Improve Your Students Grammar Skills That was the subject line of a marketing e-mail I recently got from a publisher. I didn’t bother to check whether that publisher has any punctuation and proofreading titles. Similar:New infographic to help our graduating English majors make sense of their capstone project…AcademiaIn Which I Bow Before the Mistress of…
You’ve heard of “Myst,” “Quake” and “Tomb Raider,” but how many people remember “Obsidian,” “Grim Fandango” and “Under A Killing Moon?” —Gene Emery —A Visit to the Museum of Underappreciated Games (Yahoo|Reuters (will expire)) One presumes this museum is somewhere near The Island of Misfit Toys. Of course, there is also The Underdogs, a site devoted…
According to an e-mail sent today to Harvard students, Google will collaborate with Harvard’s libraries on a pilot project to digitize a substantial number of the 15 million volumes held in the University’s extensive library system, which is second only to the Library of Congress in the number of volumes it contains. Google will provide…
Stealing someone’s words isn’t the same as stealing someone’s television. The original author doesn’t have to run to Best Buy to get a new paragraph. But ideas and words are professors’ stock and trade. Unlike the company president who steals sentences for a Rotary Club speech, or the congressman who pilfers phrases for a campaign…
During the fall semester of 2004, I drew from my previous experiences in Writing for the Web with Dr. Jerz from the Fall 2003 semester. The class has changed, and so has my perception of what writing for an internet audience entails. This section assesses what I have learned working with the class, as both…
“When I told my daughter that I was going to a presentation on blogs, she said ‘NO! You can’t do blogs in schools! Blogs are OURS!’” —Barriers to Entry (Weblogg-Ed) While I still encounter many students who have never heard the word “weblog” before I introduce it in class, I’ve been increasingly encountering students who already…
I blogged about Ailee Slater’s Oregon Daily Emerald student entitlement essay before reading any of the discussions that raged on the internet. Clancy was moved to react against the gendered response to Slater, and invoked sympathy for Slater based on her [Slater’s] apparent alienation from university culture. The sexist and ad-hominem attacks on Fark and…
“You are standing in the middle of a pretty town square in the center of a nondescript English town. Like most any other non-descript English towns, there’s not much to see or do here, but maybe you’ll find something amusing and enjoyable to do. A shiny metal phone booth sits in the center of the…
Blogging is good. So is school. This we know. And when you put them together, they create something even better. This is the main point in Terra Williams and Charles Lowe’s article, Moving to the Public: Weblogs in the Writing Classroom. The article makes the argument that blogging can be an effective classroom tool. I…
I hate it when people say I was exploited. If language really does have power, then calling me exploited turns me into a powerless cog in a brutal machine. I’d rather be called a fool. At least that leaves open the possibility that I am in control of my own life, however irrational my choices…
Nerds serve two masters. They want to be popular, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. And popularity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of an American secondary school. —Paul Graham —Why Nerds are Unpopular (Wired) This popular raced through the blogging community back…
On other occasions, students have surfed the Net during class and found Web sites that supplement the discussion – though Jones also jokes that he’s never had his students’ undivided attention thanks to the laptops, cell phones and other gizmos they carry. “There is a real power there, a kind of technological power. But also…
Young people may know that just because information is plentiful online doesn’t mean it’s reliable, yet their perceptions of what’s trustworthy frequently differ from their elders’ – sparking a larger debate about what constitutes truth in the Internet age. Georgia Tech professor Amy Bruckman tried to force students to leave their computers by requiring at…
Collier has never met most of his guild mates in person, but he knows two of them very well. They are his roommates, Adam Traum and Owen Nelson, both buddies he met in art school in Florida a few years back who are now his compadres in the real and virtual worlds. In real life,…
We are currently paying a large amount of money to attend this University and receive an education. If I have paid to be taught something, shouldn’t there be a repercussion for the teacher rather than, or at least as well as, the student when knowledge has not been taught? —Ailee Slater —Grading system gets an…
From a sample of 175,000 15-year-old students in 31 countries, researchers at the University of Munich announced in November that performance in math and reading had suffered significantly among students who have more than one computer at home. And while students seemed to benefit from limited use of computers at school, those who used them…
Dude, you’ve got to read this. A linguist from the University of Pittsburgh has published a scholarly paper deconstructing and deciphering the word “dude,” contending it is much more than a catchall for lazy, inarticulate surfers, skaters, slackers and teenagers…. Kiesling says in the fall edition of American Speech that the word derives its power…
For a librarian who has even a modest sense of either posterity or professional responsibility, entertaining any thoughts about a decline in the importance of books is painful. After all, books are how we speak to one another across generations, and one of the ways we can subvert the limitations of culture, class, gender, and…
The last 200 years have driven centralization and changed the human experience in ways that conflict with evolution. The Internet will reestablish a more balanced, decentralized lifestyle. —Jakob Nielsen —Undoing the Industrial Revolution (Alertbox) Similar:Which of my colleagues wants attention?AcademiaHere's some good writing from The New Yorker: "Seattle’s Leaders Let Scientists Take the L… If you…
In the universal, ritualistic adulation, it was no surprise that Google’s latest service received publicity that was as wide as it was shallow. The blogorrhea and avalanche of e-mail was as if a free, magical cure for cancer had been announced by the National Institutes of Health. I like and use Google a lot, but…