Dis Maks My Teacha Cry

Check out this article in which I'm quoted published yesterday in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. This is about the fifth time I've been interviewed on this topic: how new media speak is corrupting the English language. Next time, I think I'm just going to throw them one of my favorite passages from The Canterbury Tales. Bring back the good old days when standard English was pure and uncorrupted!

Are We Shrinking or Not?

Reading Clarence Fisher's post of February 18 in which he mentions Danah Boyd's mention of a map that was published in The Guardian, made me think of this video which was broadcast recently on CBS's Sunday Morning. The authors, Josh Landis and Mitch Butler, suggest that, while we don't allow our kids to walk as far from home as we used to, they may, in fact, end up traveling more than our immediate ancestors, both via the Internet and physically. It appears that many people are asking variations on this same question: is our world shrinking or expanding? But I wonder if this isn't just the same variation on the alarmist theme that has been with us since the invention of the printing press. Kind of a sub-question that is always kind of ominously floating around these discussions is whether this new world is "bad" for us or "good" for us, witness one of the main stories on NBC's Today show today complete with an audience poll at their main site asking people to vote on one of three options:

How big a role does tech play in your life?
I'm over-wired. I need to cut back on the time I spend on my phone and/or computer.
I'm under-wired. I need more tech in my life to stay plugged in to today's world.
I think I've struck the right balance between the real and virtual worlds.

OK, I've got to go and vote now myself.

Hartley in Hollywood

Here's an article in The Suburbanite about an actor who worked with me when I was workshopping my screenplay, Field Trip. Go Nate!

Album of the Year on Sale at The Exchange

At lunch today, I stopped in at my local second-hand CD place. It used to be called the "Record Exchange," but now it's just called "The Exchange," because who plays records anymore? I was looking for an album (how retro) that won Album of the Year at the Grammy's on Sunday. Everytime I go to The Exchange, I'm surprised at how much their inventory of music is shrinking. Ten years ago, they still had the bins in the center of the showroom with vinyl LPs. Now most of the store's inventory is taken up with games and DVDs. And everytime I'm in there there seem to be fewer music fans; in fact, it seems like they're always the same cast of characters now, including (what seems like) the same angry mother/grandmother selling off a bunch of video games as a punishment for some kid in her household. Last time I was there, I heard the woman going off about her progeny to the diffident "alt" clerk. This time, she just had an angry look on her face while he was explaining The Exchange's negotiation policy.

I made it to the lonely jazz bin and there it was--one copy of Herbie Hancock's The Joni Letters. It was marked down to $9.00. I thought of how weird the Grammy's seemed on Sunday and how weirder they seemed now in retrospect in the Exchange. During the telecast, they tried to juxtapose the old and the new, celebrating 50 years of Grammys. My favorite was the pairing of Keely Smith and Kid Rock singing "That Old Black Magic," almost on a par for weirdness (but not on a par musically) with the pairing of Bing Crosby and David Bowie's singing "Do You Hear What I Hear?" And, for all that effort, the Grammy's got poor ratings. When I was watching the show, I felt happy for Herbie Hancock as he talked about how no jazz album had won Album of the Year for 40 years. But, as I stood there looking for what other good stuff I could get for $2.50, I felt like the parade had passed him by.

To Blog or Not to Blog

Stephanie and I had dinner last night with some great friends, and the conversation turned to blogging (go figure). There was quite a heated debate with folks lining up on either side of the debate, although I seemed to be the only pro-blogger (and I'm even very much a latecomer to it.) Anyway, most of the people who attended this dinner couldn't understand why so many people are drawn to blogging. There was disbelief expressed over how people have time to read what amounts to other people's journal entries (sometimes focusing on daily minutiae) and then to comment on the blog entries. "Who cares?" was the opinion often expressed about the content of typical blog entries.

I must admit sometimes, when I'm reading someone's blog entry about something the person saw in the newspaper that day or about something funny that a colleague said or some such example, I sometimes think, "Why am I reading this?"

Of course, my interest in blogging is coming from an eduation point of view and, as someone who teaches future teachers, and who researches "new literacies," I feel I need to be part of the blogosphere, even though usually I'm just a lurker. Just to give one example of a positive blog resource (one, ironically, that I first heard of on a broadcast television program--The NBC Nightly News), there is a guy who has created a blog consisting of old letters that were written by his grandfather during WWI. He is typing them into his blog daily exactly 90 years after they were written, as if his grandfather had a blog from the warfront. He's not telling what happened to his grandfather, so the reader has to check in with the blog every day to see what happens. What a great resource for a teacher who is teaching the WWI era! I will probably check in from time to time with the blog to see what happens to his grandfather. Although, I probably won't have time to comment.

One Community, One Film

You've heard of entire communities reading one book and discussing it? Well, here's the first example I've seen of an entire community viewing a film together. Thanks to Frank Baker for finding this!

Twine

Check out this article that appeared in Sunday's New York Times about yet another way to organize all your documents and network with others who are interested in the same topic(s).