December 2008 Archive Page

What's happening to video is like what happened to word processing. Back in the '70s and early '80s, publishing was a rarefied, expert job. Then Apple's WYSIWYG interface made it drop-dead easy, enabling an explosion of weird new forms of micropublishing and zines. Laptop audio editing did the same thing, giving birth to the mashup and cut-and-paste subgenres of music. Then there's photo manipulation, once a rarefied propaganda technique. Photoshop made it a folk art.

In a sense, you could argue that even after 100 years of moving pictures, we still don't know what video is for. The sheer cost of creating it meant we used it for a stiflingly narrow set of purposes: news, documentaries, instructional presentations.

Now the lid is blowing off. --Clive Thompson (Wired)

This NYT overview of the NASA craft designed to replace the space shuttle is a great example of 3D animation in a news context.

Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary responds to the urban legend that his song "Puff, the Magic Dragon" is an extended metaphor for drug use. He then mockingly applies the critical lens of drug metaphors to The Star-Spangled Banner, before the group launches into "Puff."
 

During the song, we see a montage of people in the audience of all ages singing along; the unspoken message is clearly "Don't analyze, just enjoy."

I wonder if I can use this in my literary criticism class. This won't be the first time that a work that was created by an artist who had one particular vision in mind was taken up by a group of people who saw something different in it.  Should we just accept the Coca-Cola commercials that try to make an iced beverage part of wintertime Christmas rituals? (Ever wonder why Santa wears red and white?)  Should we accept what the recording industry tells about the technology behind file-sharing -- that because it can potentially be used for copyright violations, the technology itself should be illegal?  Should the ancient Romans have accepted their bread and circuses without troubling themselves to question the motives of the politicians who supplied their entertainment?

I don't at all mean to suggest Paul Yarrow has any sinister motives (well, except for that incident with the 14-year-old fan back in 1970); rather, I'm gathering notes for my "Literary Criticism" class, for which I expect I will have to overcome some resistance to the value of theoretical readings.

Any group of specialists will have their own jargon, their own methods, their own shortcuts, their own sense of identifying the boundaries of received knowledge, and their own threshold for noticing where what looks, to an outsider or beginner, like a simple concept (such as "the author's intended meaning") reveals great gaps that invite further exploration: By "author's intention," do we mean the author's intent when he wrote the first draft, the author's intent when the poem was first published, the author's intent when he agreed to censor certain passages in order to get it a wider printing, or the author's intent when he changed a few words years later when re-publishing the work in an anthology, or the author's intent when a reporter tracked him down years later and asked him some questions about the poem in question?

I do point out to my students that lit-crit isn't "anything does."  There are more *possible* interpretations than *probable* ones, and Occam's Razor reminds us that even the *probable* interpretations are not always *necessary*.

I haven't been to the Modern Languate Association's annual conference in the last several years, in part because the time slot (between Christmas and New Year's) is horrible if you want to spend time with your family (imagine that!).  Some of it is just sour grapes -- I pitched a few proposals to the MLA that didn't get accepted, but the proposals I pitched to the 4Cs did get accepted, so I went where my scholarship was a good fit.

Last year I blogged about my frustration with the 4Cs conference hotels that don't make wireless access available to attendees, which not only frustrates presenters who assume they'll be able to show a YouTube clip during their presnestation, but also severely limits the amount of liveblogging that happens. I wasn't staying at the conference hotel, so I didn't have wireless access during the conference, so this year I chose not to liveblog... I imagine many others made a similar choice. It's frustrating to be presenting on a Web 2.0 topic, without being able to demonstrate Web 2.0 techniques to your audience. 

Recently the 4Cs announced a search for a "web editor," but apparently the job description went out without any input from the fellow who had been volunteering for four years in a very similar position, and the move drew some criticism.

But it looks like blogging is part of the MLA's strategy to open up its conference to a wider audience.

Rosemary G. Feal, the MLA's executive director, is blogging the conference this year. That isn't the only thing that's new, as she explained in a conversation with The Chronicle. The pragmatic bent of many of the program offerings (see our previous blog post) is part of a deliberate strategy to respond to "the changing demographics" of the MLA's membership, Ms. Feal said. That means workshops and more teaching-oriented sessions to supplement panels devoted to lace collars in the work of Jane Austen (Ms. Feal's hypothetical example of a traditional MLA panel topic).

It's kind of a tradition for a journalist to get ahold of the MLA program, or maybe even attend a small handful of panel sessions, and then publish an article that makes the whole thing look like a bunch of navel-gazing, angels-dancing-on-pin-counting book nerds with nothing better to do than make up ridiculous things to say about obscure books, or obscure things to say about pop culture, or popular things to say about ridiculous books (or anything at all other than what literature professors are supposed to be doing, which apparently doesn't include presenting papers at the MLA).

Any group of experts is going to talk about things that don't make sense to outsiders, so it's not hard to cherry-pick with the intention of making the MLA look ridiculous. I think the MLA oranizers have the right idea in their intention to address changes in the profession and present, for a wider audience, a broader view of the totality of the organization's accomplishments.

From the LA times, a reminder to get all those family videos onto disc. I talked my father into buying a Betamax way back when. The tapes were smaller, and the quality was better, but the format didn't stick. Now it's VHS's turn.

After three decades of steady if unspectacular service, the spinning wheels of the home-entertainment stalwart are slowing to a halt at retail outlets. On a crisp Friday morning in October, the final truckload of VHS tapes rolled out of a Palm Harbor, Fla., warehouse run by Ryan J. Kugler, the last major supplier of the tapes.

"It's dead, this is it, this is the last Christmas, without a doubt," said Kugler, 34, a Burbank businessman. "I was the last one buying VHS and the last one selling it, and I'm done. Anything left in warehouse we'll just give away or throw away." -- Geoff Boucher

I'm sitting with my laptop in the hallway, guarding the kids' bedrooms, One has already tried to sneak out to watch for St. Nick (I had to put a stuffed snake along the crack under the door to keep her from peeking... I'm sure she'll fall asleep on the floor, trying to peer under the door), and the other is still stirring in his bed.

A couple hours ago, I had them burn a little energy off by jumping in front of the Christmas tree. (The shot I took of Carolyn last year came out nice, so I thought we'd try again.)

I've never been a fan of PDF documents, but now that I have a tablet PC, I thought I would try reading a few PDF documents and see how my tablet functions as an e-book reader, mostly for magazines, dissertations, or the occasional advance proof copy that someone wants to share with me.

My first order of business was to find an alternative to Adobe Reader, the bloated default monstrosity that periodically treats me to a pop-under window asking me to approve a pointless upgrade (completely freezing my browser until I go hunting for the box and click it). All I really want to do is scroll through the darn pages, occasionally searching for and/or copying text, and infrequently saving the whole thing as a text file.

I looked up Foxit, a free Firefox plug-in alternative to Adobe Reader. It looked good for a moment, but then I noticed that I had to approve to the installation of something called the "Ask.com Toolbar" if I wanted certain features.  I rejected the toolbar, which means that I got a crippled version that doesn't seem to be able to copy text. There's also a little blinking strip that flashes advertisements for Foxit. Sorry, no. I don't want that distracting my reading. (Yes, I am sure that I want to uninstall Foxit Reader, thanks for asking.)

Next I tried Sumatra. It loads fast, it fits on an SD card, and it has a minimalist design.  Best of all, the manual is a simple HTML page, not a bandwidth-hogging PDF document. A note indicates that printing is not well-tested, but I suppose I can always print from a comptuer lab if I must. But I also note that the program doesn't let you save the whole document as a text file. That might be a deal-killer for me.

Adobe has an online PDF-to-text converter, but the 11MB file that I tested got rejected for being too large. There are some geeky tools that convert PDFs to text, such as the pdftotext tool in the Xpdf suite. And again, I can always use the copy of Adobe Acrobat on one of the lab computers.

I read on Metafilter that publicists for the upcoming movie Coraline have sent beautiful hand-crafted boxes to 50 bloggers. I just finished reading the Neil Gaiman / Dave McKean book (not quite as good as their The Wolves in the Walls, but creepily delightful nonetheless) to my kids last week, so I was curious.

Absolutely classic, isn't it? Right down to the water stained, aged paper and old-fashioned typeset, I knew right away that these folks were kindred spirits, not just with me, but with many of you as well. As I lifted the lid, this is what I saw. --stainlesssteeldroppings

This came up in my feed reader today.  Like me, this gamer prefers stories to mindless shoot-em-ups, and laments the current state of commercial gaming.

There's a lot of hipocrysy in the minds of many gamers today. Almost every gamer I talk to tells me they want games with depth, carefully written storylines, and maginificent scenery - yet they camp out in front of game shops whenever the next game featuring a nameless space marine killing aliens/Russians/Chinese/terrorists comes out. I'm trying very hard to stick to my guns (you have to admit, that's a good one) when I say that I like games which at least promise me depth and decent storytelling - and I try to buy only those.--Thom Holwerda

Tonight I was reading my 10-year-old son a chapter in Beorn the Proud, a youth historical fiction that describes the relationship between a 9th-century Irish girl taken as a slave by the son of a Viking king. The heroine, Ness, spits out angry prophecies and pretty much gives the Vikings a piece of her mind every chance she gets, in a parallel of the story of St. Patrick (who, as a slave, brought Christianity to Ireland). For the convenience of the story, several of the Viking main characters have learned to speak Irish, so Ness has an audience for her rage.

I pointed out that her character was very different from the heroine of Indian Captive: The Story of Mary Jemison, an American pioneer girl who was kidnapped by the Seneca. Molly Jemison was depicted as in complete shock, then over the course of the book she comes to understand the Seneca language, then eventually she accepts her new life (even choosing, on more than one occasion, to return to her Indian family when she has the chance to escape).

The captivity narrative is a great vehicle for historical fiction, in part because the culture clash means that when you read, you learn about the captive's former culture as she contrasts it with her new experiences. We're trying to cover geography this year, and the captivity narratives let us get two different cultures at once. 

The way a captivity narrative is set up, you automatically sympathize with the victim, but a good author who contextualizes the culture can make you, if not actually condone the kidnapping, see what function the taking of captives serves in the victim's new culture. Though Molly Jemision gets a lot of attention for her cornsilk-colored hair, the author presents the culture of her Senca captors with considerable depth; the first few chapters of Beorn the Proud suggest the author may intend to showcase the resilience of Ness's Christianity under duress, with the Viking culture being presented as materialistic and opportunitstic -- so far the only Vikings we've met have been raiding parties sacking monasteries -- but even so, Beorn himself shows glimmers of kindness toward his captive.

As I was tucking Peter into bed, and wondering what sort of conclusions he might be drawing about the patterns that one finds in the traditional captivity narrative, I thought I should say something about the gender relationships.

As Peter was settling himself into bed, he said, "Yes, that's the way women used to be depicted in stories all the time, weak and weepy."

Then, stifling a yawn, and said, "Thank goodness for Ripley in Alien."

At 10, he's still a bit too young to see the Alien movies, though he's right about Sigourney Weaver's legendary kick-ass performance in the role. As I watched him curling up under the covers, I wondered aloud where he got that idea.

In reply, my son pointed sleepily towards his stack of reference books. "Science Fiction's Greatest Monsters," he said.

As I write this, it occurs to me that I was about his age when the original Alien first came out. (I didn't see it until I was a teenager.)

Raph Koster comments on the internet buzz surrounding a blog entry that went viral.

Owens's exploits might have been lost to the mists of time if not for an undergraduate student named Jane Browning, who stumbled on the story in a cafe in Gloucester County, Virginia, and tracked down the man behind the legend. You can read more about Owens in his Wikipedia entry and on Ms. Browning's blog, The Last American Pirate. On YouTube, you can watch Ms. Browning visit the site of Owens's house and interview a couple of historians about his historical status.

It's a good story. None of it is true.

Edward Owens and Jane Browning are fictions, unleashed on an unsuspecting world by students taking an upper-level history course at George Mason University. Will they get in trouble with their professor now that the hoax has been unveiled? No. It was his idea.

T. Mills Kelly, an associate professor of history at George Mason and an associate director of the university's Center for History and New Media, thought up the course, "Lying About the Past," as a novel way to teach history, not to subvert it. -- Jennifer Howard, Chronicle

The challenge in an adventure game is not based on fighting enemies, building armies, or the usual competitive activities associated with video games. Rather, the player has to figure out what the designers were thinking when they built the game and follow some script of events in order to win. These events are activated by actions the user can perform and the necessary actions are created by the player executing a particular command on a particular object in the game world. The player interacts with the world by performing actions on individual objects, using objects with each other, and navigating through the world. To progress in the game, the player needs to find a particular sequence of events or combination of actions which trigger other behaviors and events in the world. Gradually, those events lead to some winning state. The user is given a set of graphical, verbal, or textual descriptions of the game world and is supposed to figure out exactly what the programmer expects him or her to do. -- Mark Newheiser, Strange Horizons

I've blogged before about an episode of Blake's 7, a British sci-fi series from the late 70s, that centered on the thief Vila, who usually played a supporting comic-relief role. In this episode, the main action focused on his efforts to escape from a trap, and we see him develop a relationship (of sorts) with the long-dead designer of said traps.

Here's a bit of the script from City on the Edge of the World, written around 1980... I think it does a good job describing one way of thinking of the player's relationship with the puzzles in an adventure game:

KERRIL: We're shut in. Vila, we're shut in!
VILA: Don't worry. My man knows we're here.
KERRIL: Your man?
VILA: The designer. He knows we're here, and he knows we're not stupid because if we were, we wouldn't have got this far.
KERRIL: So?
VILA: So if he wanted to stop us, there's only one way left to him.
KERRIL: What?
VILA: Shh.
KERRIL: According to the locals, this lot is thousands of years old. You sound as though you're expecting to meet this character.
VILA: He may be dead, but he's still trying to outthink me. Keep behind me. Step where I step, and don't touch anything. Right?
KERRIL: Right. What are you expecting him to do?
VILA: I'm expecting him to try and kill us.

But note that the encounter with the puzzle is less meaningful when it's divorced from its context. As I noted, Vila is the comic-relief sidekick, who chooses cowardice and self-preservation over action. This episode is memorable not simply becuase of the cool puzzle, but also because the story furnishes the character with a love interest (who's turned on by the very geekiness that dooms him to sidekick status in an action TV series). I enjoyed watching Vila figure out what the designer was thinking, but that's becuase the show provided a framing narrative that explained the stakes, and I got to watch how Vila reacted to changes in the environment.

But if, while playing an adventure game, my primary reaction is "What was the designer thinking?" it's probably because the story was not sufficiently interesting. 

When I play an adventure game, I want to spend time thinking, "What would I do if I were in this situation?" or, better yet, "What would the protagonist do if he/she were in this stituation?"  If I click randomly on the screen in hopes of hitting a hot button, or if I have to type ten different synonyms to get the game to understand me, then the game world does not contain sufficient clues to help me solve the puzzle on my own.

Given my obsession with narrative, I would have liked Newheiser to have spent more time talking about the story that contextualizes the puzzles, so that the player feels that solving each separate puzzle advances the PC one step closer to reaching a goal.

An adventure game is a series of puzzles, solved by interacting with discrete elements in the game world, usually in a way that does not depend on reflexes or real-time concerns.

Bloxorz and Echochrome both fit Newheiser's definition, but they certainly aren't adventure games. Portal is a string of puzzles, but they're given meaning by a story.

It's worth the time to look back at Grahamn Nelson's classic "The Craft of Adventure," (which refers specifically to text adventures, which continued evolving on their own trajectory after the graphic adventures became popular) and Jesper Juul's Half-Real for some meaty analysis of the relationship between puzzle and story.

Sad news for Trek fans.

Majel Barrett Roddenberry, wife of "Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry and the actress who portrayed Nurse Chapel on the original science-fiction television series, died Thursday of leukemia, according to the family. --NBC

For more, see her biography on Wikipedia.

For the first time this year, I asked my school to buy me a laptop (a Dell Latitude XT, my first-ever tablet computer).  I also asked for a new monitor, and it's a beauty.

I'm pretty pleased with my setup.

Of course, it's fun to set up your office when you don't have any immediate deadlines.

The little PDA is the same, after 5 years, some loose screws, and, a few weeks ago, a new battery (with the help of this YouTube video).

An interesting method of publicizing high-quality science in a form accessible to (and editable by) the general public.

RNA Biology will require Wikipedia pages from all authors who submit work to a new section of the journal, to be launched later this week, that describes families of RNA molecules. The first paper scheduled is "A Survey of Nematode SmY RNAs"¹; its corresponding Wikipedia summary can be found here.

The goal is to encourage more scientists who work on RNA to get involved in creating and updating public data on RNA families, while being rewarded by the traditional method of a citable publication, says Sean Eddy, a computational biologist at the Janelia Farm Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Ashburn, Virginia, and a co-author of the nematode article. -- Nature, via.

Sad news from the MLA, as reported by Inside Higher Ed.

Today the Modern Language Association is releasing information on just how bad the situation is: The number of job postings in the MLA's Job Information List will be down 21 percent in 2008-9, the steepest annual decline in its 34-year history. For English language and literature, the drop will be 22.2 percent and for foreign languages, 19.6 percent. Not all jobs are listed with the MLA, so the figures don't cover every position, but the MLA's postings have tracked consistently with national trends, especially for the assistant professor positions that are so desirable to new Ph.D.'s who want to land on the tenure track. In another notable change this year, however, the percentage of the MLA's job listings that are for assistant professor positions on the tenure track dropped to 56 percent from 60 percent.

At Seton Hill, our searches for two tenure-track English faculty members continue.

Crapwrap, for a personal touch.

Bored of perfectly folded paper and exquisitely tied ribbon? Fancy adding a more 'personal' touch this year? Then why not have your Christmas presents CrapWrapped™ at Firebox. This exclusive, uniquely shoddy gift wrapping option involves us wrapping your pressies in a slapdash fashion.

The Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News (both owned by the same corporation) have announced another nail in the coffin of print journalism.

Home delivery will be available on Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays. Subscribers will have access to an electronic "e-edition" seven days a week as part of their subscription.

This "e-edition" allows you to see an exact copy of the newspaper - including all the advertising - on your computer. It can be printed and will include many additional features, such as the ability to change print size and search for specific content relevant to you. You can access these editions for free by going to www.edetroitnews.com and www.digitalfreepress.com.

On Thursdays, Fridays and Sundays, retail outlets and coin boxes will sell the same editions that home delivery subscribers receive. The other four days - Monday through Wednesday, and Saturday - we will produce innovative, newly designed single-copy editions.

I'm not sure how valuable an "exact copy of the newspaper" will be to online readers (who prefer  news, rather than a "newspaper").  The practice harkens back to a past that is rapidly fading, like the deliberate affectation of calling a bus as a "motor coach" or your great-aunt who calls a refrigerator an "electric icebox." 

The student paper which I advise regularly makes good use of its center spread, working on a large canvas that achieves emotional and rhetorical impact that a little square computer monitor can't reach. But we could also work to tap the native power of the digital medium. (I can't force the students to start podcasting campus news, but I can at least teach them the skills they'll need as 21st-century journalists.

That didn't take long. BoingBoing assembles a collection of digital interpretations of the shoe-tossing incident.

We're not teaching literature, we're teaching the professional study of literature: What we do is its own subject. Nowadays the academic study of literature has almost nothing to do with the living, breathing world outside. The further along you go in the degree ladder, and the more rarified a college you attend, the less literary studies relates to the world of the reader. The academic study of literature nowadays isn't, by and large, about how literature can help students come to terms with love, and life, and death, and mistakes, and victories, and pettiness, and nobility of spirit, and the million other things that make us human and fill our lives. It's, well, academic, about syllabi and hiring decisions, how works relate to each other, and how the author is oppressing whomever through the work. The literary critic Gerald Graff famously told us to "teach the conflicts": We and our squabbles are what it's all about. That's how we made a discipline, after all.

You wouldn't think we'd so focus on the power of written works with the United States engaged in regime change using guns and soldiers -- some of them my students. That, it would seem, would be real power. But of course, it's a literature professor telling the story; this skewing of reality makes perfect sense. At least to other literature professors. -- Bruce Fleming

I remember feeling this very frustration when I took a lit crit course as a grad student, and now I'm teaching the subject to undergrads. Of course my initial reaction is to defend my profession, and to justify what I'm about to do next term. We offer a separate course in lit crit only once every other year, so it's not as if we're kicking reading out the door. Some students in the class are planning to be high school English teachers, so I don't plan to spend the whole time wallowing in obscurity or forcing students to read works from my favorite literary subfield (which, of late, has been steampunk... brass pipework... rivets... mahogany panels... rusty, rusty rivets... um, where was I?).

I am working on an opening lecture that introduces literary criticism not as a series of facts to memorize and names to drop, but as a way of studying the thinking process that forms our own world view. Since I teach alongside colleagues who write, study, and teach about horror, suspense, romance, science-fiction, I think it's pretty safe to say our program doesn't support a particularly stodgy or rarified approach to the canon. Nevertheless, I teach lit crit to advanced students who have already taken "Intro to Literary Study" and "Writing about Literature," and most likely several other reading-heavy courses too.  Those are the courses where I feel it's most appropriate to equip students to move beyond simply "relating to" literature, and push them towards the study of the conflicts, challenges, and power struggles that led to the formation of the canon. 

Fleming teaches literature at the U.S. Naval Academy. I've enjoyed reading the musings of Mike Edwards, who teaches composition at West Point. I also teach a literature survey which draws mostly students taking a core requirement. In that class, while I do ask students to move beyond merely summarizing a work and relating it to their personal lives, I am satisfied if the course teaches the close reading skills that will help students become better readers (no matter what they end up reading).

When I used to teach writing to engineering students, I got to know what an engineering student is like, and was able to use a freshman engineering student's expectations and experiences to help me push them to the next level of wriitng. I applaud Fleming for challenging his naval students to see themselves in unlikely places.

No big finish for me... time to put the kids to bed. I'll think about this when I put together my syllabus for January.

Tropes are storytelling devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members' minds and expectations.

The site's name is misleading... while there are plenty of TV tropes, you'll also find examples from journalism, comics, video games, etc. From the "air vent escape" to "loser archetypes" to the "hard work montage," this is loads of fun.

Oh, and it's a wiki! (Via.)

For decades, TV journalists have worked in teams, with the lines of responsibility regulated by union rules or simple tradition. Stories were covered by a crew consisting of a camera operator and a correspondent (and further back, by a sound or lighting technician); their work was overseen by a producer and their footage assembled into a finished story by an editor.

But technology -- handheld or tripod-mounted cameras, laptop editing programs and the Internet -- have made it possible for one person to handle all those assignments, station managers say. -- Paul Farhi, The Washington Post

As a radio news intern for WINA-Charlottesville in the 80s, and as a news office intern at the University of Virgnia, I was amused by the choreography involving the on-camera reporter walking through a crowded scene, the videographer walking backwards in front of the reporter, a technician holding onto the belt of the videographer to help negotiate obstacles.

As a grad student in Toronto, I sort of smirked at CityTV's brand of "journalism," which had "videographers" sticking a shoulder-mounted camera in a subject's face, while holding a small hand-held camera out at arms length to get a two-shot at the same time. How could they concentrate on asking probing questions? They couldn't -- they mostly showed up at events to shoot crowd reaction shots, then after the event was over they asked the keynote speaker to summarize for the TV audience what the day's event was all about.

This move is going to save money, it's going to increase the frequency of news releases, but it's going to impact depth.  I'm not really sure that's a problem -- who goes to TV news for depth?

Fascinating follow-up to Wednesday's story about the Linux advocate who posted a bitter diatrabe lamenting the ignorance of a teacher who confiscated a student's Linux disks and wrote a heartfelt (if misguided) letter insisting that giving away software must be illegal.

"Why did you throw me to the wolves like that?"

I didn't even have to think of the reply.

"I didn't throw you to the wolves Karen, I threw ignorance to the wolves. Let me ask you something. If I had not emailed you a link to my blog, would you have even known about this?"

Again she hesitated. "What do you mean?"

"I mean that if you didn't know I had written that blog, would you have known about all these comments? Has anyone called you or bothered you about this? Have your co-workers mentioned it?"

"Well...no."

"Then the wolves didn't touch you Karen. If I had included your last name or email address, then yes, you could ask me that question but as it stands, you are just a nameless school teacher that evoked a public response from me."

She didn't say anything for several seconds. When she did, it was a quiet and simple:

"Thank you". -- Blog of Helios

And here's an interesting Twitter coda:

colleagues talked her into civil litigation for privacy violation, now on hold. Am installing Linux on her comp uter this Saturday.

The story's not over yet, but I almost want to cue the "family sitcom closing theme music."

After a long anecdote about how hard it is to predict the pro playing ability of college quarterbacks, this New Yorker article focuses on details that characterize effective teachers. While I was initially bored by the sports introduction, I ended up being fascinated by the play-by-play commentary of scenes from the classroom.

Another teacher walked over to a computer to do a PowerPoint presentation, only to realize that she hadn't turned it on. As she waited for it to boot up, the classroom slid into chaos.

Then there was the superstar--a young high-school math teacher, in jeans and a green polo shirt. "So let's see," he began, standing up at the blackboard. "Special right triangles. We're going to do practice with this, just throwing out ideas." He drew two triangles. "Label the length of the side, if you can. If you can't, we'll all do it." He was talking and moving quickly, which Pianta said might be interpreted as a bad thing, because this was trigonometry. It wasn't easy material. But his energy seemed to infect the class. And all the time he offered the promise of help. If you can't, we'll all do it. In a corner of the room was a student named Ben, who'd evidently missed a few classes. "See what you can remember, Ben," the teacher said. Ben was lost. The teacher quickly went to his side: "I'm going to give you a way to get to it." He made a quick suggestion: "How about that?" Ben went back to work. The teacher slipped over to the student next to Ben, and glanced at her work. "That's all right!" He went to a third student, then a fourth. Two and a half minutes into the lesson--the length of time it took that subpar teacher to turn on the computer--he had already laid out the problem, checked in with nearly every student in the class, and was back at the blackboard, to take the lesson a step further. -- Malcolm Gladwell

The US Holocaust Memorial Museum has cooperated with a game developer to produce a Second Life memorial to Kristallnacht ("Night of Broken Glass," a series of state-sponsored anti-Jewish riots in 1938).

I haven't visited the site yet, but it looks like there's a deliberate attempt to distance the player from the experience, by casting the player in the role of a journalist who investigates a site after the pogroms have taken place.

Involve CEO Drew Stein says the project was a labor of love that Involve executed at cost with contributions mostly from its senior developers and partners. He sees it as an evolution of work that began 15 years ago in museums experimenting wiht large-scale environmental graphics, only now the environment and the graphics are virtual.  The 3D, immersive nature, though, provides a more visceral experience, he says.

"That's one of the things we learned from the kids we worked with a year ago. There's a different sense of reality," agreed Kevlan. "That's one of the things we're hoping for that the folks that come through will not only learn more about history, but absorb it differently. When you go through the streets and see the kiosk or the newspapers hanging on windows, you absorb it. The thing for us is to how to do this without trivializing it or making it feel gamelike. You don't want them to feel like they were there, because they weren't, but that they'll know something more."

That may be the best headline I've seen on all the coverage related to the KFC teen girls sink bath MySpace photo story, but note that the <title> of the page is the more informative "KFC Bath Prank: Three Girls Fired From California KFC After Bathing In Restaurant Sinks." 

The photos themselves are silly, rather than particularly racy (for bikini pictures, anyway), but I'll let you find them on your own if you want to.  What made this story blogworthy for me is the following:

The 17-year-old girl who posted the pictures online responded with a message to those who tipped off her employer.

She wrote (sic): "Its a sad world when one has to stoop low enough to go through ones dirty laundry.... one womans trash is anothers treasure!

"Thanks alot for having good respect how can you live knowing the little bit of money you made was made hurting someone!"

Somebody has a little bit more growing up to do, it would seem.

Philipp Lenssen at "Google Blogoscoped" spotted a change in Google's panorama map interface, and asked me to weigh in.

Since a recent Google Maps Street View update, Google shows the wording "Report a concern" at the footer of their panorama photos (in older versions, a text for this elsewhere was reading "Report inappropriate image" - the title to the report page still uses that wording).

Called Muxlim Pal, it allows Muslims to look after a cartoon avatar that inhabits the virtual world.

Based loosely on other virtual worlds such as The Sims, Muxlim Pal lets members customise the look of their avatar and its private room.

Aimed at Muslims in Western nations, Muxlim Pal's creators hope it will also foster understanding among non-Muslims. --BBC (via)

Last week, as one of my classes was wrapping things up for the last day, a student who has finished all his coursework noted that I was his professor for the first and last classes of his undergraduate career. He blogged his thoughts, and e-mailed the old student roster, inviting his former classmates to share his reflections.

I was so overwhelmed that first semester. I had to write papers I'd never written in my life, do difficult research, critically analyze works of literature, write newspaper articles, and many other things. And I honestly don't think I would have made it, if it weren't for those strangers sitting in that scary classroom with me. We made it together. We lost a few along the way, some changed majors, some transferred schools, but we all shared that first college experience together (except for the Katies, they were seniors). And when someday, we are sitting at our child's high school graduation party, and he walks up to us and says, "Dad, what was it like to start college?," we will all be able to look back on that first class with Dr. Jerz, and a group of frightened freshmen and say, "you'll be just fine." --Andy LoNigro

Several students from that class have already commented on Andy's post, including one who transferred to another school, some who are still in the major, and one who had already gotten her MA and was back on campus teaching freshman comp.

One imagines the Canterbury pilgrims might have felt the same way, with their destination in sight, as they looked back on the journey they made, and the tales they shared.

I really like what Steve Ersinghaus wrote about assessment.

One of the significant issues I've faced has to do with attitude. Mine, not the students. Typically I ask students not to worry so much about making the deadline, but that the deadline is real nonetheless. I've also informed my students that they don't have to complete their papers or exams. They don't even have to come to class. Why? Because this is true. Students don't have to complete work, take a test, or come to class. No prison sentence will come of this. They may not pass into hell, either. I used to worry myself to death about students completing their work and doing everything I asked. Now, I try not to. They've paid their money and will address their commitments to the degree that they able at a given time.

I typically tell students that if they want to be "assessed" then they should complete their work and come to class and study and study and study. None of this can be forced. The philosophy goes like this: if a student wants their performance to be checked at a given time, typically at those times when I set deadlines on the calendar, they are certainly encouraged to do so by handing in an analysis, research paper, or project. In this procedure, an assessment becomes an "opportunity" for a student to show their ability.

The "You paid your tuition, you can make your own choices" conversation is usually something that I only think about when a student is already in trouble.

One of my colleagues who teaches in another division, Victoria Marie Gribschaw, never says that she "gives" grades -- she merely "reports" them.  I've started adopting that language when I speak about assessment.  I also inform students that I don't "correct" their drafts, and if a student tries to thank me for a good grade, I say something like, "You should thank yourself, since you did the work."

But I haven't really ever tried to use the language of "assessment opportunity" from the very start of a class.

I did have some very exciting success this year in my entry-level new media class, "Writing for the Internet," in which I would

1. demonstrate a new task, telling the students that eventually they would have to do the task on their own, but that they would get detailed instructions and several opportunities to practice
2. give pairs of students a week to follow those instructions (wth a full class period devoted to an in-class workshop)
3. ask pairs of students to complete a timed, in-class exercise (telling them that this was practice for when they would be expected to perform the task on their own)
4. give individual students a task to complete in a few days (letting them start the assignment as homework and bring their problems to a workshop day)
   
5. require individual students to perform the whole procedure in a timed, in-class setting

Students really seemed to appreciate the chance to go over the material in stages. Of course, this works best for discrete, core skills; once students are synthesizing and evaluating, this many iterations would be very hard to manage. Asking students to complete a major paper in stages (thesis statement, bibliography, draft, and revision) is hard when students believe they should still be able to get a decent grade by banging out a "How I apply the material to my life" paper the night before the due date, as they did in high school.

In a content-heavy course, it's not easy to devote so much class time to workshops, so the "assessment opportunities" language may help students see the value of the prewriting assignments.

Camille Paglia puts her finger on something that has vaguely troubled me.  For years I've enjoyed reading Language Log's posts on Bushisms -- which as often as not included the reminder that we all garble our syntax from time to time, and even daringly suggests that Obama makes his own share of gaffes. Remember the gratuitous Nancy Reagan joke? (Of course, that's not nearly as bad as Reagan's "We begin bombing in five minutes." But I digress.)

Paglia targets Dick Cavett's Nov 14 NYT blog on Sara Palin,"The Wild Wordsmith of Wasilla,"  calling it

...insufferably supercilious. With dripping disdain, he sniffed at her "frayed syntax, bungled grammar and run-on sentences." He called her "the serial syntax-killer from Wasilla High," "one who seems to have no first language." I will pass over Cavett's sniggering dismissal of "soccer moms" as lightweights who should stay far, far away from government.

I was so outraged when I read Cavett's column that I felt like taking to the air like a Valkyrie and dropping on him at his ocean retreat in Montauk in the chichi Hamptons. How can it be that so many highly educated Americans have so little historical and cultural consciousness that they identify their own native patois as an eternal mark of intelligence, talent and political aptitude?

Paglia then recounts an anecdote about a talented and popular Yale professor who used class time to make a sneering, classist, sexist statement about a marriage between a well-heeled socialite and an italian-American mechanic.

Yes, that is the lordly Yale that formed Dick Cavett's linguistic and cultural assumptions and that has alarmingly resurfaced in the contempt that he showed for the self-made Sarah Palin in "The Wild Wordsmith of Wasilla." I am very sorry that he, and so many other members of the educational elite, cannot take pleasure as I do in the quick, sometimes jagged, but always exuberant way that Palin speaks -- which is closer to street rapping than to the smug bourgeois cadences of the affluent professional class.

English has evolved, and the world has moved on. There is no necessary connection between bourgeois syntax and practical achievement. I have never had the slightest problem with understanding Sarah Palin's meaning at any time. Since when do free Americans subscribe to a stuffy British code of veddy, veddy proper English? We don't live in a stultified class system. In the U.K., in fact, many literary leftists make a big, obnoxious point about retaining their working-class accents. Too many American liberals claim to be defenders of the working class and then run like squealing mice from working-class manners and mores (including moose hunting and wolf control). What smirky, sheltered hypocrites. Get the broom! -- Camille Paglia, Salon

If I were still teaching Seminar in Thinking and Writing (which has units on topics such as education, race, class, and gender), I'd definitly assign Paglia, since she works so very hard [edited to insert the following word] not to fall into the kind of intellectual rut that leads students to try to turn a bumper sticker slogan into a five-paragraph essay.

This interesting post on WRT ponders the case of I Love You, Beth Cooper, a novel that presents its protagonist, Denis Cooverman, with a status bar.

Like a health meter, the reader knows how much body Dennis has remaining at any given time. Reading the book becomes the experience of seeing how far we can make our quarter last, how far we have to go before having to restart the system.

Contrast this with a story like The Quixote, where the Man of La Mancha is pummeled, broken, twisted, beaten, and has his teeth knocked out far beyond the typical number of molars and incisors. Though a health meter hardly promises veritas, it at least guarantees that the character's suffering will be restricted to the comically exaggerated limits of his illustrated body and that the main character will always be in view. -- Mark Marino

Increasingly, creative types are harnessing what I've begun to call "the T-shirt economy"--paying for bits by selling atoms. Charging for content online is hard, often impossible. Even 10 cents for a download of something like Red vs. Blue might drive away the fans. So instead of fighting this dynamic, today's smart artists are simply adapting to it.

Their algorithm is simple: First, don't limit your audience by insisting they pay to see your work. Instead, let your content roam freely online, so it generates as large an audience as possible. Then cash in on your fans' desire to sport merchandise that declares their allegiance to you. -- Clive Thompson, Wired

Douglas Engelbart gave an earth-shaking demo 40 years ago today.

The presentation included the debut of the computer mouse, which Engelbart used to control an onscreen pointer in exactly the same way we do today. For a world used to thinking of computers as impersonal boxes that read punched cards, whir awhile, then spit out reams of teletype paper, this kind of real-time graphical control was amazing enough.

But Engelbart went beyond merely demonstrating a new input device -- way beyond. His demo that day in San Francisco's Brooks Hall also premiered "what you see is what you get" editing, text and graphics displayed on a single screen, shared-screen videoconferencing, outlining, windows, version control, context-sensitive help and hyperlinks. Bam!

What's more, it was likely the first appearance of computer-generated slides, complete with bullet lists and Engelbart reading aloud every word onscreen. Fortunately, the proto-PowerPoint section only made up a small fraction of his otherwise understated and impressive tour de force. And though it took years for the industry to catch up, many later computer scientists acknowledged their debt to Engelbart.--Wired

Harvard redesigns its English major, removing required entry-level surveys and sophomore seminars.

In their place, courses in the four new categories--"Arrivals," "Poets," "Diffusions," and "Shakespeares"--would interweave literary history with textual analysis. At a gathering for prospective concentrators on Tuesday, English professor Stephen J. Greenblatt said that these courses will most likely be small seminars.

[...]

Although the Norton Anthology of English Literature will no longer be required to sit on the bookshelves of every English concentrator, those who are loyal to the English canon may still be able to get their fix: courses in the "Poets" and "Shakespeares" categories would explore foundational works like "Hamlet" and "The Canterbury Tales."

"With the changes, you won't lose any of the content of 10a and 10b," Greenblatt said at the event. "It will trickle down to students through the professors themselves who, after all, specialize in each of these areas of English literature."

In fact, English professor Gordon Teskey--an expert on Shakespeare who also used to teach English 10a--said he thinks there would be more of an emphasis on great authors, whereas the current set-up makes time period and geography the central organizing principles.

"It was on the third night that we found out that the octopus Otto was responsible for the chaos

"We knew that he was bored as the aquarium is closed for winter, and at two feet, seven inches Otto had discovered he was big enough to swing onto the edge of his tank and shoot out the 2000 Watt spot light above him with a carefully directed jet of water."

[...]

Once we saw him juggling the hermit crabs in his tank, another time he threw stones against the glass damaging it.-- Telegraph

A new generation of wired politicos will give journalists much fodder for scandal, but isn't this making it a bit too easy for them?

Incoming Obama administration director of speechwriting Jon Favreau (L) and a friend pose with a cardboard cutout of incoming Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at a party. (Obtained by The Washington Post)

Question No. 63 asks that applicants "please provide any other information ... that could ... be a possible source of embarrassment to you, your family, or the President-Elect."

For a while there this afternoon, President-elect Barack Obama's immensely talented chief speechwriter, 27-year-old Jon Favreau, might have been pondering how to address that question.

That's when some interesting photos of a recent party he attended -- including one where he's dancing with a life-sized cardboard cut-out of secretary of state-designate Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, and another where he's placed his hand on the cardboard former first lady's chest while a friend is offering her lips a beer -- popped up on Facebook for about two hours. The photos were quickly taken down -- along with every other photo Favreau had of himself on the popular social networking site, save for one profile headshot. --Washington Post

Editing, like sending thank-you cards, is one of those things that everyone acknowledges is a good idea but few people do. It takes time and you don't reap much reward, certainly not equivalent to the time. There is probably not enough attention to teaching writing in graduate school, but at least you have plenty of models and plenty of chances to practice.

Models of editing are scarce -- that is, unless you work with commercial presses or magazines. There, editors really edit. We think of those venues as shallow slaves to the market, but they often pay more attention to the words and ideas than we do. They never lose sight of their audience, holding the quaint assumption that writing is actually written for people -- not for tenure or a CV, both of whom are tone-deaf. -- Jeffrey J. Williams, Chronicle

China continued to be world's worst jailer of journalists, a dishonor it has held for 10 consecutive years. Cuba, Burma, Eritrea, and Uzbekistan round out the top five jailers from among the 29 nations that imprison journalists. Each of the top five nations has persistently placed among the world's worst in detaining journalists. At least 56 online journalists are jailed worldwide, according to CPJ's census, a tally that surpasses the number of print journalists for the first time. -- Committee to Protect Journalists

Assess thyself, lest ye be assessed.

That's a line I had drafted for inclusion in the English program review. (One of my colleagues suggested we shorten that to just "Assess thyself.")  We requested funding to bring an assessment expert to campus, to hold a workshop for the English faculty.

Inside Higher Ed has an article on the resistance to assessment often found withing the humanities disciplines.

• Any effort to try to measure learning in the humanities through what McCullough-Lovell deemed "[Margaret] Spellings-type assessment" -- defined as tests or other types of measures that could be easily compared across colleges and neatly sum up many of the learning outcomes one would seek in humanities students -- was doomed to fail, and should.
• It might be possible, and could be valuable, for humanists to reach broad agreement on the skills, abilities, and knowledge they might seek to instill in their students, and that agreement on those goals might be a starting point for identifying effective ways to measure how well students have mastered those outcomes.
• It is incumbent on humanities professors and academics generally to decide for themselves how to assess whether their students are learning, less to satisfy external calls for accountability than because it is the right thing for academics, as professionals who care about their students, to do.

"It's in our hands -- nobody is forcing us into overly prescriptive models or any one particular way at this point, and it's our responsibility to respond to the public's interest [in learning what value they're getting for their tuition and tax dollars] by doing it ourselves," said Grossman. "But the longer it's delayed," he warned, "the more over time the public will start saying, 'What is really going on?' and start pushing for the kinds of measures that nobody really wants." -- Doug Lederman

"Anchors and journalists have become part of self-reverential celebrity culture. Everything goes back to 'me.' It's driven somewhat by technological and economical change. Still, I haven't seen them pulled kicking and screaming into this," said Robert Lichter, director of the Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University.

"Anchors can be bigger stars than the nominees at a political convention. They're not only brand names, but whole mini-corporations who supply the news, tell us what it means, and then turn around and be news themselves," he added. -- Washington Times

More and more users are spending more and more time on social networking sites, but the study found they aren't very responsive to ads there: Clickthrough rates were reported to be far lower than at other sites. On the web in general, nearly 80 percent of users clicked on at least one ad in the past year; on social networking sites, fewer than 60 percent did so. - Wired