On the train, the woman to my left reads a book translated from paper to Kindle. On my right, another woman reads printouts of Powerpoint slides.

Walking the Berkshires is […] an eclectic weaving of human narrative, natural history, and conservation science with the Berkshire and Litchfield Hills as both its backdrop and point of departure. I am interested in how land and people, past and present manifest in the broader landscape and social fabric of our communities.

Thanks, Susan. Feel free to keep coming back and plugging your business. I have recently purchased eight insurance plans from the link provided. I am indestructible. I’m going to go 2 Fast 2 Furious on everyone’s ass. Look out, drivers of Monroe county and surrounding regions.

When life gives you comment spam, make lemonade a story out of it. Hilarious.

Floe, a virtual polar bear on National Grid’s Web site, can help National Grid customers analyze and measure the environmental effects of their routine daily activities, including eating, drinking, driving and making home heating energy choices. Floe can be found at the website, nationalgrid.com/floe. Visitors can interact with Floe or befriend another virtual polar bear and learn how positive environmental acts will help protect the environment.

Also, Venture Arctic, in which

players create and control ecosystems of Arctic animals. You can blow the scent of a beached bowhead whale to a hungry wolverine, melt snow to feed epic herds of caribou, or freeze over the ocean to protect schools of arctic cod from ravenous puffins and seals.

The game is based on the seasonal rhythms of the Arctic – in the summer animals fatten up on grasses, in the fall the oceans are choked with plankton, and in the winter animals must struggle to survive.

@ GreenMuze

The web is a perfect place to test the limits of unpublishability. With no printing, design or distribution costs, we are free to explore that which would never have been feasible, economically and aesthetically. While this exercise began as an exploration and provocation, the resultant texts are unusually rich; what we once considered to be our trash may, after all, turn out to be our greatest treasure.

~ Publishing the Unpublishable

I don’t agree with restraining the digitizing of classrooms, which Bauerlein also calls for, but I do agree with ensuring there’s a mix of learning spaces available. I also think that teachers should have the imagination to sometimes teach outside of the classroom altogether…

Most of Bauerlain’s approach is the same-old same-old but I do think we must pay attention to the need for slow spaces both in teaching and in life. Slowness is certainly a vital element of transliteracy.

@ Transliteracy Research Blog

Sue Thomas is looking for help “collecting examples of nature metaphors used to describe cyberspace and the internet.”

Aesthetics and low-brow associations might not be the main cause of the fear of gaming, however. Many professors can get beyond the “pop culture” aspect of gaming—indeed, many will embrace it in accordance with a cultural studies populism. More profound are the cognitive barriers to gaming compared to other new media genres. To use Janet Murray’s language, gaming as a genre provides a specific form of “cognitive scaffolding.“1 Unlike the essentially discursive nature of new media forms like podcasting and blogging, the typical immersive video-based game’s scaffolding appears difficult to integrate into the ecology of teaching as currently understood by a wide variety of faculty.

@ Educause Quarterly
(via Liberal Education Today)

The problem is not lack of context. It is context collapse: an infinite number of contexts collapsing upon one another into that single moment of recording. The images, actions, and words captured by the lens at any moment can be transported to anywhere on the planet and preserved (the performer must assume) for all time. The little glass lens becomes the gateway to a blackhole sucking all of time and space – virtually all possible contexts – in upon itself.

You’ve seen the latest wave of spam — you know, the faux outrageous news headlines: “Osama trains goats for tactical bombing.” “Laika the Russian space dog returns to Earth.” “Children admit to being little shits: Video.” Isn’t it a shame the headline is all we get? So here at Weird Tales we’re inviting YOU to turn this spam into… um… spam-ade!

Write a flash-fiction story — under 500 words — based on a spam you’ve received.

Also, SpamBLR