Thought Dance

A glimpse at online gaming/youth culture

2011-04-17T12:01:00.001-04:00

Here are some links related to "The Guild" web series about gamers online and in real life. These links come from the guild's press section.

http://www.cnn.com/2010/SHOWBIZ/09/06/dragoncon.theguild/index.html?iref=allsearch√
There are some interesting insights in the next write-up related to how heros aren't chosen - they choose themselves (what ted.com talk was that?!), and being able to tweak their own lines.

http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=31187

The order that I watched the guild episodes is season 4 and then seasons 1, 2, and 3, in order.

What got me hooked were the two songs, in this order:

Talks I've been to today

2011-04-12T06:40:00.000-04:00

Big History by David Christian (TED, March 2011)

The Danger of Science Denial by Michael Spector (TED, Feb 2010)

When Ideas have sex by Matt Ridley (TED, July 2010)

Some Great Presentations on SlideShare.net

2011-03-20T23:53:00.000-04:00

Arg. There's always more than one has time to absorb. Didn't want to lose these links. Come back later!

L2 English Learning & Teaching - Online Bits

2011-03-15T17:31:00.002-04:00

We've been studying approaches to teaching English as a second language in ENG 575/775.
Here are some related bits culled from daily online excursions since January 10, 2011.

Jay Walker on the world's English mania
Forbes Interactive Word Birth Chart: How a Toddler Learns to Talk
(See Philip DeCamp and Deb Roy's MIT Media Lab Human Speechome Project)
Deb Roy at TED.com in February: The birth of a word (20 minutes)
Go to minutes 04:56-05:50 to see the evolution of "gaaa..." to "water".
See length of utterances of caregiver speech and compare with each word is acquired in minutes through minute 07:50. The minimum length utterances coincide with when the word is acquired
We do a subconscious scaffolding - the language learning environment adapts to the learner(!)
Dr. Patricia Kohl at TEDxRainier: The linguistic genius of babies (10 minutes)
"the celestial openness of the child's mind", the 8-10 months old sound development critical period:
going from a citizen of the world to a culturally bound citizen
"It takes a human being for babies to take their statistics."
S{ubterranean} E{nglish} E{xposed}

Some available online tools for learning ESL:

Oye, ¿cómo va mi ritmo? Bueno para gozar. in Google Translate
(Here is the actual song on YouTube)
quizlet.com:
- Elements of Thinking Flashcards
- Quizlet for Teachers
- Now has voice recognition (in beta testing)
voxy.com: "Learn a language from life"
Learn English Network
Teacher's Blog

Turnitin

Fierce Memories

2011-01-22T20:03:00.006-05:00

Just some notes to myself. This last week I lost a dear friend and teacher. I wrote some things down. If the Eastern Progress does not publish it, I will, here.

A nice tribute to Jim Kenkel by Bob Yates: My best friend is dead

Two more papers by Dr. Kenkel and Dr. Yates I plan to read:
We're Prescriptivists. Isn't Everyone?
Grammar and Literacy: Embedding Outside Sources in Text

Just because:
Old Friends / Bookends tune by Simon and Garfunkel

Some nice comments regarding Dr. Kenkel in Facebook.

Dec. 6, 2010

2010-12-04T07:22:00.005-05:00

Symphony of Science
Seth Godin on the tribes we lead
Are we in control of our decisions? (Behavioral Economics)
Photoshop Snowflake Brushes
Beloit College squirrels speak

Facebook and Social Networking: Pros & Cons

2010-12-01T15:30:00.003-05:00

I just had a nice brown-bag lunchtime conversation-presentation with a small group of folks interested in Facebook and Twitter. The short of it:

Facebook now has Facebook Pages which are different from personal Facebook Profiles. Facebook Pages are handy for organizations in universities because several administrators can maintain the same page.
Use mini-feeds, photos, and comments on photos to fuel interaction and conversation.
Twitter is good for up to 140 characters at a time, perhaps twice a day to promote organization events and activities.

Why should we bother? Because students are regularly spending 2 to 5 hours a day on Facebook. Using Facebook and Twitter gives us a great chance to engage students and other constituents and send ripples through their social spheres to keep us all connected. While we can't directly control our organization's brand on social networks, we can at least participate actively in the conversations.

Here are some social web services that we discussed and some relevant presentations in no particular order:

You've Been Facebooked! (short, 14 slides)
What is Social Media? (very good, 66 slides)
Social Media ROI: Socialnomics (VERY GOOD video explaining why we might want to do Facebook)
If we behaved in real life as we do on Facebook (humorous video on some of the CONS of Facebook)
Facebook Manners And You (More humorous Facebook CONS video)
Trouble with Twitters - Super News!

The articles we discussed are in this October 2010 NACA Campus Activities Programming Magazine.

Long hunches and the connected mind: where good ideas come from

2010-09-26T07:12:00.007-04:00

Ideas and innovation seems to be a favorite theme of mine. Here is nice short discussion of where good ideas come from. I love the connection Steven Johnson of TedGlobal (July 2010) makes between coffee houses and GPS. My main takeaways from the 18-minute video below might be familiar to you already:

Chance favors the connected mind.
Good ideas come more from long hunches than from flashes of insight.

Related to the above, you might enjoy Jessa Gamble's 4-minute talk "Our natural sleep cycle". It helps me justify my own early morning awake moments.

Using Songs for Second Language Acquistion

2010-09-25T06:47:00.001-04:00

Let's just say that at least two professors, not both who teach French, have concurred with me on the value of using songs in the "second" (L2) language one is learning. My L2 is French. Here is a treasure trove of French songs, all by Georges Brassens.

My time is short these days, but I will come back to Georges Brassens, I'm sure. In Spanish we have a word "cantautor" (singer-author) for a singer who is also a song writer. I'll have to check to see if there is a special word for it, but I am certain that Georges classifies as singer-poet. Yes, the order of the words matters. The singing attracts our attention, but the poetry holds us.

Some of the songs are on the risqué side, such as Vénus callipyge (video on YouTube). But then, this is also a source of motivation in L2 learning!

Crowd Accelerated Innovation ≠ Shallow Thinking

2010-09-20T01:34:00.001-04:00

I've thought much about and enthusiastically participated in local crowd accelerated innovation on the web in my organization. With Google's introduction last week of instant search results as we type our queries, the realization of how the web and online video affects how we share and think has risen again. Here are two articles that highlight the possibilities very nicely:

The secret power of YouTube
by Chris Anderson of TED.com for CNN.com
Mind control: Is the internet changing how we think?
by Matt Ford of CNN, quoting Nicholas Carr's book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Brain

Before it slips my mind, because indeed, I do think in shorter bursts than before the internet became so ingrained in my lifestyle, I am now even more motivated to learn how to create and use video as a tool to share ideas. And I will embrace the solitude and clarity of thinking that waking up early in the morning provides me to think at length on a particular topic.

Second Language Acquisition

2010-08-27T19:19:00.000-04:00

Time to wake this blog back up. A link to remember: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-11086381

Web 2.0 Video Notes

2007-07-03T11:35:00.000-04:00

I think I saw the Web 2.0 video video in January this year. I took a look at it again and... it is still good. These are my notes:

Web 2.0 content/text is nonlinear, easily changed, linked.
We're (finally!) moving from (HTML) mark-up for form mostly to (XML) mark-up for content. Web 2.0 is linking people, sharing, trading, and collaborating.

I liked this observation --> We need to rethink some things: copyright, authorship, privacy, ... ourselves.

Initial Perceptions

2005-01-13T21:43:00.000-05:00

Choose 5 websites that you think are good and say why. You can use criteria from your readings or create your own. Add your comments to this post. If one of your websites has already been chosen and commented on, choose another, so that all of us post different websites.

Here are five of my favorite HTML and CSS websites, in no particular order:

A List Apart
The EKU Web follows the ways of A List Apart's articles.

Myer Web
Eric Myer is a CSS expert. I believe he is the principal creator of CSS!

Flash Interactivity and Animation
A great place to visit for Flash tutorials and sample files.

HTML Goodies
Can't remember how to do something? This is a great place to start!

Dave Raggett's Introduction to HTML
Notice the web address. Since this tutorial sits on the w3.org site, I'm inclined to give it more weight.

Accessibility From the Beginning

2004-12-11T22:15:00.000-05:00

You've probably heard of the need for speed. How about the need for accessibility? Build it into your web spinning from the beginning and it will be like putting your seat belts on — you'll do it automatically.

Here's an article on how to make your web space navigable with keyboard shortcuts: Using Accesskeys is Easy (www.sitepoint.com article).

Shall We Stress?

2004-12-11T06:25:00.000-05:00

It's final exam time, traditionally the time when we all seem to need to inflict stress on ourselves. To be sure, the need to apply a large amount of study time to perform well on an exam does not necessarily reflect on your immediate time management skills. It could mean that you've simply taken on too many tasks. Regardless, it is a good time to reflect on and think about how you are going to do it better next time.

Names, Identifiers, and Meaning

2004-12-04T18:49:00.000-05:00

I've just spent an hour coming up with a name for this blog. This seems to indicate that the choice of a name is important. Once names are chosen, it will be difficult to change them, particularly once others begin to depend on them.

Although the text for a link can be changed more easily than a website address, you will still want to think carefully about the text you choose to put in a link.