Weekend Reading: Oscars edition

The crazy hedonism of the weekends: Apparently I signed up to spend two hours tonight receiving last-minute Little League registrations. 

There’s a ProfHacker pro tip for you: Don’t go to Little League board meetings if you’re susceptible to guilt!

• Matthew J. Newcomb and Amy Nimon have written an article about choose-your-own-adventure stories as an analogue for wiki interfaces . . . in the form of a CYOA story: The CYOA emphasizes issues of addressing the audience and audience’s choices, and it allows students to become more conscious of their rhetorical and narrative decisions, precisely because they have to think like readers who will directing the narrative within the writer’s scheme. Unlike traditional CYOA stories, in this assignment, choices given to readers do not have to be entirely plot-driven; students can branch into different voices, viewpoints, or styles in their documents to give multiple options to readers.
• Dan Cohen reflects on “the social contract of scholarly publishing“: The demand side, however, has languished. Far fewer efforts have been made to influence the mental state of the scholarly audience. The unspoken assumption is that the reader is more or less unchangeable in this respect, only able to respond to, and validate, works that have the traditional marks of the social contract: having survived a strong filtering process, near-perfect copyediting, the imprimatur of a press.
• April 3 is iPad day, which makes this account of iPad Application Design more than usually interesting.  It’s mostly a post about interface design, but that already hints at what the device could do: The essence of the new opportunities on iPad is that this class of device is a natural home not just for the viewers and small utilities we’ve seen on our phones, but also for creators and editors as we see on desktop platforms. Productivity applications, and sophisticated workflows. There are entire genres of applications which haven’t been truly feasible on an iPhone OS device until now; this is an opportunity to literally pioneer a high-profile touch-screen version of those applications.
• I’m sure that this story about Mark Zuckerberg “hacking” into reporters’ e-mail addresses while an undergrad doesn’t tell us anything at all about Facebook’s cavalier attitudes toward privacy.  Isn’t it nice to think so?: Mark used his site, TheFacebook.com, to look up members of the site who identified themselves as members of the Crimson.  Then he examined a log of failed logins to see if any of the Crimson members had ever entered an incorrect password into TheFacebook.com.  If the cases in which they had entered failed logins, Mark tried to use them to access the Crimson members’ Harvard email accounts.  He successfully accessed two of them.
• Al Filreis, the great scholar of modernist poetry and the faculty director of the Kelly Writers House at Penn, reflects on teaching writing in new media: 1) Writing isn’t the only thing that is changing or needs to change. 2) The other kinds of changes might demand an attention very different in kind from our usual. 3) Deep down, most of us do not really want these other changes to come. 4) The ideal site might be where things happen rather than get presented or taught.

Finally, this week’s video is about code:

Algorithms are Thoughts, Chainsaws are Tools from Stephen Ramsay on Vimeo.

(Bonus link: The video that brings Twitter to life.)

[Image by Flickr user R. Stanek / Creative Commons licensed]