Design: March 2008 Archive Page

I've been making an extra effort this year to create some new worksheets designed to teach basic, stand-alone concepts in my Introduction to Literary Study class.

Here's a new worksheet to help students write a sonnet.  Below is the part they're actually supposed to submit... after that I've included the text that explains the assignment. I've already taught the basic form of the sonnet, so this is a review, but I tried to make it stand on its own.  My goal is to teach the form, rather than to encourage or reward creative expression, but I also want students to have fun.

Suggestions?  Comments?

Workbook 2-2: Write a Sonnet                                           Name ____________________________
(Bring printout to class.)

This is a poem that I wrote; Eye Contact published it a few issues ago.

 

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.

Scan the poem (identify the rhyme scheme and stress pattern). (Write on this page.) Note the "turning point" and identify the new idea. (Write on this page.) Identify the "main point" driven home in the final couplet. (On this page.) What can you conclude about the relationship between the imaginary speaker of the poem, and my own intentions as the author of the poem (and a teacher who asks students to write sonnets)? (Answer in a brief paragraph on the back.)

 

Part IIa:  Present your own original sonnet in the grid. You may write on a printout, or edit this file.

Part IIb:  Write a short paragraph (on the back) that explains how your poem demonstrates your knowledge of prosody (see Hamilton) and your ability to apply that knowledge in an original creative work. Explain any deliberate deviations from iambic pentameter.

Blackboard, a company that sells popular course-management software, recently won a $3.1 settlement against Desire2Learn.  According to Slashdot,

Blackboard has been granted a patent that covers a single person having multiple roles in an LMS: for example, a TA might be a student in one class and an instructor in another. You wouldn't think something this obvious could even be patented, but so far it's been a very effective weapon for Blackboard, badly hurting Desire2Learn and generating a huge amount of worry for the few remaining commercial LMSs that Blackboard has not already bought, and open source solutions such as Moodle (Blackboard's pledge not to attack such providers notwithstanding)."

However, according to Desire2Learn,

On March 25, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office issued its Non-Final Action on the re-examination of the Blackboard Patent. We are studying the document, found here, but in short, the PTO has rejected all 44 of Blackboard's claims.

At a workshop next week at the 4Cs, I'm presenting a half-hour on intellectual property and ethics, in an attempt to get users of off-the-shelf course management tools to think about what it means when they give an outside corporation so much control over the content of their courses.  (I'm guilty of this, too, since I use Turnitin.com a lot, so my intention is not to scold but rather raise questions; Mike Edwards will then introduce some open-source alternatives to commercial software.)

I love the retrofuture. The year I was born, 1968, Mechanix Illustrated offered this prediction of life in the year 2008. I'm still waiting for my flying car, but some of the other predictions were remarkably accurate.

The single most important item in 2008 households is the computer. These electronic brains govern everything from meal preparation and waking up the household to assembling shopping lists and keeping track of the bank balance. Sensors in kitchen appliances, climatizing units, communicators, power supply and other household utilities warn the computer when the item is likely to fail. A repairman will show up even before any obvious breakdown occurs.

Computers also handle travel reservations, relay telephone messages, keep track of birthdays and anniversaries, compute taxes and even figure the monthly bills for electricity, water, telephone and other utilities. Not every family has its private computer. Many families reserve time on a city or regional computer to serve their needs. The machine tallies up its own services and submits a bill, just as it does with other utilities.

Money has all but disappeared. Employers deposit salary checks directly into their employees' accounts. Credit cards are used for paying all bills. Each time you buy something, the card's number is fed into the store's computer station. A master computer then deducts the charge from your bank balance.

Computers not only keep track of money, they make spending it easier. TV-telephone shopping is common. To shop, you simply press the numbered code of a giant shopping center. You press another combination to zero in on the department and the merchandise in which you are interested. When you see what you want, you press a number that signifies "buy," and the household computer takes over, places the order, notifies the store of the home address and subtracts the purchase price from your bank balance. Much of the family shopping is done this way. Instead of being jostled by crowds, shoppers electronically browse through the merchandise of any number of stores.

People have more time for leisure activities in the year 2008. The average work day is about four hours. But the extra time isn't totally free. The pace of technological advance is such that a certain amount of a jobholder's spare time is used in keeping up with the new developments--on the average, about two hours of home study a day.

I can't wait to see more of Get Lamp.

Microsoft researchers discuss Blews, which is a horrible title for a promising new tool that sorts blogosphere chatter according to the red/blue political shift, and also identifies the emotional intensity of the response.

Our current visualization shows the count of liberal inlinks to a news article as a blue "wing" on the left, and the number of conservative inlinks as a red "wing" on the right. The emotional charge of the discussion around the news link is shown as a "heat indicator" on the outside of the wings. Emotional charge ranges from a single orange square to four white-hot squares. Clicking on the wings produces a dropdown of the individual blog posts linking to the news article. In the dropdown, emotionally charged posts have a fuzzy border, while emotionally neutral posts have a solid border.

Wired:

Gygax designed the original D&D game with Dave Arneson in 1974, and went on to create the Dangerous Journeys and Lejendary Adventure RPGs, as well as a number of board games. He also wrote several fantasy novels.

"I don't think I've really grokked it yet," said Mike Mearls, the lead developer of the upcoming 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons. "He was like the cool uncle that every gamer had. He shaped an entire generation of gamers."

Scott Jaschik (Inside Higher Ed)

At Hunter College of the City University of New York, some professors are asking those questions -- and a Faculty Senate committee is considering a formal complaint about violations of academic freedom -- over a course sponsored last year by the International Anticounterfeiting Coalition (known as the IACC), an organization of companies that are concerned about low-cost knockoffs of their products. The companies involved include some of the biggest names in fashion and consumer goods -- Abercrombie & Fitch, Chanel, Coach, Harley-Davidson, Levi Strauss, Reebok and so forth.

According to the complaints filed with the Faculty Senate, Hunter agreed to let the IACC sponsor a course for which students would create a campaign against counterfeiting in which they would create a fake Web site to tell the story of a fictional student experiencing trauma because of fake consumer goods.

Part of me hopes that the Hunter College incident is part of an art project... I've never heard of the International Anticounterfeiting Coalition, but it has a much bigger web presence than Mothers Against Video Game Violence (a hoax site that I've seen cited in freshman research papers).