Similar:Crazy-looking keyboards that never caught on As the typewriter become popular, it w…AestheticsWhy do journalists use "allegedly" when they report on obvious crimes captured on video?Look at this picture. A guy in a uniform…EthicsSteve Strauss: Why I Hire English MajorsDoing things correctly earns you points …AcademiaAmusing Ourselves to Depth: Is The Onion our most intelligent…
I swore I would wield my powers only for good. Witness my latest faculty service project. Similar:Hitting the weekend with just 6 ungraded papers. #partylikeaprof Hitting the weekend with just 6 ungrad…PersonalMultimodal Composition: Every time a student submits a narrated PowerPoint, a puppy cries.AcademiaSnape is not amused at this year's Hogwarts Feast.PersonalMy colleague Dr. Cusick…
Similar:Operation War DiaryOne hundred years ago today, Britain dec…CultureYork Plays 2025: Five cameras, adding up to ~100 hours of footage.Five cameras, adding up to ~100 hours of…AcademiaPresenting at #NEMLA session 8.1 Friday. “Hacking English: Examining a multimedia sandbox …AcademiaPast Tense, Part 1 (#StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch, Season 3, Episode 11) Plot contrivance particl…Rewatching ST:DS9 The Defiant…
When committee work is fun… making memes to support the English program. Similar:Academic robe, Is this the year I finally send you out to be cleaned? Nah, Febreeze is goo…Personal"Dammit Mom, I'm a daughter, not a theoretician!"”Dammit Mom, I’m a daughter, not a theor…AmusingGame Criticism, Why We Need It, and Why Reviews Aren't ItGreg Costikyan…
Similar:CNN Holds Morning Meeting To Decide What Viewers Should Panic About For Rest Of DayKicking around ideas ranging from an upt…AmusingI love a little courtyard. I think I’ve made enough #blender3d buildings for now. On to th…PersonalThe Fantasticks (Oct 18-27)PersonalThe Nightingale (WAOB Audio Theatre)I haven’t done any audio theatre recordi…AestheticsMy hard-working media students curated a…
I’m very happy that several students in my “World Drama” class chose to write about The Merchant of Venice in their latest paper. Almost as many also write about Nine. And several chose to write about both. The assignment asked students to make an intertextual argument — that is, I asked them to write an…
This essay on college students acting helpless (Chronicle of Higher Education) struck a few chords. I put a lot of time into writing my course policies and assignment instructions. The students who want to know how they can earn a 99 instead of a 95 invariably ask really good questions that arise from their close…
Graydon Hoare offers a rousing hymn to the virtues of text. Don’t get me wrong, I like me some illustrations, photos, movies and music. But text wins by a mile. Text is everything. My thoughts on this are quite absolute: text is the most powerful, useful, effective communication technology ever, period. Text is the oldest…
You can just make out Carolyn, Leigh, and me stacked up on the right edge of this picture. Carolyn won “Best Leading Actress in a Non-Musical” for The Miracle Worker, and I also got to present her with “Best Onstage Save” for some quick thinking (and dancing) during the gypsy scene in Man of La…
Five of us went to see PrimeStage’s 1984. Very well done! I wish I could have included this play in my “World Drama” class, or that I had thought to assign the novel in my “Memes and Fake News” class. When it comes to dystopian literature, the boy is better read than I was at…
Similar:“Oh, that I were a glove upon that hand. That I might touch that cheek!” #pptplaytime Rome…CulturePolice raid best-selling Turkish newspaper hours after government takes it overTurkish authorities seized control of th…BusinessScratch 3.0 beta is available. Try out the text-to-speech blocks!PersonalMy Cow Game Extracted Your Facebook DataThe Cambridge Analytica scandal is drawi…AmusingHappy 13th Birthday CarolynI’ve…
In my defense, I broke that long email down so the recipient (my chair) really only has to read about three bullet points in order to grasp the “Action Item” section… but then I had to *write* all those “just in case this become important later” details, and corral them under increasingly woebegone subheads like…
Similar:Explorers (#StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch, Season 3, Episode 22) Sisko builds an ancient Bajoran s…Rewatching ST:DS9 With a come-hither …AmusingPolice respond to Twitter bot sending death threat to another Twitter botJeffry built himself a harmless little T…CybercultureThe Comic Sans SongComic Sans is a typeface, not a font. I …AestheticsIndiscretion #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 4, Episode 5) Kira…
I expect that many of my students will be living the experiences documented in this study of how young people encounter news; nevertheless, it’s difficult to notice your own environment if you can’t compare it to *different* environments. Because I grew up with the three TV network news shows and the copy of The Washington…
Fairy tales are transmitted through language, and the shoots and branches of the Indo-European language tree are well-defined, so the scientists could trace a tale’s history back up the tree—and thus back in time. If both Slavic languages and Celtic languages had a version of Jack and the Beanstalk (and the analysis revealed they might),…
Anybody seen a post tagged this way? If so, I’d welcome a screenshot. On Friday, Facebook debuted its new flagging system for fake news in America, tagging hoax stories as “disputed” for some users. First announced amid criticism of the company for its role in spreading misinformation during the 2016 election, the new feature uses…
If you understand the environment in which medieval scholars created and used books, you can better appreciate why medieval books look and function the way they do. Understanding the cultural impact of computers requires us to study the development of both hardware and technology. Playing a text adventure game on an iOS device is convenient,…
Leigh, Peter, Carolyn and I had fun recording “The Nightmare of Prince Prezelsky” for WAOB Audio Theatre’s “All for One Stories.” (Peter plays the prince, Carolyn narrates, and my wife and I are among the servants. The full 9-minute story is online.) Prince Prezelsky needs to fight a dragon to keep his kingdom safe. But…
Wilson offers a good explanation of the position that shouting down speakers is not a form of constitutionally-protected speech. Such arguments are especially important on college campuses, where it’s the job of students to engage with new ideas — even uncomfortable ones; and the job of faculty members to equip students with the critical thinking…
Similar:Ethics of standardized testingA blogger who had a much worse day than …AcademiaI'm amused by the quirky way the "Thin Bread Crust" meme remixes the remix.I’m interested in the way the “Thin Blue…BusinessAmerica’s Real Digital Divide If you think middle-class children are…CultureOnly a Dad (Edgar Guest poem, read by Carolyn and Peter Jerz for…