Recently in the Personal Category

During a scheduled internet outage at work, I took a stack of papers from my "I'll probably never need this stuff but I need to go through it one more time before I chuck it" stack, and headed to the copy room, where there's a big recycling bin.

A colleague did a double-take as he walked by, then poked his head in the door.  "What are you doing?" he asked.

I shrugged. "Just throwing some stuff away."

He staggered.  "You!??"

I paused, in mid-chuck.  "The internet's down," I reminded him.

I really didn't think I was that bad... yes, the stack of "I'll throw this away as soon as I go through it one more time" got so high that I had to start a second stack next to it, but I've shaved off a good 18 inches in the past few days.

Anyway, this de-cluttering advice gives me a heart-warming goal:

Somewhere, keep an empty shelf.

My sixth-grader has scored very well on standardized tests for math, but he finds a blank page of math problems intimidating and boring. He spends hours -- literally hours -- wasting time at the kitchen table, not doing his long division or word problems. Yet for pleasure, he reads Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries and the last two bedtime stories we've finished have been kid-friendly biographies of Archimedes and Galen.

My son wants to be a scientist, but finds math boring. Clearly we have to do something about this!

Age-appropriate development and understanding of mathematical concepts does not advance at a rate fast enough to please test-obsessed lawmakers. But adults using test scores to reward or punish other adults are doing a disservice to the children they claim to be helping.

It does not matter the exact age that you learned to walk. What matters is that you learned to walk at a developmentally appropriate time. To do my job as a physicist I need to know matrix inversion. It didn't hurt my career that I learned that technique in college rather than in eighth grade. What mattered was that I understood enough about math when I got to college that I could take calculus. --Joseph Ganem, American Physical Society

One day, my wife put the book 10 Things All Future Mathematicians And Scientists Must Know: But Are Rarely Taught into the stack of books at my son's bedside. I glanced through the table of contents and got very excited.  The book mentions the Challenger disaster (managers ignored the engineers who warned that a low-temperature launch was risky), Dr. Snow's study of a cholera outbreak (he plotted deaths on a map and realized one water pump in the neighborhood was infected), and the principle of Occam's razor (which, in the absence of compelling evidence either way, favors the simple explanation over the complex).

Each chapter features a series of anecdotes that explain a big-picture concept (causation and correlation; bias; mistakes as an integral part of scientific inquiry; ethical experimentation), a cartoon mouse and cartoon Einstein comment on the stories, and the chapter ends with discussion questions that first require you to solve a word problem before you can weigh in with an opinion. This chapter is training young minds not to jump to conclusions, especially when all the information they need is right in front of them.

While I won't pretend this one book has solved all our math woes, I will say that at bedtime the other night, Peter was happily pondering this question:

A hot-air balloon can safely hold 1055 pounds. It currently has 6 people in it whose average weight is 128 pounds. In addition, it has a 4-foot by 6-foot metal floor that weights 8 pounds per square foot. How many 25-pound bags of sand can be safely placed in the balloon?

This question came at the end of a chapter that described the 2001 death of the up-and-coming singer Aaliyah. (A pilot initially said it was unsafe for her entourage and all their baggage to fly in a small plane; but the group refused to leave any people or any baggage behind. The pilot relented, the plane crashed soon after takeoff, and all nine people aboard were killed.) My son has a well-developed sense of morality, so he was pretty much furious at that pilot.  The emotion motivated him to answer the word problem number story.

I guided him through the process, of course, asking questions to make sure he remembered the various subtotals.

When my wife came past the door and saw that we were still up reading (and calculating), she ordered us to stop for the night.

I just excerpted and linked to a story from the Huffington Post Blog, and after I checked my blog I found a strange link floating above all the rest of my text, making both my own text that was under the link and the link itself illegible.

I had already included a link to the HuffPo. I had to spend extra time locating and removing this extra crap that appeared in my clipboard buffer.

<div style="position: fixed;"><div id="new_selection_block0.017883485913577468" style="border: medium none ; overflow: hidden; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; text-align: left; text-decoration: none;"><br /><br />Read more at: <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lenore-skenazy/as-goes-halloween-so-goes_b_340163.html" target="_blank_">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lenore-skenazy/as-goes-halloween-so-goes_b_340163.html</a></div>

I feel bullied, or at the very least treated with the assumption that anyone copy-pasting from HuffPo intends to steal the content.

The next time I think of driving traffic to The Huffington Post, I'll remember how their CSS trick messed up my layout, and I'll probably pass.

A few years ago, my daughter was thrilled to receive a hand-me-down fanny pack. (See the price tag hanging on my spiffy new one?)
Earlier this month, when my wife took the kids on a family visit for about 10 days, my daughter cried for me at night.

In the figure of the coltish, resolute Sigourney Weaver, Alien may just be the film that overhauled the old, unreconstructed horror genre and dared to put a woman centre-stage. Because make no mistake: a horror movie is what Alien is. "It's basically a haunted house film," explains the critic David Thomson. "The only difference is that the old dark house just happens to be a spaceship." --Xan Brooks, Guardian

Alien came out thirty years ago.  Thirty years ago!

I would have just turned 11.  I remember reading all about the movie in Starlog (a science fiction magazine my sister and I read from about issue #6 or #7, and we later ordered back issues so we had the complete set), and I remember seeing advertisements for Alien-themed toys, but I wondered who would want them... I'm sure I saw an edited version of the movie on TV, or maybe I rented the video, but I really wasn't into horror. 

The sequel, Aliens, came out when I was a teenager, and was a big hit with my peer group. It made me re-watch the first film, and I appreciated it more. 

I did watch the third film once, but I settled for reading an online version of the script for the fourth movie.

But honestly... thirty years?

I just got a phone call from the parent of a prospective student I spoke with on a campus visit over the summer.  The student has decided to come to Seton Hill, and the parent told me that the time I spent talking with the family over the summer was a major factor. (I'm sure the scholarship the student recently won had something to do with it, too.) 

Our admissions office works very hard, and I'm always happy when I hear that something I've done has made a difference.

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)

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

 

 

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
  

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.

My latest Blender 3D experiment.

I've kept a running tally... I've been bored for a total of 4 and 1/2 hours during our 15 years of marriage. 

You're the organizer and the schedule-keeper and the worrier, which frees me to camp with the kids in the backyard, marshal a pony army against the dollhouse fortress, and read to them until late at night.

Home-schooling is so rewarding, so challenging and exciting.  I'm grateful that you suggested that we try it.

You've put your dissertation and your plots for your fantasy/romance novels on hold for the good of the family, so I'm happy we can arrange things so that you can sleep in late (past noon on the weekends) if you want to.

You've left a grand total of one comment on a weblog -- not my blog, mind you, but someone else's.  I know you're not likely to read this, but I'll say it here anyway.

I love you.

I've blogged before about how much I dislike Adobe's arrogant use of popups that take over your computer while you are trying to do something else.

This morning, I set up the computer my kids use so that my son would be able to follow the simulated progress of Apollo 11 on wechoosethemoon.org.  That meant upgrading to Flash 10.  I made a mental note to make sure that the upgrade didn't overwrite my attempt to disable Adobe's auto-update feature (which pops up an aggressive, sticky box that demands far too much attention... I don't want my kids getting in the habit of clicking "Yes" to every box that pops up while they're on the computer), but I was on my way out the door to go to work, so I didn't have time to do check to make sure that Adobe hadn't reset all my preferences to "By all means, feel free to interrupt me as often as you like."

Taking a break at the office just now, I watched the simulation of the lunar descent and landing, and found the experience very moving. ("Tranquility base here... the Eagle has landed."  I did a fist pump and posted "W00t!" to my Twitter feed.)

As I was still poking around the site, listening to the audio from the surface of the moon, the phone rang. It was my 11yo son, his voice quavering.  He had been sitting at his computer, watching the same thing I'd been enjoying.  But on his computer, one of those intrusive, annoying, evil Adobe pop-ups had appeared, blocking the actual lunar landing. 

I had maximized the browser window (following the advice on wechoosethemoon.org), so it's probably the case that neither my son nor my wife knew that I had set them up to watch something that was on a website.  My son does know enough to "cancel" out of a dialog box, but the Adobe popups don't function like normal creatures. 

On the phone, he says he tried closing the box, but it wouldn't go away.  When he sent his sister to explain the problem to my wife, a miscommunication happened, and my wife ended up thinking that my son had closed the web browser himself, and thus was responsible for the interruption.  My son isn't very articulate when he's upset, and my wife is not exactly a techno-troubleshooter.  So, according to Peter, there was shouting and consternation, and what should have been a powerful educational experience was ruined.

Thanks a heap, Adobe.

The HD version actually came out better than I thought it would. More photos after the jump...

I tell my kids steampunk bedtime stories about the adventures of Captain Rod Gearhart and the Magnificent Blimpship. Since I also enjoy playing with Blender 3D, it seemed natural to make these clockwork heart decorations. (My wife offered detailed pointers to tweak the one on the right.)

This weekend, how can the kids and I spend our time better than playing:

• Political Machine 2008 (try explaining "special interest groups" to a seven-year-old)
• Liberty's Kids (1776, from the perspective of Ben Franklin's printing apprentice, among others)
  
• Sid Meier's Civil War Collection (sort of a stretch, I know, but the fate of the union was at stake)
• The Oregon Trail, 5th Edition (You have died of dysentery)

We don't own a copy, but we always try to rent the musical 1776.

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.

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. 

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?

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.

Okay, I'm officially lame. I teared up a few days ago during Star Trek, and tonight I teared up during this song from The Magic Treehouse: The Musical, based on a series of easy-reader books by Mary Pope Osbourne. The touring show was in my town tonight; we had front-row seats. The song is a perky, sappy tribute to brotherly and sisterly love, and the lyrics perfectly describe my own kids.

Jack: You're so brave!
Annie: You're so smart!
Jack: You make me laugh!
Annie: I love your heart!
[...]
Annie: I'm the arrow, you're the bow.
Jack: I'm the tic-tac, you're the toe!
Annie: You're the engine.
Jack: You're the steam.
Annie: I'm the peaches!
Jack: I'm the cream!
Both: What would I do without you?

A tear actually slid down my cheek after the "steam" line, and I reached for my wife's hand so she could feel it.

I am so lame...

Now I'm going to listen to this song again.

Last night, I went to see the new Star Trek movie with a member of the computer science faculty. A math professor was hoping to come, but had a change of plans. The previews suggested it would be a bit intense for me to take the kids to see it, but now that I've seen the show, I think it will be OK.  You have to know your kids though -- the opening sequence pushes some buttons that I didn't expect to have pushed in action film, and the combination of tug-at-the-heartstrings and pulse-pounding action in the opening few minutes might be a bit overwhelming.

I haven't shown my kids the whole run of classic Trek, mostly because I'd rather do other things with them besides watch TV. 

They do know a handful of the best episodes -- the ones that are really worth taking time to see (such as The Doomsday Machine and The Trouble with Tribbles). They haven't seen any of the later incarnations of the show, nor any of the movies.  What with all my wife's old videotapes of Dr. Who, and the complete run of Babylon 5 (dutifully taped by my sister and mailed to us in batches), we already have a big enough backlog of good TV that we're not watching at the moment.

As for the remake... I don't mind at all that they redesigned the sets and models to look futuristic to a 21st-century audience. Communicators and phasers are still cool.  As if to atone for the snail-paced original Trek movie (thirty years ago... 1979), there were no talky briefing room scenes -- they handled all the exposition during the action sequences, and the turbolift is still a great location for two characters to have a private conversation.  All the various characters have been tweaked just a bit, so that we recognize their iconic nature, but also see them change.  The movie has more of an ensemble feel, which is something The Next Generation developed well.

My geek-boy katra can't quite grasp what the producer was thinking when he put Delta Vega that close to Vulcan.  The engine room set was a cop-out. I know they filmed it in a brewery, but I wonder just how much money they spent on the little tribute to Agustus Gloop... was it some elaborate reference to certain characters being wet behind the ears?

Speaking of cop... where have I heard the thrumming sound made by the flying motorcycle?  It feels like an old friend, but I can't place it. Blade Runner?

The amount of lens flare, especially in the bridge scenes, was noticeably distracting. I think the goal was to tie the bridge scenes in with the CGI sequences, since the space shots also featured lots of animated lens flare. The closing credits even features an elaborate CGI sequence that renders dust or some other kind of imperfections on the camera lens. But I found that whole concept -- the shaky camera cinema verite conceit -- bothersome. The original series used handheld cameras to occasional good effect... would occasionally march into the turbolift behind Kirk, or the camera would do a 360 around Spock while he is doing a mind-meld.  It used to be far too expensive to do special effects on a moving image -- that's why the actors in the original series stood still while the transporter beam dissolved them away.

When there's reason, within the story, to watch hand-held footage -- someone's recording from a hand-held tricorder, for instance -- then I'd say, bring on the shakies. But surely in the future there will be digital stabilizer. But when I see lens flare on a CGI shot, it hurts my ability to enjoy the scene, because I know the producers aren't trying to make me feel like I'm there, floating in space with a God's eye view of the battle. Instead, they're trying to make me feel like I'm watching documentary footage.

I completely understand the need to dirty down the models and make the props and sets more functional, but I found it distracting to be reminded so often that I'm watching a movie... I just want a direct sensory infusion of space opera goodness... I was annoyed by the amount of effort the producers put into simulating the constraints of modern movie cameras.  When the shaky camera trend has run its course, its overuse in this movie will make this Star Trek outing look dated.

Having picked my nits, I will say that there were a couple of beauty shots of the new Enterprise, some surprising revelations about character backstory (now we know why Spock never took the Kobayashi Maru test), and a bold and brash feel that was just thrilling to watch.

It's the first time I've given a final exam in a while. I usually mark final projects or final papers, which I've seen in numerous draft forms for the past month, so all I really need to do is read the student's final reflection, after all the hard work is over. But in a large-ish literature class (large by Seton Hill standards -- about 30), I gave a final exam in order to assess student familiarity with the works on the syllabus. I've already marked the identification questions and the short answer questions, but my brain has hit a brick wall as I mark the long essay questions.  So I hit the internet for a web surfing break, and found I solace in knowing I am not alone.

I was chatting to a business teacher who showed me a test generating program for business. He clicks a few categories - chapters and concepts covered, number of questions desired - and hits a button. The multiple choice test instantly appears on his screen. He hits print, and his test is written. He will photocopy it and give it to his students along with a form that the students use to select their choice of answer. He will turn in those forms to an exam office that will scan the form and give him a print out of student marks. His time on task? About two minutes.

I on the other hand will take two hours to write a test that is tailored to what I taught in English, and then spend about twenty to thirty hours marking it.  -- Steve Wise

I presume Steve wrote it, since it's in the first person and there's a photo of a man on the page. But the blog is credited to Steve and Pam Wise.

I still have revised final papers to mark in three more classes, but since I've seen drafts of all those papers before, the marking should go fairly quickly.

Once more unto the breech, dear friends, once more...

The cuteness of a tribble, the temper of a mugatu, and the ham of a Shatner.

I know that my bridge playset has long since gone to the big warp core in the sky, and I can't seem to find the shoebox where I kept my original Star Trek action figures from the 70s.  

Even as a kid, I remember being frustrated that the playset didn't really look all that much like the bridge, though the captain's chair is a reasonable replica. Those little stools never did much for me -- the action figures kept falling off them, so I replaced them with blocks from my beloved Alpha Truck (which did double duty as the shuttlecraft).

Anyway...

The Star Trek Bridge playset was, hands down, the best toy I owned as a child. I played with it for approximately 10,000 hours. Especially the whirly-twirly transporter cubicle. I loved the psychedelic cardboard viewscreens, the tippy chairs and furniture, the stick-on UI for same that was as inscrutable and ridiculous as the authentic show computers. This toy had the magic, a vinyl-covered, detailed, configurable kind of magic that made you want to play with it for hours and hours on end. -- Cory Doctorow

I dislike the term "digital native."

I mean no offense to Marc Prensky, who popularized it (along with its counterpart, "digital immigrant"), but the term is laden with colonial baggage, though as a humanities person I'm perhaps hypersensitive to that sort of thing.  More important, the term also misses an important point. Today's technologically savvy young people were born analog.

Apple's iPod completely changed the music industry; the iPhone all but eliminated a whole class of handheld computers, and Amazon's Kindle seems likely to have a similar effect on the publishing industry. While no single vendor has marketed a product that comes close to the full pontential memex, the emerging semantic web -- which attempts to learn from the RSS feeds, social bookmarking rankings, and reputation management tools -- is a more recent technological effort to magnify our collective cognitive powers. Anyone who uses the web on a regular basis should thank the creators of hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) and hypertext in general, because they were all far more interested in making it easy for information to spread, than they were in figuring out how to lock it down and charge a toll for every bit.

Internet service providers are making a steady income by charging to deliver the content that The Washington Post and CNN are putting online for free.  (I'm stunned that people will gladly pay 20 cents to send a text message, and another 20 cents to read a reply, but they won't pay anything at all to read a whole newspaper.)

In its early years, Google courted the goodwill of the online community with its "Don't Be Evil" policy.

In recent years, Google's reach has expanded into e-mail, street-level photo-enhanced maps, a mobile phone system, and its purchase of Blogger, YouTube, and the online advertising service DoubleClick. Those who are exceptionally trusting, or have nothing at all to hide, can opt to permit Google to archive their web surfing history and even the entire contents of their hard drives.

The company is now aggressively courting universities with a free suite of e-mail, calendar, and document tools, pushing user content off of university servers and into a Google-controlled cloud. In 2008, the end user license agreement (EULA) for Google's web browser required users to grant Google a "perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and nonexclusive license" to archive, remix, and distribute any and all content that users create or transmit using the software.

In his 2008 book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, Clay Shirky writes, "To speak online is to publish, and to publish online is to connect with others... freedom of speech is now freedom of the press, and freedom of the press is freedom of assembly" (171).

To Google's credit, the company responded promptly and sensibly to the public outcry. I'm not ready to don a tinfoil hat yet, but the presence of such language in a shipped product raises serious questions.

Vannevar Bush's hypothetical memex was an analog vision of how technology might help academics cope with the accelerating pace of scholarly publication. He imagined what we might call a photocopier on steroids, manipulating documents at the page level, but also capable of storing annotations and trading them with other researchers, thereby permitting users to collaborate in a kind of proto sneakernet cloud.

After investing a great deal of time and effort in learning a new way of relating to the world, kids learn to be digital. "This Little PIggy" helps familiarize babies with their own digits, and ABC-123 further atomizes the world, helping kids move from putting things into their mouths in order to learn about the world, to using language in order formulate questions, and abstracting knowledge from the answers. (I think my daughter was four before she realized that nobody else's fourth little piggy "wrote on her weblog.")