Submit to Spindle, a new online arts journal run by five students from the University of Mary Washington. Spindle’s special adviser is Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Claudia Emerson.
We accept poetry, prose, art, photography, graphic design, music, film, video art, animation, dance, theatre, performance art, craft work, jewelry, fashion/costume design, and textile art.
Visit our website at http://www.spindlejournal.org/ for submission guidelines.

The proverbial ‘million dollar question’: how to get students interested, inspired, and engaged? Because I know absolutely everything and am in no way subject to error of any kind, I will answer this question. Ha.
I was lucky enough to happen upon Bryan Alexander’s gaming learning circle at the ELI conference. There’s nothing quite like listening to a group of higher-ed instructors discuss video games. What’s being used on their campuses? Medical simulations, textile design games, a game created by faculty to teach foreign languages, playing World of Warcraft (for research …

When I first started working on this movie, I had no idea what I was getting myself into. A film about Web 2.0? How could I resist? Once I came up with an idea, I worked furiously on the screenplay. By the end of the process, I was even scriptwriting in my dreams. I finally started filming with exactly two weeks left to the due date. Didn’t really bother with sleep anymore, and my friends began to complain that I was never around. This has probably been one of the …

“8 Democratic candidates face a new kind of questioning”
Tonight at 7:00pm Democratic candidates engaged in a “new” form of interaction with voters. Users were invited to submit questions via home-made YouTube videos for the candidates, and both the chosen questions and responses were shown on CNN for two hours.
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Is it truly a “new form of questioning”?
While watching this debate, I had the thought that’s it’s almost a reverse kind of fireside chat. The phrase “from your living rooms” was used multiple times, obviously to emphasize the idea that these questions …

I’ve been keeping my eye for the past few weeks on the new Facebook polls. They have been interesting at best, and utterly ridiculous at worst. However, the latest one was a little different:
“Who do you look up to the most?” (CHOICES: Politicians, athletes, businesspeople, artists, or scientists)
I think part of what makes it interesting is how abstract the question is in relation to former questions. (i.e. “boxers or briefs?” “Is global warming a concern?” “What’s your favorite burger joint?”) What do they mean by “look up to”? Admiration? Respect? …

On Monday, we were all discussing Ashley’s idea of creating a Facebook page for the class. Many ideas were thrown out (see? there’s that phrase again) and I thought I’d recap a couple. These are more thematic than technical, but I think this Facebook thing has huge potential.

Page rather than group, because we want flexibility of content.
This will serve as an online community for the members of this class. Even after the class is over, we can stay in touch and continue to exchange ideas and engage in discussions.
Even …

I think I can finally connect a few thoughts I was having last Thursday.
Web 2.0 is all about connections between people and interaction in the online environment. It involves creation of new content in addition to simple acquisition of available information. But what about the cabinet in the short story we read? It automatically knows what Bishop wants. Right now we input information into a computer and use it to find what we want. The computer does the work for us, but we still have to tell it what we …

“If an entity is sufficiently non-humanlike, then the humanlike characteristics will tend to stand out and be noticed easily, generating empathy. On the other hand, if the entity is “almost human”, then the non-human characteristics will be the ones that stand out, leading to a feeling of “strangeness” in the human viewer.”(Wikipedia)

Just a shameless plug for my online portfolio :)
www.serenae.com

Just a shameless plug for my online portfolio :)
www.serenae.com