In Dragon’s Looking Glass world, inanimate objects speak in tongues; cups, saucers, hammers, and styrofoam are endowed with the gift of speech; and the babble of a brook is literal, not metaphorical. It’s personification (and heteroglossia) taken to an extreme. It strikes me that this peculiar propensity for hearing the cacophony of voices in anything…
A Tree-Mail ‘Thank You’Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Sometimes, even for a cyber-guy like me, an old-fashioned, hand-crafted “Thank You” note just makes it all worthwhile. From my former student Kirsten Schubert, who really knows how to make a fellow feel appreciated. You’re very welcome, Kirsten! Similar:Shall I Encode Thee In DNA? Sonnets Stored On Double HelixIf…
Similar:Revisiting a Website I Created in 1996: Engineering Writing Centre (University of Toronto)During the Christmas break of 1996, when…AestheticsGingerbread USS EnterpriseMr. Sulu, set phasers to delicious! Whic…AestheticsText Messaging Declines in U.S. for First Time, Report SaysI don’t text message much. As my kids (a…CybercultureThe Irreversible Damage of Mark Zuckerberg’s SilenceWired, obviously having worked on a…
Under the guidelines, which go into effect in the fall for Princeton’s 4,600 undergraduates, faculty are expected to restrict the number of A’s to 35 percent in undergraduate courses; for junior and senior independent work, the percentage receiving A’s will be capped at 55 percent. —Princeton faculty approves grade-rationing plan (CBS/AP) Similar:When T.S. Eliot Invented the…
—Primetime Cheating (Pedablogue) My colleague Mike Arnzen has already created the blog entry I was about to create, so I’ll just link to him. Similar:The Classic Typewriter Page Frequently Asked QuestionsHow can I get rid of That Old Typewriter…AestheticsIf not enough people are stopping by your table to hear your presentation, you take your p…Academia‘It’s destroyed…
Complaints I often hear around campus (our students don’t read/write) are turned on their head when we see the kinds of writing circulating around the economy of expression called the Web. Not everyone‘sthere yet, but many are; many we don’t realize are our the students in first year writing sitting there bored because of some…
This admission is privately echoed by top players at magazines owned by major publishers, who sometimes cite more lax ad/edit divisions at European magazines as a catalyst. But a jacket showing up in a fashion layout doesn’t equal, say, a series of paid-for Cadillac references showing up in a short story that doesn’t have the…
He cried when she showed him photos she had taken of giraffes. Then, in one of his unexplained flashes of clarity, he told Debbie: “I don’t want to have Alzheimer’s.” — A frank, gripping article by Marsha King —A journey through dementia: Family surrenders to reality (Seattle Times) Similar:Dax (#StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch, Season 1, Episode…
In the 1980s millions of teenagers world-wide would battle dragons armed with just dice, paper and pens. D&D became part of youth sub-culture but as the game celebrates its 30th birthday, is anyone still playing? —Darren Water —Whatever happened to Dungeons and Dragons? (BBC) Similar:Addressing Our Biases: Medieval BathingDid medieval people bathe? If you alr…CultureCarolyn at…
The Project’s national phone survey of 1,371 adult Internet users conducted between February 3 and March 1, 2004 shows that 14% of online Americans say that at one time in their online lives they downloaded music files, but now they no longer do any downloading. That represents more than 17 million people. However, the number…
Colorado-based independent scholar Marie-Laure Ryan, author of Narrative as Virtual Reality and editor, most recently, of Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, who has offered comments here at GTxA, spoke about the ludology vs. narratology debate, admitting that she was preaching to the converted, not to the heathens… She took on the anti-narrativst arguments…
PageRank 100. Apparently, his little blog achieved a PageRank of 100. And after a coffee, Josh realized what this must mean. He called up one of his friends, a search engine affiniciado who took computer class. Matt arrived quickly, because he too never saw anything like this, and equally quickly Matt checked the rankings for…
Handwriting Analysis and Fortune Telling Yesterday I was at St. Vincent College’s “Earth Day,” where a man named Dennis collected handwriting samples and offered a personality reading. I let him go through his schtick — which included all sorts of affirming things like I am a resource person for too many people, I’ve either had…
Speaker #n will present a statistical analysis of the activity on a student weblog community in order to identify possible correlations which may advance our understanding of the pedagogical value of weblogs. The community is a group of personal blogs, all hosted on the same server and sponsored by the university. Activity on the site…
There is no day on the calendar six months or a year away, when you can say, ?OK, I‘m done promoting now, and I can stop.? Promotion needs to be a significant part of the ongoing work of maintaining your blog. If I?ve learned one thing in my years working with creative people of all…
What do films like Independence Day, Armageddon and X-Men have in common? The answer is that apart from costing millions of dollars to make, they all feature in a new course called Physics in Films that is being taught to students at the University of Central Florida. Costas Efthimiou, the mathematical physicist who teaches the…
Crunch Time: Seton Hill Blogs Bursting at the Seams Blogalicious… bloginator… “blog rally“… my students have been fiercely you-know-whatting, in order to fulfill the broad, very general requirements of their blogging portfolios. These range from the typical “write a blog responding to book X” or “blog about classroom activity Y,” to “disagree politely with one…
Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left York at 6:36 p.m. travelling at 55mph, the other from Peterborough at 4:19 p.m.at a speed of 35mph. The plan was simple, like my brother Phil. But unlike Phil, this plan just…
Effie is an old jade of 50 summers, Jessie a frisky filly of 40, and Addie, the flower of the family, a capering monstrosity of 35. Their long, skinny arms, equipped with talons at the extremities, swung mechanically, and soon were waved frantically at the suffering spectators. The mouths of their rancid features opened like…
Knowledge is different from capital, and from material goods, in that there is no inherent scarcity to knowledge. A piece of knowledge, once produced, may be replicated almost for free, distributed around the world in the blink of an electron, fed almost as easily to one person as to one billion people. Oh sure, there…