popular culture

Gateways

• Netvibes: A double-sided portal that allows for public and private views, as well as friending associates.
• iGoogle: A personal page with no external web presence. Content can be organized into tabs, Google App integration is a plus.
• Mahalo: A human edited search engine, with the goal of having 10,000 handcrafted result pages for the most popular topics. Firefox toolbar allows users to create user and topic pages.
• Shyftr: RSS reader that allows users to share and comment on each other's feed items.

Random Cool App

• PicLens: Image browser plugin for Firefox

Getting Started

• Everyone starts at Help Island, which has a handful of tutorials explaining how to interact with the world. Once you've learned the basics, you can move to the mainland, or elsewhere.
• Moving around is straightforward, using the directional keys. Getting from region to region can be done in one of two ways:
  • Do a global search, based on keyword.
  • Use the Map tool to enter a region, and then coordinates.

Ok, so perhaps that's a bit of a stretch. But the segment The Word on the Colbert Report is pretty clever, and it does show that someone in popular culture is paying attention to our use of language, even if he's making up some of his own words. This recent bit from a show is so funny that I can't help but want to show it to my students, but I'm guessing most of them have already seen it.

Check out the link. If this does not load, you want to go to "the word" and load the segment on the word Absinthestinence.

Today is the 50th anniversary of the publication of the groundbreaking Jack Kerouac novel On the Road. For any student who has not read it, it's a must. I know that probably makes people some automatically decide not to read something, but trust me on this one. For the occasion, an anniversary edition that looks so much nicer than my beat-up paperback has been published, and there is even a special publication of Kerouac's original scroll of the novel. This means lots of endless paragraphs, which is something that goes directly against what I regularly tell my students. But it goes back to the idea that you have to understand the rules before you break them. Besides, this is a novel, and my students aren't generally (I hope!) writing fiction in class.

One of the travel blogs I read posted something about it today, and I wanted to just tip my glass to Kerouac, who died too young, lived hard, and drank an awful lot.

If one of your goals this summer is to get organized, check out the blog Unclutter, which describes itself as a "blog about getting and staying organized. A place for everything, and everything in its place is our gospel."

It's not just office productivity; they talk about improving your shower by replacing bottles with a soap dispense, the quest for the perfect laptop/cellphone/gadget charging station, and wireless power transmission (to get rid of all those annoying tangles of wires).

Hilarity ensues when three dozen people dressed in blue polo shirts and khakis descend on Best Buy.

The students in ART237: From Samauri to Cyberpunk have put together some intereresting websites of their work. Check them out at: http://ww2.lafayette.edu/~fabrican/

Bum Rush the Charts is a grassroots effort by bloggers and podcasters to demonstrate the power of independent media by sending one track by an independent artist to the top of the iTunes Music list for a single day (or longer, if possible).

The bum rush begins March 22 at midnight as everyone involved with the effort buys the track "Mine Again" by the band Black Lab. If you buy the track via an iTunes affiliate link on the Bum Rush web site, the organizers will get a cut of the funds, which they're then putting into a college scholarship.

I think this is a great experiment for a number of reasons. For one, podcasts have grown tremendously over the last two years and while traditional broadcasts have a far greater listenership, I think podcasts can have an influence that far outstrips the size of their audience. This would be the first tangible test of the power that I've seen.

It's been 6 months since my last post about use of video games in the FLLRC. We are currently running Sims University in French, German, Spanish and Chinese. These games are all text based; we've worked out a way to allow users to save their own personal copy of their game on the server, and we are currently writing up tutorials to initiate new users to the interface and language learning potential. Hopefully we can do this in the next few weeks.

Last week we got "Operators Room" up and running; it is a Japanese game and can only be purchased in and shipped to households in Japan. This, of course, did not foil us; one of our Japanese students brought the game back after winter break.

Why all the fuss, you ask? Operator's Side is VOICE activated. You have to SPEAK Japanese to make the game work. Anyone wanting to try out their command of Japanese is welcome to use it. Again a great learning tool for the intermediate level student and above.

First, a faceoff with the Bill O'Reilly, the Decemberists, and other assorted guests. Now, he gets a Ben & Jerry's flavor.

If anyone sees this in the store and buys it, I want a FULL report.

http://www.slashfood.com/2007/02/15/ben-and-jerrys-announce-stephen-colbert-ice-cream/