betajames

For grammarians, it’s a dependent clause + colon + just about anything, incorporating any and all elements of the other four colons, yet differing crucially in that its pre-colon segment is always a dependent clause.

(Yikes.)

For everyone else: its usefulness lies in that it lifts you up and into a sentence you never thought you’d be reading by giving you a compact little nugget of information prior to the colon and leaving you on the hook for whatever comes thereafter, often rambling on until the reader has exhausted his/her theoretical lung capacity and can continue to read no longer.

(Breathe.)

See how fast that goes? The jumper colon is a paragraphical Red Bull, a rocket-launch of a punctuator, the Usain Bolt of literature. It’s punchy as hell. To believers of short first sentences–Hemingway?–it couldn’t get any better. To believers of long-winded sentences that leave you gasping and slightly confused–Faulkner?–it also couldn’t get any better. By itself this colon is neither a period nor a non-period… or rather it is a period and it is also a non-period. You choose.

The assumption that today’s student are computer-literate because they are “digital natives” is a pernicious one, Zvacek said. “Our students are task-specific tech savvy: they know how to do many things,” she said. “What we need is for them to be tech-skeptical.”

Zvacek was careful to make clear that by tech-skeptical, she did not mean tech-negative. The skepticism she advocates is not a knee-jerk aversion to new technology tools, but rather the critical capacity to glean the implications, and limitations, of technologies as they emerge and become woven into the students’ lives. In a campus environment, that means knowing why not to trust Google to turn up the best sources for a research paper in its top returns, or appreciating the implications of surrendering personal data -- including the propensities of one’s bladder -- to third parties on the Web.

The Pritchard axiom — that repetitive cheating undermines learning — has ominous implications for a world in which even junior high school students cut and paste from the Internet instead of producing their own writing.

If we look closely at plagiarism as practiced by youngsters, we can see that they have a different relationship to the printed word than did the generations before them. When many young people think of writing, they don’t think of fashioning original sentences into a sustained thought. They think of making something like a collage of found passages and ideas from the Internet.

They become like rap musicians who construct what they describe as new works by “sampling” (which is to say, cutting and pasting) beats and refrains from the works of others.

This comparison to rap musicians doesn't read right to me. The demands of sampling require a certain knowledge and awareness. To extend the idea that students aren't learning when they cheat to how many successful rap artists make a living reveals a lack of understanding. Such a view is overly simplistic and the definition of "learning" might be too narrow.

In my first-year and advanced composition courses, I have an assignment, "Mashup Scholarship," that asks students to put together a minimum of five sources using none of their own words. They have to use the transitions provided in the sources they've chosen. They read Lethem's "The ecstasy of influence" and watch Youtube videos for modeling purposes. They come up with alternative citation methods, from color-coding to ISBN to something else that only makes sense to them. In reflective writing about this assignment, students often name "Mashup Scholarship" among the hardest composing they've completed.

In most cases, using wikis to pool human knowledge of various topics into single, authoritative accounts falls into the “not” category. Academic culture abhors mass authorship. This is not only because many disciplines are given to disagreement and conflicting interpretations, but because scholars tend to chafe at the notion of not getting credit for their work, or having it fussed with by others.

“Literature reviews and summaries of articles are never going to be entirely objective; it would be difficult to write useful ones, for example, that conformed to Wikipedia's NPOV [neutral-point-of-view] requirements,” says Jason B. Jones, an associate professor of English at Central Connecticut State University.

Anyway, Jones says, the professoriate is too entrenched in traditional publishing to summon much interest in helping curate academic wikis.

Librarians not only provide access to physical materials, they are also trained in using the internet appropriately to extract information for users – a skill that has been at the heart of the profession for many years. This ensures that misinformation is minimised and helps to maintain a well-informed society. Furthermore, as information professionals, they play an important role in facilitating access to government information that is otherwise inaccessible to the disenfranchised. This is also crucial in a democracy, particularly during times of economic crisis. And yet, when they're needed most, libraries are talked of as an irrelevance by policymakers who think libraries should be run by untrained volunteers.

The survey also suggests that this age group generally consumes most of their political information online. Online news sources may be at the expense of newspapers and broadcasters, but the study says traditional forms of media have ‘normalised’ their use of social media, both as source material and to extend their own service. Newspaper and broadcast news websites are providing live blogs, digital correspondents, republication and retransmission, which has ‘helped to amplify the impact of social media even further’, says the study.

"They should be able to do more," says Joseph Engelberger (pictured above), the founding force behind industrial robots and considered the father of the modern robotics industry. "We need multitasking robots that can think for themselves and do something useful. Working robots have to be something more than this," he says, referring to the impracticality of most robots, at least as far as the media's opinion goes.

Two hierarchies enmesh themselves in the routine of consuming pellets and hunting phantoms, producing a single myth. The first is familial, the patrilineal logic that tells us Pac-Man and his partner, who we know only by her relation to Pac-Man, should bear a son in the image of themselves and in the image of modern France. The sign of Jr. Pac-Man communicates by way of exclusion that the future France will, too, descend from Charlemagne. Our magazines advertise that France abides "three colors, [but] one empire," while silently assuring the Gaulois bourgeoisie that the face of Pac will be the singular face of the multivalent state.