Money as Medium

Wow...what a powerful statement to use money as the printing medium. A twist on "the medium is the message"...

Email, Texting and IM

I recently finished a paper on how formal academic writing is changing due to increased use of email, texting and IM. I'm posting it here so that all those who participated in my research have a chance to see the final results. To access it please go to my wiki and look for ITSF 4190 Term Project.

Media Project

Final Media Project on Identity:

Multimodal Dance

Tonight I took a break from the crazy amount of end of the semester work and went to see a performance by the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. There aren't enough adjectives to describe it. But I'm biased because I love dance and I've been around it my whole life. Tonight, though, was the world premiere of "Uptown" choreographed by one of the company members. This performance was something I've never seen in dance before...and this might be because I don't generally go to modern dance performances. Dance is usually set to music, but tonight, they incorporated images, audio recordings of W.E.B. Du Bois and Zora Neale Hurston, poetry by Langston Hughes, and narration by one of the dancers. It was all beautifully choreographed to present the history of the Harlem Renaissance as a multimodal feast for the senses.

This is crazy!

Are we really a step away from having computers as a part of our physique?

Cell Phones as Teaching Tools

I came across this article today as I turned my computer on. It's something I've been interested in trying to incorporate into my teaching as a tool but I'm not sure how my principal would feel about it since we have a quasi-strict "no cell phones in class" rule. I can definitely see the positive and negative aspects to using cell phones to teach, but the author also make a good point about the technology today and who has access. I wonder if school district firewalls are a consideration for any of this as well.

New Words

One day last year my friends and I were sitting around talking about the new verbs we seemed to be using all of a sudden, "friend" being the most common. (as in "so-and-so friended me on facebook") It go me thinking about how new words are made and who makes them. The first time I heard "fantabulous" on TV recently I was a little surprised thinking, "Wait, that's my word! I made that one up! How did they know about that?" Or did I hear it from somewhere else? Maybe I made it up, maybe I didn't. It is logical to think thought that out of the millions of people in the world (and the U.S. in particular), someone else would come up with the same shortcuts and/or morphings of the language that I and my friends do. This article in USA Today online gives the "word of the year" according to the New Oxford Dictionary. And it started me thinking again, who makes language? The people or the media?