The race to transmit a simple message, staged by an Australian museum, was won — at a dash — by a 93-year-old telegraph operator who tapped it out using the simple system which was devised by Samuel Morse in 1832 and was the mainstay of maritime communication up until 1997. Gordon Hill, who learnt to…
In the game, you listen to a story about someone’s death and the events leading up to it. There are five characters in the story; your job is to rank them from most culpable for the death to least culpable. The trick is that the story should be balanced in such a way that any…
Jessica Prokop thought the textbook for her class at Seton Hill University was biased and that its author “seems like a bitter man.” In the annals of student rants, nothing extraordinary there. Except she didn’t just blurt out those words in her journalism class. She blogged them. Soon, the author himself was responding all the…
The UMass Dartmouth student who claimed to have been visited by Homeland Security agents over his request for “The Little Red Book” by Mao Zedong has admitted to making up the entire story. —Aaron Nicodemus —Federal agents’ visit was a hoax (South Coast Today) This does not come as a surprise to me. Kudos to…
“We are here to demand an end to the shockingly casual placement of dangerous blades in our places of work,” said Tomb Raider star Lara Croft, who estimates that she has lost more than 600,000 lives to spinning, falling, swinging, and suddenly appearing blades this year alone. “This kind of thing has been going on…
Strangely enough, the web took off very much as a publishing medium, in which people edited offline. Bizarely, they were prepared to edit the funny angle brackets of HTML source, and didn’t demand a what you see is what you get editor. WWW was soon full of lots of interesting stuff, but not a space…
Frosty Returns (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Last week we watched “Frosty Returns,” a 1990s sequel to the 1960s “Frosty the Snowman.” I don’t see how you could say Frosty returns in the sequel, since this one is set in what appears to be a completely different town (someplace that has a long tradition of celebrating “Winter Carnival,”…
A senior at UMass Dartmouth was visited by federal agents two months ago, after he requested a copy of Mao Tse-Tung’s tome on Communism called “The Little Red Book.” Two history professors at UMass Dartmouth, Brian Glyn Williams and Robert Pontbriand, said the student told them he requested the book through the UMass Dartmouth library’s…
Why do you love online publishing? Here’s why I do: As an American, I feel so fortunate to be alive at a time when, 200-some years after the ratification of the First Amendment to our nation’s Constitution, the people of this country finally have a medium at their disposal which allows any person to speak…
Blake Ranking wrote “I did it” on his blurty.com journal three days after the October 2004 crash that caused a friend’s death and left another seriously injured. He had previously told investigators he remembered nothing of the crash and little of its aftermath. —Teen Guilty Of Manslaughter After Online Confession (AP | The Pittsburgh Channel.com) If…
On the last day of class, I handed out index cards for our last collaborative piece of writing. I told my first year students to write something they learned this semester, in any class or in the residence hall. Then we shuffled the cards together and read them aloud. Here is what one class came…
I saw one ray of hope — a “popular writing” program at Seton Hall University, where nontraditional students (i.e., grownups with day jobs) could earn a degree and, more to the point, gain serious professional training without having to attend a university full time. The fact that one school had dared to attempt such a…
—Editing He-Man (Penny Arcade) Who’s been vandalizing the Wikipedia entry for He-Man? (Warning, punchline requires knowledge of 80s pop culture.) Thanks for the link, Matt. Similar:Narrow ParsersCreating n00b-friendly interactive ficti…CybercultureLiaisons (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season 7, Episode 2) Picard is Marooned with a lovelorn …Rewatching ST:TNG Worf grumbles about…AmusingInaccuracy Of Every Single Detail Forces Student Paper To…
If they want to deliver a written paper, they need to understand that, no matter how short they think it is, the odds are against their finishing it. They need a conclusion they can jump to when they get the five-minute warning. That conclusion must be brief. Rather than reading a full paper, it’s better…
Journalists “are not Emily Dickinson writing poetry on backs of envelopes, not caring whether anybody reads them.” Given the state of the industry, with newspaper circulations dropping and publications closing, Collinger said that part of the plan is to develop data and “customer driven communications” is integral to making sure the “cobbler’s children have shoes,”…
While the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal is conservative, the newspaper’s news pages are liberal, even more liberal than The New York Times. The Drudge Report may have a right-wing reputation, but it leans left. Coverage by public television and radio is conservative compared to the rest of the mainstream media. Meanwhile, almost…
It’s true that young offenders who have committed school shootings in America have also been game players. But young people in general are more likely to be gamers — 90 percent of boys and 40 percent of girls play. The overwhelming majority of kids who play do NOT commit antisocial acts. According to a 2001…
Because so many deaf children have problems with basic language skills, they get a disproportionate number of exercises related to these “abstract little pieces.” And unfortunately, that’s exactly what most educational games offer–more of the same thing that’s been shown not to work for these people. So what do I propose? For one thing, I…
For some volunteers, LibriVox is a way to combine their love of literature with their passion for the spoken word. Kristen McQuillen, 39, has recorded 21 different chapters across nine different books from her home in Tokyo. For her, reading a book aloud to someone can make the work more understandable. “I’m giving people who…
Gender in the Workplace (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) When two students followed me to my office after an exam, they gasped when I opened my door. Student 1: “Dr. Jerz — your office is clean!” Student 2: “Did your wife come here?” The shocked guffaws from myself and Student 1 attracted the attention of a colleague from…