New Year's Customs and Traditions

Dr. Nellie Deutsch has prepared an interesting trivia quiz representing New Year's customs and traditions around the world that I'd like to share with you. You'll find answers and explanations on slides immediately following each quiz item.

After taking the quiz and reading the explanations, please feel free to ask follow-up questions, post notes on local customs and traditions, or share related resources in comments on this post.

Learning English Online: New Year Around the World

Uploaded by Dr. Nellie on WiZiQ Tutorials

[83 words]

Did You Know? 3.0: Broadband for the Brain

Are you in ... [a] broadband backwash [bayou], or [a beach in] Bermuda?

Source: http://jp.youtube.com/watch?v=jpEnFwiqdx8
(buencaminos, November 07, 2008)

Where would you rather be? Get a load of the new stat's in this video, and find out!

Blogged with the Flock Browser
Revised in Blogger

[40 words]

Happy Halloween!

The following is a representation of a post from the Language Learner Development Project Blog (LLD Project Blog, Happy Halloween, 2008.10.31), a work licensed "under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License" (LLD Project Blog, License). I am reusing the copyright image in the original post with permission of the copyright owner. You can see the copyright notice if your hover your cursor over the photo below [in the actual Blogger post, not the Feedburner mail announcement], before clicking.

This is a quick, seasonal, website recommendation... for anyone ... interested in customs, history, and traditions: a History of Halloween minisite at history.com. I recommend the articles entitled Ancient History and Around the World, but there's much, much more on the site [including advertisements, games, and videos]. Just click on the link (above), or the picture (below), and go see for yourselves.

If you'd like to compare the Jack-0-Lantern in the photo above with his predecessors from last year, please check out either of last year's Halloween videos (Writing Studio Blog, Welcome Home Hallows, 2007.10.31).

[106 words excluding the block quotation]

Revised 2008.11.06
[+10 words]

NSF and the Birth of the Internet: a website review

NSF and the Birth of the Internet is a special report from the U.S. National Science Foundation combining text, graphic, and video resources.

• http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/nsf-net/

The presentation begins with a spectacular introductory video splash that loads automatically. Low connection speeds or heavy local network traffic may delay downloading and display of audio-video elements. There is a prominent link that you can use to skip the splash.

The report itself covers contributions from various domestic parties involved in network development from the 1960s to the 2000s. Video-recorded interviews with three main contributors are accessible immediately following the splash. However, the central organizing scheme of the report is a time-line, in which each decade tab in the viewing frame covers up to half a dozen resources presented as menu buttons in the main viewing window.

Most resources covering the middle years (1970s-1990s) are short interview segments featuring people involved in technological and organizational developments. Most of the interviewees are male.

Text sidebars explain graphic selections and introduce video segments. Back and next buttons on resources when actually displayed would facilitate navigation without returning to decade menus. Transcripts are available for video segments, but replace videos and sidebars in the main viewing frame.

One auxiliary window in the viewing frame displays corresponding increases in numbers of network users and data transfer rates as you browse through the decades, while the link in another, which overrides the main video links displayed immediately after the splash, in turn over-rides both the main viewing window and decade tabs with schematic maps of U.S. network growth from 1969 to 2007.

Using the conveniently located close button on the maps returns you to your previous view of decade menu resources. There is also a separate list of resources, including PDFs and Wikipedia listings, accessible both through the report frame, and in text-only view:

http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/nsf-net/resources.jsp
http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/nsf-net/textonly/related.jsp

The NSF site is accessible in text-only format, however it might take some time to find a corresponding location, such as this special report, from the top level of the site if you use the text-only link in the page footer outside of the report itself, rather than the one inside the special report viewing frame:

http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/nsf-net/textonly/index.jsp

I am grateful to George Siemens for his recent pointer to this interesting, government-funded report. I gather he gleaned it from Ray Schroeder's Educational Technology blog (Siemens, elearnspace, 2008.08.20). In the end, I'm wondering what individuals and organizations in the rest of the world were doing during the period of time covered by the NSF's special report.

Image source:
http://www.nsf.gov/images/logos/nsfe.jpg
(22 KB JPEG format)
Note: "No special permission is required from
the National Science Foundation to reproduce these images"
(http://www.nsf.gov/policies/logos.jsp, 2008.09.08).
[489 words]

Third presentation display [+ design, + ...]

Here's version three of a brief personal history, with a design for the slides, additional graphics, links, and photos. It's ready for a sound track to make the slideshow into an oral presentation.

| View | Upload your own

"The Machine is Us/ing Us" (Wesch, 2007)

Offering an illuminating perspective on writing for the 20th century, this TeacherTube version of Michael Wesch's video introduces "'Web 2.0' in just under five minutes" (2007). Please take a look, then share your feelings about it, or reflect a bit about blogging for your writing courses, in comments on this post.



Reference

Wesch, Michael. (2007.03.08). The Machine is Us/ing Us (Final Version). Retrieved June 19, 2008 from http://youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g

[74 words]

On the Reading Road Again

In the song, On the Road Again, for a movie soundtrack (1980), Willie Nelson covered a 1965 Bob Dylan song about "going places" that he has "never been" (Wikipedia, On the Road Again). Reading books is like that.

I've just picked up the next two books in the series that I've been reading for... um... several years (An Extensive Reading (ER) Project, 2008.03.01). Nevertheless, I ticked off volume five during spring recess, and went to the book store last night to stock up on ... perhaps another year's worth of leisure reading.

Now it's time to add the volumes that I'm reading to the Library Thing.

[105 words]

Labels, again

In order to make it easy for everyone to find blog posts you've made that interest them, it is important to add labels to each post that you make on your blogs. If the titles of your posts are boring, or inexplicit, and you don't label your posts with suitable labels, hardly anyone is likely to read your posts, comment, or make suggestions for improving them.

For instructional purposes, here is a short list of labels that I recommend. No, "recommend" isn't strong enough; these are required labels for Writing IVc:

• books
• essays
• movies
• portfolios
• quickposts
• reviews

Please note that each of those labels is one word, and that all of those labels are plural forms. There is no need for specific labels such as: "draft essay", "mega-essay", or "proto-portfolio" ("Proto-Portfolio" should already be in post titles).

Of course, you can--maybe even should--use multiple labels, for example: "books" plus "reviews", "drafts" (an optional alternative to "quickposts" for essays) plus "essays", or "movies" plus "reviews". Then blog visitors who search through any of the required labels are likely to find what they're looking for. That is the power of one-word labels.

If you wish to introduce other labels on your blogs, please make certain that they (will) apply to more than one post on your blog, and that they are easy for visitors to understand. For example, "fantasy", "history", "romance", or "SciFi" (science fiction) are genre labels that might apply to reviews of both books and movies. Other labels that might apply to various posts are "graphics", "media", and "photos".
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Technical note: The title of this post includes an enclosure link to a search for all other posts on this blog with the label "labels". If you'd like to use enclosure links like that on any of your blog posts: "...[G]o to your Settings | Formatting tab and set the 'Show Link fields' option to 'Yes.' This will add the enclosure link fields to your post editor. When composing a post, you'll then see a field for your enclosures. From there, just enter the URLs" to which you want the titles of particular posts to link (Blogger Help).

[revised Nov. 9, 2007; 366 words]

Sean Bean in Sharpe adventure films

Sean Bean, who may be best known for playing Boromir in the Lord of the Rings (official site & IMDb), stars with Daragh O'Malley in this series, part of which, Sharpe's Gold, originally ran on British television (ITV) starting in 1993 (Wikipedia). It is "loosely based" on historical novels that Bernard Cornwell published from 1981 onward.

I've started watching Sharpe's Rifles (DVD, 1993), which recently came to the fore in local video shops. I can hardly wait to lay eyes on the next one! Granted, my reading speed can hardly keep up with the Japanese sub-titles, but it's fun to try.

This Mr. Bean stars as a fictional soldier who became an officer for bravery in the field during the Napleonic Wars (1804-1815). There's romance, of course, an official Sharpe website with "images, "stories, trailers" and more, plus lots of info. and links to explore on Wikipedia. Check it out!