Journalists Verify Claims
Confirm what your sources tell you. Fact-checking makes the difference between ethical journalism (which sometimes upsets the powerful) and propaganda (which always aids oppressors).
Spring office cleaning thoughts: 1) I used to print a lot. 2) I have enough tote bags.
I used to print a lot. I have enough tote bags. I found more stuff for my box of once-loved tools. It felt so good throwing away all the papers having to do with that one thing. If spiders had to crawl into one box and die, I can forgive them for choosing that other…
The crisis in local journalism has become a crisis of democracy
The paucity of reporters has triggered an invisible power shift toward elected officials. A Pew Research Center study of Baltimore showed an increase in local stories based on press releases from elected officials. The trends in journalism exacerbate the divide between the coasts and the rest of the country. In 2014, almost 1 out of 5 U.S. reporters…
Books vs. Kindles: The Choice No One Made Ever
“I bought a Kindle. I didn’t immediately go home and burn all my other books. I didn’t stop buying paper books. I read both and no one came knocking at my door. It’s a boring story, I know. I’m thinking of adding in a talking pig and a plot to destroy Lady Elaine from Mr.…
Presenting at #NEMLA session 8.1 Friday. “Hacking English: Examining a multimedia sandbox ‘creative critical project’ as an approach to literature.”
Chapbooks — the latest assignment in my “History and Future of the Book” class.
Students have already done a 400-word speech, a 400-word manuscript, and a 400-word typescript. I asked them to make multiple copies of their books. They wrote, cut, pasted, photocopied, folded, and bound. Our classroom today smelled cheerfully of glue. Up next: A “Futuretext” (whatever that means).
The Post-Coding Generation?
I knew the command line well, and very occasionally delved to snoop around at the level of machine code. My brother showed me how to hack a game by changing the last machine code the game executed before rejecting an incorrect password, creating a version of the program that only let you proceed if you…
Covfefe chaos: What Trump’s typos say about his administration
Misspelled tweets and typos in press releases are becoming the norm under President Trump, but critics say it points to a pervasive carelessness in the White House.
Keeping things in the proper perspective at 4Cs: Praise for my delivery of a line from Star Trek.
Already met a lot of good people and found opportunities for following up. I’m here through Saturday morning. For now, though, I’m eating a sandwich.
Multimodal Composing, Sketchnotes, and Idea Generation
Using the mixed media of sketch notes, animation, and voiceover, this video explores the field of composition’s relationship between multimodality and composing. The piece illustrates how multimodal strategies such as sketchnotes can enhance idea generation and learning and provide classroom strategies for multimodal composition. […] We must remember that, yes, digital composition is multimodal but…
Why Textbooks And Education Are To Blame For Fake News
The way we teach it at Seton Hill, as a process that leads to a researched term paper, I think it’s safe to add freshman comp to the good list. We continue to operate on the basis that knowledge is stored in repositories, usually a book or an teacher. This dependence on textbooks has distorted…
The Media Pyramid: “Any content where ideology leads to falsehood is bad for you.”
You Are the Media You Eat
For Two Months, I Got My News From Print Newspapers. Here’s What I Learned.
Farhad Manjoo says he’s a better, more-informed person thanks to his decision to try getting his news only from print sources. Turning off the buzzing breaking-news machine I carry in my pocket was like unshackling myself from a monster who had me on speed dial, always ready to break into my day with half-baked bulletins.…
CNN Profiles Former White House “Chief Calligrapher”
Today was the last day of the manuscript unit in my “History and Future of the Book” course. I wish I had come across this article a little sooner! “As calligraphers, we feel like we’re playing an integral role. The invitation sets the stage for the whole event. Calligraphers are helping, simply, to set the…
Children struggle to hold pencils due to too much tech, doctors say
When I was in middle school, I developed a permanent red bump on my right middle finger, usually stained with the blue ink from a PaperMate erasable pen. Though I shifted to typing when I was in high school, I still wrote with a pen enough to turn that bump into a permanent feature on…
An Hour of Monastic Silence in Media Studies Class (plus an awesome drum solo)
I announced that my 300-level Media and Culture class would spend an hour in monastic silence, collaborating on a Google Doc. I expected the students would understand I was helping them get into the mood to appreciate the 14th century setting of The Name of the Rose. What I didn’t expect was an awesome drum…
Research Before Google Books (from 2006)
Me: It took a few days for the spool of microfilm to arrive via interlibrary loan. I’d use this steampunk contraption to manually seek the right page in the book. But I found it. Crying stock photo child: (Sniff) Checking sources was scary ‘n’ hard in 2006! Me: Yes it was, crying stock photo child. Yes…
Why We Forget Most of the Books We Read
It was pleasurable to encounter a familiar reference to Plato’s Phaedrus (which I just assigned in my Media & Culture class) in this Atlantic article on memory in the digital information age. With its streaming services and Wikipedia articles, the internet has lowered the stakes on remembering the culture we consume even further. But it’s…
The Cover Letter That Led to Awesome Interviews
When I do a career planning unit, I am often amused by the students who list “design skills” or “very creative” on their resumes, yet use the exact same MS-Word default resume template. A second observation is that students typically used their cover letters to describe their own emotions (e.g. as their burning desire for…
Research Poetry (communicating research results and expressing their significance through poetry)
For an article on communicating research findings in poetic verse rather than academic prose, an article in Qualitative Inquiry cites my Top 10 Poetry Tips handout.