jill/txt

“Kimmitt said he has met with representatives of Iraq’s newspapers to discuss how to report the story.”

The list of speakers at Incubation is available, and it looks good. I’m hoping to be there. I was at Incubation in 2000 and though the dorms were less than luxurious it was an inspiring event. And I got to see Sherwood Forest! This year’s Incubation is July 12-14, in Nottingham, of course.

Monday night at Teatergarasjen is full of electronic art, a lot of it performative video art I think. There’s a description and list of artists at BEK’s news site. I’ll go, assuming I find a babysitter, and I expect I will.

What a wonderful explanation of what Benjamin means by the aura of a work.

I asked my students to write a review of a blog of their choice. Several of the reviewees have read the reviews and left comments, mostly amused, some flattered, some disagreeing with the reviewer. One of them though, upon discovering that he has readers, is considering quitting blogging altogether. Vegard Johansen, another reviewee, is happy that he received good reviews, but writes that

Anmelder man en blogg eller en personlig hjemmeside sitter det alltid en privatperson bak, s� da b�r man heller velge � skrive en positiv omtale om noe man liker enn � skrive en lunken anmeldelse av noe man kanskje ikke i utgangspunktet liker eller er interessert i. (If you review a blog or a personal website there’s always an individual behind it, so you should choose to write a positive review of a site you like rather than a luke-warm review of a site you dislike from the start or aren’t interested in.)

Only a few days ago Lilia asked how one ethically uses material from weblogs when doing research. Obviously, I now have to ask a related question: Is it unethical to ask students to write reviews of weblogs?
(more…)

Magic Lantern games has just released their presidential campaign game, Frontrunner. There’s a story about it in USA Today, and more information at their website. I wonder how people are going to like pitting Kerry and Bush against each other - fictionally…?

A few months back I noted the use of the Howard Dean campaign game. If you’re interested in political games you should read my summary post on the Bin Laden games and look up Gonzalo Frasca and Ian Bogost’s Watercooler Games weblog, check out Newsgaming and also Gonzalo’s articles about how games could, perhaps, make real changes - Ideological Videogames/a>, Videogames of the Oppressed and Ephemeral Games.

A soft word, “indecent”, and it brushes my lips as they touch a petal pale as the sky and soft as the silk of a white white nightgown still warm from bed. The rain has stopped.

I was really disappointed when I realised that even after my PhD, neither Scandinavian Airlines or KLM would let me change my title from Ms to Dr Walker. However, British Airways would have been happy to oblige. I could have chosen Her Highness or President as my title with British Airways. I wonder whether people who choose titles like Crown Princess or Contessa are still allowed to fly economy? (via Boing Boing)

A new EU program on mobile and pervasive gaming is going to be led by Swedish Annika Waern, and fully half the 92m SEK (more than €10m) is going to Swedish researchers. Good on those Swedes! Here’s a Swedish article about it, and an abbreviated English one.

I’ve had a few requests for the text and grading scheme for the blog review assigment I’m currently grading, so I’ve translated it into English, all the better to share it and hopefully contribute to this kind of assignment evolving further so I can improve it next time I teach this course. Here’s an English version of the PDF I handed out to the students. For those who don’t like PDFs, I’ve included the text below.

The grade descriptions follow the Norwegian standard, and I’ve tried to write more specific descriptions of each grade for this particular assignment. It’s not a very easy task but I find it useful, and the students seem to like it too. Some of the terms I’ve used are from the SOLO taxonomy of learning outcomes, which I found at RMIT.

The general advice I’ve given as to what students should think about while writing is almost completely taken from Scott Rettberg’s version of this assignment. I’d love to hear any comments - and you’re more than welcome to take this and use it in any way you like.
(more…)

Some of the students’ blog reviews contain pearls. Catherina, for instance, writes about a personal diary mostly dealing with depression, and notes that the blog only has one category: livet mitt, my life. At first I thought she meant this metaphorically, but no, every post is “posted to” the category “my life” and there really are no other categories. Perhaps his blogging software simply defaults to categories, but whether it was planned or not, it seems such a strong image to me, such a striking, though tiny, effect. Trond’s (quite excellent) review is of Citizen Smash’s blog, which I realised after a while that I followed a year ago when Citizen Smash was Lt Smash, one of very few bloggers actually (or apparently) in Iraq. Now he’s back home, a pro-war activist, and Trond’s review elegantly examines a single post Citizen Smash made, not only showing what kind of a blog this is but exploring how this post explemifies how blogs can work as part of a community. Among my other favourite reviews so far (I still have lots I’ve not looked at yet) are Bård’s of Hixie.ch and Alina’s of Shutterbug.com.

So a student at NYU slept in the always-open library because his $15,000 scholarship and his part-time jobs couldn’t cover the $10,000 a year dormitory costs as well as books and food. And he blogged it: just look at the cover page of his blog, he’s revelling in his story and boy has he found a hook for his blog! The library threw him out after the press got the story (here the NY Times story, subscription-free in a syndicated newspaper) but NYU have put him up in dorms for free for the rest of the semester. As you would, given the press.

Free tuition, student loans for everyone that actually more or less cover living expenses and practically no homelessness ROCKS! I *heart* Norway.

Do you think DVD-Jon will get away with this one? He’s released the source code for a crack that lets you play tunes bought from iTunes on as many devices you want. I’m grading, no time for more links.

One of the problems with the grading is that I’m grading blog reviews and so I keep just having to have a look at the blog the student’s reviewed, and well, you know where that leads.

Strange how much easier it is to plan next semester’s course than to just finishing this week’s grading. I was just giving myself a few minutes of surfing, honestly, just a moment, you know, only then I thought I’d just ever-so-quickly try to set up Liz Lawley’s MT courseware, and lo and behold it all worked and was really easy so of course then I had to start filling it with content and translating it into Norwegian and… I shouldn’t even admit that. My current students will start emailing me in protest. I promise, students, I’ll get a move on! Really!

I once heard a successful administrator announce his rules for getting things done in an after dinner speech. The rules went something like this:

1. When you get to work in the morning, start by doing the thing you least want to do.

2. Keep going.
3. By doing this you’ll probably already have covered whatever has the shortest deadline but if not, do that now.
4. Go home. Reboot.

I might have that wrong. Maybe it was do the dreaded thing first then do the things that have to be finished now. I wonder whether it’d work