Long before web forums, blogs, Twitter, and in many cases, the web itself, Usenet was where the internet gathered to shoot the breeze about anything and everything under the sun. — Koala eye Similar:How a billionaires boys’ club came to dominate the public squareThe world’s richest man, Elon Musk, atta…BusinessThe Zombie Argument that Refuses to…
A few years ago it was enough for a game world to look realistic. Now, in its every action and reaction, it must behave realistically. Physics is what graphics was ten years ago – a yardstick to judge and compare games.– Keith Suart, Guardian The first article in a series. Similar:More #blender3d #steampunk control panel…
Sore throat. Sinus pressure. Upset stomach. Exhaustion. I’m sitting at home recovering from the flu, which I started to come down with during the Computers & Writing Conference this weekend. I had planned to attend Digital Humanities 2009 in Maryland, where I’m part of a group that’s presenting tomorrow. The group will survive without me as…
Here’s a surprising statement I found in a news article, quoting a Yale psychology professor. “Moms vary markedly in their roles as breadwinners from no income at all to really helping dads,” The language implies that money-making is the father’s responsibility, and the best rating on the scale that a woman can achieve is “helping”…
“You’ll have half the participants BlackBerrying each other as a submeeting, with a running commentary on the primary meeting,” Mr. Reines said. “BlackBerrys have become like cartoon thought bubbles.” Some professionals admitted that they occasionally sent mocking commentary about the proceedings, but most insisted that they used smartphones for legitimate reasons: responding to deadline requests,…
I have not yet bought a Kindle, though I’d like one. However, this bit of news gives me pause. It’s exactly the worry that has kept me from sinking money into a proprietary format. Here’s Dan Cohen, explaining what he learned from an Amazon customer service rep, after some of the books he purchased failed…
I’ll have to leave this panel before the end in order to catch a ride back to the airport. I’m going to try at least to summarize what each speaker says at the beginning, which will no doubt leave the impression that this was a one-way event. (I’ll also miss the digital arts display this…
Roundtable Chair. Charlie Lowe, Grand Valley State University Scott Banville, University of Nevada, Reno David Blakesley, Purdue University How can open source software, open access publishing, and commons-based peer production (CBPP) principles help us to create a sustainable university? How can they positively impact the social and economic development of the university and expand the…
The rise of online media has helped raise a new generation of college students who write far more, and in more-diverse forms, than their predecessors did. But the implications of the shift are hotly debated, both for the future of students’ writing and for the college curriculum. Some scholars say that this new writing is…
I arrived late and completely missed the first talk, so I’ll start with the three I did see. Surveillance of Power and the Power of SurveillanceMike Edwards, United States Military Academy at West Point Hansel and Gretel in Cyberspace: Following Breadcrumbs in a Forest of HypertextMary Karcher The Digital Emergence of the Public/Private AuthorityCasey McArdleBall…
Bill Cope, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Began by noting the strangeness of talking to an audience about social media, while also seeing faces lit by computer screens suggesting multi-tasking. Referenced new translation of Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility” (note the shift in the more familiar title). His talk…
Today, at the Computers and Writing conference, the Kairos editors presented Jerz’s Literacy Weblog with the John Lovas Memorial Academic Weblog Award. (I knew about it in advance, and was able to get funding to attend thanks to the CIT department at Seton HIll.) Lovas was a dedicated teacher, an accomplished administrator, and a patient…
Chair. Gian Pagnucci, Indiana University of Pennsylvania Process-Blogging: A Sustainable Foray into Collaborative Writing Sabatino Mangini, Indiana University of Pennsylvania Jessica Schreyer, University of Dubuque Endings: The Problem of Sustained Blogging Steve Krause, Eastern Michigan University Keeping a Blog as Chair: Sustaining Public Discourse in a Private Job Gian Pagnucci, Indiana University of Pennsylvania What…
Chair. Bonnie Kyburz, Utah Valley State University Planning for Sustainability in Multimodal First-Year Composition Programs Michele Ninacs, Buffalo State College Fast, Free, and On the ‘Net: The Story of a Self-Published Textbook Steve Krause, Eastern Michigan University How College Textbook Publishers Will Thrive in Ubiquity. Or Die Trying. Nick Carbone, Bedford/St. Martin’s Similar:Technical and Literary…
Chair Mikhail Gershovich, Barch College, CUNY Hacking Spaces: Place as Interface Danielle Nicole DeVoss, Michigan State University Douglass Walls, Michigan State University Scott Schopieray, Michigan State University Writing-a-go-go: Ubiquitous Computing and the Thirdspace of Workplace Writing Tina Bacci, University of Rhode Island The Examined Life–Cyberspace Style: The Construction of Space in the #philosophy IRC Undernet…
Barbara Ganley, Centers for Community Digital Exploration Barbara Ganley is Founder and Director of the new national organization, Centers for Community Digital Learning, Barbara Ganley has spent her career exploring integrated learning across formal and informal contexts. For nineteen years as a lecturer in the Writing Program and English Department at Middlebury College, and director…
These are my notes, lightly edited, from a panel at Computers & Writing 2009. I only found a single plug in the meeting room, in the very back row. This is a small conference, so I probably appear fairly antisocial typing way in the back here. (I’ll move up when the panel actually starts in…
A Kindle DX is on my lust-list, in part because I read a lot of PDFs. In Slate, Farhad Manjoo offers a thoughtful critique of Kindle’s self-proclaimed destiny to be a news medium: The Kindle presents news as a list–you’re given a list of sections (international, national, etc.) and, in each section, a list of…
A former Infocom beta-tester re-discovers interactive fiction (and enters the interactive fiction competition) Back then in the mid-80s, the only (decent) interactive fiction was being produced by Infocom, the almost legendary, and now defunct, software company formed by a bunch of MIT grads. After cutting my teeth on the Zork series, Enchanter, Infidel, and Witness…
I enjoy steampunk, a cultural aesthetic which celebrates what both ordinary and extraordinary things might look like, had technology progressed along the lines that Jules Verne and his contemporaries imagined. As a literary subgenre, it imagines that the immeasurable power of steam has opened the skies, leading legions of top-hatted gentlemen-explorers and parasol-wielding adventuresses to…