I have a Strunk and White. I like having it. And it’s clarity has helped me. Not because I necessarily followed the advice or even agree with it now, but because at a more formative time in my writing life, it gave me a simple place to depart from. It made me feel like a…
But in another sense, academic blogging represents the fruition, not a betrayal, of the university’s ideals. One might argue that blogging is in fact the very embodiment of what the political philosopher Michael Oakshott once called “The Conversation of Mankind”?an endless, thoroughly democratic dialogue about the best ideas and artifacts of our culture. —Robert S.…
—2005 IF Comp Results Vespers, Beyond, and A New Life are the winners of IF Comp 2005. Woo hoo! Free text games! Similar:Is Superman the next Drudge? Clark Kent quits newspapers in latest issue Even Clark Kent can see through the wri…Current_EventsNew York Times Ready to Charge Online ReadersI will miss it, but honestly, I…
I’m back! (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Last Friday afternoon, my site went down. Trying to access the homepage yielded a message that the owner of the site should contact billing@[ISP]. I assumed that there was a mix-up in terms of paying our ISP for the next year of hosting, but our billing people say that we paid…
As Riya learns who’s in your pictures, it begins to auto-tag the snaps itself, quickly scanning the rest of your photos and identifying each person it recognizes. Riya also uses text recognition to read street signs and other text in photos. —Riya Eases Pain of Pile of Pix (Wired) Similar:July 7, 1936: Get a Grip…
Once upon a time, in the Triassic Period, there were four hatchlings in a coelophysis nest, down deep in a stone cave, in the desert (wet season). The four hatchlings were Jonathon, Larry, Joseph, and the youngest one was Martha. They were coelophyses. They lived with their mother and father. But being a baby coelophysis…
The driver of the police van starts to pull out, momentarily blocking your view of Ide and the protestors. The two young men behind you come forward for a closer look. “Did Tony just give her the finger?” asks the young man in the sweatshirt. “I don’t blame him,” says the second young man. As…
From Tammany Hall, robber barons and the sinking of The Maine to Vietnam, Watergate and the Lewinsky scandal, editorial cartoonists have exalted, lambasted, praised and skewered the rich, the powerful and the foolish. Since the history of newspapers, cartooning has been a rich and vital contribution to American political commentary. With the advent of news…
—David Jump! (David Denninger) A student of mine posted a clever little video that includes some simple but very cool effects. Not much in the way of narrative or character development, but the whole thing made me smile. See David Jump!. Similar:My daughter found where all the missing pens and pencils end upAmusingFor Two Months, I…
For decades, the debate was very much focused on UFOs, sightings and abduction stories. Alien visitors turned into a modern myth. In an age when our other beliefs and ideologies were fading away, we could at least believe in UFOs. Most scientists, annoyed as they were, simply chose to ignore it. Then some bright people,…
Still, when asked what art forms speak the most to us, games don’t rank at the top. Ranked 1 to 6, where 1 is the most emotional, the order was: movies, music, books, video/PC games, paintings/artwork, and last cars. (OK, so I have a thing for cars?) Heavy gamers have more of a feeling for…
By studying journalism, you carry with you tools for assessing arguments, and a dogged determination to find the truth in yourself and in others. I love this work, but it is work. Living up to the standards of this difficult, competitive field is taxing. I have a long, long way to go. —Amanda Cochran —A…
A computer-generated reconstruction of the man’s face bears a strong enough resemblance to portraits of Copernicus to convince the scientists. —‘Body of Copernicus’ identified (BBC) See Wikipedia for more about Copernicus , the 16th-century priest whose astronomical hobby provided evidence to support the theory that the sun was at the center of the solar system. This…
Teenagers are ten times more likely to use non-standard English in written exams than in 1980, using colloquial words, informal phrases and text-messaging shorthand — such as m8 for ‘mate’, 2 instead of ‘too’ and u for ‘you’. Despite this, the two-year study found that today’s teenagers are using far more complex sentence structures, a…
Here’s where it gets fun: after students’ small groups put some thoughts up on the board, we read through the Writing Program’s Statement on Plagiarism out loud, and discuss it, making sure everything’s clear about the policy. And then I hold a plagiarism contest. —Mike Vitia —Let’s Plagiarize! (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) I’m home in Greensburg, still…
One sunny day shortly after the start of the fall term, Robert M. Dawley was preparing to spend the afternoon tutoring two students on how to measure the DNA content in the cells of tadpoles. But first he walked briskly out of his building and over to a small lounge with white cinder-block walls, stretched…
Serious Games Summit DC 2005, Day 2A Debate Between Jan Cannon-Bowers and Marc Prensky (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Do we need instructional design in serious games, or is making a good game enough? This debate is part of an ongoing turf battle within the serious games movement. As is generally the case with conference liveblogging, these are…
Serious Games Summit DC 2005, Day 2Paul Marino: Machinima: Using Games to Change Filmmaking and Instructional Video (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Executive Director, Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences Author of The Art of Machinima The presentation was a brief introduction to a demonsration of clips, many of which I’ve seen, so it wasn’t as immediately informative…
Serious Games Summit DC 2005, Day 2Derek Wischusen: Expanding Teachable Moments in Serious Games using AI (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Began with a useful grid that recognizes that realism is not the only way to evaluate a game, and that realistic games are not the only kind of training games out there. Wischusen presented two binary pairs:…
Serious Games Summit DC 2005, Day 2Sande Chen and David Michael: Roundtable — Beyond Q & A: Assessment Methods for the Next Generation of Serious Games (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) These are my very rough notes. Some of the speakers didn’t give their names, sometimes I couldn’t hear their names, and sometimes they gave their names while…