I dislike the term “digital native.” I mean no offense to Marc Prensky, who popularized it (along with its counterpart, “digital immigrant”), but the term is laden with colonial baggage, though as a humanities person I’m perhaps hypersensitive to that sort of thing. More important, the term also misses an important point. Today’s technologically savvy…
My former student Mike Rubino sent me this link to a wonderfully awful new media course description. String me up by my USB dongles if I ever teach a course like this. As print takes its place alongside smoke signals, cuneiform, and hollering, there has emerged a new literary age, one in which writers no…
My class topic today was an introduction to oral presentations for a freshman writing course. The students had already given informal four-minute practice presentations earlier in the term, but they’re gearing up for a more formal presentation. So this article comes at a good time for me. The ability to give an engaging lecture doesn’t…
We Didn’t Start the Flame War. (Don’t listen to this one with urchins underfoot.) College Humor does not pull its punches when it satirizes (and celebrates) the depths to which human nature can stoop when participating in discussion threads. (My favorite bit is the Rick Astley impersonator, a reference to an internet meme of the…
Ted Stevens was right…. The Internet is a Series of Tubes (techno remix). But the Parisian telegram system in the early 1900s and the American postal system in the mid 20th century had their own tubes, as Molly Wright Steenson demonstrates (in this example of Pecha Kucha, a genre of speech delivered with exactly 20…
A number in the news is no longer a cold fact, it is a killer fact, with all the murderous zeal that word implies. Journalists everywhere know the meaning of the phrase, the dagger of detail that runs the opposition through: the 23% up! The £16m wasted! The 140,000 children! For an example, try 271.…
Kristen Seas, “Ripple Effect: A New Perspective on Rhetorical Agency” Lars Soderlund, “Kairos and Emergence” Marc Santos, “Social Bookmarking as Distributed Research” Jeremy Tirrell, “Decorum and Emergent Ethics” I was particularly interested in this panel, in part because I taught the session chair in a few technical writing / new media classes when she was…
Four brief case studies, representing new and changing populations on campus. The group has left lots of time at the end for discussion. “We don’t have any easy answers.” Kari Warren, ” ‘Did My Mom call you yet?” Teaching Millenial Students (And Their Helicopter Parents)” Heidi Hanrahan, “‘I’ve got to pay the rent’: Teaching the…
Katie Retzinger, “Immediacy, Desire, and the Other: MMORPGS and Constructions of Identity” Mathew S.S. Johnson “The World is Subject: Gamers as Potential for Change” Phill Alexander: “Running with the Bulls: The Race Rhetoric of the Tauren in World of Warcraft” The study of games and composition have long overlapped in the areas of popular culture…
Here are my rough notes, taken while the speaker was talking. (Conference on College Composition and Communication, 2009.) After thanking the audience for the “opportunity to serve in the cause of writing,” Bazerman began with Mesopotamian farmer’s clay pebbles used to keep track of flocks. What will the world be like 5000 yrs from now,…
Does Adobe Shockwave fit your definition of malware? I train my kids not to click on random boxes that pop up, and I don’t want any boxes popping up on computers my kids use. So I was very annoyed the other day when I first saw this box — intrusive auto-update window that shows only…
News about a free-speech dust-up in the department where I used to work at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire: This fall, the English department, the publication’s then “administrative home,” voted unanimously to sever its ties to Flip Side, citing, in a statement, interest in “fostering the responsible use of free speech and the mutually respectful community…
Great piece from Ben Kuchera at Ars Technica. Today I decided to conduct an experiment. I started calling people I knew, and I asked if they had one or more video games in the house. Then I asked if they breast-fed their children. To my great shock, most answered “yes” to both. One couple I contacted switched to formula after…
When I sat down in the middle of January with an Arabic-language translator to look through Facebook, we found one new group with almost 2,000 members called “I’m sure I can find 1,000,000 members who hate Israel!!!” and another called “With all due respect, Gaza, I don’t support you,” which blamed Palestinian suffering on Hamas…
Bring on the bongo drums and the black turtlenecks — this looks like fun. Students in a poetry class were asked to write their poetry on a piece of fruit, and then share their text with the class. Melanie stood holding her Cassaba melon like a globe or Yorick’s skull in her left hand and…
Educated Americans have a tendency to think that (i) intelligence can be directly assessed through the surrogate of compliance with the rules of Standard English grammar, and that (ii) compliance with the rules of Standard English grammar can be checked quickly and easily by glancing in Strunk and White’s brainless little pamphlet of 19th-century grammar…
GlobalNerdy, via. You’ve probably seen many articles on companies and organizations saying that they take social media seriously. Here’s one such organization that you might not expect: the United States Air Force. Take a look at the Air Force Blog Assessment chart, reproduced below: Click the diagram to download the PDF version (455K). The “rules…
While the Church gets a lot of guff for its skeptical responses to Galileo’s astronomical findings, some Jesuit astronomers not only listened to his ideas but repeated his observations, and some university faculty members flatly refused to look through a telescope. Simplistic representations of scientific issues, with heroes and villains, make good stories, but rarely…
The “serious gaming” community is abuzz over Raid Gaza: in which you take on the role of the Israeli military, building tanks, fighter planes and missiles in order to pummel the Palestinian territory and kill as many people as possible within three minutes. Bonus points are awarded for hitting hospitals and police stations. Meanwhile, the…
Are you a politician? a candidate for real political office? an MP in the UK? A Senator or member of the House of Representatives in the US? or the equivalent anywhere in the world? If so, I…a humble games programmer from the UK would like to give you a free gift. a FREE copy of…