September 2009 Archive Page

Our students are transcendentalists, but they don't know it.

Speaking metaphorically, Thoreau writes "I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born."  Rather than treating children as wild creatures that needed to be tamed and civilized, Thoreau seesorder and meaning in nature, which is threatened, worn down, and buried by civilization.

At a time when being educated at Harvard meant reciting verbatim from establishment experts, Bronson Alcott in his Temple School taught through dialogue with his young pupils, asking them to express themselves by answering gently (but relentlessly) probing questions that nurtured their creative capacity, without shutting it down by training them to settle for answers. (Isn't that what we do in our seminars? Isn't that what part of the allure of being part of a small college, where you'll never be taught by a graduate student?)

I captured an example of Socratic dialogue a few weeks ago, when my 7-year-old daughter suddenly brought up free will and animism during an afternoon of birdhouse-building.  I didn't tell her what to think, I asked questions that encouraged her to think things through for herself.  (When she was six, she would sometimes stamp her foot and scream, "You can't punish me!  I haven't yet reached the age of reason!")

The last time I taught Thoreau's Walden, I noticed just how much time I was wasting matching my socks, so I bought a set of 12 identical black socks and a set of 12 identical white socks.  Presto change-o, I spend a lot less time sorting socks. 

I'm curious to find out what my students have to say about this book, since it's not a novel, or a biography. It's more than a collection of hastily composed, inter-connected and competing thoughts, but there's a level of spontaneity and emotional serendipity that might seem familiar to them.

This time around, I couldn't help but think of Mitch Maddox, who during the calendar year 2000 changed his name to DotComGuy, and retreated to a wired and webcammed home, where he lived the simple life cyberstyle, dispensing with all this tedious travel and engagement with the outdoors, and instead aiming to live by selling advertising space on his website, and ordering all that he needed online.  (Walter Kirn of Time wrote, "Like a switched-on Thoreau at a virtual Walden Pond, he devised the stunt to teach mankind that the age of e-commerce is here--and that it is good."  But the dot-com crash happened during the year 2000, and the bloom was off the cyber-rose by the time he finished his experiment in advertiser-supported and venture-capital-funded digital self-reliance.)

One last detail.  In 2004, Eric Eldred decided to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Walden by driving his Internet Bookmobile to Walden Pond Reservation and handing out free copies of the book.  A state park supervisor ordered him to stop because he hadn't requested a permit, on the grounds that his free copies would interfere with sales from the gift shop. (Boston Globe)

Old joke... when's the best time to air a radio drama? 1937. 

Radio is still around, but the salary of TV personality Katie Couric " is more than the entire annual budgets of NPR's Morning Edition and All Things Considered combined." (so says Michael Massing).  If you knew nothing about the internet beyond what you learned about it from the TV news, you'd probably think it was full of child predators, weirdos, and clips of babies dancing to pop music.

But not too long ago, TV was the strange new medium that changed the way people spent their leisure time, and the way advertisers spent their marketing budgets, despite the wishes of the established old media titans.

Network TV lost vast amounts of money in its early years. It was only because the existing ­radio networks were willing to subsidize TV that it survived--leaving CBS and NBC at the top of the heap in the '50s and '60s, just as they had been in the '30s and '40s. The old media of today have a similar chance to prosper tomorrow if they can survive the heavy financial losses that they're incurring while they develop workable new-media business models.

Established radio performers such as Benny and Hope, who embraced TV on its own visually oriented terms, flourished well into the '60s. Everyone else--­including Fred Allen--vanished into the dumpster of entertainment history. The same fate awaits contemporary old-media figures unwilling to grapple with the challenge of the new media, no matter how popular they may be today.

Americans of all ages ­embraced TV unhesitatingly. They felt no loyalty to network radio, the medium that had entertained and informed them for a quarter-century. When something came along that they deemed superior, they switched off their radios without a second thought. That's the biggest lesson taught by the new-media crisis of 1949. Nostalgia, like guilt, is a rope that wears thin. --Terry Teachout, Wall Street Journal

When the University announced its Kindle e-reader pilot program last May, administrators seemed cautiously optimistic that the e-readers would both be sustainable and serve as a valuable academic tool. But less than two weeks after 50 students received the free Kindle DX e-readers, many of them said they were dissatisfied and uncomfortable with the devices. --Fox News

Ms Watts, from Islington, north London, said: "I asked why I couldn't borrow a pair of scissors and she said, 'they are sharp, you might stab me'.

"I then asked to borrow a guillotine to cut up my leaflets but she refused again - because she said I could hit her over the head with it!"

She added: "It's absurd - there are plenty of heavy books I could have hit her with if I wanted to.

"I hardly look very threatening - it's really sad she could not make a commonsense judgement." --BBC

Thanks for telling me about this bizarre, sad story, Robert.

Videogames may be economically formidable, but they remain a byword for crass, shallow thrills. A game, it's understood, can look spectacular, but it will have little to offer its audience in the way of values, insights or craftsmanship. It's a curious and increasingly untenable situation, given that, to the increasingly large percentage of the population who play them, games are rapidly establishing themselves as the single most exciting and vigorous creative industry around: a sector able to boast not only booming revenues and growing audiences, but a melting pot of talents and new ideas that is increasingly attracting some of the biggest-hitting figures in film, television and the other arts. --Tom Chatfield, Guardian

Okay, I admit it, being known as the academic expert on a singe indie computer game from the 1970s is something like saying "I'm the handsomest one-eyed pirate on this particular ship, today," which might well be true, but doesn't exactly mean very much.

Still, I'm thrilled that I could be part of Jason Scott's forthcoming text adventure documentary.  I had a fever of 101 when he interviewed me a few years ago, and then a few months later he offered to fly me back to Mammoth Cave for a follow-up interview, but that semester I had missed three weeks of classes due to pneumonia, and I was barely on my feet again, and my systems were operating at about 40% capacity at that time, so I had to turn him down.

Anyway, it's great to see evidence that he's making progress on his movie.

Finishing off a first version of the Adventure portion of GET LAMP, I am reminded of some of the shortcomings of the documentary form - when there's a ton of information, an absolute pile of detail or aspects about a subject, you will be given a tantalizing amount of insight into a subject but crave more.

Or maybe you won't crave more. For some, the subject covered over a few minutes will be sufficient. But for some of us, a certain few, you want to find out every last thing. And not just find it out... find it out definitively, where observation and verification rule the day, and not best-guesses and what-is-saids polluting the landscape.

To that end, as regards the game Adventure and its roots in real caving, as well as exactly what parts the two authors played in the project, you will simply not do any better than Dennis G. Jerz' Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther's Original "Adventure" in Code and in Kentucky. It is, very simply, the last word on the subject - I can't imagine anyone going further than this into the history and aspects of Adventure any of us might want an answer to. --Jason Scott

In all media that boasts your byline remain impartial, and don't do anything stupid. But is it in the best interests of the paper? Washington Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander points out the the Post (along with just about every other mainstream publication) has at times come under fire for being partisan. These guidelines aim to cut off those accusations before they can be made (and already senior post editor Raju Narisetti has closed his account). But in this age of self-branded journalists, where power and readership loyalty is often the result of an audience's personal connection with the writer is it really a good idea to remove all evidence of personality from the reporter's product? --Glynnis MacNicol

I'm looking for a current book that presents gaming theory at a level appropriate for a 200-level undergraduate course.  I have only scanned through the section of Tanja Sihvonen's work, Players Unleashed! Modding <i>The Sims</i> and the Culture of Gaming (PDF), that deals with Colossal Cave Adventure. I'm not too happy with what I found there, since it seems I disagree with a Wikipedia article. (See footnote 251.)

Yes, it is true that several of my sources claim a 1975-76 date, but the phrasing suggests that some of my sources might agree with the 1972 date.  In fact, except for people who were simply repeating what they had read about the creation of Colossal Cave Adventure, not a single one of the sources I interviewed specified a date before 1975, and the earliest digital evidence is dated 1977.  To put it another way, every single one of the sources who played Crowther's original game specified a date of 1975 or later.

Those "written sources, including the Wikipedia entry" that mention the 1972 date are wrong, as I explain in the article Sihvonen cites. (Why do I suddenly feel empathy for every B-movie mad scientist who shouts "Fools! I shall crush them all!"?)

I can, and do, regularly edit the Wikipedia entry to remove the factual errors, but what can I do to combat the errors that made it into print before I published what I found out about the timeline?

Of course, Sihvonen is right -- it is a fact that many sources have printed the 1972 date.  I listed several of these sources in the section of my article where I thoroughly debunk them.  And who am I to argue with ink on paper?  All I have on my side is thoroughly cross-checked oral testimony and e-mail messages from people who have first-hand knowledge of the events in question. How can that stand up against "many written sources"?  What was I thinking!

One day, perhaps I can spend months and years gathering primary information, carefully assemble it all in a coherent, insanely detailed package, get it peer reviewed by scholars who know what they are talking about, and then somehow, if fortune blesses my efforts, find a magic way that the full text of my findings could be available, for free, somewhere in an online digital network, so that I could direct interested readers to paragraphs 79-83 of a document located at http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/001/2/000009.html.

Interview with Stan Lee (comic guru, creator of Spider-Man)

If you were starting out now, do you think you would have started out in games rather than comics?
If I were young now and I wanted to do stories, I would very much want to get into the videogame business because it's the most exciting. Videogames and movies are the most exciting forms of entertainment. But a videogame in a way is more imaginative, it has more variety. In a movie you stick to the plotline, in a videogame you go in a million different directions. I have no idea how they're able to do that. It's like a miracle.

What advice would you give to a newcomer?
Well it's like anything else, if he or she wants to be a writer they should first study writing. Don't study comic writing, study writing - read literature, read the best writers you can find. Learn the language, learn how to use it. If you want to be an artist, you've got to study the best artists in the business and try to draw as well as they do. But too many people try to become artists in comics and they're not as good as the ones that are presently drawing the comics. --UK Guardian

Dear MR BAGGINS, Fellow Conspirator,

I am Thorin Oakenshield, descendant of Thrain the Old and grandson of Thror who was King under the Mountain. I am writing you to discuss our plans, our ways, means, policy and devices for rescuing our treasure from the dragon Smaug. -- Stephen Granade riffs on the Nigerian e-mail scam (see 419 Eater).

It's a safe bet none of the world leaders meeting Thursday for the first day of the G-20 summit are aware that it's also National Punctuation Day. Rubin founded it in 2004 after he got fed up with seeing misplaced apostrophes and other transgressions by people who should know better -- newspaper reporters and editors, book publishers and billboard advertisers.

"No one cares," he says. "That's my pet peeve, that a lot of people who are doing this don't care. Where's their pride? Where's their self-esteem? Where's their drive to get it right?"

Falling on Sept. 24, National Punctuation Day promotes literacy by encouraging schools and businesses to conduct activities, programs, games or contests related to the almighty comma, period and apostrophe. It's listed in two directories published by McGraw Hill, "Chases Calendar of Events" and "The Teacher's Calendar."

Rubin also created a Web site, www.nationalpunctuationday.com, which lists the proper usage of punctuation marks and invites visitors to post photos of incorrect road or restaurant signs. --William Loeffler, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

This is a rather weak example of tying a local story to an international news event, but I do enjoy obsessing about the details of language.

Thanks for the link, Mike.

Katie Couric's annual salary is more than the entire annual budgets of NPR's Morning Edition and All Things Considered combined. Couric's salary comes to an estimated $15 million a year; NPR spends $6 million a year on its morning show and $5 million on its afternoon one. NPR has seventeen foreign bureaus (which costs it another $9.4 million a year); CBS has twelve. Few figures, I think, better capture the absurd financial structure of the network news. --Michael Massing, Columbia Journalism Review

Of course, the situation was just as bad when the top three anchors were all men, but Massing does have a point.

I am not too happy about the way wild conclusions drawn from this self-published research periodically pop up in the media. Kudos to Liberman, from Language Log, who tries (yet again) to explain.

The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness

The best way to describe this, I think, would be to say something like:

In the early 70s, women self-reported their happiness at levels somewhat higher than men did. Specifically, 5.1% more of the women reported themselves "Very happy", while 1.5% fewer reported themselves "Not too happy".

30-odd years later, in the mid 00s, women's self-reported happiness was closer to men's, though it was still slightly higher. 1.4% more of the women reported themselves "Very happy", while 0.1% fewer reported themselves "Not too happy".

To Arianna Huffington, this means that "women are becoming more and more unhappy", while "men ... have gotten progressively happier over the years". To Maureen Dowd, this means that "Before the '70s, there was a gender gap in America in which women felt greater well-being. Now there's a gender gap in which men feel better about their lives."  Ross Douthat described these numbers with the generalization "In postfeminist America, men are happier than women."

All of these statements are either false or seriously misleading.  Maybe, if you look at the data through a sophisticated statistical model, you can support a conclusion about the relative signs of the long-term-trends for males and females.  But any way you slice and dice it, there's not much there there.

I've cited the earlier stages in this discussion as motivation for a moratorium on using generic plurals to describe small statistical differences.  The contributions of Arianna Huffington and Maureen Dowd are, if anything, even better arguments for this (hopeless) cause. --Mark Liberman, Language Log

If language is as instinctive  to  humans as  dam-building is to beavers, if every 3-year-old is a grammatical genius, if the design of syntax is coded in our DNA and wired into our  brains,  why,  you might  wonder,  is  the  English language in such a mess?  Why does the average American sound like a gibbering fool every time he opens his mouth or puts  pen to paper? 
 

The contradiction begins in the fact that the words "rule" and "grammar" have very different meanings to a scientist and to a layperson.   The  rules  people learn  (or  more  likely,  fail  to  learn) in school are called [prescriptive] rules, prescribing how one "ought"  to  talk.    Scientists  studying  language propose  [descriptive]  rules,  describing  how  people [do] talk -- the way to determine whether a construction is "grammatical" is to find people  who  speak the language and ask them.  Prescriptive and descriptive grammar are completely different things, and there is a good  reason  that  scientists  focus  on  the descriptive rules. --Steven Pinker, The New Republic

I believe that the underlying facts about the Wikipedia phenomenon -- that the general public is actually intelligent, interested in sharing knowledge, interested in getting the facts straight -- are so shocking to most old media people that it is literally impossible for them to report on Wikipedia without following a storyline that goes something like this: "Yeah, this was a crazy thing that worked for awhile, but eventually they will see the light and realize that top-down control is the only thing that works."

Will the new, more gentle tool, be more widely used than protection was? I certainly hope so. We are always looking for ways to help responsible people join the Wikipedia movement and contribute constructively, while gently asking those who want to cause trouble to please go somewhere else.

Faced with the choice of preventing you from editing at all, versus allowing you to edit even though you might have bad intentions, we have erred consistently for the latter -- openness. The new tool, by making it a lot easier to keep bad stuff from appearing to the general public, is going to allow for a much more responsible Wikipedia that is, at the same time, a much more open Wikipedia. --Jimmy Wales, Huffington Post

Okay, this is my one frivolity before diving into my hell Monday (featuring an unbroken stretch of three back-to-back classes and a committee meeting):

According to a Natural Resources Defense Council survey, 78 percent of sinister one-eyed industrialists based in the Arctic have been forced to relocate their powerful underworld shadow governments, with many now secretly orchestrating world affairs from dormant volcanoes on remote islands. --The Onion

Yes, I interact with students via e-mail and the Web. And computers can be great for teaching when it's difficult or impossible for students to get to a brick-and-mortar classroom. But for me, teaching involves f2f (there, you see, I've gone and used a computer term in a sentence). I want to listen to students talking to me, to one another, having a spontaneous conversation about the subject. It's fun. It's energizing. Online, I just don't feel that kind of electricity. It's probably just a personal preference.

But I do see some significant downsides to distance education. It's touted for all the wrong reasons. It's cheap: yes, perhaps, if you discount the price of the technology (it turns out that computers cost more than people, that computer techs cost more than entry-level instructors, and that software costs more, not less, than textbooks, and it must be constantly upgraded). --Dennis Barron

Silly headline, from a University of Washington press release.

Second, fourth and sixth grade children with and without handwriting disabilities were able to write more and faster when using a pen than a keyboard to compose essays, according to new research.

The study, headed by Virginia Berninger, a University of Washington professor of educational psychology who studies normal writing development and writing disabilities, looked at children's ability to write the alphabet, sentences and essays using a pen and a keyboard.

"Children consistently did better writing with a pen when they wrote essays. They wrote more and they wrote faster." said Berninger.

It's a transparent ploy to get Google rank via incoming links, but it's also a great piece of investigative reporting. By Chandler Phillips.

"We would hire you here at Edmunds.com. Then you would go out and get a job as a car salesman and work for three months."

"Selling cars?" I asked unnecessarily.

"Right."

"Where would I work?"

"Wherever you can get hired. That would be up to you. We were thinking you should work at two dealerships. The first would be a high-volume, high-pressure store. Then you could quit and go to a no-haggle dealership. You could tell them you didn't like the pressure at the first place and you'd probably get a job on the spot."

The editor explained that they wanted me to write a series of articles describing the business from the inside. Of course I would learn the tricks of the trade, and that would better prepare me to write advice for Edmunds.com. But the benefits of the project would be greater than just information. I would live the life of a car salesman for three months. That would give me an insight and perspective that couldn't be gained by reading books or articles or interviewing former car salesmen.

"So what do you think?" the editor asked. "Interested?"

Kanye West has tried to apologize twice, once on his blog and once on Jay Leno. He blew it both times. In each case he referred to having stolen Taylor's moment. West doesn't understand that what he did was wrong, threatening and self-centered. He simply acknowledged that his completely narcissistic behavior cut into another celebrity's moment of self-centeredness!

Ms. Williams, having nobody famous to whom to apologize, has yet to properly acknowledge the implications of threatening a line judge with bodily harm. Like Mr. West, Ms. Williams fails to understand that it doesn't matter how much pressure she was under, it's not about her! She was wrong and she should simply say that, apologize for it and shut up. The storm would pass and she would be forgiven. But that seems to be beyond her.

Apparently, it's beyond Joe Wilson also. He apologized to the President and he has no plans to apologize any more, not to his colleagues and not to anyone else. Like Kanye West, Wilson seems to think that his words caused a personal hurt to the President and he is willing to apologize for that, but not for anything else. --Brad Hirschfield

Last night I came across the text of the statement by Serena Williams, which a headline writer had identified as an "apology," but the statement begins by praising Serena for her passion, it repeats the claim that the judge's call was unfair, it confuses the concepts of "passion and emotion" and "foul-mouthed tantrum, and it imagines that the continued adoration of her "fans and supporters" -- rather than any change on her part -- will help her to "move forward and grow".

Last night everyone could truly see the passion I have for my job. Now that I have had time to gain my composure, I can see that while I don't agree with the unfair line call, in the heat of battle I let my passion and emotion get the better of me and as a result handled the situation poorly. I would like to thank my fans and supporters for understanding that I am human and I look forward to continuing the journey, both professionally and personally, with you all as I move forward and grow from this experience.  --Serena Williams Issues Apology Statement

[F]our-year degrees typically require two luxuries Solvig didn't have: years of time out of the workforce, and a great deal of money.

Luckily for Solvig, there were new options available. She went online looking for something that fit her wallet and her time horizon, and an ad caught her eye: a company called StraighterLine was offering online courses in subjects like accounting, statistics, and math. This was hardly unusual--hundreds of institutions are online hawking degrees. But one thing about StraighterLine stood out: it offered as many courses as she wanted for a flat rate of $99 a month. "It sounds like a scam," Solvig thought--she'd run into a lot of shady companies and hard-sell tactics on the Internet. But for $99, why not take a risk?

Solvig threw herself into the work, studying up to eighteen hours a day. And contrary to expectations, the courses turned out to be just what she was looking for. --Kevin Carey, Washington Monthly

Google's FastFlip is the newest media toy.

The service is meant to duplicate the look and feel of perusing a printed publication. The stories are displayed on electronic pages that can be quickly scrolled through by clicking on large arrows on the side instead of a standard Web link that requires waiting several seconds for a page to load. Readers can sort through content based on topics, favorite writers and publications. --BusinessWeek

I did find myself flipping through more pages than I might otherwise have seen, but I didn't like that I had to click through in order to copy text or interact with the page in any way -- it's just an image that you're seeing, rather than an embedded page.

When I saw news.google.com for the first time, or Feedly, I got the sense that I had stumbled across something important.  I might return to the site the next time I'm bored and looking for something to blog about, but I don't see it as anything that will change my media habits.

In his Inside Higher Ed blog, Joshua Kim writes:

A transformative step that learning technologists can participate in proposing, pushing, guiding, leading, managing and maintaining would be providing a campus-wide blogging platform and institutional aggregation site. Here are some guidelines for what this could look like...

Here is the text of a comment I posted:

There is, of course, a value in creating a private online space for a specific class, but if we put our best stuff behind the Blackboard firewall, or if the content disappears into the Facebook or Twitter data sink, then we're missing the chance to use the web as a public resource.  Thanks for posting these guidelines. I like your thinking, Joshua, and I hope that more faculty and administraors will see the value of social networking technology.

In the fall of 2003, as a new hire at Seton Hill University (a small liberal arts college near Pittsburgh), I used MovableType to set up blogs.setonhill.edu, offering free, no-advertising blogs to students, faculty, and staff. 

The default template I provide is subtly branded, with a modest logo and link, but students can (and often do) choose a different design.  The fact that the blogs live under the setonhill.edu domain gives the student writers clout, and the frequency of posts and the pattern of cross-linking is interpreted favorably by Google (our aggregator has a respectable Google PageRank of 5.10).

We paid a one-time fee (about $300, I think) for a site license that permits 300 active blogs.  Each year, I've opted for an annual tech support package that has saved me hours of troubleshooting time, at a price that's about what we pay the web host.

Since blogs.setonhill.edu went online, nearly 600 users have created about 25,000 posts, attracting about 40,000 non-spam comments. I have often wished for the time to do the coding necessary to rank blogs by recent activity (in the last 24 hours, in the last week, in the last month, in the last year, and "all time"), but for now a list of recently updated blogs keeps the most active blogs visible.

Usually every semester, students get comments from the author of a textbook or academic article we've used in class.  Students posting their homework on The Scarlet Letter or the Associated Press Stylebook are likely to get some random search engine traffic.

A former admissions director blogged faithfully for some months before leaving for a different job, and the library, the student paper, our National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education, some students involved in our Study Abroad program, all of my journalism and literature students blog on the system, and about a dozen other classes taught by other faculty members have experimented with blogging.  Several faculty members have experimented with using a blog as an official professional presence, and one colleague got a book deal out of a collection of essays he posted to his blog while on a trip abroad. 

I don't censor what the students write.  Of the 25,000 blog entries on the site, I'd say that only three crossed the line into destructive irresponsibility and offensiveness, and the authors of those posts withdrew almost immediately after posting them. (Those posts are still online, but you'd have to know what to search for in order to find them.)

I'm not sure many people really care that today marks the 10th anniversary of the date that the moon was supposed to have blasted out of Earth's orbit in the British sci-fi show Space: 1999, but here's a YouTube clip that presents an alternate opening of Star Trek, redone in the style of Space: 1999.

Yes, this is very, very obscure, but I need a break from marking papers, so here it is.
 

Factual errors in live TV reports led to a security incident on the Potomac river today.

Erroneous live cable news reports on CNN and Fox had said that the Coast Guard was firing shots on the river. CNN reported the Coast Guard had fired 10 rounds at a suspicious boat, and showed vessels circling in the water -- near the bridge President Barack Obama's motorcade crossed on the way to a memorial at the Pentagon earlier Friday morning.

The Associated Press reported that an exercise was under way in the river and did not report that shots were fired.

In a statement released by the Coast Guard, officials said the problem arose when media reporters overheard radio calls made during the training exercise. --CBS

I didn't watch any of the footage, but I'd bet one of the reporters said the smoke was delicious.

Assistant Professor of Composition/English

Institution: Seton Hill University
Location: Greensburg, PA
Category:
Faculty - Liberal Arts - English and Literature
Posted: 09/09/2009
Application Due: 11/13/2009
Type: Full Time
Notes: included on Affirmative Action email
Seton Hill University seeks specialist in Composition/Writing Studies for tenure-track, Assistant Professor of English, beginning fall 2010. The faculty member will teach composition and related courses in the Undergraduate Writing Program, with additional generalist responsibilities in English. 4/4 course load. A Ph.D. in Composition/Rhetoric is required. Additional experience in literature desired. Background in writing program administration, assessment, and/or writing in the disciplines favored.

Seton Hill University is a Catholic, liberal arts University, educating traditional and non-traditional undergraduate and graduate students. Classes are offered in a variety of formats - day, evening, and weekends. Seton Hill has a student-centered campus culture based on Catholic values, acceptance, community and service. The campus is located 35 miles east of Pittsburgh. Visit setonhill.edu for more information.

To apply, send a letter of application, curriculum vitae, official transcripts, a written sample of scholarship, a statement of philosophy of teaching composition, and a composition syllabus. Applications must be postmarked by November 13, 2009.
Application Information
Apply for this Position through My HigherEdJobs
Postal Address: Dr. Laura Patterson
Undergraduate Writing Programs
Seton Hill University
Seton Hill Drive
Greensburg, PA 15601
Email Address: patterson@setonhill.edu

The Seton Hill registrar describes how her devotion to mathematics and logic has helped her serve her community.

"Nearly everything I need to know, and that I currently believe, I think I've learned at school board meetings.... I've survived seven elections, I've been beaten up by the press, made deep friendships and bitter enemies. I've been threatened, accused, betrayed, but most of all rewarded." Barbara Hinkle (8.4Mb MP3)

I'm keeping my media skills limber, posting pictures and audio that I took during Seton Hill University's discussion of This I Believe: The Personal Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women.

For anyone who's ever forgotten something or someone they wish they could remember, a bit of solace: Though the memory is hidden from your conscious mind, it might not be gone. --Wired

U.S. citizens will soon be able to log in to government websites using their Google account, or the URL of their Yahoo profile. It's a significant embrace of the open and emerging tech standards the Obama administration promised. --Wired

Not as cleverly written as that video that has a line or two about each U.S. president (which I can't locate at the moment) but still very nicely done.

From the president's prepared remarks to school children, scheduled for tomorrow.

Every single one of you has something you're good at. Every single one of you has something to offer. And you have a responsibility to yourself to discover what that is. That's the opportunity an education can provide. 

Maybe you could be a good writer - maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper - but you might not know it until you write a paper for your English class. Maybe you could be an innovator or an inventor - maybe even good enough to come up with the next iPhone or a new medicine or vaccine - but you might not know it until you do a project for your science class. Maybe you could be a mayor or a Senator or a Supreme Court Justice, but you might not know that until you join student government or the debate team.

And no matter what you want to do with your life - I guarantee that you'll need an education to do it. --Barack Obama, whitehouse.gov

Interesting that Obama mentions "articles in a newspaper," rather than "articles for a news website" or "articles for a RSS feed" or "articles for cranially-implanted holographic simulation networks."  But he does end with a reference to social networking.

Do you think the hand-washing reference is just a little bit... I don't know... pandering?  Is the President going out of his way to make Republicans look silly for opposing some Oval Office happytalk? 

A team of scientists from Britain, the United States and Papua New Guinea found more than 40 previously unidentified species when they climbed into the kilometre-deep crater of Mount Bosavi and explored a pristine jungle habitat teeming with life that has evolved in isolation since the volcano last erupted 200,000 years ago. In a remarkably rich haul from just five weeks of exploration, the biologists discovered 16 frogs which have never before been recorded by science, at least three new fish, a new bat and a giant rat, which may turn out to be the biggest in the world. --Robert Booth, Guardian

Top-down grading by the prof  turns learning (which should be a deep pleasure, setting up for a lifetime of curiosity) into a crass competition:  how do I snag the highest grade for the least amount of work? how do I give the prof what she wants so I can get the A that I need for med school?  That's the opposite of learning and curiosity, the opposite of everything I believe as a teacher, and is, quite frankly, a waste of my time and the students' time. There has to be a better way . . .
 

So, this year, when I teach "This Is Your Brain on the Internet," I'm trying out a new point system supplemented, first, by peer review and by my own constant commentary (written and oral) on student progress, goals, ambitions, and contributions.   Grading itself will be by contract:   Do all the work (and there is a lot of work), and you get an A.   Don't need an A?  Don't have time to do all the work?  No problem.  You can aim for and earn a B. There will be a chart.  You do the assignment satisfactorily, you get the points.  Add up the points, there's your grade.  Clearcut.  No guesswork.  No second-guessing 'what the prof wants.' No gaming the system.  Clearcut.  Student is responsible. 

But what determines meeting the standard required in this point system?  What does it mean to do work "satisfactorily"?  And how to judge quality, you ask?  Crowdsourcing. --Cathy Davidson, HASTAC

I remember some years ago reading an article that used a similar strategy to describe exactly what it would feel like to stand on Mars.

One of things Ford wasn't ready for is the weird smell.

"From the [spacewalks] there really is a distinct smell of space when they come back in," Ford said from the station in a Friday night news conference. "It's like...something I haven't ever smelled before, but I'll never forget it. You know how those things stick with you."

In the past, astronauts have described the smell of space as something akin to gunpowder or ozone.

The sounds of spaceflight have also been surprising, especially when Discovery fires up its large maneuvering thrusters, Ford said. -- Fox News

Some of these wacky rookies forgot to strap themselves down while sleeping, and just as the gruff, no-nonsense mission commander is in the conference room asking for a more experienced crew, the snoring rookies float past the camera.  The next morning, they try to make popcorn in the kitchen, and watch with wide eyes as various items ping-pong throughout the cabin, causing a low-gravity chain-reaction that sends a communications satellite to fiery doom.  When a capsule of Soviet cosmonauts starts running out of air, the motley crew of unlikely recruits is the only rescue team available. Will they show NASA they have the right stuff, or will NASA tell them to stuff it?  Starring Don Knotts, Tim Conway, and Leslie Nielsen. Introducing Mischa the Chimp as Dr. Bananas.

In many ways, the Times' blogs are no different from anyone else's. But there's one organizational trick they employ very effectively: Division of Labor. Times bloggers don't work on their own. They don't handle every aspect of their blogs. Who does what is divided up to bring specific expertise to bear on different parts of each post. The result is I can crank out more posts, and those posts are better overall, than if we writers did everything ourselves. I know, not everyone wants to have other people involved in their blogging. But there's a reason people work in teams. --Paul Boutin

"Just make sure that you spell everything wrong and swear a lot."
Facebook, Twitter Revolutionizing How Parents Stalk Their College-Aged Kids

The economic reality of working in journalism in the present economy: good people are losing their jobs.

For the past several years, largely as a result of free news and classifieds on the Internet, ad revenues and circulation have been sinking for newspapers nationwide. Sun management and their bosses at the Chicago-based Tribune Company, which owns the paper, have responded with repeated rounds of buyouts, layoffs, and reductions in print content. A newsroom staff that numbered 500 in 1992, when The Evening Sun was still being published, had been whittled down to about 200 before the April cuts.

As a result, staffers lived in a state of fear, mostly keeping their heads down, trying to do good work under less-than-ideal conditions. "Everyone is miserable," says one writer who has survived all the cuts and asked to remain anonymous for obvious reasons. "Whatever shred of morale there was has disappeared." --Evan Serpick, Baltimore Magazine

It's not easy teaching journalism classes in this climate. I am sure to emphasize how journalism skills transfer to other careers, and I've been considering ways to beef up the "new media" component of our "new media journalism" major.

Clever DVD Verdict review (written by recent SHU graduate Mike Rubino)

DM: You pick up Dungeons & Dragons: The Animated Series, and find that it is lighter than expected. Your nostalgia level receives a +5 for the next nine hours and 54 minutes.

(Thanks for the link, Josh.)

"The more dependent we allow ourselves to become to something like Facebook -- and Facebook does everything in its power to make you more dependent -- the more Facebook can and does abuse us," Harmsen explained by indignant e-mail. "It is not 'your' Facebook profile. It is Facebook's profile about you." -- Virginia Heffernan, New York Times

In 1970, the gap between shows featuring magic and shows featuring more science-based themes is fairly wide, which may be related to the relative cost of producing the different types of shows; Captain Kirk required pricey sets and a makeup crew while Samantha Stevens just needed a film editor and the ability to wiggle her nose. But as audience expectations for shows involving magic become analogous to their expectations for science fiction shows, magic's peaks and valleys start to correspond to those of other themes, though supernatural shows may be a bit more resilient to overall drops in television spending. --i09.com

If this were a Monday, I might have had my "News Writing" students watch it during class, since many of them are education majors (and a fair number of them admitted they were only in the class because their teaching certificate program requires the course).

This is the first time an American president has spoken directly to the nation's school children about persisting and succeeding in school. We encourage you to use this historic moment to help your students get focused and begin the school year strong. I encourage you, your teachers, and students to join me in watching the President deliver this address on Tuesday, September 8, 2009. It will be broadcast live on the White House website www.whitehouse.gov 12:00 noon eastern standard time.

As US newspaper publishers mull charging readers on the Web, a Pennsylvania daily announced plans on Monday to put some content behind a pay wall.  The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette said "PG+" would be a "members-only website with interactive features and exclusive content" available to subscribers for 36 dollars a year or for 3.99 dollars a month. --AFP

In the 90s, consumers declined to pay for the same content as the print edition, shoveled online. We'll see whether professionally-produced extras are worth the money to consumers.