The heroine’s journey

Near the end of a review of a time-management game, Emily Short offers some fairly brilliant narratological observations. A Little Princess and Jane Eyre — and buckets of other classic and semi-classic literature for young women — revolve around the idea of patient, perennial self-sacrifice and obedience as a way of life, with the hope that one day,…

Medical News:Playgrounds Too Safe to Keep Little Kids Active – in Pediatrics, General Pediatrics from MedPage Today

Strict safety rules for equipment and low budgets at childcare centers were largely blamed for playgrounds that don’t make kids feel like playing, Kristen Copeland, MD, of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, and colleagues reported. “Fixed playground equipment that meets licensing codes is unchallenging and uninteresting to children,” they wrote in the February issue of…

Could digital humanities to undergraduates could boost information literacy?

I think they mean “Teaching digital humanities to undergraduates could boost…” Pedagogically, undergraduate forays into the digital humanities need not be as complete or ambitious as building formal archives and discovery tools from scratch, the panelists said. Rather, the point is to spur students to “think critically and differently” about digital gateways and to “encourage…

Wireless computing at Seton Hill: “The most connected university I’ve ever seen… Want to see a large-scale, mission-critical installation in action?”

[A]n interview I did with key staff at Seton Hill University in Greensburg, PA, not far from Pittsburgh. This is the most connected university I’ve ever seen – every student, and there are around 2200 of these, gets an iPad and a MacBook (!), and, of course, they bring their own wireless devices to campus…

Notes on The Death of the Author

Some passages that struck me as I reviewed the influential Roland Barthes essay. [I]n ethnographic societies the responsibility for a narrative is never assumed by a person but by a mediator, shaman or relator whose ‘performance’ — the mastery of the narrative code — may possibly be admired but never his ‘genius’.T he author is…