August 2009 Archive Page

Is your Spidey-sense tingling?

Disney will take over ownership of 5,000 Marvel characters, such as Spider-Man and the X-Men.--BBC

A technology win from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

Rather and Potter emptied the victim's pockets of his cell phone and wallet and told the victim to "get out of here," police said.

The victim ran off while Rather and Potter headed toward Fifth Avenue, police said.

When officers showed up at the victim's home, he was simultaneously canceling his bank and credit cards, and using a computer to track the location of his cell phone through its GPS, police said.

Listen to a short news broadcast, such as the NPR Hourly News Summary. These stories will typically include audio clips from newsmakers, and perhaps the noise of crowds or nature. But we're just focusing on the sound of the radio journalist's voice.

Don't try to sound like "an announcer."  Forget the barking style of voice that radio announcers always seem to have in movies when they "interrupt this program with a special bulletin."
 
Radio News Delivery.mp3
(By the way, a typical radio story is just 50 seconds long, which is about how long it took me to read the following.

A radio newscaster's voice begins each story on a high pitch, with the first sentence of the story ending with a slight drop.
 
The second sentence starts at exactly this same pitch, which is an important audio cue that we're still on the same subject.

Note this slight boost of energy in the third sentence, which is important because the tone can't keep dropping forever.

Although I wouldn't do it when delivering a hard news story, I'm about to hang my voice, indicating I've got plenty more to say.

My speech is formal but conversational, with both high and low pitches within each sentence, though the general trend has been downward.

You can always tell the final sentence in a radio journalist's story; it slows down just a bit, and its pitches are the lowest of the whole piece.
 
For the New Media Journalism program at Seton Hill University, I'm Dennis Jerz.

[L]ast fall, for the first time in 15 years, Ms. McNeill, 42, did not assign "Mockingbird" -- or any novel. Instead she turned over all the decisions about which books to read to the students in her seventh- and eighth-grade English classes at Jonesboro Middle School in this south Atlanta suburb.

Among their choices: James Patterson's adrenaline-fueled "Maximum Ride" books, plenty of young-adult chick-lit novels and even the "Captain Underpants" series of comic-book-style novels.

But then there were students like Jennae Arnold, a soft-spoken eighth grader who picked challenging titles like "A Lesson Before Dying" by Ernest J. Gaines and "The Bluest Eye" by Toni Morrison, of which she wrote, partly in text-message speak: "I would have N3V3R thought of or about something like that on my own."

The approach Ms. McNeill uses, in which students choose their own books, discuss them individually with their teacher and one another, and keep detailed journals about their reading, is part of a movement to revolutionize the way literature is taught in America's schools. While there is no clear consensus among English teachers, variations on the approach, known as reading workshop, are catching on. --Motoko Rich

This sounds like a much better approach than having students at this age watch the movie so they have something to contribute to the discussion of a book they haven't read. 

In the "Literature and I" assignment that I ask my English majors to write in "Writing about Literature," several students reported that they loved reading when they were younger, but that school turned them off.  Of course the canon is an important part of our shared literature culture, and if students are all reading their own separate lists, there would be little to discuss.

Of course the classics are important, but I'd be satisfied with giving students in middle school a little more choice, and certainly letting high school students pick from among current best-sellers in an advanced English class.

My son (age 11) loves reading, and usually dashes off joyfully when I tell him to go to his room and read whatever he wants. He chooses nonfiction for his own reading pleasure, often a Popular Science, PC Gamer, or a military history book.  My daughter (7) prefers to work with her hands and body rather than to sit still, but the last few days I've been reading her The Hobbit, and she always asks for more (even though the chapters aren't a kid-friendly length).

Okay, so it's after midnight on a Friday night... but surely someone's awake in a call center, somewhere in the world.

After following the maze of links for getting contacting Verizon by telephone, I get this screen, which dead ends.

I presume there's supposed to be a phone number or a chat applet or a dancing teddy bear in that box, but it's empty -- both on Firefox and Safari. So my quest to get Verizon to undo its URL hijacking is not over. On the upside, I learned how to do a screen capture on my new MacBook Pro.

I'm blogging the Verizon tech support number so I can find it again -- it's very hard to find it on the website..

1-800-837-4966

 

 

Dude! Your shirt looks just like the blue walkway and the brown sand! How do you do that?

From the MailOnline, via.

OMG! The prez is in ur internet, killin ur freedomz!

The new version would allow the president to "declare a cybersecurity emergency" relating to "non-governmental" computer networks and do what's necessary to respond to the threat. Other sections of the proposal include a federal certification program for "cybersecurity professionals," and a requirement that certain computer systems and networks in the private sector be managed by people who have been awarded that license.

"I think the redraft, while improved, remains troubling due to its vagueness," said Larry Clinton, president of the Internet Security Alliance, which counts representatives of Verizon, Verisign, Nortel, and Carnegie Mellon University on its board. "It is unclear what authority Sen. Rockefeller thinks is necessary over the private sector. Unless this is clarified, we cannot properly analyze, let alone support the bill."--Declan McCullagh, C|Net

Tonight on Channel 4 Action News at 11, Seton Hill University students reflecting on what they learned by watching a half hour of local Channel 4 Action TV News.  We go now to Channel 4 Action News at 11 reporter Dennis Jerz, with this live Channel 4 Action News at 11 report.

I had my news writing students watch the local "Channel 4 Action News" last night.

My sympathies to nearby Carnegie-Mellon U, which is dealing with the aftermath of yesterday's student suicide.

The news report positioned the CMU story as the central piece, first noting that Channel 4 doesn't usually cover suicides, but then proceeding to just that. The reporter, live on the scene hours after the suicide was reported, had to report that the university had no comment, and filled up her time by summarizing general info that anyone could have found on the school website.

The closest thing to an eyewitness report was a guy who said he saw some stairwells roped off, though later that same fellow stopped himself just before he admitted that he could understand a student wanting to commit suicide at a more stressful time of year.  

I was most stunned when the reporter transitioned back to her live presence on campus by saying, "Slowly the news spreading."   (I just checked the audio recording I made... there was no "is" in her statement.)

News of a campus suicide is spreading slowly, she says, while reporting live from that campus... so presumably she's speaking about the spread of news on that campus.

Spreading slowly? That's hard to believe. Unless, of course, the CMU community is an internet-free, anti-internet, no-word-of-mouth zone.

Last term, when an off-campus shooting led to the death of a Seton Hill student, news spread very quickly indeed.

Today, I was careful to explain that TV news was a powerful force that had a tremendous impact on life in the 20th C, noting that in the 50s people were as excited about TV as we are today about the internet.  I have on several occasions admitted to students that, because I am a textual learner, I don't find the TV news very valuable. More often than not, if I hear something of interest on the TV, I will walk away to the computer and look it up for myself online, where I can control how much time I spend on this story.

Cynical as I am about TV, I was nevertheless surprised when I came across the text of this advertisement for a WTAE-TV reporter. The language emphasizes the emotional, ratings-driven nature of television.

Do you have a track record of delivering high-impact, highly promotable pieces? Do you have the skills to plug in to the biggest issues in our viewers' lives and produce and tell that story so that it becomes appointment television? WTAE-TV, Pittsburgh's Hearst Television station, is searching for an experienced and creative reporter for our Call 4 Action franchise. You should have a vision for ambitious special projects stories AND the flexibility and ability to drive "day of" consumer stories and lead story sidebars. If you enterprise stories that have production sizzle and get results, we want to see the proof on tape. You must be able to work weekends, holidays and various shifts as needed, plus hold a valid driver's license.  Motor Vehicle Record check required.

Nothing about fairness, depth, knowledge of the community, or writing ability. Of course, it's a given that good reporters have those skills, so the ad is focusing on what's harder to find in the applicant pool -- the ability to "enterprise stories that have production sizzle."  And clearly, the ad is telling people who don't already understand what those buzzwords mean, and who don't buy into the existential value of such an activity, not to bother applying.

A couple days ago, I posted to Twitter about hearing a strange whining noise, which didn't seem to change in volume when I moved inside or outside. Later I realized it was my voice recorder in my fanny pack. So this story hit home with me.

Ominous Music Heard Throughout U.S. Sends Nation Into Panic

With this Wired article, Clive Thompson put me into a happy place, and I wanted to share it. He's quoting Andrea Lunsford:

"I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization," she says. For Lunsford, technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it--and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.

The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That's because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom--life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.

It's almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn't a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they'd leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.

But is this explosion of prose good, on a technical level? Yes. Lunsford's team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos--assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.

Although Wikipedia has prevented anonymous users from creating new articles for several years now, the new flagging system crosses a psychological Rubicon. It will divide Wikipedia's contributors into two classes -- experienced, trusted editors, and everyone else -- altering Wikipedia's implicit notion that everyone has an equal right to edit entries.

That right was never absolute, and the policy changes are an extension of earlier struggles between control and openness.--Noam Cohen, New York Times

Wonderful stuff from Steven Krause.

Representing the world champion, the "going to hell in a hand-basket," the eternal the youth are getting worse and worse, and carrying on the tradition of complaining about students that dates back in western culture to at least Isocrates, I give you Stanley Fish's "What Should Colleges Teach?" on his New York Times "blog." Judging by the many comments here that repeat "oh yes, the students are so much worse today than they used to be," he's clearly the champ and the crowd favorite.  And why wouldn't he be?  Isn't it much more satisfying for grown-ups to note the weaknesses of youth?  After all, to do so simultaneously suggests that the grown-ups of today are both "better" than the current youth, and it suggests that the previous youth (e.g., today's grown-ups) were also better than the current youth ("When I was their age, we learned this stuff.  But now...").

In the challenger's corner, we have Clive Thompson and his WIRED article "The New Literacy," in which he argues that "it's not that today's students can't write.  It's that they're doing it in different places and in different ways."  Boos from the crowd; looks like Thompson has an uphill battle.  Let's see how this works out.

(Ding-ding-ding!)

I love the scare quotes for Fish's "blog".

Last week, I spent a little while doing the rounds, trying to drum up some advertising customers for the student paper. Ordinarily there's a student who carries the role of business manager, but when we're in between student workers, or outside of class time, I try to push things along.

There were twenty different things I'd rather have been doing at that time, but the money goes directly to support the school's educational mission. We recently replaced our six-year-old hand-me-down computers with a couple of new ones, and over the years we've students to training workshops and conferences in New York and elsewhere.

So here I am, going door to door, mentioning that I'm trying to sell ads, and watching eyes glaze over. 

"I can give you two minutes," said a guy in an apron.

It was a humbling experience -- being blown off by a guy wearing an apron.  I didn't even have two minutes of stuff to say -- I just mentioned that his competition down the street just bought an ad of X size, and leaving my contact information. 

But it was a good experience, too. 

I'm used to walking into a chattering room full of students who immediately settle down and wait for me to start talking. A small handful of students who feel very comfortable around me will politely mime a wristwatch check when I've run over time; most just sit there and wait for me to finish. Of course, it's my goal in the classroom to let the students do most of the talking, but on the first day of classes, the students are perfectly happy listening as I go over the syllabus. I also spend part of my week working on committees with other faculty and staff members, so it's not as if I expect the world to revolve around me.

I wasn't mad at the busy employees who didn't even look up from their desk during my pitch, who didn't give me their name or accept my card, who didn't take the copy of The Setonian.  Instead, I was feeling guilty for all the times I have blown off a sales representative, thrown a sales pitch directly into my spam folder, or avoided eye contact with someone wearing a "Vendor" nametag.

A recent article in Inside Higher Ed offers a gentle rebuke to the edupunk movement, which celebrates do-it-yourself technical solutions over the pre-packaged corporate products. If a few admissions and hiring decisions had gone a different way in the past, I might very well be peddling educational software or textbooks to busy professors.
 

The Golden Rule for Ed Tech Vendors

• Many of the people in the for-profit world in fact come from the non-profit educational world. You will be surprised that their backgrounds, interests, and passions will so closely match your own. For this reason, they tend to identify too strongly with their customers, and will be unhappy when they think their companies actions are not in the best interests of the colleges and universities that they work with.
• If you talk to your ed. tech. vendor representative you may be surprised to the degree that they believe in the profit-motive as a motivator for innovation. They have often left the slow and hidebound cultures of academia precisely because of the slowness of traditional institutions to change and innovate. They like that their success or failures can be measured by bottom line evaluations, in hard profit and loss numbers. They will believe, and they will be correct, that it is the for profit educational technology world that is responsible for much of the innovation in higher education. --Joshua Kim
  

I've been sitting on a particular interactive fiction work-in-progress for ten years. Ten years! Every so often I dust it off and add a little more, but I still haven't finished the chore of converting it from Inform 6 to Inform 7.  And while hiding from this project, I went and released a different project that hinted at a sequel that I haven't even started on, seven years later. Seven years!

Clearly I need a bit of help finishing some of the creative projects that I start. Even during the summer, when I kicked my Blender3D skills up a few notches, I never got the 8- or 4-hour blocks of uninterrupted time that I used to depend on in order to develop a complex project.

Anyway, IF designer and gaming maven Emily Short explains how her own creative efforts have developed. Here's where her essay winds up:

Write the through-line first: come up with your setting and any prototype coding you need to do, and maybe make a list of puzzles/elements that you'd like to see in the finished game. Then create a simple outline design of the game and implement it so that you have something you can play (even if very quickly) from a beginning to the end, and which contains the most critical turning points of the plot. With that skeleton in place, consider what you like and dislike about the structure; you complicate the game incrementally, fleshing pieces out with new puzzles or improving on the simple puzzles/conversations that you used to start with. You may be drawing on the list of puzzles or situations you'd had in mind to start with, but you don't have to commit to a whole structure at the outset.

What's great about this: by the end of the first week or so you have a complete playable game. It is always in some sense "finished" -- oh, not in a state you'd want to release, certainly, but it has a clear enough shape that there's not a horrible anxiety-producing mystery about what will go in any part of it. The ending gets as much attention as the introduction, and isn't likely to be fundamentally different in style, theme, or implementation quality.

At the same time, you've got a process with a lot of flexibility, because you can add new elements to address design flaws you see. Too steep a learning curve? Fine; add a few more intermediate puzzles to the opening of the game. Not enough motivation for a major NPC? Add another conversation scene that sheds some unexpected light on her background. (A weird thing about IF: it's generally easier to add stuff than to take it out. If you've implemented a major feature or a complex puzzle it may have implications here and there throughout the whole code. Editing it back out is like kudzu eradication and may leave you with bugs.)

Finally, this process offers the best odds for return on investment. At any given phase of development you'll have something that you could stop, beta-test, polish, and release. Doing that early might produce a bite-sized mini-game with little story complexity; doing it late might produce a 15-hour masterwork; but the process of getting from what you have to a game you can release is always clear.

I bought my Olympia Monica S in Croydon, south London, from an office supply shop when I was 20. It was a decisive moment. I wanted to write and a typewriter was the essential tool of the trade, an instrument every bit as vital as a paintbrush is to a painter or a guitar to a guitarist. Longhand was never an option. Acquiring a typewriter, particularly if you had no plans to become a secretary, was a sign of identity, a declaration of commitment and intent. .. [T]he computer has never been a dedicated writing tool -- writing is the least of it -- and everyone uses them. They are somehow both more marvellous and more ordinary. That's why there isn't a shred of romance in the idea of a writer and his or her personal computer.--Rick Poynor

A few years ago, I bought a wireless mouse, used it for a few days, then put it away in favor of my old mouse.  Every so often, like when I'm not feeling the course-prep love and I'm desperately looking for an excuse to procrastinate, I remember that wireless mouse, but can't remember why I stopped using it. So I dig it out, reinstall it, use it for a while, and then put it away again.  The last time that happened, I decided I would put it away so far that I wouldn't be able to find it the next time I wanted to try it again.

I want to try it again, but I can't remember where I put it. And no, I don't remember why I must have decided the corded mouse was better.

People on the road can turn an LOL into a great big O-M-G. -- Katie Couric, advocating a "designated texter."

A teenager who posted a death threat on Facebook, yesterday became the first person in Britain to be jailed for bullying on a social networking site. Keeley Houghton, 18, said she would kill Emily Moore, whom she had bullied for four years since they were at school together. --Daily Mail

A reprint of a good article that has since disappeared behind the Technology Review subscription firewall. Probably too dated to assign to my news writing students this year, so I guess I'll just refer to it in lecture.

The informational edge was perilous, it was unpredictable, and it required the news audience to be willing to learn something it did not already know. Stories from the edge were not typically reassuring about the future. In this sense they were like actual news, unpredictable flashes from the unknown. On the other hand, the coveted emotional center was reliable, it was predictable, and its story lines could be duplicated over and over. It reassured the audience by telling it what it already knew rather than challenging it to learn. This explains why TV news voices all use similar cadences, why all anchors seem to sound alike, why reporters in the field all use the identical tone of urgency no matter whether the story is about the devastating aftermath of an earthquake or someone's lost kitty.

It also explains why TV news seems so archaic next to the advertising and entertainment content on the same networks. Among the greatest frustrations of working in TV news over the past decade was to see that while advertisers and entertainment producers were permitted to do wildly risky things in pursuit of audiences, news producers rarely ventured out of a safety zone of crime, celebrity, and character-driven tragedy yarns. --John Hockenberry

Any college professor knows the depressing feeling that comes when you stay up late marking a stack of papers, and a high percentage of students don't even bother to pick them up.  One instructor made an art installation out of abandoned student essays. 

As an instructor of art for the past 7 years, I have had the disheartening experience of encountering illiteracy at the college level with a frequency that far exceeded my expectations. Having taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara; Fresno City College; Hillsborough Community College in Tampa, FL; and Bakersfield College, I decided to collect the hundreds of student essays written for my classes that were abandoned by their authors (the fact that these students did not find the retrieval of their work to be important was in many ways discouraging enough). I decided to archive these student essays as documentation of the growing illiteracy problem, for what I found in the contents therein mirrored and sometimes surpassed the following data.


--Look Like If The Words Are Bleeding

I suppose, too, that there's some self-selection involved -- perhaps the students who care least about their writing are the most likely to abandon their essays, while the best writers were proud of their work and wanted to pick it up. A lively discussion on the comments page.

The context in which the students' intellectual property is used -- as evidence of the nation's illiteracy -- is problematic, as is the fact that the students weren't given the opportunity to consent to their work being used this way.

Zombie math. Yay! (PDF. Boo!)

Zombies are a popular figure in pop culture/entertainment and they are usually portrayed as being brought about through an outbreak or epidemic. Consequently, we model a zombie attack, using biological assumptions based on popular zombie movies. We introduce a basic model for zombie infection, determine equilibria and their stability, and illustrate the outcome with numerical solutions. We then refine the model to introduce a latent period of zombification, whereby humans are infected, but not infectious, before becoming undead. We then modify the model to include the effects of possible quarantine or a cure. Finally, we examine the impact of regular, impulsive reductions in the number of zombies and derive conditions under which eradication can occur. We show that only quick, aggressive attacks can stave off the doomsday scenario: the collapse of society as zombies overtake us all. --  Infectious Disease Modelling Research Progress

Mike points out the professor named "Robert Smith?" ("the question mark is part of his surname and not a typographical mistake," according to the BBC).

Many specific things come to mind when I ponder writing a 200 word paragraph on my identity as a writer. First of all, when I think of producing that many words about my writing identity, I think of my ability to start immediately writing, using the first thing that pops into my head, since the word count is so important.  A second tip for producing the required number of words on my identity as a writer is to repeat the assigned writing topic as many times as possible. But most of all, I think of how useful it is to begin with a couple of unrelated points about my identity as a writer, and then bring in a random third point, unrelated to the first two, and by calling it my "most important," giving the impression that I am building towards a conclusion. Finally, after repeating my points about starting with the first thing that pops into my head, frequently repeating the assigned topic, and picking a random point to call the "most important," I can squeeze out more words by summarizing what I've written. Therefore, I hope these 200 words convey a specific point about who I am as a writer.

Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C., recently introduced a grade called FD to deal with cheaters. The letters stand for failure with academic dishonesty. --Calgary Herald

FD for cheaters? Why not FU?

(Thanks for the suggestion, Josh.)

Interesting pair of essays in The Chronicle Review. I may use this in my journalism class for a unit on statistics, advocacy, and the importance of open-minded skepticism in the reporting of the news.

Christina Hoff Sommers, in her essay "Persistent Myths in Feminist Scholarship" (The Chronicle Review, online edition, June 29), criticized Nancy K.D. Lemon, a lecturer in domestic-violence law at the University of California at Berkeley's School of Law, for publishing errors in the popular textbook she edits, Domestic Violence Law, and for not taking seriously her continuing criticisms of the book. "One reason that feminist scholarship contains hard-to-kill falsehoods is that reasonable, evidence-backed criticism is regarded as a personal attack," Sommers charged. Following is Lemon's response to those criticisms and Sommers's rebuttal. Sommers is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

TV news emphasizes the immediate and the emotional.  This screen shot shows how the NBC news affiliate in Miami allows readers to rate stories by emotions.

Notice that this mechanism does not reward stories for being fair, informative, accurate, or even newsworthy. 

I stumbled across this feature while reading a story about the 11-year-old reporter who got a one-on-one interview with the president. Miami is apparently "bored" with that story, though the city is "laughing" about stories on Cuba running out of toilet paper, an elderly couple starting a fire while doing the nasty in bed (illustrated by the image of a sexy young couple in bed, since apparently no sexy hidden camera footage of the newsmaking and whoopee-making elderly couple was available), and a man who pretended to be disabled so a hired nurse would change his dirty diapers.

Teale Fristoe reviews The Great Flu.

In the game, the player acts as the head of the World Pandemic Control during the outbreak of an unknown flu.  As the game progresses, the player must take actions, such as dispatching research teams, dispensing medication and face masks, and closing schools and airports, in an attempt to control and ultimately defeat the virus.  As the pandemic intensifies, the player is given information about the history and science of epidemics through a series of newspaper articles and videos.  Eventually, if the player is successful, the game ends with a count of the number of people infected and killed over the pandemic's life span, and the money spent containing the virus.

I think the game succeeds in presenting players with a lot of information through the multimedia featured in the game, and by including hints in it, giving players incentive to absorb it.  Furthermore, it nicely illustrates the dangers of our highly connected world: there's nothing more jarring than fighting a virus raging in Central and North America only to glance at Europe and find the epidemic exploding half way across the globe.  However, the game does suffer from a few common pitfalls, and going over them might shed some light on some of the challenges with using games for education.

If you want to perform a proper string quartet, they noted, you can't cut out the cellist nor can you squeeze in more performances by playing the music faster. But that was then -- before MP3s and iPods proved just how freely music could flow. Before Google scanned and digitized 7 million books and Wikipedia users created the world's largest encyclopedia. Before YouTube Edu and iTunes U made video and audio lectures by the best professors in the country available for free, and before college students built Facebook into the world's largest social network, changing the way we all share information. Suddenly, it is possible to imagine a new model of education using online resources to serve more students, more cheaply than ever before. -- Fast Company

I'm happy to see open content and edu-hacking getting some mainstream attention. It's a little depressing to see the focus on the commercial potential, though given the source of the article, that focus is not actually surprising.

I just noticed that Jason Scott has redesigned the home page for his film website. Good things are worth the wait. I'm content to wait.

One reason why I continue to resist putting much effort into Facebook and Twitter is that, when I do so, my work disappears into someone else's database. If someone else decides to start charging me to view my own archives, or the links other people create to my content, then the visibility of my work suffers.

An open source alternative to Twitter sounds like a great solution.

Twitter -- or, rather, the idea of a pervasive, public short messaging network -- could be too important to be left under one entity's control. The people behind the OpenMicroBlogging (OMB) movement say it's time for the 140-character, publicly-subscribable format pioneered by Twitter to become an open standard, in part because, as last week's attack showed, Twitter is as vulnerable as it is vital.

"The total failure of Twitter during the DDoS attacks highlights the fact that, with Twitter, we're relying on a single service for mass communication of this type," said open microblogging supporter and Ektron CTO Bill Cava. "Most everyone understands it's ridiculous to expect one service to provide email support to the world. The same is true for micro messaging. The reality is, it can't and won't continue this way for too much longer." -- Wired

I was on the road (and away from a computer) for the past few days, on a little family outing.  My wife brought along a copy of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure #4 that she picked up cheap at a library sale.

The cover of this book, originally published in 1979, features a big-jawed space hero in a suit that sports a familiar color scheme.

[The] story is told of a music critic who was sent to a concert hall in Chicago to review a performance. When he found the hall burning down, he went home and went to bed. In the morning he explained, "There was no story. The concert hall burned down."

I trust these stories are apocryphal, but they serve to illustrate the difficulty of defining news.

There is some truth in the statement that good news is not news. Good news is the stuff of life. It is what happens to most of us most of the time. We survive. We prosper.

But if happiness was all we had to read about, we'd be very bored indeed. -- Jack Smith, LA Times (1987)

Amid the economic downturn, there are fewer places in New York to plug in computers. As idle workers fill coffee-shop tables -- nursing a single cup, if that, and surfing the Web for hours -- and as shop owners struggle to stay in business, a decade-old love affair between coffee shops and laptop-wielding customers is fading. In some places, customers just get cold looks, but in a growing number of small coffee shops, firm restrictions on laptop use have been imposed and electric outlets have been locked. The laptop backlash may predate the recession, but the recession clearly has accelerated it. -- Erica Alini, Wall Street Journal

Here's how Ebert ended a review he wrote yesterday:

It's said that Richard Harding Davis was dispatched by William Randolph Hearst to cover the Johnstown flood. Here was his lead: "God stood on a mountaintop here and looked at what his waters had wrought." Hearst cabled back: "Forget flood. Interview God."

A wonderful story. Checking out the quote online, I found a blog entry by Dennis G. Jerz of Seton Hill University, reporting that I have related this same story four times in print since 1993, sometimes changing it slightly. Good gravy! My only defense for using it once again is that it's more interesting than anything else I could write about "The Answer Man." -- Roger Ebert

He's talking about "Forget Flood. Review Movies."

Good luck with that, Rupert.

"We intend to charge for all our news websites," Mr Murdoch said. "If we're successful, we'll be followed by all media," he added, predicting "significant revenues" from charging for differentiated news online.

I think it probably makes sense to charge a bit in order to get unique content early, before it's released to the general public.  Maybe some tech and business bloggers would pay a little bit in order to get an advance peek at high-profile investigative reports, so that they have time to research their own localized version of the story, ready to be put on their own websites along with a link to the original story.  Maybe if Blogger Joe pays to access News Source X's premium content, Blogger Joe can post a permalink to the premium content, within some reasonable restrictions, so that spammers lose their license if they simply copy the entire stream of premium content and post it on their own site.

I think it's far more likely that Big Media as we know it will change drastically, rather than consumers the world over will ever get used to paying for content they've been used to getting for free.

My latest Blender 3D experiment.

I'm all for training students in fact-gathering, clear writing, and getting a sense of the outside world. But I'm wondering if the time-honored student newspaper is still the best way to do that.

Has your campus found a more contemporary way to get students the benefits that newspapers used to offer? Maybe a way that doesn't automatically doom them to the ashbin of history? -- Dean Dad, Inside Higher Ed

Here's the comment I just submitted:

At the first meeting of a journalism class this past January, I tore up a copy of the student paper.

I'm the adviser for that paper, so I softened the blow a bit by first assuring the students that I thought it was a good issue -- well designed, with accurate and lively content -- and that it was serving its on-campus audience well.  We have no intentions of dropping the print edition, or even scaling it back. But I did feel the need to dramatize the deep, permanent changes that journalism had undergone during the past year.

I was hired in 2003 to start a "new media journalism" program at a small, private liberal arts school.  Our NMJ students regularly blog, and I've taught classes on podcasting, web design, and gaming culture.  Our program aims to provide students with core writing skills and transferable new media skills -- not the least of which being how to use a complex software tool, and the ability to integrate several such tools (and whatever new tools they will encounter after they graduate) with their core writing skills.

Even in the middle of a huge shakedown in the journalism business, our recent graduates have been hired in the past year at a major network in New York, and at a community daily here in southwestern Pennsylvania.  Some have found jobs in related fields (technical writing, editorial assistant, paralegal), while others have opted to use their skills in grad school or the Peace Corps.

Combining words and technology can be a tough sell; some of our best writers in the program have made it known that they can hardly stand computers.  But I refuse to prepare students for a profession that will not exist by the time they graduate.

Political message? You decide.

Blip from Sean Mullen on Vimeo.

Imagine if all teaching happened like this... if all persuasion came from demonstrations like this.

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival.

I've watched it three more times since blogging it, and it still makes me smile.

Within five years:

(1) Many online journals and magazines now only publishing traditional text-based fiction and poetry will, as part of their online offerings, publish digital literature on a regular basis;

(2) Most major universities and many colleges (if they don't already) will offer courses in New Media, and those courses will cover/include digital literature;

(3) Accomplished scholars who assess the whole of digital literature by examining exemplary models from early hypertexts will be saying "oops!" and seeking a vocabulary that accepts the continual flux and explosive change of current practices in digital literature;

[...]

--Alan Bigelow, Netpoetic