Ars Technica reports on a recent study which shows that instant messaging may not be ruining students' writing abilities after all as many might believe. For instance,

Researchers Sali Tagliamonte and Derek Denis studied over a million words from IM communications and compared it to more than 250,000 spoken words of those between the ages of 15 and 20. The two found that, while written and spoken speech share some similarities, IM communications actually leaned toward the formal side.

Full disclosure: one of the founders of this site, due to launch May 19, is a former student of mine. But here's an interesting re-mediation: Web back to print.

WordHustler is conceived as a social network that, according to the press release, "provides writers with a bevy of innovative tools designed to help authors of all genres to get their manuscripts into the hands of editors and find publishing success."

I was browsing the template library of Office 2007 today when I came across an interesting "academic" letter template: "Complaint about Teacher." The letter is probably what you could expect from a parent whose kiddo isn't making the A's she rightfully deserves. Here's a few snippets from it:

"Urizen separated out a region from the rest of eternity, shrank it into solid matter, weighed it in his scales, measured it with his rods and plumblines, circumscribed it with his compasses, and wrote laws for it in his great brass-bound books. This sorry region, the region over which Urizen rules, is the universe in which we live..."

OpenOffice.org has released public beta 3.0, which includes native OS X support (previous betas required an X11 installation). The beta is intel only. It may be downloaded from the snapshots section.

I think I'm going to be able to attend this interactive fiction event at the Unversity of Maryland:

As part of our work on a project funded by the Library of Congress dedicated to Preserving Virtual Worlds (http://www.ndiipp.uiuc.edu/pca/), MITH will be hosting a table-read of the original version of ADVENTURE, recently recovered from backup tapes at Stanford University. We will read through the complete text of the game, and also (geeks that we are) have a look at its FORTRAN source code.

Today's Chronicle had an article on the Open Humanities Press. One of the board members is Stephen Greenblatt, who as MLA president wrote an influential letter on the coming crisis in scholarly publishing.

InsideHigherEd.com reports that the music industry is engaging in something akin to preemptive strikes. The article Mysterious Multiplication of Copyright Complaints takes a look at the speculative reasons behind increase in complaints lodged with a variety of colleges and universities, both big and small, despite no evidence of an increase in illegally shared files.

The new complaints seem to be resulting in an increased reluctance to pursue alleged violations. For instance,

Indiana officials are now discussing whether they should continue to respond to complaints from the recording industry with the same aggressiveness. It’s not that university leaders have suddenly decided that illegal behavior isn’t wrong; instead, they are beginning to question the legitimacy of the notices the Recording Industry Association of America sends accusing network users of illegally sharing music.

One commenter in the discussion noted that the investigative arm of the RIAA is now referred to as a "contractor" rather than investigator.

Starting tomorrow, I'm teaching an online writing class over our 6 week spring term. As the final project in the course, students will complete a team-based paper assignment. Given that the class is online, Google Docs seems a very effective tool for students. Rather than having to create instructions myself for using Google Docs, I was lucky enough to find this extensive set of video tutorials over at ExpertVillage, How to Use Google Documents. This will be a great resource for use in my face-to-face classes as well.

OK, so I admit that I am baiting Charlie with that title, but I would like to ask a few questions to get a sense of everyone's investment in open source vs. proprietary file formats. For those who haven't followed it, here's the backstory (as I understand it):