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Maybe it’s just a temporary thing, but I’m a little miffed right now:

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation sponsored a great series on “Digital Media and Learning,” and worked out a deal with MIT press where you can order the print version or you can download the open source version for free. Here’s a link to that site.

However, when I tried just now to browse through one of these open source publications, the MIT press gives me an error and says that the file wasn’t found. What gives? Did someone have “take-backs” on these once free articles?

Email clean-out blog post #2: Here’s a link to a report from the CCCCs called “Top Intellectual Property Developments of 2007 for Scholars of Composition, Rhetoric, and Communication.” It includes some links and information about, well, the title of the site: IP issues for the comp/rhet world. Among many other things, working in this material/discussion into ENGL 516 next winter might be one of the changes I make to that course.

I’m cleaning up my email this morning, and thought this might be a good place to put a link to Concentrate, which is a local start-up/blog/web site aimed at promoting various businesses and enterprises. There isn’t much there yet, though one thing it makes me think about for teaching the Writing for the World Wide Web course is search engine optimization. There’s an article here about an area company that does this stuff, and as I put the schedule for this course together this week, it makes me think that maybe I ought to see if one of these folks would like to participate in the online discussion a bit during the course.

This might or might not be “something:”

The Dumpster (2006: Golan Levin, Kamal Nigam and Jonathan Feinberg) is an interactive online visualization that attempts to depict a slice through the romantic lives of American teenagers. Using real postings extracted from millions of online blogs, visitors to the project can surf through tens of thousands of specific romantic relationships in which one person has “dumped” another.

Via my Reader feed and danah’s blog apophenia.

Article/link #2 I don’t want to lose when I reboot: “Gaming helps students hone 21st-century skills,” from eNews and its annoying password/account-driven web site. The sub-head specifically singles out sites like Second Life. A couple paragraphs:

Sharnell Jackson, the chief eLearning officer for Chicago Public Schools and the webinar’s moderator, noted that gaming and simulations are highly interactive, allow for instant feedback, immerse students in collaborative environments, and allow for rapid decision-making. The webinar was sponsored by the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN).

Studies of the brain have pointed to data suggesting that repeated exposure to video games reinforces the ability to create mental maps, inductive discovery such as formulating hypotheses, and the ability to focus on several things at once and respond faster to unexpected stimuli.

Which reminds me that the next time I teach English 516, I’m going to have to once again re-add the units on gaming and writing.

I haven’t had a chance to read all of this, but I wanted to post a link before I forgot, before I restart my browser and computer, and before I start grading. This is “A snapshot of student reading habits over two decades,” from a UC-Berkeley News website. Since I don’t have the time to do the reading right now (ironically enough), I just stuck with the top 10 lists, and just to make it even easier, I’ll just stick here with the top 2:

• 1987: #1 The Color Purple (Alice Walker); #2 The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
• 1997: #1 The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand) #2 A Hundred Secret Senses (Amy Tan)
• 2007: #1 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (J.K. Rowling) #2 title unspecified (J.K. Rowling)

A few links I came across in various ways the last couple of days before I get on to the conference business of the day, which is a trip to the beach:

• Mike Rose’s Blog.
• This article about podcasting turning into publishing. One of the points I think I want to make in my book project (oh yeah, that pesky book project… almost forgot about that…) is that one of the logical transitions/signs of success of a blog is the blog’s author gets some kind of book deal. So this makes sense to me.
• The design code rap:
  
• EveryZing. I haven’t played with this yet, but apparently, it’s an effort at creating a search engine that can look at multimedia for information. I heard about this at a presentation yesterday by Deborah Vess, who talked about…
• … this, Apple + iPods @ GCSU, which is about a pretty large and interesting Podcasting/videocasting initiative at Georgia College and State University.

I think I would prefer to actually be leaving for the airport today, but when I booked this trip, I didn’t know exactly when the conference presentations were going to happen and I didn’t realize that there’s almost nothing on the program Friday. So as long as I’m here, I think I’ll find out what St. Augustine is like.

Let me first be very clear: this mystery conference in Jacksonville has actually turned out to be a pretty good thing. I went to some good panels this morning and this afternoon, I had some nice chats with various folks, mostly from the community college world, my presentation went pretty well, and I got to catch up a bit with at least one friendly face I recognized from the computers and writing conference world. So it has been a much better conference than I had expected, and I am looking forward to some of the sessions tomorrow.

But it has still been kind of weird.

First off, the sessions this morning that I attended had some pretty small audiences– which is fine, frankly. That’s typical for academic conferences, and I just kind of assumed this is kind of a small conference overall. But when I went to the luncheon banquet, I was rather surprised to see a rather large ballroom with somewhere around 800 or so people in it, complete with a big dais of distinguished people. It was odd; I was just wondering where the heck all these people came from.

Then there was the mini-monolith. Before the keynote speech by Marc Prensky (the first 20 minutes of which were pretty good; the second 20 minutes which were kinda problematic; and the last 20 minutes of which were probably unnecessary), they announced the awards for the conference. Now, one of the reasons I was sent by folks at EMU to this conference in the first place was that I was the EMU nominee for an “Award for Innovative Excellence in Teaching, Learning and Technology.” So I knew I was going to get something, and I also knew that there was 40 or so other winners. But I wasn’t expecting this:

This trophy is pretty cool, but it seems rather dangerous. It’s made out of marble, it’s about eight and half inches high and about three and a half inches in circumference, it is cut so it has a rather sharp point at top, and has got to weigh 10 pounds. Gian Pagnucci (a fellow winner, btw) and I were talking at dinner about this, and we both seriously wondered if you could actually take this thing onto an airplane in carry-on luggage. I mean, I have no doubt that you could most definitely brain someone with this thing if you really wanted to. I’m a little worried about what kind of damage it’s liable to cause in my checked suitcase.

Well, it’s the thought that counts, right?

Tomorrow, more mysteries await.

As I mentioned yesterday, I’m at this something of a mystery conference and listening to a guy talking about a laptop campus program at Cal State San Bernardino. It’s potentially pretty interesting to me because while CSU-SB is a lot smaller than EMU, the profile of what the school is like is pretty similar to EMU. I think this is a guy I should talk to at some point. One of the points he just made: the main complaint that various powers-that-be on his campus (e.g., faculty senate, tech committees, provosts, etc.) was concern about that one poor student who just can’t afford a laptop no matter what. So the solution they came up with was they collected old but still decent laptops from other institutional resources. So far, they’ve loaned out one.

Another fun-fact: 70% of the students at CSU-SB are on financial aid. At the same time, some huge percentage of students had computers, over 70% had high speed internet access where they lived, and over half of the students already owned a laptop before they were required to buy one. Again, given that CSU-SB has a similar profile of students at EMU, I bet that a survey would be about the same.

But a couple of other things I came across via my feed that kind of connect to the conference and that’s just kind of interesting:

• “Analysis: How multimedia can improve teaching,” from eNews (which features an annoying registration feature), which is about this Cisco study available via pdf here. I’ve only browsed through it; it looks very science-y and statistics and stuff, and kind of potentially interesting and useful.
• “Margaret Spellings, Where Are You?” from Inside Higher Ed. It’s basically an article about all sorts of different assessment tools going on around the country with all kinds of different universities. I know we’ve got a couple of different initiatives about assessment at EMU, and what I find reassuring about the article is that the efforts of higher ed on this already might end up fending off federally mandated standards.

It’s that time of the semester, and I’m trying to slap together a presentation for the conference I’m going to next week. So here’s a bunch of links that I had meant to write more about earlier but I’m just going to mention now. Some of this might be handy for teaching at some point:

• “A guide to writing better emails.” Nothing earth-shattering here, but good advice nonetheless.
• The curious and odd ProfEssays site. I’m not sure how I came across this, but I think it is interesting and odd and strange that this paper mill’s web site has as much information as it has about plagiarism.
• A review of a book called Proust and the Squid. Sounds like a cool book. Here’s the first paragraph from the review:
  

  For most people, reading is a taken for granted skill. The purpose of Proust and the Squid is to reveal the magic and mystery of reading and its pathologies. This everyday activity is not natural, and is a recent development from an evolutionary perspective. There is no ‘reading center’ in the brain, but something a lot more enigmatic, an acquired way of using existing structures and connections. New imaging technology shows startling differences between dyslexics and others, differences that illuminate the journey to literacy as never before. It is only 6000 years since humans trained their brains to read, and during that time they have improved on the process to such a staggering degree that the modern child takes 2000 days to achieve a degree of literacy that took 2000 years to develop. The dark cloud on the horizon is another human invention of staggering genius: digitalization. This most economic of information systems was made possible by the very thing it now threatens: the ability to read.

• “How to start writing quality articles for blogs and article marketing.” This is a little too much in the “get rich quick with your blog writing” category of things for me, but still some interesting advice in this little piece. Might be good for Writing for the WWW.
• This link and this link go to popular press stories about a study some folks did about why people read blogs. I haven’t had a chance to look at all the details yet, but it looks interesting for all kinds of different reasons, and it looks like what they are arguing is that blog reading is practiced as “a habit,” and that there is a fuzzy line between blog writing and reading. All of which falls in line with my BAWS project. This might also make for good WWWW reading.
• Finally, WEbook, which I just stumbled across. It looks like a collaborative book writing site. I dunno, maybe that’s one way to get the ol’ scholarly work done, throw it out there on this site and see if other people will do the writing for me.