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My talented wife has written a set of lesson plans for It’s a Wonderful Life, the immediate occasion being our local professional theatre company’s production of the musical version. (See Stage Right Greensburg calendar.) Based on Philip van Doren Stern’s story “The Greatest Gift” (1943), Frank Capra’s 1946 film It’s a Wonderful Life celebrates the…
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I finally committed “Twittercide” about a month ago. Some of my followers begged me to reconsider, and the flood of affection and good wishes felt a little like the end of “It’s a Wonderful Life.” But I knew it was time to return to mine. Do I still have the occasional urge to tweet? Do…
For each minute of video watched on a desktop, tablet users watched for one minute 17 seconds, an average of 28 percent longer than desktop viewing. Video completion rates on tablets were also 30 percent higher than non-tablet mobile devices. While online viewers were more likely to turn to laptops or desktops to watch short…
As the producers noted in an apology announcement, Rand’s work extols “a society driven by rational self-interest.” On the back of the film’s retail DVD and Blu-ray however, the movie’s synopsis contradictorily states “AYN RAND’s timeless novel of courage and self-sacrifice comes to life…’” via ‘Atlas Shrugged’ film producers replacing 100,000 DVD’s after mischaracterizing Ayn…
“It’s 2012 and our emergency alert system still sounds like a Speak and Spell and looks like an Atari 2600,” wrote one among a range of instant reactions broadcast on Twitter. The tweet was apparently a response to the 1960s-style black and white lettering of the television message. — Did the national Emergency Alert System mistakenly…
Winning the big game, surviving an illness or a scary car crash, working your way through grief… these are all common topics for personal essays. But in fiction, these kinds of actions are most meaningful when they happen as part of the background to a story that focuses on the inner life of the protagonist.…
Flash became a dominant desktop platform by allowing developers to code interactive games, create animated advertisements and deliver video to any browser that had the plugin installed, without having to take into account the particulars of any given browser. However, with the development of Javascript, CSS, and HTML5, which has native support for video, many…
I have the delightful privilege of teaching The Tempest in a literature class, to a student who’s performing in it through the theater department. “I was ecstatic to play Ferdinand,” says Andrew Meholick, a junior from Reynoldsville majoring in theater performance. “He is a true romantic who is willing to do anything just to lay…
Whereas a mere couple decades ago, one could simply point a finger at the mass media and their powerful cultural producers as the source of most offensive stereotypes about minority groups, Web 2.0 technology and the #Occupy movement shows us how stereotypes can be perpetuated, embellished, nay, even constructed at the grassroots level, by men…
Does anyone still think journalists aren’t creative writers? Take a look at this brilliantly concise character sketch: The rumpled scholar sat discussing the dispute on a recent afternoon in his high-ceilinged living room, which was crowded with books and his paintings. A parrot named Ike provided the occasional squawk, and sunlight streamed over the 400…
In general, I find Turnitin.com’s GradeMark function a time-saver, though the process of creating rubrics is tedious. Over the years, I’ve collected a big list of stock comments that I can drop into a paper easily. Just now, I was re-alphabetizing those comments in order to make them more useful, when the screen started acting…
Touched up this handout on integrating quotations: If your college instructor wants you to cite every fact or opinion you find in an outside source, how do you make room for your own opinion? Paraphrase. You can introduce studies that agree with you (Smith 123; Jones and Chin 123) and those that disagree with you…
For my journalism class, I have already created some fake press releases and other documents and created a scenario that simulates how a student reporter might cover an incident involving a member of the campus. If you’ve been following the news, you’ll know that there’s been a real-world incident. I’ve been freshening up what I…
Associated Press The Associated Press has added a new entry on retweeting to its social media guidelines. Staffers are reminded to keep their opinions to themselves. Retweets, like tweets, should not be written in a way that looks like you’re expressing a personal opinion on the issues of the day. Disclaimers — like “retweets do…
Designed exclusively for Amazon Prime subscribers who own a Kindle (sorry, iPad users – the Kindle App alone will not suffice), the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library allows consumers to borrow one book per month without any due dates. Amazon can only offer this option because the books are digital; the company isn’t loaning consumers much…
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One of the most popular pages on my site — a single page that earns about 20% of my hits — started out as a class assignment for a technical writing student whose project for a real-world client ran into a snag. In Fall 2002, I showed my student Kathy Kennedy a model of a…
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