A powerful essay, for the next time I teach Videogame Culture and Theory. (Some salty language ahead.) So the Hitman Absolution trailer. Do I have a problem with the existence of female assassins? No. Do I have a problem with female assassins dressing up as nuns? No. Do I have a problem with Agent 47 killing females…
This month’s edition of The Pulse podcast features a conversation with Mary Ann Gawelek, provost of Seton Hill University, discussing how her institution’s iPad experiment — begun in 2010 — has fared. RPP_102_iPads-in-Education.mp3 via The Pulse: Seton Hill’s iPad Experiment | Inside Higher Ed. Similar:The Enduring Allure of Choose Your Own Adventure BooksI didn’t realize…
Almost all the promise once held by virtual worlds has since been realized by Facebook. For every social interaction, brand engagement or persistent multiplayer social experience that Second Life or World of Warcraft or MTV’s Virtual Lower East Side was supposed to provide, there’s something the same or very similar available on Facebook — probably…
“Overall, it was just boring. Really boring! Really boring!” —The Washington Post. Similar:The Sentence That Knocked Down the Berlin Wall (But Almost Didn’t)Words that defined Ronald Reagan’s presi…CultureIn Defense of DistractionIf you’re a fan of lifehacking, you’ll a…CultureThe Media Pyramid: “Any content where ideology leads to falsehood is bad for you.”You Are the Media You…
Great headlines from winner David Bowman. National Headline Contest 2011. Similar:Support the arts in your community! I’m here for the daughter and the rest of the cast. @j…Support the arts in your community! I’m …CultureHow Technology Has Changed The Way We WriteSocial media services have put writing t…CultureDigital literacy is different from print literacy. How…
Contrary to concerns that increasing use and popularity of ‘txtspk’ will ruin children’s vocabularies, youngsters demonstrated that they know when it is not appropriate, only including it in their stories when transcribing an imagined text message. The research also found that many of the words contained in children’s stories are repeated from celebrated writers –…
To qualify for a day at the local water park, my daughter woke up early, and is now happily reading. Similar:Confuse Students to Help Them LearnConfusing sometimes helps cats, so why n…Academiadungeon.jpg (JPEG Image, 2535×1616 pixels)Great Zork map.AestheticsPast Tense, Part 1 (#StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch, Season 3, Episode 11) Plot contrivance particl…Rewatching ST:DS9 The Defiant is…
A middle school teacher in South Carolina has been accused of dragging a student under a table during class, telling the boy “this is what the Nazis do to Jews,” police said Monday. The 12-year-old student said he got up to sharpen a pencil at Bluffton Middle School on Wednesday when Patricia Mulholland grabbed him…
I updated the journalism portal of my online writing site, and touched up some existing handouts: News Story vs. English Essay Your English instructor carefully reads your essay to evaluate the depth of your knowledge, the breadth of your vocabulary, and the loftiness of your ideas. Joe Sixpack glances quickly at your news story to…
Atwood, on his blog Coding Horror, miffed by the “everyone should learn to code” meme, likens coding to plumbing. It’s not for everyone. “Look, I love programming. I also believe programming is important … in the right context, for some people,” he writes. “But so are a lot of skills. I would no more urge…
My daughter was recently in the Stage Right! Greensburg homeschool preteen production of Once Upon a Mixed-up Fairy Tale, playing Little Red Riding Hood. Here the girls are singing “Astonishing.” My son played Marshal Cord Elam in the teen production, Oklahoma. He’s wearing the vest and white hat. Similar:In the Era of Fake News, Teaching…
In the early 1970s William Crowther worked for the high-tech R&D company BBN Technologies as part of a team developing the ARPAnet; a computer network predecessor to the Internet. Crowther has never shown any desire to court celebrity for his achievements. Aside from a couple of interviews from books, Where Wizards Stay Up Late and Genesis II: Creation and…
My intuition is that, even for the wary, recalcitrant, or skeptical, the ways individuals connect now online and learn from one another’s connections no longer represent the pathological or aberrant (i.e. the shallow, distracted, lonely, asocial, unprofessional digital generation: you know the litany!), but “the future.” Since many are worried about “the future,” those who…
If you were a kid during the ’80s and read any books at all, you probably read at least one Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA), probably by either R.A. Montgomery or Edward Packard. And if you read one, you read more than one. They were addictive, candy for our brains, but also, they empowered us…
Scientists now believe that much of the life on Earth is barely able to fog a mirror, as it were. The deep-sea microbes may be an extreme example of a laid-back norm. Most of Earth life, measured by numbers, is not rambunctious and charismatic like life in the sunshine, nor is it akin to the…
It’s also a cultural climate where audiences are increasingly used to thinking of books as media companions — popular film series like Harry Potter, Twilight and The Hunger Games, or TV series like Game of Thrones, all feel richer to fans if they read the books as well as enjoy the films. Designers of text-based…
Seton Hill new media journalism graduate Chris Ulicne, who now works for the Latrobe Bulletin, wrote a really nice feature on Stage Right (local theatre company and school for the performing arts). The full text of the article is not online, but this image is from the PDF of the front page (available through the…
This is a great story about a parent who tries everything when she learns her boy is being bullied. The mom shouts at the principal, gives her son advice on how to fight, and gets the cops involved. The gentle son takes a very different approach. Powerful story. I didn’t trust the principal to help…
A colleague just sent me this kind note, which supplies a very-welcome jolt of enthusiasm as the semester winds down: This is probably going to be the best written paper I’ve published, and I could not have done it without your help! (In part because your suggestions make so much sense that it’s making me…
Humanities students are not used to failure. They want to get it right the first time. When they are new to the game, they want to get good grades on what are essentially first drafts. Once they learn how much work it is to write and edit a really good essay, their goals shift—from getting…