Someone who owned 10,000 hardcover books and the same number of vinyl records could bequeath them to descendants, but legal experts say passing on iTunes and Kindle libraries would be much more complicated. And one’s heirs stand to lose huge sums of money. “I find it hard to imagine a situation where a family would…
I don’t get to teach technical writing much anymore, so when I touched on it in a new media class I took the opportunity to freshen up some older web resources. A business memo, a lab report, or a professional e-mail are all variations on the basic report structure described in this document. Feel free to modify these guidelines…
Are we moving toward an era where Americans will speak discernibly red versus blue accents? It’s hard to say. Social identities are complex, and can be defined along a number of different dimensions like class, race, or ethnicity. Not everyone feels that politics are a part of their core identity. But I suspect that political…
I’ve been meaning to create a screencast like this for a long time. Teaching an online lit course is great motivation for churning out these things. 1. What is Literary Close Reading? (0:30) Why a literary close reading doesn’t mean “anything goes” (1:00) 2. Why Do We Read Closely? (1:35) 3. Let’s Read a Text…
Newspapers and their fans make a lot of noise about the professionalism of journalism, that journalism needs to be paid for, that the Internet is no substitute for the hard core objectivity and insightful commentary newspapers offer. and so on. Whether these arguments are true or not does not interest me. I have found…
As gimmicky as “steampunk Huck and Tom” sounds, the characters actually may be quite well suited for steampunk. Twain’s novel Tom Sawyer Abroad was a play on Jules Verne-style adventure stories, and featured a mad professor and his absurd, futuristic airship. And Tom Sawyer had his own mystery story with Tom Sawyer, Detective. However, Twain…
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Here’s a fantasy workspace, that I built in Blender 3D, using various Googled images of old books and this awesome steampunk keyboard. Here’s me in my real office. The books aren’t as neat and tidy. I just took some reference photos of the chair… I’ll add it to my fantasy office the next time I…
There’s often a moment in a lit class when a student says, “Since the professor says there’s no single ‘correct’ interpretation of a story, then pretty much anything goes, so I’m going to argue ‘Huck was a girl’ or ‘Hester was a witch.’ ” Of all the possible “correct” answers, the stronger ones are better…
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“If we really are trying to teach the world, including people from other cultures, we have to take a responsibility to educate people about plagiarism, not just vaporize people for it,” said Mr. Severance, who is also a clinical associate professor of information at Michigan, in an interview on Wednesday. —The Chronicle of Higher Education.…
My students and colleagues sometimes wonder why I don’t approve the Seton Hill student paper before it’s published, or give students grades on their published work. Student journalists at the University of Georgia resigned en masse rather than relinquish editorial control to an “editorial director” and nonstudent staff. In a draft outlining the “expectations of editorial…
Multitasking, when it comes to paying attention, is a myth. The brain naturally focuses on concepts sequentially, one at a time. At first that might sound confusing; at one level the brain does multitask. You can walk and talk at the same time. Your brain controls your heartbeat while you read a book. Pianists can…
Last week my daughter and I were a little too early to see the Westmoreland Museum of American Art’s new exhibit, so we revisited some of our favorite items in the permanent collection. Similar:When You've Already Got a Major, But You Love Books (Seton Hill English) When committee work is fun… making…AcademiaDani Girl (Geyer/13Players)https://youtu.be/5k06Z1_azMo Dani…
Students also need to learn that being offended is an emotional response, not a rational one. If you don’t like something I’ve said–or, as in this case, something somebody else said–don’t just get upset about it. See if you can formulate a cogent rebuttal. That, too, is a key element of critical thinking. Finally–and most…
Soon after WWII began, the USS Requin began serving as a training target for sonar crews. After several refits during the Cold War, she eventually came to rest in Pittsburgh as a museum exhibit in 1990.
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I was at a youth car wash today, watching my son and the other the kids spray each other (and sometimes the cars). One of the customers happened to be carrying an anthology of dystopian science fiction. We got to chatting, and he told me about this parlor game — which sadly seems to be…
A long-time fan of Edith Nesmit recounts what it was like to be asked to write a sequel. I was flattered to be asked but initially declined: I felt it would be restricting to try to write in another author’s style, especially if they were writing long ago. I did say, just to sound obliging,…