Miscellany

Cleaning out my Bloglines clippings folder (e.g., procrastinating):

• “I Found It on the Internet: Coming of Age Online,” from the July 28, 2005 California Computer News Magazine, reviews a new ALA book on teens and their Internet habits. The book was written by the librarian at University High School in Champaign.
• “From Early On, Multimedia Rules,” from the August 3, 2005 New York Times discusses use of PowerPoint and other presentation software for oral reports, but conveys concern about the potential for plagiarism among young users who are focus more on appearance than content. The article states, “But some teachers and parents fear that, like students before them who spent more time on a project’s artistic design than the actual research, today’s computer-savvy students will focus more on the presentation than on the work behind it. Indeed, teachers tell stories of students who produce sophisticated computer-aided presentations, but the information contained in them is simply cut and pasted from Web sites. And those teachers who lack experience using the software could be swayed by a professional-looking presentation when grading.”
• “Comics Escape a Paper Box, and Electronic Questions Pop Out,” from August 17, 2005 New York Times, explores how genre boundaries and definitions are affected when texts move online by comparing paper-based and web-based comics.
• Literary Letters, Lost in Cyberspace, from the Sept 4, 2005 New York Times, considers how our traditional methods of digging into the biographical and literary practices of writers will change as more writers move online, composing e-mail, blogs, instant messages, and other online texts instead of communicating on pieces of paper.