October 2008 Archive Page

The Christian Science Monitor plans major changes in April 2009 that are expected to make it the first newspaper with a national audience to shift from a daily print format to an online publication that is updated continuously each day. CSM

This paper doesn't offer the typical flighty, bloggy online chatter that tends to dilute the value of online journalism. The print world's loss is the online world's gain.

Some award-winning sports journalism. Filing it away for future reference.

A researcher who studies World of Warcraft likens leading in-game raiding parties to teaching a class.

Raiding has taught me that being a good teacher requires laying down strict guidelines while simultaneously demonstrating real care for your students. The stronger the ties of trust and respect between teacher and student, the more weight they will bear. In the past I've cringed when my raid leaders cheerfully announced that we would spend the next four hours dying over, and over, and over again to a boss who seemed impossible to defeat. But I've trusted them, done my job, and ultimately we have triumphed because they insisted on perseverance. The visiting raid leader who took us through the Kael raid lacked that history with us -- he was too much of a stranger to ask us to dig deep and give big.

A willingness to take risks can also be shored up by commitment and drive. Our guest leader drove my guildies nuts, but impressed me with his professionalism. Does this mean that after graduate school even generous doses of sadism seem unremarkable? Perhaps. But it also indicates that I was willing to work hard to see Kael dead, even if it meant catching some flack. For them, it was a game, and when it stopped being fun they lost interest.

What I learned that night was that I believe in the power of fear and humiliation as teaching methods. Obviously, I don't think they are teaching methods that should be used often, or be at the heart of our pedagogy. But I do think that there are occasions when it is appropriate to let people know that there is no safety net. There are times -- not all the time, or most of the time, but occasionally and inevitably -- when you have to tell people to shut up and do their job. I'm not happy to discover that I believe this, and in some ways I wish I didn't. But Warcraft has taught me that I there is a place for "sink or swim" methods in teaching. (Alex Golub, Inside Higher Ed)

The headline immediately caught my attention.  I went to Catholic high school, and while most of my teachers were laypeople (that is, not nuns or priests), my freshman year I had an octogenarian Latin teacher (a priest) who would threaten to throw erasers at us -- but always with a twinkle in his eye.  He was actually very patient and charming, but he used the eraser threat as if he were parodying the stereotype of a strict teacher. 

My Algebra II / Trigonometry teacher was not a parody, she was serious. Usually, the only praise she ever gave was moving on to the next student after you'd survived your grilling. After a quiz, she would say "Everyone who got an A, bring your paper up.  Now everyone who got a B, bring your paper up.  Now, all the rest of you."  That was a sort of reverse humiliation, since the rest of us saw that someone was able to earn an A. She called us "Sir Jerz" or "Lady Ryan," which I suppose was vaguely appropriate, since our mascot was a knight, but I'm sure her goal was to take us down a peg or two and remind us who was really in charge.  If we answered her question with a "yes," she'd say "Yes, what?" And we'd say, "Yes, sister." 

I've had plenty of other teachers who were more personable, and made me feel happier while I was in the classroom, but she really stands out in my memory. But boy, she really made me want to study.

One of my freshmen recently submitted a paper about how to overcome writer's block.  It reminded me of this story, which I came across many years ago and was able to find again fairly quickly with Google. Fun stuff.

The purpose of this sentence (which can also serve as a paragraph) is to speculate that if the Declaration of Independence had been worded and structured as lackadaisically and incoherently as this story has been so far, there's no telling what kind of warped libertine society we'd be living in now or to what depths of decadence the inhabitants of this country might have sunk, even to the point of deranged and debased writers constructing irritatingly cumbersome and needlessly prolix sentences that sometimes possess the questionable if not downright undesirable quality of referring to themselves and they sometimes even become run-on sentences or exhibit other signs of inexcusably sloppy grammar like unneeded superfluous redundancies that almost certainly would have insidious effects on the lifestyle and morals of our impressionable youth, leading them to commit incest or even murder and maybe that's why Billy is strangling his mother, because of sentences just like this one, which have no discernible goals or perspicuous purpose and just end up anywhere, even in mid

Bizarre. A sentence fragment. Another fragment. Twelve years old. This is a sentence that. Fragmented. And strangling his mother. Sorry, sorry. Bizarre. This. More fragments. This is it. Fragments. The title of this story, which. Blond. Sorry, sorry. Fragment after frag- ment. Harder. This is a sentence that. Fragments. Damn good device.

The purpose of this sentence is threefold: (1) to apologize for the unfortunate and inexplicable lapse exhibited by the preceding paragraph; (2) to assure you, the reader, that it will not happen again; and (3) to reiterate the point that these are uncertain and difficult times and that aspects of language, even seemingly stable and deeply rooted ones such as syntax and meaning, do break down. This sentence adds nothing substantial to the sentiments of the preceding sentence but merely provides a concluding sentence to this paragraph, which otherwise might not have one.

This sentence, in a sudden and courageous burst of altruism, tries to abandon the self-referential mode but fails. This sentence tries again, but the attempt is doomed from the start.-- David Moser

Contrary to popular belief, electronic data has proven to be much more ephemeral than books, journals or pieces of plastic art. After all, when was the last time you opened a WordPerfect file or tried to read an 8-inch floppy disk?

"Even over the course of 10 years, you can have a rapid enough evolution in the ways people store digital information and the programs they use to access it that file formats can fall out of date," McDonough said.

Magnetic tape, which stores most of the world's computer backups, can degrade within a decade. According to the National Archives Web site by the mid-1970s, only two machines could read the data from the 1960 U.S. Census: One was in Japan, the other in the Smithsonian Institution. Some of the data collected from NASA's 1976 Viking landing on Mars is unreadable and lost forever.

From a cultural perspective, McDonough said there's a "huge amount" of content that's only being developed or is available in a digital-only format.  -- Physorg.com

I play a small part of the digital preservation project mentioned in this piece. One of the digital artifacts the project is using as a case study is Adventure, which has been the subject of my recent scholarship, so I've been pitching in where I can.

From Wired:

My colleague David Stanley links to this article.

Many people, especially academic experts, have argued that Wikipedia's articles can't be trusted, because they are written and edited by volunteers who have never been vetted. Nevertheless, studies have found that the articles are remarkably accurate. The reason is that Wikipedia's community of more than seven million registered users has organically evolved a set of policies and procedures for removing untruths. This also explains Wikipedia's explosive growth: if the stuff in Wikipedia didn't seem "true enough" to most readers, they wouldn't keep coming back to the website.

These policies have become the social contract for Wikipedia's army of apparently insomniac volunteers. Thanks to them, incorrect information generally disappears quite quickly.

So how do the Wikipedians decide what's true and what's not? On what is their epistemology based?

Unlike the laws of mathematics or science, wikitruth isn't based on principles such as consistency or observa­bility. It's not even based on common sense or firsthand experience. Wikipedia has evolved a radically different set of epistemological standards--standards that aren't especially surprising given that the site is rooted in a Web-based community, but that should concern those of us who are interested in traditional notions of truth and accuracy. On Wikipedia, objective truth isn't all that important, actually. What makes a fact or statement fit for inclusion is that it appeared in some other publication--ideally, one that is in English and is available free online. "The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth," states Wikipedia's official policy on the subject. --Simon L. Garfinkle, Technology Review

Police say she illegally accessed log-in details of the man playing her husband, and killed off his character.

The woman, a piano teacher, is in jail in Sapporo waiting to learn if she faces charges of illegally accessing a computer and manipulating data. (BBC)

Thanks for the link, Robert.

My six-year-old daughter is in the next room, playing with her hand-made paper dolls. 

A few minutes ago, I heard her tones get a little deeper, and as I listened, I heard, "I'm Barack Obama, and I approve this message." 

Then I heard the rustle of another paper doll, and my daughter said, again in a deep voice, "Well, I'm John McCain, and here's why you should vote for me."

As near as I could figure it, the political differences between the Obama and McCain platforms hinge on birthday parties, the alphabet, the answer to five plus zero, and the dubious value of cooked carrots.

Jim  Munroe, a Toronto indie new media author whose work I've been following for some time, recently published this useful article on building an audience. Of course he mentions self-published print zines and blogs, but he also mentions another subject I've been introducing my students to this term...

6. TEXT ADVENTURE VIDEOGAMES
Anyone out there play Zork as a kid? Or any text adventure games? Go west, Take sword? They were a type of videogame that was entirely text, and is also known as interactive fiction. IF is an amazing thing: a videogame you can make without programming or graphics skills.

Quick Tips:
-there's a community of people who write and play these games, and they have a competition each year that often attracts more than 50 new games (one's happening now! Download and vote!)
-and thanks to this community, there are now tools that make it possible for non-programmers to write these games, one in particular is called Inform 7
-the audience for text games is small but intense
-it's kind of like poetry in that there's no money in it, and the audience for it is small, but if you were affected by it in your youth you keep coming back to it -- some people had a slim volume of poetry and I had The Lurking Horror

Blogging this to assign for my students to read when the current unit is over.

Not surprisingly, the Web serves the first function of a local paper exceptionally well. They deliver information instantly, and articles can be updated and corrected in real time. What is surprising, though, is the unfortunate and neglected condition of most student papers' Web sites. The average site has a clunky layout, sloppy design and little-to-no attention to color schemes or aesthetics. Many sites are a muddled array of hyperlinks, with uncategorized articles strewn every which way. Graphics are poorly sized. Fonts are dull. Multimedia is ignored.

All of these flaws are shocking when one realizes that Generation Y, the most tech-savvy ever born, maintains and codes these sites. Yet their designs are, excuse my snarkiness, very 1990s. But worse than my aesthetic objections is my philosophical gripe: Most student papers' online content essentially mirrors the print content. They are updated daily or weekly, only in conjunction with the print paper. Such an organization suggests a clear prioritizing of the physical newspaper -- a mistake that the professional news media, by and large, began to correct a decade ago. -- Brian Farkas, Inside Higher Ed

My provost just sent this link to me and some faculty from computer science and theater, all of whom I've already spoken with, very informally, about some kind of collaboration.

Game design has helped rekindle interest in computer science and become a hot new major at more than 200 schools across the country, according to the Entertainment Software Assn., a trade group. Because making games crosses several disciplines, the diversity of programs that offer such courses is staggering: Fine arts colleges, engineering schools, film schools, music schools and even drama programs are sending graduates into the fast-growing industry.

"Some programs throw a drama guy together with a programming guy to see what they come up with," said Bing Gordon, a venture capitalist and former chief creative officer for industry powerhouse Electronic Arts Inc. "Games is the ultimate interdisciplinary art." (Alex Pham, LA Times)

I logged onto Yahoo and found that my profile had been changed. The first of Yahoo's "Top Questions" is "What happened to my profile?" but the link just goes to the aggressively cheerful "Welcome to the Profiles Tutorials!" page, which does not actually answer the question.

Another question is "What happened to my alias profile?", which includes this heap of committee-spawned obfuscatory hooey:

If you had a profile page associated with your alias prior to migration to your new profile on Yahoo!, it will not be viewable moving forward.

I'm not sure that "migration" would be a good way to describe what happens if millions of birds are pulled from their nests and moved to a another location without warning, but whatever. And I suppose that being given a pretty much profile sort of counts as getting a "new profile," in the same way that if a bunch of pirates looted the house you rented, you'd end up with a "new house" because it no longer resembles the old one.  Because the auxiliary verb "will" already conveys "in the future," I wonder what someone thought the adverbial phrase "moving forward" would add to this linguistic mush.  It seems to be a euphemism for something like "anymore" or "ever again."

Many of the comments on Slashdot point out that Yahoo! is a free service, so it's not like we should really expect much of them.

Another writes, "Yahoo please die already, noone has liked you since '96."

A few weeks ago, my editors were bummed when I pointed out that an unusually large number of typos had slipped through the proofreading net and popped up in the headlines.  For the most recent issue, the headlines were fine, but I found three typos in bylines.

So the student paper isn't perfect. Even Homer nods, and sometimes, so does The Gray Lady.

In this NYT article, the focus is on Cindy McCain's relationship to congress, not her wealth, so shouldn't that be "Capitol"?
I asked the student editor not to try to place the blame on any one person, but rather to work towards a culture where more people take responsibility for checking the paper for errors. 

We've added an extra issue each semester, so the students are under more pressure, yet the quality of their journalism has remained high. 

I'll just keep asking them to work on polish and AP style. (We'll be fine.)

Via Karissa:

Mr. McCarraher defended his client by revealing his ingenious trump card- the victim's Facebook page.

On that page was a picture of her at a fancy dress party. She was smiling.

Here are some of the lawyer's touching words in describing the victim: "What we have is a person who has post traumatic stress but is quite capable of going out and having a good time at a fancy dress party." -- Chris Matyszczyk

Teaching: Midterm Grades (w00t!)

• LA100 (14 Oct)
  
• EL200 (16 Oct)
• EL236 (16 Oct)
• EL405 (16 Oct)

Administration/Advising

• Submit two recommendations (Oct 15)
• Program Review Executive Summary (Draft Oct 17; awaiting reviews)
  
• Advising Grids
• Internal proposal for a summer outreach project
  

Research

• Submit co-authored article (been sitting on it for months)
• Finish article for anthology (probably missed the deadline by now)
• Comment on architecture-in-games dissertation
• Comment on proposed Inform 7 manual chapter
• Request funds for spring/summer travel
  

Life

• Leave work in time not to be in the doghouse when I get home
  
• Success:
• Oct 14
• Oct 15
• Wife-approved Late Night
• Oct 16
• In the Doghouse for Being Late
  
• Oct 17
• Avoid getting depressed by this list

http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html

I'd like to be able to link to specific details on the map, but I don't think it's possible.

I'd never heard of the "Argument Slide" before.  The "concept visualization" cluster is probably most useful for teaching my freshman writing students.  I'm taking a quick break from marking midterms, and I only glanced at this. Filing it for later. (Via Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, where Lisa Spiro also introduces me to the term "slow blogging").

During play, the screen background was solid black with a white border, with one color line representing each player.  We displayed the game score in a horizontal strip at the bottom of the screen.  It wasn't the most graphically advanced program, but it was simple and fun.  It looked something like this:

[...]

"Both the AI and the humans had three missiles they could use during the course of the game. When a missile hit a wall, it would create a mini 'explosion' that would erase the color on the background back to black as it faded out - thereby eliminating sections of the trail left by previous cycles."

Soon we had players and computers firing missiles to shoot their way out of tight situations. Nonetheless, Tron purists may scoff, since the movie programs didn't have such luxuries as missiles to get them out of a bind.

[...]

One day, when Marco and I were playing against two computer opponents, we forced one of the AI cycles to trap itself between its own walls and the bottom game border.  Sensing an impending crash, it fired a missile, just like it always did whenever it was trapped.  But this time was different - instead of firing at another trail, it fired at the game border, which looked like any other light cycle trail as far as the computer was concerned.  The missile impacted with the border, leaving a cycle-sized hole, and the computer promptly took the exit and left the main playing field.  Puzzled, we watched as the cycle drove through the scoring display at the bottom of the screen.  It easily avoided the score digits and then drove off the screen altogether.

Shortly after, the system crashed.

Our minds reeled as we tried to understand what we had just seen.  The computer had found a way to get out of the game.  When a cycle left the game screen, it escaped into computer memory - just like in the movie.

Our jaws dropped when we realized what had happened.  (Real Life Tron on an Apple IIgs)

A few weeks ago, one of my local papers, the Tribune-Review, implemented a little JavaScript magic to try to hide its advertisements from the ad-blocking software I use. That means my ad-blocker didn't recognize some of the advertising cruft, so it let it pass through the filter, and the news pages suddenly started skipping and cavorting, blinking and wiggling in throes of mercantile ecstasy. 

It took me about five minutes to see their new trick. So I looked around and found a more aggressive ad blocker, which, fortunately for me, blocks even more of the non-intrusive ads that I had been willing to put up with.

On Gameshelf, Andrew Plotkin offers a great discussion of flash ads. This line sums it up pretty nicely:

You cannot get me to start watching ads by making them more intrusive; you can only make me hate you more.

I will put up with text ads, or graphic ads that don't blink. I won't put up with things that reach across into the content area, that add paid hyperlinks in the content area, or that otherwise interfere with my ability to use my browser (popups, disabling the "go back" button, etc.). 

There are millions and millions of pages on the internet, and if yours annoys me, I will leave.

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.

At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it moving
Beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.

And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practises tying
His father's tie there in secret

And the face of the father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something

That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.

Donald Justice (1925-2004)

You already know a different way of looking at the familiar.

Thanks to Nick Montfort for posting this gem:

Posted by Stephen Totilo on 10/8/08 at 12:00 pm.

"Lost" creator J.J. Abrams may not have have felt like explaining the smoke monster to MTV News movies reporter Josh Horowitz during an interview taped a few feet from my desk last week. But he both offered to adopt Horowitz and answered one question about his interest in making video games.

What kind of games would Abrams like to make? "Zork"-style text-adventures.

Seton Hill recently won a multimillion dollar instruction technology grant, part of which includes funding for a new technology specialist (which will become a permanent job when the grant ends). 

In helping to write the job notice, I drafted the "you-attitude" paragraphs, with the references to Bioshock and lolcats.

Our grant will fund the creation of a new instructional technology center, and we're motivated to put our resources to good use. Which is where you come in.

You love talking to people about technology. You have experience encouraging interactive exchanges between students and professor, students and their peers, and students and technology. You can help us eliminate the "sage on the stage" instructional model, and implement the "guide on the side" via multiple teaching points established around the room. You have the technical skills to maintain the latest in PCs/Macs, projection equipment, cameras, video iPods, text-to-speech scanning pens, and assistive technology of many kinds. You have the creativity and the people skills necessary to help us put our resources to good use, as Seton Hill continues to expand its learning environment as part of a globally networked virtual classroom.

You are also sufficiently well-versed in digital culture to maintain and promote the site as a collaborative learning center and recreational gaming lounge, when not needed for classes. (It's a tough job, but hey, someone's got to make sure Bioshock runs on the huge projection screen; u can has lolz!)

The search is currently open and will continue until the successful candidate is identified. (See the full job notice.)

I'm saving this for the next time I talk to my journalism students about surveys. Language Log.

Do you think surveys asking for people's opinions about the way things are, rather than verifiable things they have done, are an even more extreme form of stupidity, resulting in nonsense like "43% of employees believe managers may be snooping on them" being passed off as news or even social science?

__ strongly agree __ sort of agree __ utterly undecided __ hardly care __ sort of disagree __ strongly disagree

Does it sometimes occur to you to just refuse to do any more surveys until the morons who make them up show some signs of getting their act together?

__ strongly agree __ sort of agree __ utterly undecided __ hardly care __ sort of disagree __ strongly disagree

In a Ph.D. thesis called "The Paradox of the Guided User," a dutch researcher examined the productivity of users who were dependent on computers, and users who had a pen-and-paper alternative. The article doesn't link to the full dissertation, so it's risky to extrapolate beyond the quotes in the article, so I'll just repeat a few here:

"Present-day software must be user-friendly. Indeed, train ticket machines at railway stations should be simple and provide us with a ticket quickly," van Nimwegen told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

"But in other situations, I think we should not be assisted as much as graphic software interfaces like Microsoft Windows or Apple OSX are doing today," he added.

Van Nimwegen says much software turns us into passive beings, subjected to the whims of computers, randomly clicking on icons and menu options. In the long run, this hinders our creativity and memory, he says. --eNews 2.0

This article meshes nicely with a unit I'm preparing to spring on my Writing for the Internet students later this week.  I'm trying to get them past the "creative hypertext is confusing and boring" attitude that sometimes prevents experienced 'net users from appreciating the hyperauthor's use of a medium that can, in fact, be disorienting and alienating. 

Next, I'm going to introduce them to the command line, in order to prepare my English majors to appreciate the lesson I'm trying to teach them when I ask them to do some elementary programming and game-creation tasks.

That's the story that's been set up for the player to experience, and he travels along that path like a tourist on a Disneyland ride. However much choice the player seems to have in between these story checkpoints, the overall path of the game is geometrically equivalent to those of film or theater or books. We choose to ignore the fundamental quality that makes games different and so compelling-- their interactivity.

The other approach is to "open up" Moby Dick, to allow the player real, significant choices in the course of events and their outcomes. In this configuration, an especially skillful player might be so good at the game that he does indeed catch and kill Moby Dick, triumphantly achieving Captain Ahab's revenge-- and along with it, destroying the whole point of Melville's story. Allowing such an alternate ending robs the work of its power; the story of Moby Dick is engaging precisely because Captain Ahab cannot find extra lives, rewind time or load an old save for a second chance, and the story of his obsession and undoing is fixed over time, a static sculpture in four dimensions.

The issue of these changeable outcomes is what the critic Roger Ebert infamously identified as the central problem with games-as-art, and despite the emotional flurries and dismissive grumblings from the gaming community, it is actually a good point without a clear answer. If Melville had so much as allowed for any possibility at all where Captain Ahab "wins," no matter how remote, the work's message and its interpretation of the world completely changes. Instead of destiny and fate, we would now speak of probability and chance. Work hard enough, get lucky enough, and anything is possible -- Matthew Wasteland, GameSetWatch

My provost just sent some of my colleagues a link to this article on games and literacy:

But doubtful teachers and literacy experts question how effective it is to use an overwhelmingly visual medium to connect youngsters to the written word. They suggest that while a handful of players might be motivated to pick up a book, many more will skip the text and go straight to the game. Others suggest that video games detract from the experience of being wholly immersed in a book.

Some researchers, though, say that even when children don't read much text, they are picking up skills that can help them thrive in a visually oriented digital world. And some educational experts suggest that video games still stimulate reading in blogs and strategy guides for players.

To be sure, some of the experiments pairing electronic games with books will be little more than marketing gimmicks. But publishers and authors suggest that some projects may push creative boundaries, helping to extend storytelling beyond the traditional covers of a book. (Motoko Rich, NYT)

Beautiful, beautiful 1980s introduction to "sophisticated word-processor" technology.

My student Dani Choynowski, a double-major in new media journalism and theatre, is a very busy woman.  She's getting top-notch grades in two challenging majors, her hand is usually the first one up during workshops or discussions, and she's always ready with some connection to the world of theater or Harry Potter.

Last semester, as a sophomore, she took a very demanding 300-level course, "Media Aesthetcis," the theme of which was the history and future of the book.  As part of her work in this term's "Writing for the Internet," she blogged about a major revelation that she had a few hours ago.  This is exactly what I needed to read on a drizzly gray day when I had been feeling a little grumpy and overwhelmed with various projects and responsibilities. This is the sort of thing that reminds me why I love my job so much.

Now I finally see what the point of that class was. El 336 was theory, and EL 236 is the practical application. Wow, what an epiphany. I'm a little in shock because when I say I loathed EL 336, I wasn't kidding. There was a 4 page paper due every week (think a super- ultra synthesized essay pertaining to all the readings you blogged about), not to mention forum presentations, an 8-10 page midterm paper and a final 12-15 page paper. I haven't had Digital imaging, Topics in media aesthetics, or Publications Workshop yet, so I can't speak for the rest of my time here, but EL 336 has been the most difficult (sans General Chemistry 1) class I have taken at Seton Hill so far.

Since the subject changes every time the class is offered, I don't know if you will have the same reaction as I did. But if you do find yourself cursing you papers to hell (especially when your hard drive crashes in the middle of your mid-term paper and you didn't save a backup because you were in the zone too deep to pay attention and then have to re-write it while wondering if the $1300 machine is ever going to run again !!@#$!@$), I will offer you these words of wisdom:

you will be so glad you took the class (and will also feel an immense weight lift off you on the glorious day the class ended). You will be a much better writer by the end of those  3 1/2 months.

It's strange how one little reading can cause you to have an epiphany. I haven't gone past the second link in Is Hypertext Fiction Possible?. --Daniella Choynowski

Ideally, the practical "EL236: Writing for the Internet" is a prerequisite for "EL336: Media Aesthetics," but I let her take the 300-level class first because it fit better with her plans for her double-major. 

It's possible that, had she taken the classes in the intended order, the theory class would have been a little less stressful, but then she wouldn't have had the "aha" moment that brought the material into such clarity for her.

I just attended an inspiring talk by Benjamin Ajak (one of the Sudanese "Lost Boys") and Judy Bernstein, who collaborated with Alephonsion Deng and Benson Deng to write They Poured Fire on Us From the Sky, which was SHU's summer reading book.

 

"Education is the power of the world."

"When I tell my story, I wash my heart."

In response to a student who asked him what aspects of American life he found most surprising, Benjamin demonstrated the cheesy grin he had to plaster on his face when he worked at a grocery store: "I have to give them my teeth."

He also told an anecdote about going out the parking lot to collect carts and noticing "Two dudes kissing."

A journalism student at NYU published a Generation Y-ney piece on PBS's MediaShift.

The first thing I notice when I walk into the class is that there are 14 girls and two boys. Already NYU is dominated by females, but the journalism department is exceptionally estrogen-infested. Professor Quigley begins by explaining how blogs are becoming more imprtant and asks if any of us have a blog.

One hand slowly rises. It's mine. (Alana Taylor)

It's certainly... interesting to have a student publicly evaluate a class in this manner, after the class has been in session for a few weeks.   While she is careful to distance her essay from a personal attack on her professor, she complains about the old-media stance of the course, and the program as a whole. Based on the scarcity of student bloggers in this particular classroom, it seems to me that the professor is pitching the class at the right level -- though the generic term "blog" is far less familiar to today's teens than branded bloglike entities "Facebook" or "MySpace." 

My former student, Amanda Cochran, now a grad student at NYU, reacts to Taylor's piece.

Like Taylor, I am one of the only bloggers in my graduate school class, and I'm looked upon as a novelty. As many of my readers know, blogging was an important part of my undergrad experience. We were on the cutting edge of journalism (and still are) at Seton Hill -- as it would seem in light of this report. I know about blogging. I know what I need to do to write a good blog. This ability has enhanced my resume and, more importantly, my understanding of online media and its direction. However, it is true that few other students do know about blogging and its ramifications on their future careers.

Okay, so Taylor made a point. So what? She has done much more harm than good to her career by this stunt. Taylor, looking oh-so-Facebookish in the picture posted with the piece, did invade her classroom, as cited by NYU professor Quigley. However, more importantly, no matter if she isn't a traditional journalist or not, she violated a journalistic tenet of disclosure to her subjects for a completely unworthy assignment. If I were an employer, I would think twice before hiring her -- and that's enough in this competitive business to stay unemployed. (Amanda Cochran)

Taylor had planned to write a follow-up for MediaShift, but editor Mark Glaser did so instead.

I turned into a bobble-head doll, nodding, nodding, nodding, while reading this excerpt. I've already requested it for the library.

We are at a crossroads. There are two possible paths before us--one in which we destroy what is great about the Internet and about how young people use it, and one in which we make smart choices and head toward a bright future in a digital age. The stakes of our actions today are very high. The choices that we are making now will govern how our children and grandchildren live their lives in many important ways: how they shape their identities, protect their privacy, and keep themselves safe; how they create, understand, and shape the information that underlies the decision-making of their generation; and how they learn, innovate, and take responsibility as citizens. On one of these paths, we seek to constrain their creativity, self-expression, and innovation in public and private spheres; on the other, we embrace these things while minimizing the dangers that come with the new era.

Fear is the single biggest obstacle to getting started on that second path, the one where we realize the potential of digital technology and the way that Digital Natives are using it. Parents, educators, and psychologists all have legitimate reasons to worry about the digital environment in which young people are spending so much of their time. So do corporations, who see their revenues at risk in industry after industry--recorded entertainment, telephony, newspapers, and on and on. Lawmakers, responding to this sense of crisis, fear that they will pay a high price if they fail to act in the traditional manner to right these wrongs. The choices that we are making now will govern how our children and grandchildren live their lives in many important ways: how they shape their identities, protect their privacy, and keep themselves safe.

The media feeds this fear. News coverage is saturated with frightening stories of cyberbullying, online predators, Internet addiction, and online pornography. Of course parents worry. Parents worry most that their digitally connected kids are at risk of abduction when they spend hours a day in an uncontrolled digital environment where few things are precisely as they seem at first glance. They worry, too, about bullying that their children may encounter online, addiction to violent video games, and access to pornographic and hateful images. --Palfrey and Gasser

'Hi YouTube, it's me, Kiki,'' the teenager said to the camera as she swiveled in her chair to jazzy background music. ''And today I'm going to show you how to cheat on a test - the effective way.''

She demonstrates her technique, slipping a small piece of paper with the answers in a clear-tubed pen as she rationalizes her reasons for cheating. (Chicago Sun-Times)

Kiki's video includes a link to her blog, where we learn she is a community college student who wrote a few weeks ago, "I think I want to start being in the media right now. You know, being seen in movies and television."  Well, you've got part of your wish, Kiki.

It's hard for me to imagine what's going through the head of someone who posts a video like this, but at the same time, I can't help but feel amused. First of all, there's a lot of stuff on YouTube, so it's not surprising to find someone has posted a video about cheating.

Second, how many words can you put inside a clear plastic pen tube?  We're talking about filling up the inside diameter, not the outside diameter.  Even if you have really good eyes, and can discern two lines of text, we're talking about 20 words.  In the time it takes to watch Kiki's video, you could say those 20 words to yourself 20 times over, or spend a minute making up an acronym to help you memorize key terms. (The YouTube article on how to cheat on a test with a fake Coke bottle label actually describes something that requires some forethought and talent, and users have rated it much higher than Kiki's method.)

Since I teach small classes where each student is expected to contribute during class, and because most of my classes are writing classes, I can de-emphasize the "memorize facts and spit them back" activities, and instead focus on process. 

When I gave a vocabulary quiz last semester, I let my students bring in a one-page cheat sheet.  I figured that the benefit the student would gain from having to filter the material and decide what was important enough to go onto the cheat sheet would be more beneficial to their learning than cramming. But in that case, I wasn't intersted in getting them to memorize any particular vocabulary words. Rather, I was calling attention to the process of deducing the meanings of unfamiliar words by having them break a word down into its components (prefix, root, suffix).  I also had them invent new words. (Examples I included were "post-cardiofractal" and "circumvore".)

Along the same lines, I let students in Writing for the Internet consult their textbooks and even look on their classmates' computers while they were doing an in-class HTML exercise. (My only stipulation was I didn't want them to ask each other for answers.)  Again, I wasn't asking student to memorize HTML, but rather asking them to internalize the technical steps that go into creating and uploading a web site, so that we can move on to the much more important issues of content and audience.

For my second time teaching "New Media Projects," I have replaced routine "prove you can use this tool" quizzes with peer-focused screencasts.  Rather than have students prove to me that they can perform certain design and programming skills in class, I am asking them to use Cam Studio to record a video of them talking a novice through some steps that demonstrate their skills.  So far we have screencasts on Blender 3D (a modeling and animation tool), Inform 7 (a programming environment for text-based games, which I don't think had been covered on YouTube before), and an open topic that's simply supposed to be interesting to Seton Hill University students.  This phase of the course is designed to get students familiar with various unfamiliar tools. Of course there's only so much they can learn in the two or three weeks we spend on each tool, but when each time they watch and comment on a peer's screencasts, they'll get a slightly different approach to using the tool.

(BTW, also quoted in the Sun-Times article is Liz Losh, whose path I cross on the blogosphere from time to time.)