ESPN360.com

As many sports fans have, I’ve seen countless commercials for ESPN360.com over the past few months, but, partially due to the inexplicit nature of the commercials and partially due to my inattentiveness when commercials come on, I’ve had no idea exactly what the site does.  Until today.  I was just browsing through the list of today’s NBA games on ESPN.com in order to find out which games will be televised, when I noticed that there was an additional game, the Nuggets/Mavs game, which was tagged with ESPN360.com.  So, I finally gave in and brought up the 360 site to see what was going on.  Turns out, 360 is live sports in on-demand webcast form.  You can pause, rewind, fast-forward and watch certain events for up to 24 hours.  Pretty awesome, huh?

Unfortunately, there’s a catch:  Your internet service provider has to carry the service in order for you to be able to use it.  It appears that Verizon Online customers can access the service no matter where they live and even away from home.  But, Time Warner Cable, which I’m at the mercy of here in Endicott and back in Rochester, doesn’t carry the ESPN360 service yet.  The reason:  ESPN is charging ISP’s, rather than consumers, for the use of their service, just like they do with their cable channels.  At ESPN360.com, they have a ready-to-go request form that you can send to your ISP to get them to carry the 360 service, but, I’m not getting my hopes up.  Road Runner is expensive enough already, and if Time Warner takes on more costs like 360 subscriptions, the expense will be passed on to consumers.  Also, broadband ISP’s have been increasingly fond of bandwidth throttling and setting upload and download caps, so, who knows what effect more streaming television will have.

Personally, I don’t want to foot the bill for ESPN360.com, but, it would be a nice perk, though I won’t be switching to Verizon DSL anytime soon in order to get it.  If I’m going to subscribe to anything, it’s going to be NBA League Pass, which I might actually do next year.  I don’t get to watch nearly enough Suns, Nuggets, Blazers, or Hornets games.

Fourth Grade Adbusters

I know that most of us English types get the NCTE Inbox e-mails, but, regardless, I have to link to this article from The Herald that they included this week titled “Don’t Let Them Take Ad-vantage.” The article is about a fourth-grade teacher who brought in a media literacy specialist that she met at a teaching conference to deliver a lesson on deceptive techniques in advertising pieces. I’m truly impressed. If only cases like this weren’t singular and newsworthy, but instead the norm. If that were the case, by the time we got students in our middle and high school English classes, they’d probably already be working on some clever culture jamming projects like this one.

If school literacy is moving toward “reading the world as text,” then media literacy studies are imperative, whether they’re in ELA, communications, electives, or wherever. I mean, I’m not advocating for widespread youth cynicism and dissent and insubordination exactly, but, a little healthy mistrust and a critical eye for the details obviously would help Americans start to fit the bill and be considered good, active citizens of a democracy. Plus, I’d certainly rather have a classroom decorated with adbuster-like posters and images than lame dioramas about The Great Gatsby and the roaring twenties. Bravo, Orchard Park Elementary!

My Other Blog

I don’t even know if any of the people who check this blog knew that I had another blog, but I do, and I’ve decided to move it (Andy and His Ephemera, which I formerly used blogger to host) over here to WordPress.  There are lots of reasons.  First and foremost, I think I’ll blog more because being able to manage both of my blogs on WordPress with the same account is super easy.  The WordPress layouts are cleaner looking, and I really love the easily customizable headers.  Blogging here at Digerati Boombati using WordPress really grew on me in the past few months, so moving my personal blog over was inevitable.

Update your bookmarks and bloglines, pals:  Andy and His Ephemera.

If you’re interested, I’ll probably be posting about a bunch of random stuff: music, books, movies, internet crap, maybe some of my favorite tv shows like The Big Bang Theory (if the writers’ strike ever ends), pictures, posting links and youtube videos, lame personal reflections, etc. etc.

My Comic and Comics Webquest Action

I had been planning for a few weeks to make a webquest on Zusak’s The Book Thief, as some of you know.  My idea was to create an opportunity for students to explore the power of language, which is a major theme of the book, in some poems, art, music, videos, etc. etc. whatever.  Conceptually, it sounded easy enough.  But, I’ve realized that I don’t know a damn thing about poetry or art, so finding stuff to work with was fruitless.  And searching by titles with terms like “power of langauge” doesn’t bring up anything worthwhile.  Anyway, I’m still interested in working with this idea, just not in webquest form.  Most of the other stuff I thought of using is in book form anyway, so it doesn’t really fit with a webquest as far as I can imagine.  I really wanted to include a digital version of Dr. Seuss’s Yertle the Turtle, since Yertle is a satirical Turtle version of Hitler, but no luck.  I could only get the text part.

So, after seeing a presentation on the program Comic Life by one of my classmates, Laura, who is an awesome teacher and person, I was anxious to get to use the program.  I read a bunch of webcomics on a daily basis, one of which, Michael’s Exciting Life, seems to use Comic Life since it’s a photowebcomic, which I never knew until I saw Laura’s presentation on the program.  Wanting to play around with the program, I did go into the lab last week and do exactly that.  I took the photos from my trip to the NCTE Convention off my flickr account and made a two page comic, which you can read HERE.  It’s not that great or that long, and it needs a better title.  Oh well, though–just a first test run.  I got a copy of Comic Life for Windows for myself, so now that I have a short break before student teaching, I’m going to try to come up with some ideas for designing my own semi-regularly updated photowebcomic involving stories which me, my girlfriend, and some friends or family members will act out—something sort of in the vein of Michael’s Exciting Life.  Maybe eventually I’ll be able to get my students help me with it and have them become contributors or creators themselves.

After playing around with Comic Life, I realized that having students explore the various genres and formats of comics online, since there are so many free and great webcomics to read online, my favorite of which is Dinosaur Comics (I can never plug it enough!), generate some encyclopedia style entries and favorites lists and post them on a class wiki, then create their own comic, using a webquest as a guide, might be a good idea.  So, I made that on Thursday morning before we were supposed to have class.  You can access my webquest HERE.  It’s still a little rough, but I’m going to be adding to it as I think of more content.  Let me know what you think or if you have any suggestions.  I’d appreciate it.

The Greatest Arcade Game Player of an Era

Wow, I just found a trailer for a movie titled King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters that looks awesome. I thought I’d pass it along because it comes out on DVD in late January. The film is about the two best Donkey Kong players ever in a head-to-head battle twenty years after the game was at the height of its success. Looks like an instant classic.

Go HERE for more info.

The Asylum of All Things Andy: My Weblife in Stasis

I decided to use Google Pages to make a webpage for myself, rather than using iWeb in the Mac lab on campus.  I admit, iWeb is much cooler.  But, for some reason awhile back I lost all of my saved work in iWeb, and I don’t know why.  I still have the domain file on my student drive, but iWeb won’t load the content.  Ray and I tinkered with it and concluded that the saved work will no longer work.  I was annoyed at first, but now I don’t really care because I wouldn’t have been able to update the webpage made with iWeb anyway.  I don’t own a Mac, and though I want one, I probably won’t get one for a couple years since I just got my laptop last year.  I’m also not going to be at Cortland too often now that I’m nearly finished with my graduate classes and will only have to come back for student teaching colloquiums.

Anyway, my webpage can be acccessed HERE.  I’m not too happy with the structural limitations of the layout, but I did the best I could with it.  The Google Pages layouts really just resemble narrow blog templates, and I wish that I could widen it.  I actually could widen it if I had bunches of time to experiment with editing the html code, but I don’t have the time right now with papers, projects, and an exam on my plate.  The upside of Google Pages is that they don’t put ad banners on your pages like Free Webs does, and they also give you 100 MB of free space, which is significantly more than Free Webs.

Making a webpage for myself doesn’t seem nearly as cool nowadays as it did a few years ago because we’re already so connected in so many other ways: Flickr, Facebook, Del.icio.us, blogs, Twitter, etc.  Amateur-made free webpages seem boring to me now without the capability for friends and colleagues to comment and interact with your work.  I mean, webpages are still useful as a hub for organizing our linked internet trails which are now a mile wide, but, I’m still more likely to spend time reading and commenting on someone’s blog or Facebook feeds than I would be to click around on a rigid webpage that is the antithesis of web 2.0.  My Flickr and last.fm badges and my del.icio.us tags automatically update on my webpage, and I could add more widgets, but I don’t like the idea that every living, constantly updating thing on my webpage has to reside in the sidebar, resulting in an overstuffed sidebar and a boring main section.  And for that reason I didn’t put much in the sidebar.  Ah, I don’t know.  /rant

My Eighth Grade Book Club Wiki and Resources

Here is the link to the wiki I put together for the eighth grade book club at Cortland High School.  Hopefully the teachers will pick up the torch and really start using the wiki, rather than letting it atrophy completely.  Even though I don’t think I’m going to be able to make it to any more of the book club meetings due to student teaching in the spring, I’m going to try to send out one more encouraging e-mail and continue to monitor for updates and hopefully contribute a bit too.  Even if the wiki for the book club hasn’t become a completely satisfying experience yet, I’m still hopeful that the teachers and students might use it more in the coming months with future meetings.  Some of the students did genuinely seem interested in the wiki, these things do take time though.  And with them only meeting once per month, there isn’t much opportunity to get them hooked.  Regardless, in the process I learned for myself how easy and potentially useful wikis could be in the ELA classroom.

In my research on wikis, I did find a few useful resources that I’d like to share.  First, I found a great podcast on David Warlick’s blog that is titled “Exploring Wikis in Education with Vicki Davis and Adam Frey,” which is not only a great introduction to wikis and their potential in classrooms, but also interesting because Vicki Davis gives firsthand account of her experiences using wikis in her own classes and plenty of useful advice.  Second, I found a ReadWriteThink lesson plan idea titled “A Collaboration of Sites and Sounds: Using Wikis to Catalog Protest Songs.”  The lesson is essentially a collaborative discovery, examination, and sharing of protest songs which is an engaging way of introducing young students to the idea of working toward social justice, which we’re all concerned with as idealistic ELA teachers.  As the lesson explains, “In 2005, hip-hop artist Kanye West released the single ‘Diamonds from Sierra Leone’ to bring attention to the issue of conflict diamonds. In this lesson, students research and analyze contemporary and historic protest songs and then as a class catalog their findings in a wiki.”  Now, personally I don’t care for Kanye West, but I know that my preferences don’t matter so much.  Kanye West as an introduction, or a partial introduction along with some others, to the art of the protest song will get the attention of probably 75% of the average class at this point in time.  I think this lesson is worthwhile for the same reason that more closely examining all texts that students are already immersed in is worthwhile: students need to be able to read the world around them, and if the music of their world has a message or an agenda, particularly an activist agenda, which much of it doesn’t in the popular realm, then it is worth taking up.  If I’m standing up there blabbering about everything that’s wrong with the world, they’re not going to get as interested as if one of their favorite music artists is singing about it.

I know that some teachers think that examining music in English class, whether it be for poetry or media or musical elements, is lame or has no place or is cliched, but I still like the idea of building opportunities for critical thinking, discussing, and writing around the primary discourses which students are most familiar with.  And no matter what you’re producing, being able to place the end products on a wiki for collaborative editing, organizing, and further examination has to be more useful and inspiring than the typical research paper which is handed in to the teacher and forgotten about, which has no real audience outside the teacher.  I don’t imagine myself ever devoting large portions of the curriculum to analysis of music, but it seems like a great thing to do from time to time in order to get to know your students more and to help them continue to develop a functional, everyday critical awareness of the world.

Wired’s Geekipedia is Weakipedia. NOT!

I just spent a fair amount of time browsing Wired magazine’s Geekipedia, which is good fun. It reminds me of a presentation that Amanda, Joe Fox, and I saw novelist Barry Lyga (author of The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl) give at the Rochester Teen Book Fest last spring. Lyga’s novel is mostly about being a teenage geek, and he had a great power point slideshow on “geekdom” that lasted a good twenty minutes, maybe. He started out by providing various definitions for the word geek, which are really quite funny. Here’s what the American Heritage Dictionary says:

n.

1. 1. A person regarded as foolish, inept, or clumsy.
   2. A person who is single-minded or accomplished in scientific or technical pursuits but is felt to be socially inept.
2. A carnival performer whose show consists of bizarre acts, such as biting the head off a live chicken.

Doesn’t it seem strange that dictionaries haven’t labeled that second entry as “archaic usage” as they do for most word usages which have been outmoded for a long time? He also showed the first entry for geek on urbandictionary.com, which is “The people you pick on in high school and wind up working for as an adult.” Great. Anyway, Lyga had a great presentation on the pervasiveness of “geekdom” from politicians like Bill Clinton to… Oh, I can’t remember, but it was good.

Anyway, as Wired purports, browsing Geekipedia is fun, and with the newfound pervasiveness of a necessary geek knowledge also is somewhat essential. Navigating Geekipedia is a bit tedious, since sometimes you can’t find the alphabetic listing on certain pages, but once there I found that I was familiar with a fair amount of the terminology relating to the internet, but not the more scientific stuff, and not the names of many of the innovators listed. For instance, it was interesting to see entries for two dudes who have changed the face of the blogosphere that I’d never even heard of: Nick Denton and Robert Scoble. I’d also never heard of this intriguing entry: Godwin’s Law, which notes “a feature of online discussion groups: As a thread gathered steam, members would start hurling insults and inevitably someone would be compared to Adolf Hitler. Thus Godwin’s law: The longer an online conversation continues, the greater the probability of a reference to Nazis.” I’ve been a member of a few online message boards, mostly music-related communities, for the past five years, and I’ve never once encountered Godwin’s Law in action. Then again, I don’t frequent the large public forums that are known for rampant douchebaggery and probably lead to these kinds of insult-laden discussions. I frequent a few forums that are online sanctuaries for record geeks and fans of obscure subgenres of music like Japanese psych-rock, New Zealand jangle pop, or post-everything acid folk, for instance, and while we’re all a bit real-life socially inept, we’re at least civil to each other for the most part because we’re happy to encounter other people that share in the same geekdom.

Another entry that I appreciate is the one for Obscolescence Management – “It’s tempting to live on the cutting edge, but rushing out to buy the latest and greatest can lead to frustration, depleted funds, and a growing pile of digital doorstops. The rational approach is to choose gadgets that keep you productive and efficient while early adopters thrash out tomorrow’s features, standards, and form factors.” Hmm, remind anyone of Amazon’s Kindle? Don’t put it on your Christmas or Hanukkah lists yet unless you’re ridiculously wealthy and are going to be purchasing one every year.

Personally, from my experiences with adolescents in schools and those from my own family, such as my teenage cousins, I’m finding that I’m a way bigger internet geek than most kids. I’m addicted to fantasy basketball, my music forums, bloglines, checking my email, delicious, stumble upon (thanks to Ray), last.fm, Facebook, Rate Your Music, Dinosaur Comics (which should definitely have an entry on Geekipedia!), YouTube, etc. etc. etc. I really have no idea outside of social networking and YouTube, though, what typical teens are tuned into on the internet. I think setting up a Geekipedia with my students in order to take inventory and survey what exactly people are familiar with would be extremely helpful, not only to see what they know, but why they think it’s important as Geekipedia set out to explain. Beginning of the year icebreakers seem essential with new classes of students, and a run at making a customized version of Geekipedia would be a good introduction to everyone’s internet tastes.

“The Lines between Ersatz and Authenticity”: Carrie Brownstein on Video Games

I have a bunch of music blogs plugged into my bloglines, most of which don’t update too often, but are always great when they do. One of my favorites is published as Monitor Mix on the NPR website and written by Carrie Brownstein, a founding member of the seminal “riot grrrl” (whatever that means) punk band, Sleater-Kinney. I always considered Sleater-Kinney to be one of the smartest bands, but I guess I had no idea because Brownstein’s blog for NPR is consistently brilliant and thought-provoking. Strike another one up for NPR!

Anyway, the reason I mention her blog here is that her most recent post is about the role video games play in our contemporary society. She wrote a review of the new video game Rock Band for Slate magazine, and she continued the discussion of gaming on her blog. Brownstein points out that “The line between gamers and non-gamers is clearly diminishing, if not already obsolete,” citing the fact that some are hardcore online gamers, some are social gamers playing participatory games like Guitar Hero or those for the Wii, and others make a game out of social networking: “isn’t compulsively checking and updating your Facebook page just another form of gaming? In other words, few of us are immune.” With all of the trivia challenges and zombie tags that are infiltrating Facebook, I have to agree.

Then, though, Brownstein gets to a point about gaming in our society which Jerry would appreciate, and the more I think about it, I appreciate it too. She says, “Part of me feels that Rock Band is yet another example of our culture’s increased tolerance of phoniness, whether for the sake of simplicity or out of sheer denial. It’s certainly easier to pretend to make art or to speak the truth than to actually do either.” She mentions that not just in video games, but also in music nowadays, there is a “blurring [of] the lines between ersatz and authenticity.” And I guess that is where we as English teachers and media literacy educators come in. Our role is to bring this discussion of truth and authenticity to the forefront with our students who all love games, whatever genre they fall under.

Taylor Mali’s “The The Impotence of Proofreading”

Every “English torturer” should see this video. Plus, I figure we’re at the end of a semester and at a high stress point, so we could use a good laugh. Taylor Mali, the guy who is famous for the “What Teachers Make” poem, delivers some good laughs with this piece on proofreading.