Seed Magazine is sponsoring a science writing contest with some pretty generous prizes:

Today, the mantra of competitiveness has gained new momentum in the US, reinvigorating a discussion about education and the public's understanding of science. Science is high on the agenda of the European Union. And China and Africa have identified science literacy as a cornerstone of their respective development strategies. This begs the question:

What does it mean to be scientifically literate in the 21st century?

I was thinking about posting some old papers I wrote in grad school to my blog the other day, but I paused for a moment because I was a bit concerned about plagiarism. I don't really care if someone copies what I wrote, but I do have sympathy for instructors trying to teach students how to write. If their students plagiarized from me, I wanted to make sure instructors would be able to find my original.

I went back and found an old blog post, then tried searching for it from Google: I cut and pasted it into the Google search bar, and I came up with no results. You can search for my blog title and the blog home page will come up in Google, but you can't find individual posts.

Anders Jacobsen has pledged to contribute $1 to tsunami relief for every blog linking to his post about tsunami relief -- and to the leading tsunami relief organizations.

I did the same on my blog, but I upped the ante: I'll commit $5 for every link to my site and to tsunami relief.

So, Kairosnews members, now you have the opportunity to generate a free $6 to tsunami relief -- and I recommend you offer your own c

Since they already archive regular correspondence, it was a natural for the British Library to begin archiving e-mail correspondence as well. Slashdot pointed me to a neat article about the pitfalls of trying to create an archive of a medium that is in constant flux: one of the computers in their collection can't even be turned on for lack of a power cable.

The article inspired me to search through my personal e-mail archives, which I blog about here. The most interesting tidbits were my first encounters with spam:

Slashdot pointed me to this New York Times article about computerized grading of student essays. Apparently, every high school junior in the state of Indiana is now required to take an essay test that is graded by a computer.

With the increasing number of mandates to test student writing, "there's a certain inevitability to computerized essay grading," said Stan Jones, Indiana's commissioner of higher education. Indiana's computerized essay scoring, he said, will reduce by half the cost of administering a pencil-and-paper test and will free teachers from distributing, collecting and, above all, grading thousands of test booklets.

Over on Word Munger, I'm blogging about the impact of ebooks. There hasn't been much speculation yet on what the effect of ebooks will be (I suspect there will be more when Sony's new reader is released to the American market), and most of it has focused on the idea that "E-paper could save newspapers a bundle on printing and distribution."

Wow! Newspapers will save a bundle? Gosh! Let me be the first in line to buy a $400 reader so newspapers can save a bundle! A better question is this: what will a newspaper be when it no longer involves paper? Will the 2034 equivalent of a “newspaper” even exist? Why should it? The reason they exist now is because they are a cheap way to distribute news. Surely with technology like e-books, we can come up with an even cheaper way.

I've brushed off the cobwebs, oiled all the joints, and restored Wordmunger.com back to working order. Originally Wordmunger was just a satire Web site, but in it's newest incarnation it's a genuine full scale Weblog, powered by Wordpress. Consider this an official invitation to bookmark the site. Visit early, visit often. (I'm planning daily updates)


I decided to post this to Kairosnews now because in today's entry, I opine about the introduction of Sony's new e-ink powered e-book reader, which seems to me to be right up Knews' alley.

The new Commontext Web site is now up and running--on Drupal. Just like Kairosnews, visitors can now comment and discuss every item on the site.

This feature will be particularly useful as more classroom texts come online: users will be able to provide instant, public feedback on any Commontext work.

The interactive features of the site will also enable a more dynamic text development process, where several contributors to a project can comment and make changes on texts, in real time.

Head on over to the site and let us know what you think!

Professional writer John Scalzi blogs about vanity presses, asking whether they offer a worthwhile service to writers. They are, after all, traditionally scorned by the established press as preying on the all-too-ample egos of publishing wannabes.

Checking in again live from C&W 2003. Charlie Lowe is discussing the role of open source content management systems. He's demonstrating the weblog he uses for his courses and comparing it to proprietary systems such as Blackboard. He points out that when a classroom operates in a public space, students experience a more realistic writing situation: their audience is real, not imagined. Charlie has also blogged about his session.