Sir John Everett Millais’ 1852 painting “Ophelia” might be subtitled “Western Literature’s Woman.” It seems to me that the history of Western Literature has prescribed this role for its women: the drowned suicide of men’s struggles for power and control. Ophelia is the metaphor for a real world of patriarchal desire for control. Ophelia is [...]
Archive | December, 2004
The Media in 2014
Robin Sloan’s video The Media in 2014 considers the near future of the news media extrapolated from current trends and recent history of microprocessing technologies and the Internet. It suggests ways that the news will become decentralized and put into the hands of individuals and smaller groups of people: personalized media overtakes the behemoths of [...]
Rate My Professors
Well, it seems that a couple of students have rated me on RateMyProfessors.com. “Cocky and sarcastic,” huh? Sheesh. My question is: how in the world do they know if these people have even had one of my courses? Are web sites like this really helpful? Are student evaluations really that helpful beyond a popularity contest? [...]
Ralph Goodwin
In another stack of photos, I found some from high school, mostly friends doing their goofy things, but some of teachers that really made an impact on my life. Ralph Goodwin was one of those teachers. Goodwin was a science teacher; I believe he taught computer science in our high-tech classroom full of TRS-80s, but [...]
L.A. as Hell
Thanks to Thom for sending me the link to Dante’s Inferno Illustrated by Sandow Birk. These illustrations translate Doré’s original engravings to offer “a re-translation of Dante’s seminal work into the images and street language of today. This opens the poem to audiences both familiar with Dante and the audience that would never encounter the [...]
Educational Conditioning
Computer-assisted instruction, applied thoughtlessly and imitatively, threatens to extend the worst features of education as it is now. (Nelson, Computer Lib / Dream Machines, 1974) Perhaps one of the reasons why many students have difficulty with online literature courses is that their educational experiences do not train them to meet the expectations that distance education [...]
A Reminder from the Chair
Bob puts the “Incomplete” in perspective: If you need to give a student an Incomplete, please make sure you fill out the requisite form and enter the “I” grade in Banner. The Catalog says that an “I” grade “indicates that the student for non-academic reasons was unable to complete the requirements for a course.” I [...]
