The goal is economy of style, accomplished, like most good writing, through vigorous editing. If you tweet, you know the drill: You've got a spot-on observation, deep thought or humorous nugget to get off your chest and onto the screen. You type away and you end up with, say, 220 characters. So you whittle, and you whittle some more. You work in a contraction or two. If you value the integrity of your writing, you avoid cute rhyme abbreviations ("Gr8!").
Before governments made the ISL mandatory, people often found themselves lost in the myriad of web sites, naively double-clicking Hit The Monkey to Win iPad ads, finding themselves spammed by pop-unders. Acquiring the license typically takes only between 2-5 days of education by your local Surf Training School. You will need to carefully prepare for the final test, in which you are required to answer simple questions like:
- What is a pyramid scheme, and do they really work?
- How do I replace the solar cells on my cyber glove?
- Why exactly is it bad for people to badmouth their governments or big companies online?
- Why is it illegal to surf without a RealIdentity card?
- In which year did Google buy the internet?
While each of these definitions works in some fashion or another, the historical progression of definition as a derogatory item limits any author’s ability to really define what a video game is. With the formative years of the technology behind us, a new era of formation is needed; one that eschews previous development in favor of actually and consciously exploring a medium (and it is a medium) that allows for representation of real systems and exploration of imagined ones.
In 1969, John Lennon inserted a phrase from Chuck Berry in "Come Together", almost certainly as a tribute, but Berry's publisher was a Rottweiler and demanded recompense. If Lennon had used "Here Come Old Flattop" as his title, he might have been safe. For settlement, Lennon agreed to record some Chuck Berry songs on his album Rock'n'Roll, so it was no great hardship.
George Harrison had a worldwide hit with "My Sweet Lord" in 1971. It is odd that its producer, Phil Spector, never pointed out the similarity with "He's So Fine" by the New York girl group The Chiffons. After Allen Klein fell out with The Beatles, he bought the publishing rights to "He's So Fine" and sued Harrison in revenge. He won and over £1m changed hands. After the case, the judge remarked, "I actually like both songs", to which Harrison replied, "What do you mean 'both'? You've just ruled they're one and the same."
What I mean is that what I wrote at Yale was for an audience of a single person, my professor, and that it was intended to convince him that I knew what I was talking about so he would give me a good grade, rather than being intended to communicate something to him that would convince them to change him mind, or trying to give him a framework for thinking about something. In a way, writing a college paper in its current structure is almost custom-designed to crush in the student the idea of writing as a communicative act, because it feels like a long, highly structured interoffice memo rather than an address to the world.
I'll tell you two things I've done here at NYU with the writing my students do for me. One, I assign them write for each other. So they think, "My peers are going to read this and also my professor is going to read this." You'd think they'd be more concerned about me reading it, but the quality goes up when they know their friends are going to read it.
The other thing I do, with some of their stuff, is publish it online. I took a whole bunch of papers by my students from a class we did on the effect of the Internet on the 2008 Presidential election, and I just put them in a big folder and put them online. People's reaction to this was: "Oh, I may actually be communicating something; I'd better get it together here."
The Duke paper reports that the negative effect on test scores was not universal, but was largely confined to lower-income households, in which, the authors hypothesized, parental supervision might be spottier, giving students greater opportunity to use the computer for entertainment unrelated to homework and reducing the amount of time spent studying.
The North Carolina study suggests the disconcerting possibility that home computers and Internet access have such a negative effect only on some groups and end up widening achievement gaps between socioeconomic groups. The expansion of broadband service was associated with a pronounced drop in test scores for black students in both reading and math, but no effect on the math scores and little on the reading scores of other students.
the most advanced models are fully autonomous, guided by artificial intelligence software like motion tracking and speech recognition, which can make them just engaging enough to rival humans at some teaching tasks.
Researchers say the pace of innovation is such that these machines should begin to learn as they teach, becoming the sort of infinitely patient, highly informed instructors that would be effective in subjects like foreign language or in repetitive therapies used to treat developmental problems like autism.
Some question whether college students ever could have studied 24 hours a week — roughly three and a half hours a night. But even if you dispute the historical decline, there is still plenty of reason for concern over the state of 21st-century study practices. In survey after survey since 2000, college and high school students are alarmingly candid that they are simply not studying very much at all. Some longtime professors have noted the trend, which rarely gets mentioned by college admissions officials when prospective students visit campus.
But when it comes to “why,” the answers are less clear. The easy culprits — the allure of the Internet (Facebook!), the advent of new technologies (dude, what’s a card catalog?), and the changing demographics of college campuses — don’t appear to be driving the change, Babcock and Marks found. What might be causing it, they suggest, is the growing power of students and professors’ unwillingness to challenge them.
Providing a writer with the opportunity to revise opens the door for executive decisions. Not only might we see a potentially strong point jettisoned due to lack of development in a timely manner (aka, Steven Seagal's Colonel Travis (skip to 9:21 if impatient)), but it is also possible even something more substantial might not make it. What follows is that something more, "A Potential Model of Online Engagement," a later section of a piece I'm revising under deadline this week. Given the focus of the essay, "Potential Model" didn't quite fit; I knew it when I submitted the piece and those who reviewed it only reinforced this knowledge. So, rather than subject it to the editor's knife, I made a pre-emptive strike, an executive decision, and offer it up here instead for your perusal.
Also, I need to get some less militaristic metaphors (or maybe more Seagal references).
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Because of my diverse research interests in composition, pedagogy, technology, and videogames, it is essential to remain current. Offline methods include organization memberships, attendance at discipline-specific conferences, and subscriptions to journals and other publications. However, I also keep active accounts on Delicious, Posterous, Scribd, and Twitter. This not only makes scholarly activities accessible and public, but also allows me to follow those with similar interests and keep abreast of new developments. Interaction via these communicative technologies is somewhat akin to subscriptions to academic discussion boards and mailing lists but in ways more accessible, open, and public. Through social media tools, I show academic work performed on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis as well as the fruits of those labors.
Functioning as a model of sound academic research online, these four social media tools also work together as a performance of public intellectualism. For instance, I store all online information relevant to my interests on Delicious, a social bookmarking site that allows me to maintain a public, reverse-chronological record of the most recent developments in research through the application of tags like "pedagogy," "rhetoric," and "videogames." Meanwhile, Posterous functions as a vehicle for working through ideas in a public format and further recording the directions my research interests take. It is also in this space that I document the drafting of more traditional academic pieces, such as this very chapter. I post these more traditional academic pieces on Scribd, which is similar to Youtube in that anyone can post any text-based document for others to see and read. I use it as an online repository for all my efforts I consider to be academic work, including assignments and syllabi for past, present, and future courses as well as my dissertation and essays approved for publication. In other words, I use it to provide tangible evidence of my academic output. I announce much of this output on Twitter, which also provides a way to brainstorm new work.
There is an implicit encouragement to finding community with others on Twitter, but it also functions as a launching pad to the other online spaces mentioned here. In fact, Twitter offers what Henry Jenkins calls "spreadable media," noting that, as an academic, broadcast channels are important if he is going to get his ideas into broader circulation: "I don't have access to the airwaves or to a printed publication which might bring what I write to a much broader readership. I don't have an advertising budget with which to put my ideas onto billboards. Twitter, as a platform, alters the scale of my communication by allowing me to expand my readership". The expansion of readership via Twitter often leads to further conversation among interested parties; such conversations continue to have a direct influence on my own research and scholarship.
A tangible example of what this online scholarship makes possible concerns my recent involvement with the Great Lakes THAT (The Humanities and Technology) Camp. Ethan Watrall, Assistant Professor in the Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies and Media at Michigan State University and director of the Great Lakes THAT Camp, encouraged me to submit a proposal because of prior Twitter-based conversations about open courseware. These are the kinds of scholarly activities in which I engage almost every day. In this particular instance, it led to a conference presentation that furthered the academic interests of THAT Camp attendees.
Maintaining a persistent presence online also has some significant connections to professional service. By remaining active via Posterous and Twitter, I not only make new contacts in my fields of inquiry and interest but also have additional venues for sharing ideas and information. By posting items relevant to my interests as well as those following me on Twitter and subscribing to me on Posterous, I encourage and support the work of others. I also engage in learning on a level that is similar to, yet different from, conversing with colleagues in the halls of the English department. Such online engagement is a kind of worthwhile public intellectualism and it continues to have a direct impact on my pedagogical and publishing interests.
Again, it is vital to be informed about the latest research on topics of importance and interest; online communicative technologies help me do that. Partaking in such activities, though, also reveals something about the university I work for. I am an online representative of the English department at the University of Michigan-Flint. I remain mindful of this in every online action I take and I emphasize this point to students in relation to their own academic, online work as well.