A student sent me an e-mail asking for advice on how to write a letter to the editor. I found plenty of web resources that are designed to help volunteers write letters designed to get a particular message out — that is, Citizens for the Defense of Rutebegas offer specialized tips for how to write…
This ABC News story following up on an early 1990s story ends on a deftly sensitive note. Since entering prison Smart has completed two master’s degrees, one in law and one in English literature. Those studies have kept her focused. And she said her favorite book is “The Scarlet Letter,” which is the tale of…
News I saw on theonering.net (via Slashdot) has LOTR fans unclenching their hairy, unshod toes and reaching for the tobacco jar: The two “Hobbit” films – “The Hobbit” and its sequel – are scheduled to be shot simultaneously, with pre-production beginning as soon as possible. Principal photography is tentatively set for a 2009 start, with…
I know what you’re thinking, but my story is that I’m gathering information for a research project on gender in science fiction. Yeah, that’s it. Similar:Stage Right Water SpriteLast week my daughter and I were a littl…AestheticsMost Christians don’t actually care about Starbucks cups. Here’s what we do know.No Christians in my social media feed…
Advice from GameCareerGuide.com resembles what I tell my English literature majors about why they are expected to study and benefit from literary works that they might not choose to read for their own pleasure. (The same goes for students in my Video Game Culture and Theory course.) Before you begin down this path there is…
Anna L. Mallory (Roanoke Times): The game, a takeoff on programs popular before the Internet and Nintendo, blends social-networking and choose-your-own adventure tools. It allows players to not only play games but also create and share their own adventures in user-submitted fictional lands. Mallory also includes some quotes from former Infocom Imp Steve Meretzky on…
In Wired, Jenna Wortham focuses on what blogs typically look like to journalists. Blogs are re-shaping not just news and entertainment, but also publishing, politics and public relations. Robert Scoble, Microsoft’s most famous blogger, is widely credited with putting a human face on the giant company and facilitating an exchange between customer and corporation. Matt…
Filing this MetaFilter thread on movies about journalism. Similar:Facebook Removes Human Curators From Trending ModuleToday, Facebook announced that human cur…BusinessTrump and JFK: Masters of New MediaI didn’t use Newsweek’s clickbaity headl…CultureVerification HandbookOne of journalism’s most treasured clich…Current_EventsIn News, What’s Fake and What’s Real Can Depend on What You Want to Believe The proliferation of fake…
The American Scholar: One of the students sticks his or her head out the passenger window and serenades — or accosts — the startled pedestrian with some passionately recited lines by Walt Whitman or Pablo Neruda. The kid pops back in, rolls up the window, and the van takes off in search of the next…
For Jorn Barger, who coined the word “weblog” in December of 1997, outbound links are key to the formula that makes a weblog useful to readers: 2. You can certainly include links to your original thoughts, posted elsewhere … but if you have more original posts than links, you probably need to learn some humility.…
Katie Haegele quotes Chris Joseph: “It seems most people these days equate literature with the novel, which is obviously a relatively recent form, and then judge all other literature by that standard, which is a terrible measure of digital literature,” Joseph said in an e-mail interview. “My feeling is that younger audiences already do accept…
I’m misquoted on your December press page. What I wrote was When students are writing about some areas of popular culture, user-authored sites such as Wikipedia and Urbandictionary, or game databases like MobyGames are actually far more useful than academic sources (which take months or even years to appear). http://jerz.setonhill.edu/weblog/permalink/banning-wikipedia-at-school-go/ But the quote appears as…
From the Google Blog, a preview of Google’s mashup of Wikipedia and About.com: The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors — but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names…
Blogged as a reference, for the next time I have to introduce students to semiotics (ytmnd.com). Similar:Students say "math class is stupid and boring," and they are right. –Mathematician Paul L…I am working on some conference papers t…CultureQuidditch Comes to Seton HillwartsVisitors often remark the campus reminds…AcademiaScholars' unconvincing case about the value of the humanities…
Why does this happen? For some reason, perhaps the oddity of ordering milk from an online bookseller, has attracted a large number of spoof reviews — Lovecraft, Coleridge, romances, haiku. Here’s a bit of Tuscan Whole Milk flash fiction: This milk was so good, I passed out. When I woke up 3 weeks later, apes…
movabletype.org As of today, and forever forward, Movable Type is open source. This means you can freely modify, redistribute, and use Movable Type for any purpose you choose. This is a good thing. MT had previously had a policy that you could make changes to the code but you couldn’t redistribute those changes. MT has…
Yahoo! | AFP: The Greek myth that ancient Spartans threw their stunted and sickly newborns off a cliff was not corroborated by archaeological digs in the area, researchers said Monday. Like the myth about lemmings hurling themselves to their death, this new detail, found from a study of bones found iat the base of the…
News.com.au Det-Sgt Jeff Maher of the homicide squad confirmed that a Google Earth satellite mapping van had been filming the area for up to a week. He said the images captured by satellite could hold some clues to the gruesome murder. “They (Google Earth) have had a van in the area for the last week,”…
Yahoo | Reuters “w00t,” an expression of joy coined by online gamers, was crowned word of the year on Tuesday by the publisher of a leading U.S. dictionary. Similar:NASA finally makes contact with Voyager 2 after longest radio silence in 30 yearsI was thrilled as a middle-schooler to s…Current_EventsMultitasking while studying: Divided attention and technological…
Karissa sent me this story from Macworld: Eight consumer and public-interest groups filed a complaint with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, saying mobile phone providers should not be able to block text messages from political groups and advertisers. […] If the FCC grants the petition, it would open up mobile phone networks to millions of…