You’d have thought I’d thrown rats down on the tables. One student got really angry, said he never knew what to expect in this class and now he’d always be on guard from now on. Another said he felt that I’d broken his confidence–“It’s one thing to see it back and forth on e-mail, but…
I begged the Dean not to make me teach “Modern American Politics” this semester. I knew that in order to teach it properly I would have to delve into the secrets of the Bush administration. I knew that I would learn THINGS THAT HUMANS (as we say in these post-sexist times) ARE NOT MEANT TO…
WHEN I heard the learn?d astronomer; When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me; When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them; When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room, How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;…
William Shatner, who played the commander of the starship USS Enterprise in the ’60s Star Trek series, arrived in Riverside [Iowa] Tuesday to hold auditions for four small parts in a low-budget, sci-fi movie he wrote with Star Trek co-star, Leonard Nimoy…..Although Kirk’s hometown was never mentioned in the TV series, Gene Roddenberry, the show’s…
“Yoda’s philosophy was quite simplistic. ‘If you get angry, you’re gonna lose.’ ‘Don’t try, do.’ He has a basic philosophy that is very charming. Not very profound, although young people consider it profound. I wish they would read more.” —Irvin Kershner, mentor of George Lucas. —Naked Wookiees and broken R2-D2s (CNN/AP) Similar:The Hitchhiker's Guide to the…
Internet bloggers have drawn blood and American journalism may never be the same…. Orville Schell, dean of the School of Journalism at the University of California in Berkeley, said CBS’s admission of error after days of stalling was “a landmark moment for the balance between the blogosphere and mainstream media.” —Triumph of the bloggers? (CNN/Reuters) The…
Blogrolling‘sgone dark and the blogrolls lie limp, no shuffle and bustle as busy blogs hustle their way to the head of the queue. Gone too are the diacriticals, small, precious marks of individualization, the QWERTY electron bursts that celebrate fresh activity, new life?our SETI receivers. Brackets and parentheses, asterisks and exclamations, plusses and minuses and…
Spam: In Your E-Mail and on Your Blog (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Wikipedia has an excellent overview of spam — electronic junk mail. A strict definition of spam identifies it as unsolicited commercial bunk messages, but viruses that send multiple copies of infected messages, and chain letters bearing bogus virus warnings or charitable messages are responsible for…
I could have sketched the layout of her blog for her with fair accuracy, but I?ve never before spoken her name. —Jill Walker —ubiquity? (jill/txt) An interesting epiphany describing the impersonal intimacy one can experience in the blogosphere. Similar:Meet the 12-year-old boy who makes games instead of going to schoolTurning on the anti-clickbait filter: Ho…CulturePrime Stage…
Anything that lets us avoid a trip to the video-rental store, while simultaneously offering more choices of movies, sounds good at first glance. In some ways, it’s the future of home entertainment. If such a service ever does take shape, however, it’ll likely include severe restrictions on what customers can do with what they’ve rented.…
—Xenoblogging (Google) Last week when I posted on a course web page a detailed explanation of how I plan to evaluate student blogs, I coined a phrase and googled it. Nobody seems to have used it before. Now, thanks to the reach of KairosNews and a few popular bloggers who read it, several other edu-bloggers are…
Isolated and Stranded…and Wet (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Yesterday afternoon, if you were on campus at Seton Hill University, you might have noticed signs going up in the hallways, stating that the faculty/staff e-mail server would be down all weekend, for unavoidable emergency repairs. If you were behind me as I was driving home in the pouring…
An Idaho English teacher is in trouble for ripping up a Bible in class. Burley High’s Karen Christenson said she was trying to illustrate a point about censorship, as her sophomore students read Ray Bradbury’s novel “Fahrenheit 451,” which is set in a future society that commands all literature be burned. —Teacher In Trouble For…
Much of what I and a former student put in “Writing Effective E-Mail: Top 10 Tips” also applies to e-newsletters, but people are much more likely to scan (or trash) newsletters that seem irrelevant. I like e-mail newsletters because they are self-contained — I can print them out and read them offline, or I can…
With funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Committee on Institutional Cooperation conducted a study (June-November, 2003) to determine the extent to which publication of a scholarly monograph is essential for faculty to receive tenure in the humanistic disciplines…. Among the major findings are the following: With the exception of scholars who are doing…
Our first and most important line of defense against academic dishonesty is simply good teaching. Cheating and plagiarism often arise in a vacuum created by routine, lack of interest and overwork. Professors who give the same assignment every semester, fail to guide students in the development of their projects and have little interest in what…
FactCheck.org fills a journalistic void. Major media outlets tend to report on the strategy behind campaign commercials rather than analyzing the content for veracity. Even though Jackson pioneered ad watches for CNN, the cable network let him go last year. “I’ve seen the press generally put less emphasis on ad watches and fact-check-type stories,” Jackson…
After much delay, the results of this year’s BetaComp are in. I was pleased to see that once again, each entrant found at least *something* that no other entrant did, and no single entrant found more than about 50% of all the bugs that were found. This reinforces the prevailing theory that several testers (and…
The problem with comments, open forums, e-mail discussion lists and other user-generated online content is that it takes work — usually a moderator or trust system — to make sure the comments stay relevant, clean and spam-free. In fact, spammers have made old Usenet groups unreadable, have flooded most e-mail inboxes, and have brought their…
Whenever Richard Cory went down town, We people on the pavement looked at him: He was a gentleman from sole to crown, Clean favored, and imperially slim. —Richard Cory Interactive Adventure (LLamas) Quite frankly, this was a disappointment, but it was still sick, so it might still have some morbid entertainment value. (The climax of…