Back to the Classroom

As an administrator, I worked with other professors and administrators. As an instructor of graduate creative writers and upper-division English majors, I was teaching students who also loved words and writing, students who aspired to be what I was, a published author employed in a bookish field. Believe me, I am no longer preaching to…

The Immortal Henrietta Lacks

“Oh yeah! Scientists I’ve talked to say you cannot overestimate how important HeLa cells have been.” Yet no one in the Lacks family had been informed by Johns Hopkins of the existence of their mother’s cells, until a researcher called in the early 1970s wanting to test the family. “Henrietta’s husband basically got a phone…

Epic Game Design Tour

Epic Game Design Tour / Final Exam Review from Adam Marshall Smith on Vimeo. Similar:Dozens of Colleges’ Upward Bound Applications Are Denied for Failing to Dot Every II’m not saying that the Upward Bound kid…AcademiaWanted in College Graduates: Tolerance for Ambiguity”What answer do you want?” “Just tell…Academia10 Rules of Internet – Anil DashA very useful,…

Doritos Tablet (iPad Spoof)

Similar:In May, 2002, I was blogging about… typefaces in period movies; poets Paul Dirac and Ste…In May, 2002, I was blogging about …ArtNo, This Beach Photo Doesn't Prove The Media Is LyingHave you seen this image mashup being ci…Current_EventsEnjoying my "Dystopia in American Literature" class.After a kind of prelude in which we look…AcademiaIn education, Apple…

Change The Code, Keep the Text

Today, programmers, web-developers and designers possess countless different ways to display digital words online, much like an artist with a blank canvas. As words float across our computer screens, code may be considered the underlying thought and form of expression that supports online words, preventing the words from physically or metaphorically “disappearing into [cyber]space” (Richards,…

Teaching Online Journalism » 21 examples of Flash journalism

These are interactive news packages I’ve selected to show to journalism students as we discuss some of the capabilities of Adobe Flash. Many are very recent. —Mindy McAdams Similar:How Television Covered the Kennedy Assassination – a 1964 TV Guide ArticleIt was a new, shocking, traumatic thing …CultureBlender 3D Flyover of Fantasy Steampunk Spacecraft When my…

Academy Award Winning Movie Trailer

Link pointing to blog entry about a different self-referential clip, and also a different (more vulgar) self-referential clip.   Similar:We Are the Product Facebook SellsFacebook does not care what Hobbit you a…BusinessWhat is a COVID-19 compliance supervisor? What to know about Hollywood's newest jobIn the wake of the pandemic, the enterta…BusinessYou, Too, Can Have a…

Words Are Cheap

I am so looking forward to Jason Scott’s Get Lamp. (Family obligations are keeping me from attending the premiere at PAX East.) Talking to Scott, his passion for the subject and for detail are both formidable. Most of our interview was tangents, and I didn’t mind any of them. Discussing Colossal Cave Adventure, he ran…

Citations: Efficient In-text Quotations

When writing a paper in MLA style, prefer brief quotations from your sources, in order to emphasize how the complex connections between the sources support your original argument. In the essay “The Full Title of an Essay Fills Lots of Space” by Maxwell Wordsworth Filler, it talks about how easy it is to bury your own thoughts when…

Crash Blossoms

Legendary headlines from years past (some of which verge on the mythical) include “Giant Waves Down Queen Mary’s Funnel,” “MacArthur Flies Back to Front” and “Eighth Army Push Bottles Up Germans.” The Columbia Journalism Review even published two anthologies of ambiguous headlinese in the 1980s, with the classic titles “Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim” and…

You will consume.

I didn’t watch that movie awards thing, but I understand this ad premiered last night. Here we see the iPad as a tool for monetizing the consumption of the internet. I saw brief flashes of a keyboard, e-mail, a desktop publication program, and a photo album, so the ad does acknowledge the role of user-created…

Top home-school texts dismiss Darwin, evolution

Christian-based materials dominate a growing home-school education market that encompasses more than 1.5 million students in the U.S. And for most home-school parents, a Bible-based version of the Earth’s creation is exactly what they want. Federal statistics from 2007 show 83 percent of home-schooling parents want to give their children “religious or moral instruction.” Hold…