When people can more easily fire off all sorts of messages–from updates about their breakfast to questions about the evening’s plans–being able to figure out which messages are truly important, or even which warrant a response, can be difficult. Information overload can lead some people to tune out messages altogether. Such noise makes us even…
I don’t use APA style, but this article about nine pages of corrections to the APA style manual caught my eye. “It’s egregious,” said John Foubert, an associate professor of education at Oklahoma State University, who bought two copies of the book – one for his office and one for home – when it was…
In the figure of the coltish, resolute Sigourney Weaver, Alien may just be the film that overhauled the old, unreconstructed horror genre and dared to put a woman centre-stage. Because make no mistake: a horror movie is what Alien is. “It’s basically a haunted house film,” explains the critic David Thomson. “The only difference is…
I’ve asked students in my “Writing about Literature” class to write a book review, in order to establish a connection to the literary world outside the classroom. The Purdue Online Writing Lab has a brief handout, Writing a Book Review, which begins by explaining the difference between a “book report” (written for the teacher who…
I just drafted a new handout on writing editorials. I couldn’t find anything online pitched at the proper level, so I had to write it myself. (I’ll probably be able to use a version of this in my freshman comp class too.) Presume that your opponent has good reasons for disagreeing with you. Talk to…
Robin Burkinshaw has finished Alice and Kev, an interesting exercise in computer-assisted storytelling, using screen shots from The Sims 3 to tell the story of a homeless father and daughter. Originally the story was told serially, with a few posts a week; then there were a few very long gaps, but the story is finished…
The AP recently raised eyebrows last year when it announced its intent to charge bloggers who quote from an AP story, and again more recently when it announced vague plans to track the spread of AP stories through secret embedded codes. The AP’s position is that if search engines are making money delivering customers to…
Yesterday in my journalism class, I asked everyone in the room to take out a coin and flip it twice, and raise their hand if it came up the same. Then I asked the ones whose hands were up to flip again, and keep their hand up if the coin came up the same yet…
Course management systems (CMSs), used throughout colleges and universities for presenting online or technology-enhanced classes, are not pedagogically neutral shells for course content. They influence pedagogy by presenting default formats designed to guide the instructor toward creating a course in a certain way. This is particularly true of integrated systems (such as Blackboard/WebCT), but is…
Though moribund today, for decades Usenet was the paper of record for the online world, and its hundreds of millions of “newsgroup” postings chronicle everything from the birth of the web to the rise of Microsoft, as well as more trivial matters. In February 2001, Google rescued that history when it acquired the New York-based…
Full episode. “Text ‘uncle’! Text ‘uncle’!!” “But why talk… when I could text?” “That text was totally worth the 15 cents it cost to receive it!” “Then Zach Skyped us, liveblogged our spelling bee, and friended us on Facebook!”“Faculty lounge talk out in the halls?” Similar:In January 2000, I was blogging about dancing paperclips, the…
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On Wednesday, a federal district court in Los Angeles dismissed Brown’s claim against Electronic Arts for the use of his image in its Madden NFL series. Judge Florence Marie-Cooper essentially found that video games are “expressive works, akin to an expressive painting that depicts celebrity athletes of past and present in a realistic sporting environment.”…
A good collection, on a well-designed page. www.readprint.com Thanks for the suggestion, Josh. Similar:Fascinating observation on Trump's ability to drive the "Spygate" story Within the span of five days, Trump we…CultureHow it feels to watch a user test your product for the first time Jonathon Shariat.AmusingDetailed Articulation of Feet in Unity3DI’m following a lot of…
I’ve been a journalist for 27 years, and I love that romantic old notion of the newsroom as much as the next guy. But I recently canceled my two morning papers–The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal–because I got tired of carrying them from the front porch to the recycling bin, sometimes without…
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I just got a phone call from the parent of a prospective student I spoke with on a campus visit over the summer. The student has decided to come to Seton Hill, and the parent told me that the time I spent talking with the family over the summer was a major factor. (I’m sure…
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Our students are transcendentalists, but they don’t know it. Speaking metaphorically, Thoreau writes “I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.” Rather than treating children as wild creatures that needed to be tamed and civilized, Thoreau seesorder and meaning in nature, which is threatened, worn down, and buried by civilization.…