Settle thy studies (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) I’ve written before about using circle games in my teaching. Since students are wrestling with midterm projects and other major assignments, and since I’m teaching a large number of freshmen in 200-level courses this year, I’m seeing lots of worn-down students. In my Drama as Lit course, up to now…
Blogs are all the rage, and I encourage their use as part of the external – and internal – communications process. Unlike press releases, which tend to read as if they’d been composed by the mating of a computer and lawyer, good blogs have a distinctly human voice. They are conversational almost by definition. But…
Jacobs decided to craft an article about Wikipedia, complete with a series of intentional mistakes and typos, and post it on the site. The hope was that the community itself would be able to fix the errors and create a clean version that would be ready for publication in Esquire’s December issue. The original version…
The way I read a letter ‘s this: ‘T is first I lock the door, And push it with my fingers next, For transport it be sure. And then I go the furthest off To counteract a knock; Then draw my little letter forth And softly pick its lock. Then, glancing narrow at the wall,…
The ?word daemon?, Leonard ventures, ?however spelled, uncovers a provocative and useful dualism. An intermediary with another world doesn’t have to be beneficient. Yet neither is it compelled to be nefarious. It can be both, flip-flopping between positive and negative states?depending on context or perception, on the vagaries of polities, or the whims of the…
Morgan Spurlock, whose movie Super Size Me documents what happened to his body when he ate nothing but McDonald’s food for 30 days, spoke at Seton Hill earlier this evening. I asked him to autograph this burger. My journalism students were required to attend the class, and have a short article due tomorrow. I asked…
I see students calling me over to their desks to ask about a word problem, and half the time me reading the word problem aloud to them is enough to answer their question. I see students skimming over paragraphs of text (not that I blame them) and then asking me what they really needed to…
While blogging has real intellectual payoffs, it is not conventional academic writing and shouldn’t be an academic’s main focus if he or she wants to get tenure. But to dismiss blogging as a bad idea altogether is to make an enormous mistake. Academic bloggers differ in their goals. Some are blogging to get personal or…
We expect them to be able to follow us around the house, picking up after us, chattering with us like C-3PO, reading our emotions with the accuracy, if not the intent, of HAL. While robots have proved indispensable in narrow kinds of work, like assembly lines, when it comes to interactions with unpredictable, flesh-and-blood humans,…
The average American is a ravenous media junkie, consuming up to nine hours a day of television, web time or cellphone minutes, according to new research which raises fresh questions about how technology is revolutionising society. From iPods filling commuters’ ears, the screens scrolling headlines in the elevator at work to proliferating on-the-move tools like…
Astronomers at the Palo Alto Observatory are citing “lunar error” as the cause of the three-moon pileup that totalled Ganymede and severely dented Callisto and Europa Monday, causing an estimated $700 quadrillion in damage. —Ganymede Totalled In Three-Moon Pileup (The Onion (Satire)) An oldie. Similar:Utility Tactical Waist Pack Pouch Military Camping Hiking Outdoor Hand Waist Bag:…
There’s no question that certain things are lost when documents are prepared and transmitted in electronic formats. The texture, heft, even smell of the paper, the coffee cup’s stain, the crinkled edges and dog-eared pages, the physical abrasions of marks and erasures. Let’s think for a moment about what’s gained though. By opening my word…
There are some things that become so ubiquitous and familiar to us – so seemingly obvious – that we forget that they actually had to be invented. Here’s a case in point – the weblog post’s permalink. I mean – let’s think about it. The problem was that a weblog’s front page is by far…
Basically, I remember being afraid a lot of the time. I felt incredibly unsafe. I remember a couple of trips to the hospital after being in freezing water for long periods of time, losing quite a bit of my hearing for days at a time due to explosives, having my heart monitored when one went…
Welcome to IFComp 2005, the competition for short text adventures. —Interactive Fiction Competition 2005 (ifcomp.org) Free text-adventure games, written specifically for this annual competition. Anyone can be a judge. Similar:How reading fiction can help improve our mental healthIn general, I avoid clicking on any head…BooksWhat Is Newsworthy? (10m animated lecture)https://youtu.be/xSKllj9wuSk How do j…CultureYou Are Not a…
Adam Jacot de Boinod first became entranced by language when he discovered 27 words for “moustache” in an Albanian dictionary – and another 27 for “eyebrows”. A world of bushy machismo and stolid dignity sprang to life before his eyes. He began hanging out in second-hand bookshops, looking for foreign dictionaries and the tiny revelations…
Did anyone have the right to be so little changed by the voyage as Armstrong seems to have been? “How long must it take before I cease to be known as a spaceman?” he asked a reporter seven years after coming home. —Thomas Mallon reviews James R. Hansen’s First Man. —Moon Walker: How Neil Armstrong…
PC Gamers of the World Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose But Your Retail Chains! —Manifesto Games Grek Gostikyan, science fiction author and game developer, resigned from Nokia in order to invest his energies in the indie game development movement. He blogs at Games * Art * Design * Culture. Similar:I should be writing my…
No individual has made billions off Star Trek—although that franchise, too, has its own mountains of merchandise, including toys, video games, and hundreds of books. More impressive than its merchandise and its profits, though, is its monumental amount of screen-time. Since the first broadcast of the first episode on September 8, 1966, there have been…
—MLA Citation Style (Long Island University) It’s got Star Trek. It’s got Flash Gordon. It’s in MLA style. What could be better? Similar:Anti-globalism Is Common Factor in Social Media Conspiracy Theories, says UW ProfFascinating academic effort to find a pa…AcademiaSlashes in Legal WritingI’m not a student. I found your we…BusinessLetter to the editor: Setting record straight…