Pale Fire: Bloggers are both Kinbote and Shade (Literacy Weblog) “Jerz’s Literacy Weblog” has been classified as a “research blog,” even though I think of it as a teaching tool and memory aid. My blogging sometimes reminds me of the obsessive behavior of Professor Charles Kinbote, the protagonist in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Kinbote compulsively catalogues…
“Emerson was himself a sort of group blogger in The Dial, a magazine he founded with Margaret Fuller in 1840. He designed it as a compendium of the ‘good fanatics,’ like Thoreau, Alcott and Channing in his Concord circle. ‘I would not have it too purely literary,’ he wrote to Fuller, venting a blogger’s ambition.…
“It’s not every day you see your teacher naked in the technology room or posing with a cello.” — Charlotte, British schoolgirl who helped organize teacher pinup calendar for charity. —Teachers Strip off for Calendar (BBC) Uh, I should hope not, Charlotte. The pictures really aren’t that revealing, but this is still just too weird. The…
“People often throw around the terms “objective” and “subjective” when talking about the results of a usability test. These terms are frequently equated with the statistical terms “quantitative” and “qualitative”. The analogy is false, and this misunderstanding can have consequences for the interpretations and conclusions of usability tests.” Philip Hodgson —Usability Test Data (User Focus) Similar:How…
“This special language had its origins in business-speak, and began to spread when Margaret Thatcher insisted that universities should see themselves as businesses, involving ‘processes’ and ‘products’. Such language is fine for the business world, which deals with the definable and quantifiable. As long as the ‘product’ works and sells, they can use whatever language…
“This past year has seen the world of Weblogs, aka the blogosphere, grow in power and stature, if not to the general public, then to the other media. So we’ve created a graphical depiction of what I believe to be the most influential blogs, pushing the direction of media coverage and perhaps even public policy.…
“Take the Quiz now and find out where you fit on the political map!” —World’s Smallest Political Quiz (Advocates for Self-Government) I enjoyed taking this little quiz, then I played with it a little to see how it works. My own score was centrist with libertarian leanings, but I can see too many weaknesses in the…
“WatchBlog is a multiple-editor weblog broken up into three major political affiliations, each with its own blog: the Democrats, the Republicans and the Third Party (covering everything outside the two major parties).” —WatchBlog: 2004 Election News, Opinion and Commentary (WatchBlog) This looks interesting — a three-column blog — Democrat on the left side, Republican on the…
“TV3 has apologised after a graphic labelling US President George W. Bush a ‘professional fascist’ flashed up during its primetime news. | The baseline graphic, which was supposed to have promoted an upcoming weather bulletin, was aired to 360,000 viewers halfway through Wednesday night’s news.” —New Zealand Newscast Accidentally Labels Bush ‘Professional Fascist’ (NZ Herald) Similar:Ambiguous…
“When I was studying at York, reading the plays was part of the curriculum, and then, in the summer, there were a selection of the plays performed in the street (perhaps 15?), conveniently available to watch. Now that I am at Toronto, there are still medieval play recreations regularly available to watch, since the PLS…
“In fact, our language is littered with words that once used to be brands. Escalator, pogo, gunk and heroin are all examples, as is tabloid, which was originally registered by a drugs company in 1884 and came to mean ‘small tablet’.” —Google Calls in the ‘Language Police’ (BBC) This is a light-weight riff on the observation…
The ancient ossuary (“bone box”) marked with an inscription identifying the occupant as “James, brother of Jesus” has been officially declared a fake: “The varnish covered large areas of the ossuary surface and the patina had burst through the varnish in many places. Both varnish and patina coated a rosette inscribed on the other side…
“To some, a blog is the software and the user’s experience with the software, and because of that they focus on the technology that makes blogs possible. | To others, blogs are experiential in terms of an individual’s relationship to a blog as relationship, whether as an individual or one of a community.” —Talk about…
“He had found the route after discovering a forgotten map in public archives which revealed the secret access from the monastery attic. | The map was a key exhibit in the trial. The attic, reached by a daring climb up exterior walls, led to a steep, narrow stairway and then the secret chamber. A hidden…
Margaret Atwood recalls encountering Animal Farm” as a girl: “I mistook it for a book about talking animals, sort of like Wind in the Willows. I knew nothing about the kind of politics in the book – the child’s version of politics then, just after the war, consisted of the simple notion that Hitler was…
“Who would have guessed, when this New Hampshire YMCA camp was founded in 1905, that anyone would even have to think about an electronics policy?| But in today’s world, where some teens are more tech-savvy than their parents, and they often won’t leave home without their electronic toys, that’s reality. And camp directors are having…
The Corpus Christi Play was an annual outdoor event, involving hundreds of actors; it was already a long-established tradition by the end of the 14th century, and continued until suppressed by the Protestant Reformation in the late 16th century.” —Medieval ‘Body of Christ’ PlayLiteracy Weblog) Today is the day the medieval church would have celebrated…
Google is Already Spidering my New SiteLiteracy Weblog) My digital move from UWEC to Seton Hill is happening much faster than I had anticipated. My UWEC weblog, which changed several times a day, seems to have encouraged Google’s spiders to check out a good chunk of my website on a regular basis. The cache was…
“Professors are ‘in the gist business.’ But a vernacular sound bite, no matter how strategically placed in a text or a lecture, won’t help students parse scholarly discourse. More important, getting students to write about what they know does not necessarily make them more adept at writing about more “traditional” academic subjects.” Glenn C. Altschuler…
“Microsoft, which has been talking tough on spam, is putting its money where its mouth is. The company revealed Tuesday that it has filed 15 civil suits in the United States and the United Kingdom against spammers who it says have sent more than 2 billion unsolicited messages to users of Microsoft’s MSN and Hotmail…