English Education Professor

 All about 21st Century Literacies. Worth 8 Minutes of your time.

Link to YouTube – Did You Know 2.0

Henry Jenkins, a blogger to follow, beautifully describes how media consumers are a little more active than we originally thought. 

Out of this tension between academic theory and fan experience emerged first an essay, “Star Trek Reread, Rerun, Rewritten” and then a book, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Textual Poachers emerged at a moment when fans were still largely marginal to the way mass media was produced and consumed, still hidden from the view of most “average consumers” and as such, represented a radically different way of thinking about how one might live in relation to media texts. In the book, I describe them as “rogue readers.” What most people took from that book was my concept of “poaching,” the idea that fans construct their own culture — fan fiction, artwork, costumes, music, and videos — from content appropriated from mass media, reshaping it to serve their own needs and interests.

Source: Confessions of an Aca-Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins: About Me

 I love these problem-solving lesson designs.

Performance Tasks: You have been employed by Rogers Communications, Inc. to write a manual about comma usage for their employees after a comma mistake cost the company $2.13 million (Canadian). Employees will need a manual that is user-friendly, helpful, concise, but also thoroughly discusses the rules for commas.

Source: ubdeducators » Dana Comma Unit

I like this definition. I don’t know if the “bold” part is true, though.

Twitter is an inwardly focused place where humans are the aggregators and connectors, providing links and using direct replies to source content and create conversation. The value Twitter delivers is a direct result of the number of people you follow and who follow you. Build a community and you have an engaging conversation that can be joined at any time in a number of ways.

Source: blognation USA technology

But for authors and readers, MySpace offers something entirely new: a forum where we can finally meet and get to know one another — or even collaborate in literary games. For instance, soon after the novelist Matt Haig put up a MySpace profile to promote his book “The Dead Fathers Club,” he received a message that would make any writer’s heart thump. Someone wanted to “friend” him, and that someone was none other than … William Shakespeare. Shakespeare “sent a message telling me how much he enjoyed my work,” Haig explained to me (via MySpace mail). “I returned the compliment and told him ‘King Lear’ was pretty good, too, and that I’m sure he has a solid career ahead of him.”

Source: Writers and MySpace | Blogging Pedagogy

The Invisible Man
The Wealth of Nations
Julius Caesar
Hamlet
Animal Farm


1984
Paradise Lost
The Origin of Species
The Canterbury Tales
Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar


Jane Eyre
Peter Pan
Pride and Prejudice
Inferno
Roughing It

Source: Online Books, Poems, Short Stories – Read Print

Most of the time the urge is to be alone in a room, so that is why I write.

Source: Orhan Pamuk – Banquet Speech

Very useful for using in a Distance Education course.

Link to 20+ Free And Fresh Icon Sets | Graphics

Neat idea.

Hmmm…Familiar?

1) INVOKE A TERRIFYING ENEMY check
2) CREATE A GULAG (Guantanamo Bay, etc) check
3) DEVELOP A THUG CASTE (Private para-military troops) check
4) SET UP INTERNAL SURVEILLANCE (Wire tapping; reading emails, etc) check
5) HARASS CITIZENS’ GROUPS (Familiar with the Cifa? Look it up.) check
6) ARBITRARY DETENTION AND RELEASE check
7) TARGET KEY INDIVIDUALS (Threaten artists, writers, academics, civil servants…) check CONTROL THE PRESS (Arrest of US journalists is at an all-time high) check
9) DISSENT = TREASON (CRITICISM = ESPIONAGE) (Read about the 2006 Military Commission Act) check
10) SUSPEND THE RULE OF LAW (Familiarize yourself with John Warner’s Defense Authorization Act, 2007) check