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, …