A former student writes: I need to find a simple book that sort of explains the trends of Web 2.0. Nothing too techy, but something that would talk about what makes it special, what people are doing with 2.0, and the best ways to utilize its philosophies. Basically, my company is moving towards plenty of…
I read on Metafilter that publicists for the upcoming movie Coraline have sent beautiful hand-crafted boxes to 50 bloggers. I just finished reading the Neil Gaiman / Dave McKean book (not quite as good as their The Wolves in the Walls, but creepily delightful nonetheless) to my kids last week, so I was curious. Absolutely…
Tonight I was reading my 10-year-old son a chapter in Beorn the Proud, a youth historical fiction that describes the relationship between a 9th-century Irish girl taken as a slave by the son of a Viking king. The heroine, Ness, spits out angry prophecies and pretty much gives the Vikings a piece of her mind…
We’re not teaching literature, we’re teaching the professional study of literature: What we do is its own subject. Nowadays the academic study of literature has almost nothing to do with the living, breathing world outside. The further along you go in the degree ladder, and the more rarified a college you attend, the less literary…
This interesting post on WRT ponders the case of I Love You, Beth Cooper, a novel that presents its protagonist, Denis Cooverman, with a status bar. Like a health meter, the reader knows how much body Dennis has remaining at any given time. Reading the book becomes the experience of seeing how far we can…
Great little feature from the Chronicle Here are some of the things you learn when you participate in a Milton marathon: Milton is not as boring as you think. Paradise Lost has something for everyone: Hot but innocent sex! (You thought Adam and Eve spent all their time in Eden gardening?) Descriptions of hellfire that…
Fiction – including poetry – should be taken just as seriously as facts-based research, according to the team from Manchester University and the London School of Economics (LSE). Novels should be required reading because fiction “does not compromise on complexity, politics or readability in the way that academic literature sometimes does,” said Dr Dennis Rodgers from Manchester University’s Brooks World Poverty…
Many professors will spend countless hours putting together elaborate and voluminous course packets of photocopies for classroom use (I used to be one of them). And now, it is more frequent for technologically minded teachers to file-share large numbers of PDFs through password protected sites on campus. This is so wrong it hurts. We are…
My provost just sent some of my colleagues a link to this article on games and literacy: But doubtful teachers and literacy experts question how effective it is to use an overwhelmingly visual medium to connect youngsters to the written word. They suggest that while a handful of players might be motivated to pick up…
In many ways, things have never been better for book readers. Amazon puts reviews at your fingertips, we have easy access to out-of-print titles through eBay and efficient inter-library loan services, and tons of out-of-copyright classics are only a click away. But as this NYMag article (“The End“) spells it out, the publishing industry is…
The Commonwealth of Virginia announces plans for a free, open-source physics textbook. The Virginia Physics “Flexbook” project is a collaborative effort of the Secretaries of Education and Technology and the Department of Education that seeks to elevate the quality of physics instruction across the Commonwealth. Participating educators will create and compile supplemental materials relating to…
Groklaw has a good analysis of the recent Harry Potter Lexicon smackdown. Fair use good, too much verbatim copying bad. The fact is, Rowling and her editor led the defendant on with praise of his website work, such that there was a suggestion by him that he might be the editor of the official encyclopedia,…
From a recent study of university libraries. There’s plenty in this report on digital scholarship, print journals, and comparative approaches of the various disciplines. Neither faculty members nor librarians expect e-books to constitute a viable substitute for print books; they are more generally seen as complementary. Somewhat oddly given this low level of faculty interest…
Our provost sent this link to English faculty members this morning. One of my recent juniors was particularly eloquent on the subject. After having sat in my classroom for a year forcefully projecting his boredom, he started an e-mail dialogue with me over the summer. “The reason for studying fiction escapes me,” he wrote. “Why…
If my old shoebox of Meego Star Trek action figures turns up, I’ll consider myself very happy. Seton Hill’s librarian, David Stanley, reports an even more significant historical find. From the Reeves Library blog. Kelly Addleman, our public services librarian, received an email from a researcher in Germany who has been making a survey of…
A good feature from the New York Times: Young people “aren’t as troubled as some of us older folks are by reading that doesn’t go in a line,” said Rand J. Spiro, a professor of educational psychology at Michigan State University who is studying reading practices on the Internet. “That’s a good thing because the…
Former editors protest and lament the discontinuation of a literary staple: The dismantling of the Sunday Book Review section and the migration of a few surviving reviews to the Sunday Calendar section represents a historic retreat from the large ambitions which accompanied the birth of the section. To be sure, no section of any newspaper…
Editor and Publisher: The newest version of the Associated Press Stylebook is available, and if you follow it, “WMD,” “iPhone” and “anti-virus” are in, while “barmaid,” “blue blood” and “malarkey” are out. Those are just some of the changes to its rules for certain often-used phrases and words. There are also new acceptable forms of…
Inside Google Book Search For U.S. books published between 1923 and 1963, the rights holder needed to submit a form to the U.S. Copyright Office renewing the copyright 28 years after publication. In most cases, books that were never renewed are now in the public domain. Estimates of how many books were renewed vary, but…
From Scholastic, a report that shows books still appeal to kids. Does this mean that mouse-clicking adults will think of books as childish? A new study released today finds that 75% of kids age 5-17 agree with the statement, “No matter what I can do online, I’ll always want to read books printed on paper,”…