June 2009 Archive Page

I spent a few hours cleaning up my e-mail archives yesterday. I was amazed of the amount of space that was taken up by 4MB flyers for events I did not attend, 2 MB PDFs of one-page forms that I could have printed out from a 3kb HTML page, and batches of photos (@1MB each) that students sent me to chronicle their participation in group activities.

If someone is sending me a document because they want my feedback on the design, or if I want to add a family photo to an archive, then of course the high bandwidth is justified.

But I can't be the only one who's annoyed when someone sends me a 500kb Microbloat Word file that contains nothing but a 20-word thesis statement, or a list of URLs.

In our everyday routine, disk storage is cheap and plentiful. It's good that we don't have to worry about what to keep and what to toss. I bought a 16 GB memory card for my 30GB tablet PC - it was dirt cheap to add that much extra storage. But there are times when an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

I'll never work with data at the file-compression level, but I learned quite a bit from this very clear explanation from someone who knows about such things.

In physics, we know that matter and energy are interchangeable.  In computer science, we know that time and space are interchangeable.  Usually, we can find a way to make things faster by using more space, or make things smaller by taking more time. -- Eric Sink

The personality profile is a staple of intro to journalism classes, but newspapers don't tend to collect all their profiles in one place, so I often have trouble finding models.

Entrants in the Hearst Journalism Awards have to supply a profile as part of their application process (which also includes general news and on-the-spot reporting).  While the website doesn't seem to aggregate the winning profiles on a single page, here are links to some of the recent winning profile entries.

2007-08

• First Place: John W. Cox (Three times a week, a truck putters 45 miles south from a farm in Sonoma County, headed for Berkeley's North Shattuck neighborhood, filled with plump, corn-bred, nine-week-old ducks.)
• Second Place: Andrew R. McGill (There's a story about agrarian author Wendell Berry that food buffs and literary types like to pass around. According to popular legend, when an out-of-state fan asked Berry to travel and speak at a conference, the writer responded with a 14-line poem. It read in part: "In the labor of the fields longer than a man's life I am at home. Don't come with me. You stay home too.")
  
• Third Place: Matthew Baker (Alice Waters' appearance isn't the flashiness you'd expect from a world-class chef. Aside from a dark, striped scarf, she wears little color and little jewelry.)

2006-07

• First Place: Halle Stockton (Thousands idolize Mimi Silbert for her contagious spirit and persistent belief in self-sufficiency. / Her following includes ex-convicts, former gang members, heroin and crack addicts and prostitutes.)
• Second Place: Daniel C. Ford (Gary Dockery looked around the courtroom soaking in his last few moments of freedom./He was out of chances and standing before a judge seconds away from a life sentence that would write the final chapter to his short, but violent, sad and hate-filled life.)
  
• Third Place: Megan G. Boehnke (Gary Dockery looked rigidly uncomfortable sitting in his black patterned suit and red tie. Tattoos peeked out from behind the stiff fabric. There were flames on his hands, letters on his knuckles, and other symbols on his neck./ But when he started to tell a story about his savior, the 29-year-old former convict, who was facing life in prison for a hate crime only a year and a half ago, relaxed.)

The journalism class that I'm preparing to teach this fall is a writing course, but it's also very content-heavy -- lots of specialized vocabulary, lots of unique professional practices to teach.

This fall, I'm not using a big $100 journalism textbook. Instead, I'll be spending more time with several smaller texts.  In place of assigning chapters for students to read passively (out of a sense of obligation that I need to "cover" loads of specialized topics), I'm going to treat it more like a writing course, which means more writing (and pre-writing, and peer editing, and revision).   I already teach my freshman writing courses this way, but I guess I had to teach this journalism course a couple of times before I could make the shift. 

The best way for students to learn how to do journalism is to work on the student paper, so there's only so much I can expect from any course. Nevertheless, in the years when "News Writing" is not offered, the student editors report they have a much harder time developing the newbie staff members, so clearly this course does have an impact on the quality of the student paper.

The last time I taught this course, I came down with pneumonia just a few weeks into the term, so I had to rely -- far more than I had planned to -- on assigning chapters and workbook pages.  After I was physically capable of coming back to the classroom, it was fairly easy of me to fall back on lectures and book chapters, but I could feel my mental energies draining whenever I tried to evaluate a paper at any level beyond marking grammar mistakes, or when I tried to moderate a class discussion at any level between lecturing and replying to specific questions.

This year, I've signed up to particpate in a pilot project using "clickers" -- wireless hand-held response gadgets that students can use, in the middle of a lecture or workshop, to respond to spot quetsions.  I'll go into the classroom with an agenda, and a set of loaded questions that are designed to get the students thinking, "Hey, I noticed that, too... I wonder why it is?"  (Which is preferable to "I'd better write that down in case I have to spit it back for a quiz.")

I'm preparing my syllabus with a list of what clicker questions I'll need to prepare for each day's topic.  I've got a fairly decent, very brief handout on newsworthiness, and a more detailed podcast on newsworthiness, but rather than assign these texts first then quiz students on their ability to spit back cognitive chunks (thus placing myself as the source of knowledge to be memorized, and training the students to expect that I will do all the filtering and heavy lifting for them), I will instead try to introduce the concepts through questions:

Which potential story is more interestiing to you?
A) a power outage that affects 20 families. 
B) a power outage that affects 10,000 families.

Which potential story is more interesting to you:
A) President Obama enjoys tea with the Queen of England
B) An ostentatiously tatooed and pierced children's librarian who married the impeached former mayor of your home town enjoys tea with the Queen of England.

...and follow up with discussions that move towards synthesis and evaluation, with links and page numbers for the students to refer to (for review, or for further examples, or for more depth).  (The idea in this case is not simply to get them to spit back the characteristics of a newsworthy story, but rather to help them recognize that the metrics of "newsworthiness" are derived from human nature, rather than a bunch of arbitrary values.)

I'm always on the lookout  for interesting stories that one can tell with statistics -- and cautionary tales about misusing statistics in order to create news where there isn't any.

Via MetaFilter -- this OK Cupid article breaks down responses to user-generated dating profile questions. Green states were more likely to answer "yes" than the national average (yellow), and red states were more likely to answer "no".  Note that this doesn't even come close to representing a statistical average of the population -- just the answers collected by the OK Cupid dating service.

Would you date someone just for the sex?

data set: 448,000 people answered

The answers to the question about daily showering are also worth a look.

"What if I had a check on my desk for $5,000? And what if I rewarded the writer whose introduction most caught my attention, who most effectively made me want to continue because of a solid and clear thesis, with a check for five grand? Would your introductions improve even more?"

Cries of "Absolutely!" filled the room -- to which I replied, "Then you always could do it. You just couldn't be bothered."

Silence followed. -- Bob Kunzinger, Chronicle of Higher Education (paid subscription)

After working with students on their thesis, Kunzinger has his students write the introduction to their papers in class, and gives them a separate grade on each section of the paper. He points out that students know their professors have to read anything they write, and that professors will allow rewrites, so they don't put much effort into their drafts. (He notes that this isn't malice on their part -- they've been trained through high school that a good assignment is a finished one, and he argues that poor performance in wiriting classes has more to do with students choosing not to make any significant effort, rather than students being unable to write.)

The first few panels of a 12-panel cartoon.

Thanks for the suggestion, Mike.

Teen tries out a Walkman for a week.

It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette. --Scott Campbell, BBC

This is from the online version of a paper being presented at Hypertext09.

I already knew the general shape of the history, and I'm not sure that the author is actually providing us with a new take or a new insight (the introduction simply establishes the facts, rather than emphasizing how a new archival discovery, historical or critical approach, or point of view shapes and organizes those facts).  Nevertheless, I was impressed with the references that carefully walk through events from the dawn of the blogosphere.

Today's blogosphere with its wealth of discursive practices is, in Jay Bolter's phrase, a writing space.^[1] It did not start this way. The blogosphere had an immediate historical predecessor, the weblog community, in which the weblog held a rhetorically ambiguous and contested status between a writing space that answered an author's expressive needs and an access structure^[2] through which an editor was meant to aggregate and annotate the Web's undiscovered riches. The conflict between access structure and writing space appears under a number of different names in the writings of Rebecca Blood, the weblog community's foremost apologist and chronicler, who describes it as an antagonism that split the community at its core: those who, like herself, believed that weblogs performed a "valuable filtering function"^[3] and aimed to be "dependable sources of links to reliably interesting material"^[4]:54 increasingly found themselves opposed to - and outnumbered by - an "influx of short-form diarists" who wouldn't link but posted "entry after entry of blurts and personal observations,"^[5]:149 thus "inverting the primary values of the community."^[5]:154 -- Rudolph Ammann

My favorite "winner" in this year's Lyttle Lytton Contest, which awards writers who can, in one sentence, imitate the infamous "It was a dark and stormy night" novel opening.

Alex turned to Gertrude, in much the same way Martin Landau turned to Barbara Bain in the opening of Space: 1999. -- Alex Dering

I can't say I understand my creation, but it sure was fun making it.

A high school secretary has been charged with illegally changing grades in a school computer system to improve her daughter's class standing and with lowering the grades of two other girls. --Elanor Chute, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

I just supervised a teaching demonstration in the Writing Popular Fiction program here at Seton HIll, and the experience inspired me to touch up an old handout on developing ideas for short stories.

A short story is tight -- there is no room for long exposition, there are no subplots to explore, and by the end of the story there should be no loose ends to tie up.  End right at the climax, so that the reader has to imagine how a life-changing event will affect the protagonist.

[...]

While readers of genre fiction (such as horror, fantasy, or mystery) have certain specific expectations, in general the reader's enjoyment comes from identifying the crucial revelation -- what James Joyce described as an epiphany -- that defines the moral significance of the protagonist's actions.

• Your goody-two-shoes protagonist happens upon an envelope from a cancer testing lab.  It's addressed to her arch enemy.  The story ends with the protagonist tearing the envelope open. [What's inside the envelope is not as important as your character's decision to snoop.]
  
• A husband comes home from work early, carrying flowers and a diamond bracelet.  He he hears her singing a romantic duet with someone else. He might first check to see that he's got the receipt, or he might set his jaw and open up the display box, or he might first stick the bracelet in his wife's gas tank.  [We don't actually need to see his wife's reaction -- his decision to knock on the door means he's chosen a confrontation rather than walking away.]
  
• The protagonist is in the upstairs hallway of someone else's house.  She hears snoring in the next room, pulls out a rope, and reaches for the switch in order to turn off the light. [Obviously the story would need to give us a little more detail about who this person is and what she wants, but once she makes her decision, the story is over.]
  

Drawing on real-life experiences, such as winning the big game, bouncing back after an illness or injury, or dealing with the death of a loved one, are attractive choices for students who are looking for a "personal essay" topic. But simply describing powerful emotional experiences ("She would never forget the wonderful feeling..."  "He was more furious than he had ever been...") is not the same thing as generating emotional responses in the reader.

Big, two-dimensional drop-down panels group navigation options to eliminate scrolling and use typography, icons, and tooltips to explain the user's choices. -- Jakob Neilsen

Set phasers to "meh"! 

My wife arranged a visit to The Franklin Institute a couple of weeks ago. We didn't actually know that this Star Trek exhibit was there.  I was ready to pass, in favor of the more educational exhibits, but my wife made it a Father's Day treat and shelled out enough gold-pressed latinum for the four of us.

No photography was allowed in the exhibit, which was annoying, so I wasn't going to blog it at all because, well, sometimes words are boring.  But this YouTube clip, in between the chatter and the promos, shows some of the collection.



Despite her ability to channel William Shatner, my seven-year-old quickly got restless. My son enjoys reading every single line on every single card in every single display, so we took our time working through the place.  I kept hoping maybe there would be a ball pit full of tribbles for the girl, or a dress-up area where she could try on different forehead bumps.  No such luck.  My wife had to take her out early.

Chris Anderson is best-known for championing the long tail (marketing to the niche customers who fill out the trailing end of a demographics chart, rather than trying to create products to please the mass market) and has been promoting a book on the topic.  One of the early reviewers for his book identified great swaths that were taken, without citation, from Wikipedia.   

All those are my screwups after we decided not to run notes as planned, due to my inability to find a good citation format for web sources...

This all came about once we collapsed the notes into the copy. I had the original sources footnoted, but once we lost the footnotes at the 11th hour, I went through the document and redid all the attributions... Obviously in my rush at the end I missed a few of that last category, which is bad. -- Chris Anderson, in an e-mail to Waldo Jaquith (VQR)

A highly visible internet economy expert, and the editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine, working with an editor on a print project (not blogging in the heat of the moment) chooses to drop citations altogether, rather than dig a little deeper to find out information that any freshman comp student is expected to know?

Anderson is certainly doing the right thing by taking responsibility right away, rather than hoping it will blow over (it won't).

Jaquith (who broke the story on the Virginia Quarterly Review's blog) is careful to note that "All ideas that form of the core the book are credited, and his own thesis that he builds upon that showed no signs of being anybody's but his own."

Since, as I understand it, copies of Anderson's book have been floating around in draft form for some time, it's theoretically possible that some of Anderson's own writing might have been inappropriately pasted into Wikipedia articles.  (Just now, I put a segment of Anderson's text into Turnitin.com, and the service marked it all as having appeared on Anderson's blog, where in fact an excerpt from the book was recently published.  Turnitin.com didn't drill down any deeper than that.)

If Anderson had maintained a habit of properly citing every use of Wikipedia text, it would be easier to give him the benefit of the doubt, and assume that uncited passages were appropriated by Wikipedia users.  But Anderson's reply takes responsibility for failing to cite, even though the "I didn't know how to do it" excuse holds little weight.

The "long tail" meme has its critics, so I expect there will be a lot of chatter about this.  I certainly have no desire to purchase this book now.  I'll buy one from a different author -- someone out there in the long tail.

Woah! Trying to charge bloggers who quote more than 5 words was bad enough (I no longer quote from or link to AP stories).

But the most contentious element in the new policy, which the union also decried as "vague," gives this instruction to employees using Facebook: "Monitor your profile page to make sure material posted by others doesn't violate AP standards: any such material should be deleted."

"That's the part that makes us cringe," Winton said, adding that the union is "reviewing it with legal counsel."

That means AP reporters, and all other AP employees, are held responsible for any comments posted by their friends to pictures or links on their profiles. -- Wired

I've never been a phone guy.  My voicemail recording advises people to e-mail me rather than wait for me to remember to check my messages. 

Around 2004, I told a class of students that I didn't use instant messager because I would have nobody to talk to.  I got a generous "awww!" of pity from the class. 

I didn't mean to imply that I had no friends; rather, for years I had already been keeping up with friends and family via e-mail and telephone, and with professional contacts through e-mail, blogs, and Usenet.  I had no personal or professional need to hang out in chat rooms, so I've never done it (just as I have never gone para-sailing, or owned a ferret).

If you spread my handheld computer investment across the 12 years I've used a PDA, I've spent a very reasonable $4/month.  I will probably want my next PDA to have WiFi, but I'm never more than a few steps from a computer when I'm at work or home.  I just don't feel obligated to pay the phone company so that, if I'm out on an errand or playing with the kids in the backyard, I will be available to high school students with grammar questions or SEO prospectors asking me for reciprocal links.

While liveblogging a talk at Computers and Writing 2009, I overheard people talking about the back-channel discussion that was occurring on Twitter.  In the registration room, there was a projection stream displaying the Twitter feed for #cw09. 

For the first time, I found a reason to tweet. 

But does the label Twitter Revolution, which has been slapped on the two most recent events, oversell the technology? Skeptics note that only a small number of people used Twitter to organize protests in Iran and that other means -- individual text messaging, old-fashioned word of mouth and Farsi-language Web sites -- were more influential. But Twitter did prove to be a crucial tool in the cat-and-mouse game between the opposition and the government over enlisting world opinion. As the Iranian government restricts journalists' access to events, the protesters have used Twitter's agile communication system to direct the public and journalists alike to video, photographs and written material related to the protests. (As has become established custom on Twitter, users have agreed to mark, or "tag," each of their tweets with the same bit of type -- #IranElection -- so that users can find them more easily). So maybe there was no Twitter Revolution. But over the last week, we learned a few lessons about the strengths and weaknesses of a technology that is less than three years old and is experiencing explosive growth. -- Noam Cohen, New York Times

Long before web forums, blogs, Twitter, and in many cases, the web itself, Usenet was where the internet gathered to shoot the breeze about anything and everything under the sun. -- Koala eye

A few years ago it was enough for a game world to look realistic. Now, in its every action and reaction, it must behave realistically. Physics is what graphics was ten years ago - a yardstick to judge and compare games.--  Keith Suart, Guardian

The first article in a series.

Sore throat. Sinus pressure. Upset stomach. Exhaustion.

I'm sitting at home recovering from the flu, which I started to come down with during the Computers & Writing Conference this weekend. 

I had planned to attend Digital Humanities 2009 in Maryland, where I'm part of a group that's presenting tomorrow.  The group will survive without me as I try to recover.  If I feel well enough to drive tomorrow, I might try to catch the middle of the conference.

The week before, I took a train from Greensburg (near Pittsburgh) to Philadelphia, then a commuter train to a town in New Jersey for my nephew's baptism.  I was proud to learn I still have the touch -- the baby went to sleep in my arms.

During the same Mass, there was another family there for their own baptism.  Someone from that family was strutting all over the place with his video camera, completely oblivious to the fact that a religious service was going on (he could have been a bit more respectful), and that another family was also trying to take pictures of the same event.   I didn't feel like disrupting the service further by joining a media scrum, so I missed some shots, but I did discretely move so that I could get some (unobstructed) video clips during the actual sprinkling of water.

I've been thinking a lot about babies.

My own kids (Peter is 11 and Carolyn is 7) are talkative and rambunctious.  Our parenting philosophy has never equated "good child" with "quiet child."  So I'm probably immune to a certain level of squawking that might upset the average person.

On the ride up, we sat in the row behind a baby who looked about 12-14 months.

This is not a story about how annoying it is to travel near a cranky baby.  I didn't mind at all that the baby in the row in front of me drooled happily in my face and threw toys into my lap.  And, in fact, when an older couple (who could have chosen a seat elsewhere on the train) started complaining very loudly about the baby, I turned around and said "Do you know what really bothers me on trains?  Traveling near adults who complain too loudly." (I resisted the urge to say "old people who complain too loudly."  But they moved seats shortly after that.)

Anyone who's been around a baby knows that the noises a happy baby makes are far preferable to the noises an unhappy baby makes, so I was very happy when my own kids started playing with the baby.  My kids delighted in sending the toys back over the divider and singing songs for the baby.  (They did their fair share of whining over the course of 6 or 8 hours, too, but the baby kept them well occupied.)

What was really, really sad is that for hours at a time, this baby's mother sat with her laptop open, chatting in some kind of RPG, checking Facebook, and later putting in a movie for herself.. 

Near the beginning of the ride, we exchanged perfunctory greetings with all our neighbors, which established the creation of a temporary community.  At one point, a young man across the aisle helped my kids count to 20 in Spanish.  Later, when this same fellow started swearing casually into his cell phone, I tapped him on the shoulder and avuncularly reminded him of the presence of children on the train.  (His face registered dismay, and as he got off the train later, he put his hand on my shoulder and apologized sincerely.)

Not once during this train ride did the mother engage with my kids, despite the fact that my kids were amusing her kid for hours. She didn't take the baby away from them (to signal she wanted them to back off), or teach my kids games that the baby likes, or ask me about my kids, or join in the fun.  She seemed perfectly content to leave the baby-minding task to my kids, so that she could concentrate on her computer.

While I didn't like the feeling that I had become the moral enforcer of our corner of the train, I know that my own kids needed some boundaries.. Let the baby touch you, I told them, but don't grab the baby.  Don't startle the baby with loud noises.  Don't let the baby give you his bottle or snacks -- tell him to put them in his own mouth, and praise him for it. 

At one point, I had to take a hard toy away from the baby and give him a soft toy because he was swinging it around near my face.

At another point, the baby had clambered up onto the arm of his seat, pounding against the window, his center of gravity up pretty close to the seat back.  We went over a bump, the baby wobbled, and I lurched forward to catch him. The mother thanked me, and said something like "I was just getting something from my bag," as if to explain her inattentiveness.  But in truth, she had been just as preoccupied by her computer for hours.
 
Every so often the baby would let out a shriek.  Another passenger must have scowled at the mother, because I heard her say, rather helplessly, "I don't know why he's doing that."

I knew why her baby was doing that.  It was because my own kids were making faces at him, making his toys dance for him, and playing peek-a-boo with him. For hours. 

What could she have been writing on her Facebook page, that was more important than turning her head to see why her baby was shrieking for joy?

Here's a surprising statement I found in a news article, quoting a Yale psychology professor.

"Moms vary markedly in their roles as breadwinners from no income at all to really helping dads,"

The language implies that money-making is the father's responsibility, and the best rating on the scale that a woman can achieve is "helping" a man. While I recognize that the professor was very likely speaking in the context of roles within the family unit, presuming that the family includes both a mom and a dad whose achievements can be measured and compared meaningfully, Larry Summers was resoundingly skewered for making an off-the-cuff statement acknowledging the existence of the position that men have a biological advantage over women when it comes to math.

Oh, whoops, I double-checked that quote from the university professor.  That's not what he said. Here's what he REALLY said (emphasis added):

"Dads vary markedly in their roles as caretakers from not there at all to really helping moms," Kazdin said. (MSNBC.com)

Again, I recognize that Kazdin was answering a reporter's questions, speaking without notes or a chance to revise.  But I'm sure that any professor who made the first statement (ghettoizing breadwinning women into the role of spousal "helpers") would have caught some well-deserved flak.

Can you spot the double-standard?

"You'll have half the participants BlackBerrying each other as a submeeting, with a running commentary on the primary meeting," Mr. Reines said. "BlackBerrys have become like cartoon thought bubbles."

Some professionals admitted that they occasionally sent mocking commentary about the proceedings, but most insisted that they used smartphones for legitimate reasons: responding to deadline requests, plumbing the Web for data to illuminate an issue under discussion or simply taking notes. -- Alex Williams, New York Times

I have not yet bought a Kindle, though I'd like one.  However, this bit of news gives me pause. It's exactly the worry that has kept me from sinking money into a proprietary format.  Here's Dan Cohen, explaining what he learned from an Amazon customer service rep, after some of the books he purchased failed to transfer from his online account to his iPhone:

You can buy a book and it can only be downloaded numerous times or you can buy a book and only then discover that it can be downloaded only once. (The rep even put it this way!) There is no way to know.

In the meantime, Amazon wants us to upgrade our Kindles every year or two. Apple wants us to upgrade our iPhone or iPod touch every year or two. This means that although the books remain in your Kindle library online you may not be able to download them once you upgrade your hardware. And there is no way to know -- at least according to what the customer service rep told me. -- Gear Diary

I'll have to leave this panel before the end in order to catch a ride back to the airport. I'm going to try at least to summarize what each speaker says at the beginning, which will no doubt leave the impression that this was a one-way event. (I'll also miss the digital arts display this evening, which is too bad.)

Jeff Grabill, Michigan State University

Steve Krause, Eastern Michigan University
Virginia Kuhn, University of Southern California
Charlie Lowe, Grand Valley State University
Dan Melzer, Sacramento State University
Cynthia Selfe, Ohio State University
Kathleen Yancey, Florida State University

Begins with a pitch for CW 2010 in Purdue next year. (I'd love to go.)

Roundtable
Chair. Charlie Lowe, Grand Valley State University

Scott Banville, University of Nevada, Reno
David Blakesley, Purdue University

How can open source software, open access publishing, and commons-based peer production (CBPP) principles help us to create a sustainable university?

How can they positively impact the social and economic development of the university and expand the resources available that sustain university culture?

What is the role of the university in the larger community in fostering such sustainable practices?

The rise of online media has helped raise a new generation of college students who write far more, and in more-diverse forms, than their predecessors did. But the implications of the shift are hotly debated, both for the future of students' writing and for the college curriculum.

Some scholars say that this new writing is more engaged and more connected to an audience, and that colleges should encourage students to bring lessons from that writing into the classroom. Others argue that tweets and blog posts enforce bad writing habits and have little relevance to the kind of sustained, focused argument that academic work demands. -- Josh Keller, Chronicle of HIgher Education

I arrived late and completely missed the first talk, so I'll start with the three I did see.

Surveillance of Power and the Power of Surveillance
Mike Edwards, United States Military Academy at West Point

Hansel and Gretel in Cyberspace: Following Breadcrumbs in a Forest of Hypertext
Mary Karcher

The Digital Emergence of the Public/Private Authority
Casey McArdle
Ball State University

Bill Cope, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Began by noting the strangeness of talking to an audience about social media, while also seeing faces lit by computer screens suggesting multi-tasking. Referenced new translation of Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility" (note the shift in the more familiar title). His talk will explore the peculiar affordances of the digital.

Today, at the Computers and Writing conference, the Kairos editors presented Jerz's Literacy Weblog with the John Lovas Memorial Academic Weblog Award. (I knew about it in advance, and was able to get funding to attend thanks to the CIT department at Seton HIll.)  Lovas was a dedicated teacher, an accomplished administrator, and a patient mentor. I'm honored to be associated with his tremendous achievements.

From an announcement on the Kairos Facebook page:

Jerz's Weblog by Dennis Jerz of Seton Hill University

The John Lovas Weblog recognized this year has been a resource for writing teachers for most of this decade.  This blog offers a glimpse into the formative history of blogging in writing.  It bridges new media journalism, rhetoric, and composition studies in productive and insightful ways. 

It's author was one of the first professors to use blogging in teaching, coining the term "forced blogging" and problematizing its practice.  The weblog reflects lively intertextual exchanges with other blogs about gaming, interactive fiction, and digital pedagogy that have large readerships and show how much his bibliographical work is respected.

The blog, Jerz's Literacy Weblog, by Dennis Jerz of Seton Hill University, addresses a range of issues of relevance to our field from recounting panels at the recent 4C's conference to discussions of video games in education and the decline of newspapers.

Jerz shows continuing leadership in addressing the potential role of emerging technologies and new media in the teaching of writing and this is regularly reflected in his blog, making his site an excellent resource for those who wish to engage in such challenges.

Chair. Gian Pagnucci, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

Process-Blogging: A Sustainable Foray into Collaborative Writing
Sabatino Mangini, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
Jessica Schreyer, University of Dubuque

Endings: The Problem of Sustained Blogging
Steve Krause, Eastern Michigan University

Keeping a Blog as Chair: Sustaining Public Discourse in a Private Job
Gian Pagnucci, Indiana University of Pennsylvania

What follows are my notes, lightly edited.  My own comments are in square brackets.

Chair. Bonnie Kyburz, Utah Valley State University

Planning for Sustainability in Multimodal First-Year Composition Programs
Michele Ninacs, Buffalo State College

Fast, Free, and On the 'Net: The Story of a Self-Published Textbook
Steve Krause, Eastern Michigan University

How College Textbook Publishers Will Thrive in Ubiquity. Or Die Trying.
Nick Carbone, Bedford/St. Martin's

Chair Mikhail Gershovich, Barch College, CUNY

Hacking Spaces: Place as Interface

• Danielle Nicole DeVoss, Michigan State University
• Douglass Walls, Michigan State University

• Scott Schopieray, Michigan State University

Writing-a-go-go: Ubiquitous Computing and the Thirdspace of Workplace Writing
Tina Bacci, University of Rhode Island

The Examined Life--Cyberspace Style: The Construction of Space in the #philosophy IRC Undernet Community
Kennie Rose, University of Louisville

What follows are my rough notes, lightly edited. [My own comments are in square brackets.]

Barbara Ganley, Centers for Community Digital Exploration

Barbara Ganley is Founder and Director of the new national organization, Centers for Community Digital Learning, Barbara Ganley has spent her career exploring integrated learning across formal and informal contexts. For nineteen years as a lecturer in the Writing Program and English Department at Middlebury College, and director of Middlebury's Project for Integrated Expression, Barbara taught innovative courses in creative writing, composition, arts writing, and Irish literature and film. An active implementer of new media and Web 2.0 practices within writing classrooms since 2001, her research interests include the multimedia essay as a means of academic and vernacular discourse and social software as a vehicle for personal expression, community-building, and connected learning. Since 2004 she has kept a professional blog to explore the pedagogical, philosophical and theoretical underpinnings to the emergent learning outcomes in her uses of digital and communication technologies in the classroom and out in the world. You can find her blogging at bgblogging.wordpress.com.

These are my lightly-edited liveblogging notes.

[Note... based on the content of the Twitter feed, I think there may be more to talk about with regard to this talk.  Lots of people thought the talk was aimed at the wrong audience. I'll need a while to think about that, since I wasn't part of the Twitter discussion, so for now, here are my notes.] 

Began by warning the audience that the presentation would be interactive, and asking everyone to move. I and Karl were tethered to our laptop cables, so we just swapped rows and stayed where we were.

Asked who was on twitter... a good show of hands. Asked people to contribute on Twitter

#cw09 Ecotone

Ecotones or crossroads.  [Literally, my experience with Colossal Cave, when I moved from understanding Colossal Cave only through the 1970s game, to understanding it as a real geographical location.]

These are my notes, lightly edited, from a panel at Computers & Writing 2009.

I only found a single plug in the meeting room, in the very back row. This is a small conference, so I probably appear fairly antisocial typing way in the back here.  (I'll move up when the panel actually starts in a few minutes, after my laptop has sucked in a bit of juice.) 

I had considered attending a simultaneous panel on blogging, but I'd already heard one of the presenters make a very similar talk, so this panel won out.

Chair. Andrea Murphy, Old Dominion University

• Technologizing Pedagogy: How FY Writing Curriculum is Created by Electrons
  Will Hochman, Southern Connecticut State University
• Computers, Tools, and Instruments: Academic Dependence on Machine Terminology and Its Effect on Student Perceptions of the Computer Classroom
  Sarah Spring, Texas A&M University
• Ubiquitous Computing and The Perils of Early Adoption
  Jim Kalmbach, Illinois State University

A Kindle DX is on my lust-list, in part because I read a lot of PDFs. In Slate, Farhad Manjoo offers a thoughtful critique of Kindle's self-proclaimed destiny to be a news medium:

The Kindle presents news as a list--you're given a list of sections (international, national, etc.) and, in each section, a list of headlines and a one-sentence capsule of each story. It's your job to guess, from the list, which pieces to read. This turns out to be a terrible way to navigate the news.

Every newspaper you've ever read was put together by someone with an opinion about which of the day's stories was most important. Newspapers convey these opinions through universal, easy-to-understand design conventions--they put important stories on front pages, with the most important ones going higher on the page and getting more space and bigger headlines. You can pick up any page of the paper and--just by reading headlines, subheads, and photo captions--quickly get the gist of several news items. Even when you do choose to read a story, you don't have to read the whole thing. Since it takes no time to switch from one story to another, you can read just a few paragraphs and then go on to something else. -- Farhad Manjoo, Slate

A former Infocom beta-tester re-discovers interactive fiction (and enters the interactive fiction competition)

Back then in the mid-80s, the only (decent) interactive fiction was being produced by Infocom, the almost legendary, and now defunct, software company formed by a bunch of MIT grads.

After cutting my teeth on the Zork series, Enchanter, Infidel, and Witness on my old Apple II+, I somehow heard about the concept of "beta testing" and got the bright idea to apply to Infocom to test their games.  With the encouragement of my parents, I sent in a letter to them, and to my amazement I got accepted! -- Matt Wigdahl

I enjoy steampunk, a cultural aesthetic which celebrates what both ordinary and extraordinary things might look like, had technology progressed along the lines that Jules Verne and his contemporaries imagined. As a literary subgenre, it imagines that the immeasurable power of steam has opened the skies, leading legions of top-hatted gentlemen-explorers and parasol-wielding adventuresses to the heavens beyond.

With steampunk on my mind, after submitting the final semester grades, I took a moment to celebrate by poking through the stacks. I found this absolutely beautiful book, A History of the Growth of the Steam Engine, by Robert H. Thurston, published in 1878. (Full text via Google Books.)

This isn't just a retro aesthetic, reacting against the streamlined and textureless Apple assembly line, or a self-conscious choice to make every bolt and gear visible in order to force us to come into direct contact with the technology. This is the real thing.
This engraving of the Worthington Pumping-Engine made my heart stop.

I also love the detail in this Compound Marine Engine. It's proportioned so that it looks to my eye almost like a desk toy, but I assume that's a person-sized hatchway visible on the left image. No riveted portholes? C'mon! I left the pages and my hand in the frame, so you can get a better idea of the materiality, the hefty bookiness of this book.

It's hot here in Sacramento.  I got lost wandering the UC-Davis campus looking for the Computers & Writing registration table. I discovered lots of bike paths -- several of them more than once.  I stumbled upon a building with people whom I recognize from various conferences.  There was a nice snack table.  I had helped myself and settled down with a plate before I realized I had walked into the tail end of a workshop session. What was I going to do, put the food back and leave?  That would have been rude.

I found these big metal things near the art building.  I don't know what they are, but I like them.

I'm caching up after the end-of-term grading crunch, spending a few weeks taking care of my wife (she had a minor surgery), and family trip for my nephew's baptism. I just got back from the train station about a half hour ahead of some huge thunderstorms, and now I'm unable to sleep because I'm heading to the airport again in a couple of hours (for my first visit to Computers & Writing).

Anyway, this is old news, but I'm blogging it for future reference. When Ian Bogost's site got hacked, Google flagged his site as a source of malware, and Twitter banned him based on Google's report.

The particular sort of cascading failure sheds light on an often unseen power Google holds, one that extends far beyond privacy and personal information. Web browsers and services like Twitter trust Google's reports of online danger implicitly. Yet, Google's system makes no distinction between people who have malsites and people who get hacked and then fix their sites. Neither Google nor Twitter notified me at all, despite the fact that both have my email address via my respective accounts at those services, nor did they give me any fair warning to remedy the problem before they took action. Instead, they just treated me like a cybercriminal. -- Ian Bogost (See also Liz Losh.)

Since my school is testing the waters for outsourcing its e-mail and other core services to Google, I'm naturally interested in this sort of thing.

Charles Crowell writes a valentine to Amazon's e-reader as a cost-saving tool for cash-strapped college students:

If we extrapolate these savings from these two courses over a two-semester, ten-course academic year, we could expect an average savings of $245.05. That number, of course, would vary according to the cost of the respective textbooks, their number, the number of textbooks in a Kindle format, and the Kindle version price of those textbooks. Lots of variables, but my point here is that there are some budgetary savings available from a traditional pedagogical approach to using the Kindle. As textbook publishers put more and more textbooks into formats that can be read by eBook readers of any type, the savings should be larger. I've modeled prospective savings in a traditional, textbook-based pedagogy, and the savings would appear to be on the order of 50 percent per year. Over four years of undergraduate school, that's a savings of several thousand dollars. -- Inside Higher Ed

An interesting development from the UK:

In the first case dealing with the privacy of internet bloggers, the judge ruled that Mr Horton had no "reasonable expectation" to anonymity because "blogging is essentially a public rather than a private activity".

The judge also said that even if the blogger could have claimed he had a right to anonymity, the judge would have ruled against him on public interest grounds. -- Times Online

Back in 2003, my division chair said he would support a university blogging portal only if members blogged under their own name. That turns out to have worked out well for us.  I don't, however, require commenters to prove who they say they are. 

The Las Vegas Review-Journal says it has been served with a federal grand jury subpoena seeking information on people who posted supposedly threatening anonymous comments on a story about a tax fraud trial. -- The Register

Andrew Hussie remixes Dinosaur Comics with a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story. The results hurts my head, and not in a good way. But that's a good thing, because, well, it's a remix of Dinosaur Comics with a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure story.

With the recent release of the new Star Trek, I started to wonder how is this going to affect the kids? Thankfully, mine have heard of and have watched plenty of the original series, so I didn't have to worry about their state of mind. But there are a lot of kids out there who think that this new movie is Star Trek. That it's some flashy action adventure space movie with chiseled young actors and massive special effects. While that's all well and good, since it's a reboot for the purpose of gathering new fans, I think it's important that kids have a sense of history when it comes to things as influential as Star Trek. GeekDad, Wired

My 7-year-old daughter just finished watching a YouTube version of More Tribbles, More Troubles, the 1970s animated return of the Tribbles.

For one day, Haaretz editor-in-chief Dov Alfon sent most of his staff reporters home and sent 31 of Israel's finest authors and poets to cover the day's news.

The idea behind the paper's June 10 special edition was to honor Israel's annual Hebrew Book Week, which opened the same day, by inviting Israeli authors to get away from their forthcoming novels and letting them bear witness to the events of the day.

This wasn't a Sabbath supplement, a chance to balance the news with extra color. This was a near complete replacement of the newspaper itself. Save for the sports section and a few other articles, all the reporters' notebooks were handed over to poets and novelists, both bestselling and up-and-coming. Their articles filled the pages, from the leading headline to the weather report. -- Daniel Estrin, Forward

So, did the reporters go home and write poems? If so, this would resemble that episode of The Brady Bunch where Mrs. Brady went to the office, and Mr. Brady stayed home with the kids.

Thanks for the tip, Mike.

I've become a fan of audiobooks, mostly because I can listen to them while folding laundry or weeding the yard or while auto-piloting my way through the grocery store. I've thought about writing an article like the one that just appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education. One book, sampled four ways -- paperback, audiobook, Kindle, and iPhone.  Ann Kirschner beat me to it -- and did a fine job.  She seems surprised at how much she enjoyed the audiobook:

Soon I was looking for any excuse to stay plugged in just a little bit longer. In fact, if I made a graph of total reading time on Little Dorrit, I bet that the audiobook would win (though not for the most pages).

You can listen while you are walking around.

You can listen while driving.

You can listen while applying makeup.

You can listen while you are cooking.

You can listen while you are in the dentist's chair.

Audiobooks also impose a certain discipline. I think of this as real-time reading: The author and narrator control your pace, and it is impractical to skim ahead or thumb back to another section. For Dickens, so naturally cinematic and plot-driven, that can have a breathtaking effect. It was my good fortune to be listening when Little Dorrit and Maggie spent their long night wandering the London streets. I shivered with them, I shared their exhaustion, and I sighed with the dull relief of returning to the Marshalsea prison.

Kirschner notes that young people who grew up playing hand-held games will have no problem reading from small screens.  She's right, though of course when those young people start losing their eyesight, they might appreciate larger displays. 

Right now, I'm struggling through a text-to-speech version of the Illiad, and I'm not enjoying it as much as I have enjoyed some more modern stuff.  I don't think it has much to do with the content, but rather the fact that the past few weeks have been a bit hectic, with my wife having an operation and me needing to take care of her and supervise the home-schooling, while at the same time trying to wrap up the loose ends of the semester.  So I've been hitting the sack pretty late and pretty tired, without the benefit of any commute time or solitary-walk-around-the-quad-with-headphones time.  When I fall asleep during a chapter, I'm more inclined to jump ahead then back up and re-listen, since I know it will take me forever to find out what happens if I try to study each chapter.

The embedded preview of Evercracked! was very, very slow when I checked it just now, so I haven't watched it, but the UK Guardian article on videogame documentaries also includes some links to existing movies.

The King of Kong: Fistful of Quarters
A fascinating look at the bizarre rivalry between gamers Steve Wiebe and Billy Mitchell as they vie for dominance of Nintendo's Donkey Kong coin-op. Met with huge critical acclaim on its release two years ago.

Chasing Ghosts
Joyfully nostalgic ode to the arcades of the early eighties. Performed well in film festivals in 2007, but is hard to track down now.

8Bit
Described as, "a mélange of a rocumentary, art expose and a culture-critical investigation" this is a more cerebral approach to the subject matter, analysing the impact of game graphics on art and music, with a nod toward the chiptune scene.

Frag
Reasonably recent documentary on professional gaming circuit, considering the dedication of the players but also the corruption, money and drugs seemingly blighting the emerging sport.

I hope soon to see the forthcoming Get Lamp on this list.

Many of the canonical works of hypertext fiction were written before the World Wide Web, so the author/designers were creating an experience for users who were not already familiar with the conventions of HTML documents. (When we surf the web, we expect links to change color after we visit them, we expect a home button in the upper left corner, etc.).

Although advocates of hypertext narrative (Bolter 2001, Jackson 1997, Landow 1997, for example) have enthusiastically argued that interactivity offers the reader more creative input, the difficult balance between the positive rewards of creative control and the negative effects of unwanted effort, is an aspect barely discussed in the literature, though Murray (1997b) and Ryan (2006) acknowledge the issue.The data strongly supports Murray's (1997) contention that authorial control and reader agency must be carefully balanced. What appeared to be happening for the readers in my study is that the presence of interactivity promised something that hypertext in its current form could not deliver -- ie, a game-like level of user control combined with a novel-like level of audience subordination to authorial leadership. The two experiences seemed to clash destructively in many readers' minds.The readers who commented on this issue all talked about the need for control to be given such that it progressed the narrative at all times. Whether that control is the offer of hyper-linked words, or animated images, whatever the reader does to the screen should develop the story. -- James Pope, interjunction.org (See also Part 1, "Twists in the Digital Tale")

An arbitrator has found that Lakehead Uni­versity did not violate a collective bargaining agreement when it replaced its campus e-mail network with Google's e-mail service. -- CAUT ACPPU Bulletin

Judging from conversations with retired bloggers, many of the orphans were cast aside by people who had assumed that once they started blogging, the world would beat a path to their digital door.

"I was always hoping more people would read it, and it would get a lot of comments," Mrs. Nichols said recently by telephone, sounding a little betrayed. "Every once in a while I would see this thing on TV about some mommy blogger making $4,000 a month, and thought, 'I would like that.' "

Not all fallow blogs die from lack of reader interest. Some bloggers find themselves too busy -- what with, say, homework and swim practice, or perhaps even housework and parenting. Others graduate to more immediate formats, like Twitter and Facebook. And a few -- gasp -- actually decide to reclaim some smidgen of personal privacy. --Douglas Quenqua, New York Times

I think Harlan Ellison said becoming a writer is easy, but staying a writer is much harder.  When the availability of free blogging software meant that writers didn't first have to learn HTML in order to publish their thoughts online, we saw lots of word-oriented people add their voices to the tech-oriented people who were already online.  Now that Twitter and Facebook have lowered the barrier even more, social networking tools give an online presence to people who aren't interested in writing more than 140 characters at a time, or who are content with expressing their personal identity by joining groups.

Another phenomenon that the author doesn't mention is the effect of the group blog.  Super blog sites like Huffington Post, or smaller groups of five or ten experts in a specific subject matter, capture much of the buzz that used to be created by lone bloggers.

It's not uncommon for me to assign an essay or textbook to my students, and have the author find out about the blogging assignment, and either e-mail me privately or post comments directly on student websites.  Simply knowing that the words they write *might* be read by an audience much wider than the class does affect the parameters of the assignment.

I don't promise that my students will find fame and fortune through their blogs, but those of my students who are interested in a career in writing often report that their academic blogs, stuffed with academic content from several years of courses with blogging requirements, are a useful component in a professional portfolio, demonstrating the ability to produce quality work, over time, on a deadline, and in public.  

Weblogs have already changed the nature of journalism, giving readers a platform from which to challenge the mainstream media construction of the news.  And the social networks wouldn't exist in their present form if bloggers hadn't demonstrated the power of linking user-generated content.  Blogs are a textual medium, but now that the average internet user has the bandwidth to do plenty with audio and video, the primacy of text will fade.

Your newspaper overlords believe they can sell you their content if they can just get  everybody on the same page and nail the sales pitch this time. They're looking for the magic words, not the underlying logic (the tricky part? Doing all this without breaking federal anti-trust law).

This is folly, of course. Even MIT Technology Review Editor and Publisher Justin Jason Pontin concluded that news and opinion must be given away to the aggregators, and that was in an essay advancing the case for paid content.

Pontin comes from the magazine field, which suffers from similar woes but is a fundamentally different beast than the general bundling machine we call the American metro newspaper. All sorts of content can be sold online quite profitably (you can read my thoughts on this here and here), but trying to force people to pay for generic news content because your advertising rates have dropped so low they no longer cover the cost of your operations? Have fun selling that one, boys.

And sell it they are.

[...]

Quality journalism is expensive, and to the extent that it provides a public good, we will find ways to fund it. But top-heavy, poorly run, arrogant-to-the-bitter-end media companies? This is their crisis, not our crisis, and it certainly isn't about journalism. --Dan Conover,. Xark

Still, the creative-writing program, unsystematic or even anti-system as it might believe itself to be, is a system. People go in at one end and they come out the other, bearing (like the Scarecrow) a piece of paper with a Latin inscription, but also bearing (unlike the Scarecrow) the impress of an institutional experience. The nature of that experience mutates as the folk wisdom of the workshop mutates--from "Show, don't tell," which was the mantra in the nineteen-forties and fifties, to the effectively opposite mantra "Find your voice," which took over in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. McGurl suggests that these mantras encode shifting patterns of cultural assumptions--about identity, about work, about gender and class, and, of course, about what counts as good writing--and that they have had a big effect on the stories and novels that American writers have produced. "The rise of the creative-writing program," he says, "stands as the most important event in postwar American literary history." -- Louis Menand, The New Yorker

Read to the end -- Menand is being professionally skeptical throughout the essay, but he admits in the end that learning to write poems is a process that brings its own benefits, whether or not they include publishing poetry.

From Open Access News:.

1. The undersigned university press directors support the dissemination of scholarly research as broadly as possible.

2. We support the free access to scientific, technical, and medical journal articles no later than 12 months after publication. We understand that the length of time before free release of journal articles will by necessity vary for other disciplines.

3. We support the principle that scholarly research fully funded by governmental entities is a public good and should be treated as such. We support legislation that strengthens this principle and oppose legislation designed to weaken it.

4. We support the archiving and free release of the final, published version of scholarly journal articles to ensure accuracy and citation reliability.

5. We will work directly with academic libraries, governmental entities, scholarly societies, and faculty to determine appropriate strategies concerning dissemination options, including institutional repositories and national scholarly archives.

Inside Higher Ed offers the following context:

Text-message shorthand conventions arose from the users, because the need to type quickly on a tiny keyboard was greater than the need to spell correctly and preserve the subtleties of punctuation. But as users find more ways to hash and remix their social networking, a new set of technical needs may give rise to new conventions.  Mike Arnzen alerted me to Microsyntax.org.

Many people don't remember that the use of '@' to indicate that a message was to be sent to a specific user's attention (a reply or a mention) is a convention that grew up with the service's earliest days.

We have some relatively mature conventions -- like hashtags ('#twitter' or '#ruby', for example) -- that have spread into wide use but are not directly supported by Twitter itself, and where different applications may support them in very different ways.

At the other extreme, we have new conventions appearing -- like CoTweet's use of '^' preceding initial of authors in group twitter accounts, my recent suggestion for '/' as syntax to precede or enclose locations (as in '/Germany' or '/156 South Park, San Francisco CA/'), or my proposal for subtags (like '#sxsw.kathysierra' or '#w2e.PR') -- and these could lead to confusion or conflicts between contending approaches to the same purpose. -- Stowe Boyd

While scanning the coverage of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, I found this interesting editorial, which questions the depiction of the student protesters as pro-democracy.

The truth is that the students in the square had only the haziest understanding of western-style democracy. To the extent that the protests were directed at abuses of an existing system by an emerging elite, they were motivated more by outrage at the betrayal of socialist ideals than by aspirations for a new system. The mood in the square was at least as much conservative as it was activist.

Such arguments may seem arcane two decades later. But, in my view, they are keenly relevant. The styling of Tiananmen as a pro-democracy movement helped to miscast the west's narrative on China's past and future.--James Kynge, Financial Times

The social web is the new walled garden: the photos we upload to Facebook, the 140-character messages we post to Twitter, and all of this other social activity is more or less locked away in those services. A friend cannot reply to your Twitter post without registering an account, and you are basically locked out of doing anything on Facebook unless you sign up. And it's all-but-impossible to take all your stuff out of these services in order to switch to a competitor.

To be sure, authorized features like Facebook Connect allow users to share their activity from other services with their Facebook community, such as movie ratings at Flixter.com or high iPhone game scores. And there are also unauthorized tools that allow you to cross-post your content to multiple sites, but they are basically hacks, and they do not enable any of the real two-way interaction that defines the "social" web. In the words of Forrester Researcher Jeremiah Owyang, "the inhabitants of today's isolated social networks will adopt a more useful social experience" by importing cool stuff from the wider web. But, he emphasizes, "they'll still be stuck on those islands."

Leo Laporte, a broadcaster who runs the popular TWiT network of technology podcasts, calls the phenomenon "the social silo," and he doesn't think it can last much longer. "People are pouring all this content and value into individual sites," says Laporte, "but they aren't going to want to keep dealing with Facebook, and Twitter, and FriendFeed, and whatever is next." -- David Charter, Wired

The concept is simple: from the top of the screen a series of differently-shaped "blocks" fall slowly towards the bottom. The player can turn each block as it falls - making a line into a column, say - or move it sideways, but once it hits the lowest point, it stays. If the blocks fill a line without gaps, they disappear. Otherwise they pile up, giving the player less and less time before they hit the "bottom". Simple; but hugely addictive. A quarter of a century later, it has a legitimate claim to being the videogame that has truly conquered the world. -- Guardian

In Montfort and Bogost's case study platform studies also suggest a useful approach to media histories. Their work on the Atari VCS focuses on the role of creative individuals in the process of game development for the platform, and the book earmarks several important moments in videogame history. These moments are traced back to the particular groups and individuals involved, and the authors discussion is supported by interviews with the parties involved. Each chapter unfolds and examines a specific material programming challenge and how it was overcome by creative programming.-- Thomas Apperley, Digital Culture & Education

To protect itself from millions of dollars worth of taxes, Proctor & Gamble UK tried to defend a lower court's ruling that a Pringle is not a potato chip.

At some point, a potato-chip-like item is so different from a potato chip that it can no longer be called one -- but when?-- Adam Cohen, New York Times

A good overview of a genre I've been following from the beginning. I sometimes wonder why references to political cartoons aren't more common in discussions of games about current events. At any rate, the article begins by mentioning the importance of Flash, the 9/11 attacks, and Gonzalo Frasca's thought-provoking response, September 12th.

Water Cooler Games, a website maintained by Frasca and Bogost, tracked the development of what they labelled "newsgames" (which we can now separate into the sub-genres of newsgames, "editorial games," "political games," and "documentary games" with the benefit of hindsight) from 2003 until today. The year 2004 saw the creation of Madrid--Frasca's follow-up to September 12th that we've covered elsewhere--an editorial game that simply asks one to remember a tragic event, an early entry into the documentary genre called John Kerry's Silver Star Mission by Kuma/War, and the controversial doc game JFK Reloaded, wherein one tries to mimic the exact shots fired on President Kennedy (supposedly) by Lee Harvey Oswald. Ed Halter notes the popularization of Osama bin Laden whack-a-mole games in the mid-2000s, but no other prominent editorial games appear to have popped up until early 2006.

Here begins a series of chronologically-ordered micro reviews, for which I will provide meta-commentary throughout and at the end of the article. For the most part, I will be embellishing on the notes made by Frasca and Bogost as they documented the editorial games made through the bulk of 2006. -- Simon Fefrari, News Games

This sort of thing makes me very unhappy... without my permission, Microsoft pushes out an add-on for a competitor's product.

The service pack for the .NET Framework, like other updates, was pushed out to users through the Windows Update Web site. A number of readers had never heard of this platform before Windows Update started offering the service pack for it, and many of you wanted to know whether it was okay to go ahead and install this thing. Having earlier checked to see whether the service pack had caused any widespread problems or interfered with third-party programs -- and not finding any that warranted waving readers away from this update -- I told readers not to worry and to go ahead and install it.

I'm here to report a small side effect from installing this service pack that I was not aware of until just a few days ago: Apparently, the .NET update automatically installs its own Firefox add-on that is difficult -- if not dangerous -- to remove, once installed.-- Brian Krebs, Washington Post