A colleague of mine with a real job alerted me to a book called Integrated HTML and CSS: A Smarter, Faster Way to Learn by Virginia Debolt that he said looks interesting. The description on amazon.com makes it sound pretty cool too; maybe if I end up teaching a version of Writing for the World Wide Web next year….
"Essential bookmarks for web designers and web developers"
Check out this list of “Essential bookmarks for web designers and web developers.” I don’t really have time right now to see if it really is all that “essential” for the likes of me, but I am more than willing to let this guy maintain this handy list of links instead of me. Or at least I’m willing to link to his list of links….
Television: a study in contrasts
This morning, I surfed over to Jeff Rice’s blog and read this entry called “Media Mind,” which is a reflection on a New York Times Magazine essay by Steve Johnson called “TV Makes You Smarter.” Here’s a relevant paragraph from that article, one that makes me think it might make for a good reading assignment in the class I teach called “Writing, Style, and Technology:”
But another kind of televised intelligence is on the rise. Think of the cognitive benefits conventionally ascribed to reading: attention, patience, retention, the parsing of narrative threads. Over the last half-century, programming on TV has increased the demands it places on precisely these mental faculties. This growing complexity involves three primary elements: multiple threading, flashing arrows and social networks.
In other words, not all television is crappy, and I think this has always been the case, actually.
Anyway, on my way back from the gym (where, among other things, I walked/jogged on a treadmill while watching TV), I heard this BBC News story on Michigan Public Radio about an organization called White Dot that is claiming this as turn your TV off week. It was the usual “TV is bad for you” story, but with an interesting twist. As the White Dot web site makes clear, this organization wants folks to turn off TVs that are invading public spaces (bars, pubs, cafes, etc.), and they want them to use this universal remote device to do it. To quote from their web site:
At EuroDisney, before they can see “Honey I Shrunk the Kids”, visitors are ushered into a dark, carpeted room to wait for the next show to begin. Stuck there, with nowhere to go, they are forced to watch Kodak commercials on long banks of televisions. Standing in line at Disneyland is now a business all in itself. And these visitors, who’ve already paid their money, are now the perfect captive audience.
Luckily, on the day I was there with my young daughter, I had a prototype of the TV-B-Gone universal TV off switch. Very slowly, I pulled it out of my bag and aimed it up at the nearest television. I pressed the button and my mouth fell open. The entire bank of TVs on my side of the room had gone black.
“Man,” I thought “the future starts now!”
First off, if you go to a place like EuroDisney and are steamed about how you are constantly being bombarded by media messages and commercials, I think the televisions you are forced to watch while waiting in line are the least of your problems.
Second, there are plenty of places to go where you can enjoy a “TV Free” environment in public. I can’t think of a coffee shop that I go to that has a television, and while I go to plenty of restaurants and bars that have TVs, most of those places have areas where you can sit and be pretty much away from TV.
Third, it seems to me that going into a crowded bar and messing with the TV with this TV Be Gone device (during a Pistons playoff game, for example) is a way to get yourself a good ass-whoppin’. And that’s the thing: while these White Dot people see a TV in a bar as an invasion of their precisious personal space, most of the people in the bar are there to be a part of a community experience, one that involves watching a sporting event on TV.
Personally, the whole argument is pretty irrelevant to me right now. I used to watch quite a bit more TV than I do now, but I think I have more or less passed out of the demographic for “ideal” television viewer. Nowadays, I mostly watch the Food Network, Comedy Central, network news, and CNN. I watch stuff on HBO once in a while (Six Feet Under, for example), but I think I can count on one hand the number of network shows I watch on an even remotely regular basis.
Just don’t use that TV Be Gone thing on me….
CFP: Computers and Writing Online
This is old news (it showed up on Kairosnews a week ago), but check out the CFP for Computers and Writing Online anyway. Proposals are due on May 2, which means this might be a good opportunity for graduate students or even “go-getter” undergrads to participate in a version of an academic conference without having to put up the money (fees, travel, etc.).
One of the other innovations here is that C&W online is going to be hosted via the Kairosnews blog space; another example of how blogs have a lot of potential and promise for the kind of scholarly work we do in person and/or in print now.
Do you want some more reasons to not shop at Walmart?
Here ya go: Walmartwatch.com
Stupid Michigan Weather…
Here’s my backyard this morning– ON FREAKIN’ APRIL 24!!! Jeesh.
We’re under a winter storm warning, but I have my doubts. They were predicting up to seven inches yesterday in the paper, and they’ve backed down to maybe three today. We’ll see. And then tomorrow, it’s supposed to get up to 50.
Stupid Michigan weather….
Bush at Calvin College: two random thoughts
While surfing around this morning, I came across a pseudo-blog at the Washington Post called “White House Briefing,” and I read Friday’s story about W. being the commencement speaker at Calvin College this spring. The writer, Dan Froomkin, answers the question “why Calvin College?” by pointing out that Calvin is “a highly regarded center of evangelical intellectual thought.” I suppose that’s true, but Calvin is also in Grand Rapids, which is smack-dab in the middle of Michigan “Bush Country.”
Anyway, two unrelated thoughts occur to me this morning. First, I’m pretty sure Calvin didn’t so much invite Bush to come speak, and I don’t think it was the result of Republican alumni per se; I’m pretty sure what happened is the White House said to the folks at Calvin “hey, guess what? W. is going to give your commencement speech.” That’s pretty much what happened here at EMU five or six years ago when Bill Clinton was the commencement speaker. As I understood the process back then, EMU was pretty much told Clinton was going to be speaking; it wasn’t so much that anybody at EMU asked him to come.
Second, I have a very different memory of Calvin College. This must be close to 20 years ago now, but my friend Troy and I had a mutual friend of ours from Cedar Falls named Ann (just friends, btw) who ended up going to Calvin College. I don’t remember Ann as being particularly religious– she was one of the “theater kids” at my high school– so I don’t know why she ended up out at Calvin, and I honestly have no idea why Troy and I would have shlepped all the way from Iowa out to Grand Rapids (other than just to go on a roadtrip), but shlep we did. I don’t remember a lot of evangelical intellectualism on our visit; instead, I remember meeting Ann’s friends who partied their asses off, seemingly 24 hours a day.
Of course, as I think about it, maybe there is a relationship to college age drunkenness, evangelical intellectualism, and W.: maybe Calvin (and other religious colleges) is considered such a “religious center” because, through an environment that fosters debauchery of the youth, it’s really building students who have something to repent for. I mean, isn’t that what made W. into an evangelical Christian, a youth of cocaine and drunk driving? It’s a kind of reverse psychology thing.
Hey Ya, Charlie Brown!
See “Hey Ya, Charlie Brown,” a .mov format movie that remixes scenes from a Charlie Brown cartoon and the Outkast song “Hey Ya!” The funniest part is at the beginning; after that it gets a little repeatitive, though I guess the song does too.
Interestingly enough, I first saw a snippet of this as part of a presentation Lawrence Lessig gave at the Conference for College Composition and Communication this past March in San Francisco. That’s the “big conference” I go to for my line of work. Lessig’s talk, which was about issues of intellectual property, copyright, and the Internet, was one of the best I’ve ever seen at an event like this and he used this little video as an example of the creativity possible with remixing. If you’re curious (and shouldn’t you be?), you can actually listen to Lessig’s whole CCCCs presentation here. There’s some other cool links at that site, too.
Lessig talk at the CCCCs online
I think this has been up and running for a while, but I am just getting around to adding a link now:
They are mp3 files (along with some links) and I think they will be “required listening” the next time I teach 516. The only problem is that a sound recording alone can’t capture all the excitement of Lessig’s presentation; you’d need some video for that, or at least his zillions of PowerPoint slides.
(Kind of) fun readability testing tool
I stumbled across this, the Juicy Studio Readability Test, while surfing around this morning. Plug in an URL and it gives you results, though the page is a little confusing, I think– you have to scan down the page quite a bit. Interestingly enough, my official blog scores a 10.7 on the Gunning Fog Index (which means, according to the explanation on the site, that I’m somewhere between Newsweek and The Wall Street Journal), while my unofficial blog scores a 7.03 (somewhere between TV Guide and Reader’s Digest).
Yeah, yeah, I know, readability tests are problematic, of course. But I still think that they’re kind of interesting, and I think it might be interesting to use some things like readability tests and grammar checkers as part of the revision process– not grading mind you, but as an aid in reading. I know this is the case in my own writing. I have the grammar checker off in my copy of MS Word, but every once in a while, I do run it when I’m revising or proofreading something. I find it frequently helps me slow down my in my own re-reading, and every once in a while, it gives me some good advice.
And besides, this site is just kinda fun.