Via John Walter’s Facebook page (I think this Facebook thing might catch on, btw) comes this link to a glossary of media theory terms. It looks like something that was started (but not finished for some reason) as a project associated with something at the University of Chicago. Kind of an interesting resource that might be useful for research and/or teaching.
Teaching idea for 516 next winter: PraxisWiki
Just something to jot down for now, but just looking now at the Kairos web site again, I “discovered” something that has been there for a while, their PraxisWiki section. I haven’t looked through it too much yet, but it seems like it might be a great venue for students in English 516 to present/publish some of their research projects.
Just how crazy is the far right in this country?
Via Facebook (of all things!), I came across this: “Conquering the Drawbacks of Democracy,” an archive of an article that was pulled from the Family Security Matters web site. This one might take a bit of explaining:
Family Security Matters (as far as I can tell) is a very conservative web site with the goal of protecting us from terrorist (the Iraqis responsible for 9/11 type of terrorists), Muslims, Mexicans, the left wing, etc. Think Dick Chenney’s and Pat Buchanan’s love-child of a web site. Now apparently, the article by Phillip Atkinson was yanked after being published on the Family Security Matters web site because it was too nutty for even this group of nutjobs. “Why is that,” you ask? Well basically, Atkinson’s article laments the problems of democracy and how if we wanted to get something done (like defeating the terrorist), it would be a heck of a lot better to have a dictatorship. And Atkinson has an idea about who that dictator should be. Here are the closing paragraphs from the piece:
If President Bush copied Julius Caesar by ordering his army to empty Iraq of Arabs and repopulate the country with Americans, he would achieve immediate results: popularity with his military; enrichment of America by converting an Arabian Iraq into an American Iraq (therefore turning it from a liability to an asset); and boost American prestiege while terrifying American enemies.
He could then follow Caesar’s example and use his newfound popularity with the military to wield military power to become the first permanent president of America, and end the civil chaos caused by the continually squabbling Congress and the out-of-control Supreme Court.
President Bush can fail in his duty to himself, his country, and his God, by becoming “ex-president” Bush or he can become “President-for-Life” Bush: the conqueror of Iraq, who brings sense to the Congress and sanity to the Supreme Court. Then who would be able to stop Bush from emulating Augustus Caesar and becoming ruler of the world? For only an America united under one ruler has the power to save humanity from the threat of a new Dark Age wrought by terrorists armed with nuclear weapons.
Wow. And the thing is is that I think that this piece got pulled from this web site not because it is at odds with the beliefs and hopes of the folks running this organization, but because Atkins is saying something out-loud that these people believe and hope but know they cannot say. Scary stuff, if you ask me.
DIY Social Networks, perhaps as an alternative/supplement to online teaching tools?
This is another couple of links that falls into the category of “this is interesting, but I don’t have time think too hard about this now:” TechCrunch had a post a while ago called “9 Ways to Build Your Own Social Network,” and this morning, I came across “34 More Ways to Build Your Own Social Network.” Having just looked at these things for 10-15 minutes this morning, these are all different options for doing MySpace/Facebook -like things on your own, with different levels of “do it yourself”-ness. Some of these solutions seem about as easy as Facebook itself, while other options involve software you have to install and run on your own server.
It seems to me a tool like this might be a good thing for online teaching. I tried to get students in recent online classes to have some networking with each other via Facebook, but they weren’t that interested. So many students at EMU are older and/or returning, and while I have lots of students with Facebook accounts, I also have a lot who don’t have them and who are leery of starting an account. And for students who do have Facebook accounts, most of them don’t seem to like mixing the “fun” of that social networking tool with the “work” of classes and school.
So, if a teacher (or a program) could build their own social networking space, perhaps that could help introduce the ideas/uses of this kind of software in a classroom while not crossing the “fun” border some students have in place with Facebook and/or MySpace. Maybe it could even replace clunky software like Blackboard.
Weekend(ish) link round-up, mostly BAWS
I didn’t do a whole lot of work on the BAWS project this weekend– unless you count going to the office supply store for materials I think I’m going to need to keep track of various articles and talking with Steve B. and Bill HD about putting together a survey and getting the paperwork done for human subject review while golfing. I did come across a couple of links to keep track of though:
- “What Part of Bomb Don’t You Understand?” This is a link to a free mp3 for the Chicago Public Radio show This American Life; the story of interest to me here is “chapter 1” of the show, about ten or so minutes into it. Basically, it’s a story about a woman named Rachel North who was on one of the subway cars (in British, that’s tube carriages) in the London Bombings and she started blogging about the experience. She became very popular for this, and ultimately was a target of various conspiracy theorist and ugly comments on her blog. Interesting stuff, which also brings me to this:
- Ellen Goodman’s recent column, “E-male.” On the one hand, part of it seems to be Goodman taking on the role of old school newspaper writer contemplating this new-fangled blog thing. On the other hand, she makes some very good points about the “maleness” and “masculinity” of blogs– maleness in the sense that most bloggers (at least of the political kind) are white male, and masculine in the sense that the mode of discourse in blog forums tends to be aggressive. To quote one paragraph: “Now, after what’s been a long, low rumble over demography and diversity, a grass-roots rebellion is finally surfacing in the netroots. At Yearly Kos itself, home of what Jennifer Pozner described on Huffington Post as the “blustering A-list boys of the ‘netroots,’ ” there was the panel titled gamely: “Blogging While Female.” The question for the panel was this: “The blogosphere was supposed to be a place where gender didn’t matter and voice was all. So what happened?”” I tried doing a search for “Blogging While Female” and didn’t come up with much. Maybe later.
- Two links from Jill Walker, who appears to also be working on a book about blogs (dang, I hope it’s different than my currently imaginary book): first, there’s this, a PDF of a study (summary, I think?), “In 2006, the Top 50K Blogs Generated $500M in Ad Revenue.” Second, this post called “on ads and readership,” in which she discusses a web tracking service called Alexa (which actually isn’t that interesting to me because it only works for the “top 100,000” blogs) and the role of advertising on readership. Interesting stuff, and it makes me think, happily, that Jill and I are approaching the blog elephant from different ends.
When stormtroopers get their shopping done
Actually, this is from these flickr photo users, a couple who like to wear Star Wars stormtrooper helmets in different settings. Funny stuff, found via boing boing.
Maybe this is why Italy is so expensive!
“Venice charges rude tourists extra,” from the Telegraph (UK), which I found today via boing boing. To quote the opening paragraphs:
A “significant proportion” of the city’s bars and restaurants are now operating two or even three price lists: one for tourists, another for locals, and a third for “sympathetic” tourists who make more effort than the usual grunted demands.
“There are different pricing levels,” said Franco Conte, the head of the Venetian branch of Codacons, the Italian consumer rights group.
“If you are Italian, a croissant and a cappuccino costs €3.50 (£2.40),” he said. “If you speak another language, it costs €7.
“In restaurants, a pizza and a drink for two people costs between €20 to €25 for locals, perhaps cheaper for Venetians – but €50 to €60 if you are forestieri.” In Italy, the word forestieri applies to all strangers, who are said to be “from the forest”.
The solution? Brush up on some Italian phrases, according to the article….
Fun with databases and RefWorks; a possible BAWS tangent
There was a conversation a few months back on a mailing list– I think Tech-Rhet– where some current PhD student was asking about the best software options for compiling a bibliography. Frankly, I didn’t pay much attention to it, mainly because I didn’t have time but also because it had not even occurred to me that I would need/want to use such a beast, even as I was embarking on my BAWS project. I guess I’m like that old dude who runs the shoe repair business on the corner and doesn’t understand why he’d need a computer to keep track of his receipts since the filing cabinet has been working great for that for 50 years already.
Well, I decided to change my ways a bit and I’ve started to experiment with some options.
I do like zotero a lot and I have it installed on the browser on my desktop computer, but I wanted something that I could access from any computer. I have a CiteULike account and I might be using it more in the future, but it seems to me that it wants you to manually write up most bibliographic information, which is less convenient. EndNote is apparently the “industry standard,” but I don’t do “industry standard” windoze computing, and besides, it’s expensive.
At EMU, we have this service called RefWorks, so that’s what I’m going to try for the time-being. It is not the most user-friendly thing in the world, but it seems to be able to import bibliographic data from other databases reasonably well. For example, I can look something up in the MLA database via the EMU library and click a button that more or less exports that info into my RefWorks database. Within my database itself, I can add notes, alter the citation information so that it matches up different style guides, etc. It’s sweet. Well, sorta sweet. The import features are far from perfect, and there is always the danger that, with the seemingly never-ending budget cuts at EMU so we can prop up the football team and thus improve our image around the country (no kidding, this is more or less the Board of Regents’ strategy right now, apparently), the library will be forced to discontinue its subscription to RefWorks. But for the time-being, it’s nice.
While working with this and also WorldCat (an example of how the import features into RefWorks from databases is far from perfect, and also an example of a database that I should have used before but hadn’t), I came across a surprising number of pieces of fiction involving blogs, most of it adolescent novels. I’m not entirely sure what to do with this and it would be an enormous tangent, but what does it say about the potential of blogging as a writerly space when it is fodder for fiction? I don’t know, maybe nothing at all; maybe a lot of people who blog a lot fancy themselves to have the sort of power they lend to their characters? maybe a lot of readers of these books are hoping for the same kind of power? I guess I might have to read one of these things to see…,
"Too Old for Facebook?"
This is a Business Week article (I don’t know if it’s just on their web site or not, “Too Old for Facebook?” by Rachael King. The basic point is that a lot of people “born in the 70’s and earlier” are starting to discover things like Facebook in large numbers. This might be something worth including in my teaching, in large part because I have a lot of students– particularly at the graduate level– who either actually were born in the 70’s and earlier, or they feel like Facebook is the kind of thing that only “the kids” do.
Of course, there are two other reasons why I’m linking to this now. First off, it seems like many friends and family (my wife, for example) have just recently discovered this new-fangled Facebook thing and that is kind of amusing. And second, I realize that I have become so old that I fall into the “and earlier” category.
Animator vs. Animation
Cool little movie– even if it was made on a PC: