Katie Retzinger, “Immediacy, Desire, and the Other: MMORPGS and Constructions of Identity” Mathew S.S. Johnson “The World is Subject: Gamers as Potential for Change” Phill Alexander: “Running with the Bulls: The Race Rhetoric of the Tauren in World of Warcraft” The study of games and composition have long overlapped in the areas of popular culture…
Pamela Gay, “The Blogitorial: An Alternative ? Genre for Writing” Derek Boczkowski, “When Writing (and Teaching) Goes Public: Blogging and the Wall-less Classroom” Michael J. Faris, “What’s in a ‘Zine? A Public Ancestry of Blogs” What follows are my rough notes, lightly edited. I’ve inserted my own thoughts in square brackets. Similar:Facebook Announces $300 Million…
Michael Williamson, “Validity and Bias in Writing Assessment” Les Perelman, “The Five Paragraph Essay Makes People Stupid and Machines Smart” Brian Huot: “How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the 5-Paragraph Essay” Nancy Glaser, “One of Many Myths: Does the Five-Paragraph Essay Sink or Swim in Large-Scale Writing Assessments.” Edward White, Respondent. (White recently…
[My own thoughts will appear in brackets. I regularly assign Rose’s essay, “I Just Wanna be Average” to my freshman writing students. He considers the editorial a valuable form of public writing, and teaches graduate classes that ask students to use their specialized subject knowledge to produce editorials of value to the broader community.] Bringing…
Dawn M. Armfield, “On the Go: Mobile Technologies and Literacy” Daisy Pignetti-Cochran, “What are you doing? Teaching with Twitter?” Kimberly A. Schulz, “Social Presence in the Online Writing Classroom: Community-building through Social Networking Technology” (with comments from Laura Gurak) I do the “suck air in through my teeth” thing whenever I hear statements about how…
Bonnnie Kyburz [I arrived a few minutes late, so if she gave a specific paper title, I missed it.] Cheryl Ball, “B-Movie Virgin Sacrifice: Digital Scholarship in a Print-Tenure World” Michael Salvo “New Media Is/Are not Island(s) : Emplacing New Media in Communities for Use” Take-away message for me: When I first began teaching HTML…
Here are my rough notes, taken while the speaker was talking. (Conference on College Composition and Communication, 2009.) After thanking the audience for the “opportunity to serve in the cause of writing,” Bazerman began with Mesopotamian farmer’s clay pebbles used to keep track of flocks. What will the world be like 5000 yrs from now,…
A brief overview of a handful of tools that help the game-creation process. if you’ve got a brilliant idea and don’t have the capital to build it yourself – or the inclination to pimp it to your local Big Name Publisher, create a proof of concept with these recommended game engine kits and let us…
If I were a children’s author, I would write the story of Reba the Rebarbative Rhubarb. Of course, at the end, she’d be Reba the Redeemed Rhubarb. Similar:Hanging with the rude mechanicals @setonhilluniversityA Midsummer Night’s Dream.CultureTrump, finally, takes the coronavirus emergency seriously CNN’s Stephen Collinson praises the pr…Current_EventsOp-ed: QAnon, the Holocaust and the deadly power…
Powerful journalistic storytelling. There’s no way to tell this story without being disturbing. And then there’s the big twist that comes in from left field at the end… stunning. No significant facts were in dispute. Miles Harrison, 49, was an amiable person, a diligent businessman and a doting, conscientious father until the day last summer…
If the newspapers do not survive, then what takes on the crucial social and economic roles they have performed over the past century and more? That is unknowable. Failing some inventive institutional spark, some vital functions might simply go unperformed. The Internet is creating a “tragedy of the commons” situation for news, and no one…
Does Adobe Shockwave fit your definition of malware? I train my kids not to click on random boxes that pop up, and I don’t want any boxes popping up on computers my kids use. So I was very annoyed the other day when I first saw this box — intrusive auto-update window that shows only…
I smell trouble. Via Trekmovie.com: Genki’s “Red Shirt” cologne (whose tag line “Because Tomorrow May Never Come” is priceless) celebrates the sacrifices of those often nameless crew of the USS Enterprise. Described appropriately as a cologne for those with a “devotion to living each day as it could be your last” the cologne has top…
On the first day of classes, I make sure that everyone knows that cell phone use during class is NOT going to be allowed. Not a text, not a tune, nothing. On day two, I backtrack just a bit and introduce them to the county’s disaster alert program that residents and students can sign up…
Repeat after me. Newspaper ≠journalism. Journalism ⊃ newspaper. Why a once-profitable industry suddenly seems as outmoded as America’s automakers is a tale that involves arrogance, mistakes, eroding trust and the rise of a digital world in which newspapers feel compelled to give away their content. “Most of the wounds are self-inflicted,” says Phil Bronstein,…
“Playing video games all day, alone and friendless, is is simply the best way that we have to prepare our children for a life of solitude in a barren wasteland.” Similar:My big acting moment in this scene is declining a drink. #indie #filmAmusingShirley Temple Black, Screen Darling, Dies at 85 Shirley Temple Black, who as…
The new Kindle is still way out of my price range, though of course I’m still craving one. This news took a bit of the edge off of that craving, since I regularly load my MP3 player with the sounds of a computerized voice reading common-domain texts. Amazon.com will let copyright holders opt out of…
Citing the challenging times faced by its members, The American Society of Newspaper Editors today announced it has canceled its 2009 convention. — ASNE According to the ASNE website, one of the items on the agenda at the conference was a motion to drop the reference to “paper” in the organization’s name, and to expand…
Kathleen Blake Yancey offers a thoughtful overview of the challenges and opportunities that technology brings to teachers of English. I particularly like her analysis of an effort, organized by high school students, to get AP test-takers to insert the catchphrase “THIS IS SPARTA!” into their exams. [‘T]he students understood the new audiences of twenty-first century…
The Baltimore Sun publishes this item under the “entertainment” section: Sanders admitted inserting a graphic phrase into a video to make it appear that John Gibson of Fox News was denigrating U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. In the faked video, which appeared first on YouTube and later on The Huffington Post, Gibson is shown using…