Monthly Archives: October 2006

Update

By Michael Becker | Published: October 28, 2006
For those of you who do read this blog, rest assured that it is not dead, not by a long shot. I’ll come back with more reg­u­lar updates in the near future. As a side note, I just picked up Richard Lanham’s The Electronic Word and Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence. More to come on [...]
Posted in Site News | Comments closed

Virtual News Anchor

By Michael Becker | Published: October 28, 2006
So the guys at Northwestern University have put a new spin on the news aggre­ga­tor. News At Seven pulls feeds from the Internet along with rel­e­vant pho­tos. The feeds are then for­mat­ted into a half-hour long news show that is read by–get this–the vir­tual char­ac­ter Alex from the game Half-Life 2. A few of the [...]
Posted in Internet News | Comments closed

Idologues in the Classroom

By Michael Becker | Published: October 18, 2006
Maxine Hairston’s arti­cle struck a chord with me. First of all, she crit­i­cizes English depart­ments for their politi­ciza­tion, which I take to be a jab at lit­er­ary the­ory. Secondly, she makes me com­pletely self-aware of how pol­i­tics fit in to my writ­ing class. For her, ide­ol­ogy in the class­room is unpro­fes­sional if it seeks to [...]
Posted in Higher Education | Comments closed

The Human Conversation

By Michael Becker | Published: October 13, 2006
The notion of con­ver­sa­tion stuck with me as I fin­ished Kenneth Bruffee’s essay. From time to time, I find myself lost in the­ory, praxis, ped­a­gogy, rhetoric, and dia­logue. I am con­fronted by an over­whelm­ing sense that the work we do as schol­ars is mean­ing­less. What good does it do to argue about lit­er­a­ture and com­po­si­tion [...]
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Hatchfest Panel

By Michael Becker | Published: October 9, 2006
Well, here’s to being sick and miss­ing out on big things. I was ill Friday, which forced me to can­cel my com­po­si­tion class. On top of that, it also forced me to miss out on a panel at Bozeman’s two-year-old film fes­ti­val, Hatchfest. The panel was on the future of dig­i­tal tech­nol­ogy and fea­tured the [...]
Posted in Miscellany | Comments closed