The wife of a Frenchman let me in on a secret method of holding up your side in a conversation in French even when you can hardly speak the language. You simply need three phrases: – C’est vrai! This mean’s “It’s true”, […]

Today Lisbeth‘s defending her PhD thesis on virtual worlds! I wish I could be there, but at any rate, Torill promised me she’ll blog it. Lisbeth’s a bit nervous, but she’ll be fine: she does wonderful work, has strong ideas and will […]

Go look at this map of the world that dynamically displays blog posts, as they’re written, glued to the appropriate place on the map – it’s awesome to watch. For your blog posts to show up here, you need to have the […]

Where, exactly, is /dev/null? I imagine it as a sort of void, a black hole of the system to which I can banish things, send thoughts into exile. I sent all my mail to /dev/null, this afternoon, due to a forgotten then. […]

Assessments for my web design course are finally finished, after a two hour phone meeting with the external examiner. We had 27 students complete the course, and the assessment was budgeted at 90 minutes per student per examiner, which is pretty close […]

Now look at this: a grading system based on Slashdot and karma (scroll down to read about karma, it’s under Assignments). Alex Halavais’s Media in the Information Age course, taught last autumn, had students write 500-1000 word responses each week. Students were […]

Good grief, only 2% of American women keep their names when they marry! Here you have to justify a choice to take your husband’s name, it’s so rare. I couldn’t find the exact numbers at Statistics Norway but among the peope I […]

Have you seen fotolog.net? It’s a community of photo blogs. Thousands of users post their photos daily. Each user has a page of their own which shows their most recently posted photo, in addition to thumbnails of their previous five photos in […]

Jon quotes Adrienne Rich: If you can read and understand this poem send something back: a burning strand of hair a still-warm, still-liquid drop of blood a shell thickened from being battered year on year send something back. Which is another reason […]

One thing I’ve really liked in the student weblogs I’ve been grading is that there are a lot of posts that are really useful. It’s so different from exams where only the examiners are ever going to see all the work students […]