August 31, 2010 – 6:50 pm
Many semesters ago, even prior to the issues brought up in this post, I had one of my first encounters with the laptop and smart device as a tool for critical thinking and information literacy. In Composition II, we’d been talking in class about Connecticut’s brain drain subject and the thought occurred to me that [...]
At Tunxis Community College we’re always looking for ways to provide students opportunity for challenge. In a course titled New Media Perspectives, the introductory course in Tunxis’s New Media Communication program, we employ Tinderbox, software developed by Eastgate Systems. This powerful software provides students flexible methods of visually illustrating relationships, physically linking ideas, and developing [...]
Something bugging me. It’s been bugging me since 100 Days 2008. But it’s come back since I’ve been reading Hargood and Millard on Narrative and Theme. It’s bugging me in a good way. But here’s the story. Let’s say you watch John Timmons’s video perusals. Of course, a first viewing will produce an interpretation or [...]
As we’re fans of Michael Dante DiMartino’s animated Avatar, my son and I attended Shyamalan’s version today titled The Last Airbender. My first response is, “What was he thinking?” and “It’s not that hard.” The animated work is an excellent unification story, a journey narrative of impressive complexity, color, and emotional pull. Aang, the last [...]
Monday is the Solstice. 8:30 or so and dusk can still be seen. Great. This summer I have a few projects. Some are trivial. Prep for Fall teaching, bone up some programming. Other things not so much. In May I decided to learn how to play the guitar. And 100 Days is pulsing like the [...]
I’m teaching myself how to play the guitar. I have the Idiot’s Guide and a Fender acoustic, whose neck is too small for my left hand but is nonetheless playable. Too small, because at the size of my fingers, it’s tough to play something like A without the index rubbing up against the third string. [...]
Mano Singham’s The New War Between Science and Religion published in CHE is an odd duck. Here’s a portion of the set-up The former group, known as accommodationists, seeks to carve out areas of knowledge that are off-limits to science, arguing that certain fundamental features of the world—such as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and the [...]
It’s always interesting after a course has run to think back through and consider content, method, and production. New Media Perspectives has seen several versions and we’re really just hitting our stride in the course. We cover several issues: 1. An overview of new media principles and examples we think are generalized and reflect digital [...]
This is an email answer from a student, responding to an article I sent that seemed to have relation to her research topic: This article would have been perfect to go along with the Filion study. Nice.
The Courant asks a leading question of the “governors”: “Where specifically will you find the money or savings to lead the state out of the red?” 4 out of 8 “governors” focus only on “guvment” and how they’d play with that red herring. Give some credit to Foley, Griebel, Lamont, and Malloy for admitting to [...]
We did some iPad tests today with That Night. Some basic content filtering and attention to CSS3 makes making for the device pretty simple, in fact, so simple that the writer can concentrate on content. The fonts are a little small, but Juanita and Cadif will fix that issue. That’s a plus. I like this [...]
The past few years have seen different themes. Last year we were talking and studying jazz music and its relationship to issues of performance, creativity, history, hypertext, and new media. This semester, we’ve picked up a new or more elaborate theme: film, new media, hypertext, and performance: we’ve gone from Roberto Bolaño through to Anthony [...]
There are a couple of problems with 60 Minutes’s Brain Power report: 1. This isn’t The Matrix nor do these pills make people “smarter”; they temporary provide chemical therapy for focus. The persistent use of “smart drugs” is deceptive. 2. The report should have been framed against testing as a means of measuring learning in [...]
We had steak salad tonight. Simple, easy, and something else. I seared the steak on a hot griddle (this cast iron griddle has been seasoning for a couple of years so it’s always easy to clean and smells astoundingly). I sliced up a sweat onion and slid it beside the steak for blackening on the [...]
Roger Valdez of World Changing points to a study in JUPD on fundamental relationships: So while the study has its limits — it compares just two neighborhoods in a single city– it points, as other studies do, to the evidence that sprawl and car dependence are closely linked, and are responsible for a disproportionate share [...]
That Night I Wandered on my Homeward Way (DrunkenBoat 10)
100 Days: 100 Poems, Summer 2008
