Writer, Professor, and Everything Else
I found this via a Facebook ad: Word Clay, a self publishing service with a pretty snazzy-looking interface. And I like the name, Word Clay.
Of course, vanity press er, self published books are worth pretty much diddly-squat in academia and such, but this site and my recent trip to the new Borders (which features a sort of self publishing station in the techno-geek area) makes me wonder: has some marketing study decided that self publishing is the next big thing in the age of the Internets?
Gary “AD&D” Gygax passed away. As geeky IT web site “The Register” put it:
Dungeons & Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax rolled a natural one on his fortitude save today, dying at level 69 at his home in Lake Geneva.
Best known for developing D&D with Dave Arneson in 1974, Gygax helped formulate a pen-and-pencil role playing ruleset that would become a touchstone for modern gaming across its genres.
My own AD&D phase was in junior high/early high school, with a few gaming sessions all the way into early college years. Truth be told though the people I hung out with were more likely to play Traveller or Runequest. Will is getting the itch to play these games already, playing a kind of watered-down version and also making up a version with some friends at his school. I suspect Gary would be proud.
Via the Web Worker Daily (and I got the point here from the techrhet email list), “Who Needs Photoshop? 6 Free Graphics App Gems,” which is just that. It’s interesting how much this free/share/open source -ware has flourished. When I was first teaching classes like “Writing for the World Wide Web,” I always spent a fair amount of time on Dreamweaver and PhotoShop under the theory that students needed to have some working knowledge of these packages to do stuff for the class, even though students generally couldn’t afford to get this software legally. Nowadays, that stuff really isn’t that necessary, is it?
It isn’t so much a video as it is an extract from a podcast, but The Ricky Gervais Show is worth sharing in any format. I present to you a brain boiling (et al) urban legend:
Some of the other English teachers in the crowd out there may have seen this one before; I had not, and it game me a chuckle in a good kinda way:
From my long-time/college friend Chris comes this video that explains the “Monty Hall Problem:”
Now, just to give you an idea about what kind of geek, arguer, and non-science/non-math kind of guy I was: I recall having long and even heated arguments about this topic among the seven other similarly inspired geeky folks I lived with on Davenport in Iowa City as an undergrad. And I even remember this carrying on into my MFA program. One night, a friend of mine and I tried to test this theory in the only way a couple English/creative writing types could have managed: we acted it in little table-top game of “Let’s Make a Deal,” playing it out 100 times. And damned if switching didn’t win 66 times.
Ah, memories.
While surfing about this morning, I came across a promo for a film called “The Last Calligraphers,” which is coming out this summer and which is a documentary about the only newspaper in Asia (maybe the world, I don’t know) written by hand. It’s been running since 1927. They do ultimately convert what they write into plates and print it, but the way that they “get it down” is kind of cool.
Yesterday, I heard a pretty interesting story on the public radio show “This American Life.” The overall theme of the show was called “Human Resources,” and it will be available at this link (I think?) starting on Monday. The lead story was “The Rubber Room.”
The rubber room is essentially a holding facility for teachers in the New York City school system who have been suspended for something and are awaiting some kind of hearing and/or reassignment. Basically, these people have to show up to this place and do nothing (well, they can play cards, sleep, chat, etc.) for seven hours a day and get paid for it. On face-value, this might seem like some kind of scam. But as the story suggests, it is far from a happy-go-lucky kind of arrangement. Interesting stuff.
They are trying to make a documentary movie about this, and there’s a web site called RubberRoomMovie.com where you can view a trailer, learn more about the whole set-up, etc.
From bbTV, which I found from John Battelle’s Searchblog:
From the blog Framed comes this entry, “Don’t Turnitin: Annotated Bibliography:”
Late last year, the company (Turnitin) attempted to induce high school students–minors, mostly–to assent to a new and draconian user agreement by clicking through a document that appeared when one logged in to Turnitin. Turnitin attempted to induce students to agree to its terms without even notifying the school district or the parents of children in the school. This step caused the school to temporarily suspend the service.
Now, however, the school has sent home a form for parents to sign authorizing their children to click through and assent to the Turnitin contract. Unfortunately, the school did not tell parents anything about the content of the agreement they were supposed to authorize their children to assent to.
The blogger in question, James Trumm, also includes a handy bibliography that sums up the problems of Turnitin. But these tactics are pretty dang low if you ask me.