During a marking break, I finally got a chance to experiment with the mashup tool that Yahoo created for the San Francisco International Film Festival. I was too late to be eligible for my video mashup to be entered into the contest and played on the big screen, but it was fun nonetheless. The mashup is in the gallery, and I registered under the name gordsellar. The title of the mashup is “(No electric sheep)” and it’s just a man’s dream about women. Silly, but it was fun to play with this technology. Too late but fun has two meanings, …
Month: April 2006
When the Government Tries to Get Its Hands On Your…
This article in Glamour was linked by someone on Culturelist, and it’s rather sobering. Rightwing religious fanatics trying to control the reproduction even of people who aren’t members of their religion… it’s sick, like so much of the Right in America.
Where NOT To Go in New York
The New York Times presents an interactive map tracking Homicides and Crime in New York City. (via Culturelist)
Weirdest Recipe Yet
My Elementary Writing students were working with forms of organization, and we touched upon the structures of lists. Lists of items in which order doesn’t matter — say, ingredients in a recipe, where we just list with commas and an “and” before the last item, and sequence lists, where we outline a series of steps in a procedure, starting each new step with a word indicative of the new step: “First”, “Second”, “Third”, “Next”, “Then”, “After that,” and “Finally” (plus variations). So I had this bolt of inspiration and asked students to submit recipes to me. The recipes would consist …
Plagiarism and Learning
Reading “Why plagiarists do it” by Jack Schafer puts me in mind of the work of marking piles of essays, writing assignments, and exams. One of my students plagiarized in a way I haven’t yet seen. I could tell almost as soon as I saw the text — without reading it, even — that it was copied from somewhere. How? One of the simplest clues is that when someone plagiarizes text from the Net, he usually isn’t the most engaged person. He’s not the kind of person who gets to know a lot about technology, learns how to use software, …
The Economics of Cheating (And Catching Cheaters)
Over at Gangwon notes, there’s an interesting post about the economics of caring about cheating.. I should note that this is specific to cheating on tests. I gotta say, I kind of agree. Most cheaters: Are inept students to begin with, and are likely to hang themselves with any rope you actually give them. Are highly susceptible to well-designed tests. The cheaters among Korean students benefit very much from the multiple-choice, regurgitate-but-don’t-demonstrate-deep-understanding forms that testing often takes here. A test that’s designed simply to force a student to demonstrate understanding and enough intelligence to performing a little synthesis of the …
On Course
Here’s the update: I’m now 100% definitely going to Seattle for the Clarion Workshop. I’ll fly out on the 17th, and I’m going to try to get a ticket that allows me to stop by my mother’s place on the way back to Korea, six weeks later. I’m now in the thick of marking. It’s just not pretty. But one thing that is really making me happy is that a lot of my students seem to have really picked up what I’ve been trying to get them to learn — things like structure in their writing, or a certain kind …
Quizzically
You Are 50% Evil You are evil, but you haven’t yet mastered the dark side. Fear not though – you are on your way to world domination. How Evil Are You? Okay, I’m only half-wicked. You Should Be a Science Fiction Writer Your ideas are very strange, and people often wonder what planet you’re from. And while you may have some problems being “normal,” you’ll have no problems writing sci-fi. Whether it’s epic films, important novels, or vivid comics… Your own little universe could leave an important mark on the world! What Type of Writer Should You Be? But I …
Goreans (NOT Koreans)
Salon Chain gang is a look at the disturbing lifestyle being led by some extreme fans of John Norman’s icky, weird, disturbing Gor books. Female slavery and such. It shocks me how such cruddy books could inspire such a weird movement. No, wait, it really doesn’t. I find it very amusing that the dimwits who actually believe the Japanese changed the spelling from Corea to Korea to put the Koreans down (as if they cared about Romanizations!), and who sometimes spell it Gorea for, well, complicated and somewhat silly reasons, now have to contend with a bunch of messed up …
DARE Generation Diary: Something’s rotten in the State of South Carolina
Dare Generation Diary reports a nutter pol in South Carolina who is apparently pushing to outsource imprisonment of sex-offenders and drug addicts. (Via BoingBoing)