I don’t entirely know why I think this is as funny as it is– maybe because as part of my blog research, I’ve been thinking a lot about the whole “blogging for money/get rich quick” thing. Or maybe this just is funny.
Really? A party for an operating system?
I am sure that I will get the new OS sooner than later, though after what I see as a piss-poor version of the “upgrade” to iMovie, I think I want to read some reviews first. But I don’t think I get the “come to the new OS party” thing. Maybe I’m just not geeky enough.
Of course, there are free t-shirts….
20% or so of all college students took at least one online class in 2006
From this article from Inside Higher Ed, “More Online Enrollments:”
More students than ever are taking courses online, but that doesn’t mean the growth will continue indefinitely. That’s the takeaway from the Sloan Foundation’s latest survey, conducted with the Babson Survey Research Group, of colleges’ online course offerings.
With results from nearly 4,500 institutions of all types, the report, “Online Nation: Five Years of Growth in Online Learning�, found that in fall 2006, nearly 3.5 million students — or 19.8 percent of total postsecondary enrollments — took at least one course online. That’s a 9.7-percent increase over the previous year, but growth has been slowing significantly: last year, the jump was 36.5 percent.
But compared to the growth rate for enrollment overall (1.3 percent), the report notes, the online sector is still rapidly expanding. Most of that expansion is happening where online classes are already being offered.
I don’t really have time right now to read through the article in detail or the report its based on, but as someone who teaches online, I’m sure it’ll be useful later on.
Crazy dude on a unicycle
I came across this via kottke.org. Pretty impressive stuff.
At least two U.S. Presidential Cabinet members have blogs
I came across this Associated Press article (hosted by Google? I didn’t realize they were doing that nowadays), “Two Cabinet Secretaries Start Blogs.” The secretaries in question here are Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. The story says that there’s a State Department blog too, but they don’t have a link to that one.
Leavitt’s blog seems a little more real to me than Chertoff’s:
“I’ve decided to wade in a little deeper into blogdom by writing one for the next month or so,” Leavitt wrote in his first entry. “I’m going to see how I feel after that time period. I may continue; I may not.”
Leavitt says he writes every blog entry himself, often late at night in hotel rooms when he is traveling. He is concerned that his entries are too long; on Aug. 20, he wrote 2,444 words about his trip to an orphanage in South Africa.
Chertoff began blogging in September so he could “open a dialogue with the American people about our nation’s security.” Chertoff comes up with an idea for a blog entry, then someone in the department writes it, and Chertoff heavily edits it, said Jeff Ostermayer, a department spokesman who oversees the blog.
The article also quotes Michael X. Delli Carpini, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, who is pretty critical of these sorts of blogs:
Public officials usually are promoting policies and not offering honest reflections of what is going on, Delli Carpini said. The key to a successful blog is to make sure the information in the blog is honest, accurate and serving a public purpose. “The very same technology that can make things more democratic can also be used for manipulation and propaganda,” he said.
I see Caprini’s point, but I’m not entirely sure to what extent the typical, “garden variety” blog is “honest, accurate, and serving a public purpose.” I mean, many blogs are written under a pseudonym, and I would argue (at least I think I am arguing in BAWS) that bloggers shape their identities through their words, what they choose to discuss and not discuss, in response to an audience, and to meet their own needs as a writer. That’s not the same as what Carpini is talking about.
A lot of blogs– including these two– are popping up nowadays that are more or less PR pieces. It seems to me that the extent to which this is a “problem” has a lot to do with one’s definition of a blog. But I don’t have too much time to get into that this morning….
Incidentally, I spent about 5 minutes skimming through these two blogs, and I would say that Leavitt’s seems a lot more “real” than Chertoff’s, though Chertoff’s isn’t really just his blog, either.
Actually using video games to teach: "Playing to Learn"
This looks like a promise link/topic for ENGL 516 for the winter term: via Confessions of an Aca/Fan, I learned about Playing to Learn by David Hutchison. Henry Jenkins has a long post/interview with Hutchison; this links to “part one” of the interview, and I’m sure that a part two (maybe more) will come after this. Here’s a quote from Jenkins blog that indicates to me how this might all fit into this stuff:
Hutchinson’s book promises over 100 game activities appropriate for classroom use, a selection that spans across academic subjects (language arts, mathematics, science, social studies, history, geography, health & physical education, drama, music, visual arts, computers, and business) and grade levels (including both elementary and high school). Writers like James Paul Gee, Kurt Squire, xx and David Shaffer, have made the conceptual argument for the pedagogical value of games; our own Education Arcade has been one of a number of academic research projects focused on designing, prototyping, and field testing games for instructional purposes; Hutchinson’s focus is on what we can do in our schools right now, using projects already on the market, to tap student and teacher interests in games. In the course of the collection, the models many different conceptual approaches for thinking about games — including many designed to foster core media literacy skills. The result is a book which will be valuable to classroom teachers or for that matter, parents who want to engage their children in meaningful conversations about the place of games in their lives and about how games structure the way we see the world.
Sounds cool to me, and as the parent of a child who plays plenty of video games, it might be something I pick up for my own purposes, too.
Scary costume for Halloween
Via boing-boing, I came across this site that has a Senator Larry Craig paper bag mask kit. Basically, it’s a couple PDF files of Craig’s infamous post-bathroom arrest mugshot that you download, print, and paste onto a paper bag. Ingenious, but since I am the one who usually answers the door and passes out candy on Halloween, it might be a little too scary for the kiddies.
Lots and lots of stuff on social networking
Via Jill/Txt comes this link to danah boyd’s bibliography on social networks. It certainly looks like a site (with a lot of cites!) potentially useful for ENGL 516, and maybe for 444. Lots of good and current stuff here.
The problem of finding reusable shopping bags
A couple weeks ago, I finally came around to the idea that I ought to use some reusable shopping bags for groceries and such. Part of it is the environmental issues everyone already knows about– a zillion plastic and/or paper bags filling up landfills, etc., etc., etc. But part of it is just to help declutter the house a bit and ditch all the plastic bags that get stuffed under the sink or paper bags in the garage or whatever.
But here’s the thing: Whole Foods was selling lovely canvas bags, but for eight bucks each, and it is essentially an advertisement for Whole Foods. So I went seeking alternatives, and surprisingly, I pretty much struck out. I tried places like Target, Bed Bath and Beyond, other grocery stores, a hardware store, etc. Nothing. Maybe I just didn’t look hard enough, but if places like the Food (W)hole want people to use reusable bags, they need to price them better.
Anyway, the solution I came up with was Ikea: I bought two of their giant and reusable bags for 59 cents apiece. They are gigantic, made out of a durable plastic, and the roll/fold up into a small-ish ball. I had shopping success with them yesterday; we’ll see how it goes from here.
On watching CourtTV
It’s been a pretty busy week around here in general– surprisingly, because at the beginning of the week, I thought I was going to have a lot more time to write and read than I thought I would. One of my interruptions this week has been the Orange Taylor trial and its coverage on CourtTV. This has been a topic of conversation on the community blog I run, EMUTalk.org, for months and months– here’s a link to the category on that blog. More details there than you could shake a stick at, but basically, Orange Taylor is on trial as I type for the murder of Laura Dickinson last December, a murder that EMU administrators essentially covered up and that cost some of them, notably President John Fallon, their jobs.
Now the Taylor trial is the “featured trial” on CourtTV– they’re calling it the “Dorm Room Murder.” Normally, I don’t watch CourtTV, but since this is a very local story for me, I’ve been tuning in when I can.The coverage I’m watching is just the audio of the interview with Taylor before he was charged with anything, so what you hear is a recording made back in January (where they are talking about a crime in December 2006 and where they are discussing pictures and videos and such from back then) and video of the court live. Right now, they’re focusing on Taylor and the police officer who conducted the interview reading the transcript of the audio.
I have to say it’s fascinating viewing. Again, it might just be that I’m more interested because it is something that is happening here– literally, I could ride my bike to the court house and I’ll be on campus later today. But just the way this is presented, with all these different mediums mashed together to make the story and compelling TV.
And it isn’t just a “the facts and only the facts” kind of presentation. CourtTV anchors interrupt the trial about every 15 minutes or so before the commercial breaks and to usually talk to lawyer commentators. Now, I’m no lawyer and everyone is presumed innocent and such, but without going into any detail, the evidence against Orange Taylor is pretty overwhelming. But in the world of CourtTV, “reasonable doubt” is key: commentators talk about whether or not the interview was even legal, about the validity of Taylor’s story, etc., etc. And it occurred to me that in TV-land, they have to do this. If the commentators came on and said “oh, he’s guilty as hell,” then most viewers would turn the channel.
I don’t know exactly what that all says (and maybe it’s patently obvious), but I still think it’s interesting.
One other thing I’ve learned from this: if the police ask you to come in for an interview for any reason (well, unless you are clearly the victim of a crime), bring a lawyer. Taylor, who is proving himself not to be one of EMU’s best and brightest in this interview, more or less gives the police all that they need to file charges against him just through this “informal interview.”