planning because, otherwise, my students would have centered the lesson on me. Is this what you want? Are we right? They would ask with their words and their eyes, watching me for nonverbal cues when I refuse to tell them what to do next. --Miki Louch --Formulating: putting the rubber to the road (Of ferocious tigers and wild strawberries)

At a packed session for academic librarians attending the annual meeting of the American Library Association, in Washington, the topic was how to help students who have learned many of their information gathering and analysis skills from video games apply that knowledge in the library. Speakers said that gaming skills are in many ways representative of a broader cultural divide between today?s college students and the librarians who hope to teach them. --Scott Jaschik --When ''Digital Natives'' Go to the Library (Inside Higher Ed)

I'd love to learn more about how libraries are modding themselves in order to take advantage of the considerable digital literacies that our students bring with them when the arrive on campus.

He is full of high sentence, like J. Alfred Prufrock. But beneath it all, one finds a sense of cultural history combining one part idyllic idealization with two parts status anxiety. Gorman only appears to be facing hard questions about the new digital order. Actually he is just echoing debates on "mass society" from five or six decades ago.

So let us go, then, you and I -- friends, as we are, of dusty pre-digital cultural literacy -- into the library stacks. Let us locate a bound volume of Sewanee Review from 1957 and open it to read "Daydreams and Nightmares: Reflections on the Criticism of Mass Culture" by Edward Shils. The same text may be found in Shils's collection The Intellectuals and the Powers and Other Essays, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1972 -- a volume not yet absorbed by Google Books. --Scott McLemee --Mass Culture 2.0 (Inside Higher Ed)

A good response to librarian Michael Gorman's latest anti-technology rants.

"The words we suggest," says senior editor Steven Kleinedler, "are not meant to be exhaustive but are a benchmark against which graduates and their parents can measure themselves. If you are able to use these words correctly, you are likely to have a superior command of the language." --100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know (Houghton Mifflin Books)

Hmm... the editors' description of the list is very different from the way it's being marketed. Simply knowing the definition of these words won't suddenly make you more intelligent.

Someone who doesn't know words like "euro" or "suffragist" probably has other important gaps in his or her education. Most citizens probably get through their days without much chance of encountering "moiety" or "ziggurat."

All these words are in my reading vocabulary, but I don't believe I have ever used "abjure" or "abrogate" in a written or spoken sentence, and I wouldn't have been able to explain the difference if I hadn't looked it up just now. Because I never took French, I would never use "gauche" in speech (even though I finally know how to pronounce it, since I just looked it up now), unless perhaps I was creating dialogue for a character who either 1) knew French well enough to be influenced by its vocabulary or 2) wanted people to think that he or she was the kind of cultured person who was used to being around people who dropped French terms. I would have described "jejune" as "immature" or "dull," rather than recognize its Latin root as meaning "meager" or "hungry," or its more technical sense as "lacking nutritious value." I sort of recognized "quotidian" as meaning something like "average" or "typical," but until just now, I never recognized the Latin roots that make its specific meaning "everyday."

In the second line of King Lear, Gloucester says:

It did always seem so to us: but now, in the
division of the kingdom, it appears not which of
the dukes he values most; for equalities are so
weighed, that curiosity in neither can make choice
of either's moiety.

That certainly gives sufficient context to guess that "moiety" means something like "division" or "share," though its more precise definition -- "half" -- is less clear. (The very first line in the play indicates the choice is between two dukes -- Albany and Cornwall.)

Publishers want to sell dictionaries, but the skill of being able to figure out a workable definition of a word based on its context is actually more important to literacy than the ability to memorize words on a list.

--(BRACKETS) - hidden camera prank on unsuspecting public. (YouTube)

Amusing.

Bradbury has decided to make news about the writing of his iconographic work and what he really meant. Fahrenheit 451 is not, he says firmly, a story about government censorship. Nor was it a response to Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose investigations had already instilled fear and stifled the creativity of thousands.

This, despite the fact that reviews, critiques and essays over the decades say that is precisely what it is all about. Even Bradbury's authorized biographer, Sam Weller, in The Bradbury Chronicles, refers to Fahrenheit 451 as a book about censorship.

Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.

"Television gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was," Bradbury says, summarizing TV's content with a single word that he spits out as an epithet: "factoids." He says this while sitting in a room dominated by a gigantic flat-panel television broadcasting the Fox News Channel, muted, factoids crawling across the bottom of the screen.

His fear in 1953 that television would kill books has, he says, been partially confirmed by television's effect on substance in the news. --Amy E. Boyle Johnston --Ray Bradbury: Farehheit 451 Misinterpreted (LA Weekly)

I've never taught this book, but I've been thinking about it, and this is actually the approach I would have taken -- that it was a storyteller's response to the rise of storywatching.

So I pour myself a glass of red wine, settle in with a fresh pair of flannel pajamas and start channeling my inner geek with glee. Primetime or not, I love the Bee. I love it. I love the celebration of intelligence, the championing of nerd-ship, of the brotherhood of brainiac. This is why the Bee should be on primetime network television. So that the Steve Jobs in all of us gets some real screen time. So that the incredible freakiness of spelling into your hand has an audience. A chance to shine. A chance to let every kid who spends his evenings rocking back and forth in his bedroom dreading the misery of junior high see that it is going to be okay. That geekiness has a freaking point! The Bee is a nerd manifesto! WHOO-HOO! --West Coast Bee Call (Throwing Things)

Detailed commentary on last night's spelling bee championship, which I watched with the family.

A screenwriter couldn't possibly have come up with the victory interview, in which the winner says he prefers math and music to spelling because spelling is "just memorization." After the reporter invites him to give his opinion of the bee now, the kid pauses for a long, long time and says, "Does that mean I'm supposed to like it more now?"

Way to put a serrefine on that post-competition enthusiasm.