Radio News Delivery: How to Sound Like a Radio Broadcaster

Listen to a short news broadcast, such as the NPR Hourly News Summary. These stories will typically include audio clips from newsmakers, and perhaps the noise of crowds or nature. But we’re just focusing on the sound of the radio journalist’s voice. Don’t try to sound like “an announcer.”  Forget the barking style of voice that radio announcers always…

John Lovas Memorial Academic Weblog Award — Computers and Writing 2009

Today, at the Computers and Writing conference, the Kairos editors presented Jerz’s Literacy Weblog with the John Lovas Memorial Academic Weblog Award. (I knew about it in advance, and was able to get funding to attend thanks to the CIT department at Seton HIll.)  Lovas was a dedicated teacher, an accomplished administrator, and a patient…

Metaphoric Space, Cyberspace, and Work Space — Computers and Writing 2009

Chair Mikhail Gershovich, Barch College, CUNY Hacking Spaces: Place as Interface Danielle Nicole DeVoss, Michigan State University Douglass Walls, Michigan State University Scott Schopieray, Michigan State University Writing-a-go-go: Ubiquitous Computing and the Thirdspace of Workplace Writing Tina Bacci, University of Rhode Island The Examined Life–Cyberspace Style: The Construction of Space in the #philosophy IRC Undernet…

The Impact of Ubiquitous (or not so ubiquitous) Computing on Faculty and Students — Computers and Writing 2009

These are my notes, lightly edited, from a panel at Computers & Writing 2009. I only found a single plug in the meeting room, in the very back row. This is a small conference, so I probably appear fairly antisocial typing way in the back here.  (I’ll move up when the panel actually starts in…

Heard any Good Books Lately?

Heard Any Good Books.mp3 (5min, 1MB) When pneumonia wiped me out for about two months in the fall of 2007, for several weeks I could do little more than lie on the futon and worry about the work I was missing.  During the first week or so, when I still imagined it was just the…

Text to Speech

—Text to Speech (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Over the summer when I spend little time in the office and a lot of time outdoors, I often fall behind in my reading. The past few weeks I have been using TextAloud, a fairly simple but interesting program that converts text files to MP3s. I then put the MP3s…

Pope's focus: Reason — Its relationship to the divine was the subject of a recent speech that upset some Muslims.

The quotation that caused all the furor involves a 14th-century dialogue between a Byzantine emperor and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam. The pope quotes the emperor, who says: “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his…

Freedom of speech redefined by blogs: Words travel faster, stay around longer in the blogosphere

Jessica Prokop thought the textbook for her class at Seton Hill University was biased and that its author “seems like a bitter man.” In the annals of student rants, nothing extraordinary there. Except she didn’t just blurt out those words in her journalism class. She blogged them. Soon, the author himself was responding all the…

Technorati's Speech Bubble Icon

—Technorati’s Speech Bubble Icon (Technorati) What Technorati used to call its “Link Cosmos” appears to have been replaced by “Web Conversations.” The speech bubble icon that calls up a list of inboud links referencing a particular website is now part of the Technorati logo. Much less new-agey, much more down-to-earth. I haven’t time to investigate that…