If a picture is worth a thousand words, what is a Cinemagraph worth? A novel.

People would re-blog it and leave comments like “I can’t stop staring at this.”

It’s mesmerizing and would’ve never happened if not for Tumblr’s file size limit on images.

Between 1998 and 2002, Rhizome commissioned artists to produce splash pages for its website. It’s hard to imagine landing pages like this functioning on today’s frantically paced web, but in a time of modems and slow-loading websites, these splash screens were a fast way to introduce viewers to the kind of content one might expect on the site.

Monitor comment sections.

I had no shortage of people telling me I was going to be a starving writer, or that I wasted my collegiate experience learning “useless” skills.

Can we imagine an app that “measures” whether one is really in love with someone else? Or an app that compares how one’s processes of creativity hold up against established measures of creative inspiration? How about an app that compares the “depth” of one’s grieving for a loved one against others’ grief?

So how can a whole infrastructure of surveillance that was, elsewhere, so obviously wrong suddenly become right, indeed celebrated, when instituted by start-up companies on the American West Coast?

The primary business model of the internet is built on mass surveillance.

This is focused on data extraction rather than the production of new goods, thus generating intense concentrations of power over extraction and threatening core values such as freedom.

It will be thrilling to see what happens to that army in further installments now that one of their own got woke.

One of the beautiful things about filmmaking is the dialectic it creates between filmmakers and audiences to create jointly the universe being seen.

This is some intergalactic peak blackness right here: it was black sanitation workers in Memphis in 1968 who were so close to the heart of oppression that none other than Martin Luther King Jr thought they were key to taking down a system of death, too.

much like Nat Turner

If all the stormtroopers were as black as Boyega, this would would mean the First Order has an apartheid structure that is quite familiar and not unlike that of slave plantations, the former South African government or American sports leagues.

indeed, it could be read as the first science fiction film of the Black Lives Matter era.

It not only made sense, it made the Force Awakens an even more intriguing and politically engaging movie.

though we are conditioned to believe that whiteness is the norm even in outer space

What I would hope will begin to happen in SF/F/H is that, in the same way that women writers and readers are claiming a place in the fantastical genres, there will begin to be more diverse expressions of people's lived experiences of race, culture, class, sexuality, social structures, and gender, and that more of those expressions will begin to come from outside the United States.

someone who brings up the issue of the inequities of race can make people uncomfortable and as a result can be seen to be the problem. It's a weird twist that can turn the people who are being racialized into the racist ones for daring to mention that there is not an even playing field.

Nichols herself only stayed with the show because none other than Martin Luther King asked her to;

Oh, and of course, Nichelle Nichols as Lt. Uhura in Star Trek

magical realism (an "othering" term in itself, since it's so often used to refer to and exoticize fantastical fiction by hot country peoples)

So another strategy I have is to sometimes refuse to write yet another plea to the dominant culture for justice, and instead to simply set the story of the "othered" people front and center and talk about their (our) lives and their concerns.

In other words, one of the things I can do is to intervene in the readers' assumptions by creating a world in which standards are different.

However, in fantastical fiction, I can directly manipulate the metaphorical structure of the story. I can create a science fictional world in which relative fatness or slimness has about the same significance as eye [End Page 100] color, but only persons under five feet, five inches are considered beautiful.

But too, when my work is coming from a Caribbean context, fusion fits very well; that's how we survived.

And here I need to qualify, because all fiction is imaginative and much of it transcends the quotidian. I'm just trying to identify science fiction/ fantasy/horror/magical realism as fiction that starts from the principle of making the impossible possible.

"life sucks, sometimes it's not too bad, but mostly people are mean to each other, then they die."

infusing allusions to Haitian culture and references to Yoruba spirituality, Jamaican revolutionaries, and Trinidadian carnival into science fiction mainstays such as alternative dimensions and artificial intelligence

For instance, public assignments tap into fears of public embarrassment.

Don’t they need to be oriented at the proper audience?

This is not necessarily bad, but also doesn’t necessarily empower.

but until students see this domain as a space that rewards rigor and experimentation, it will not promote student agency.

If one of the things that students learn from using the grading contract is that they value sleeping in several times a semester rather than attending class (and earning a higher grade), I’m happy to help them achieve that self-knowledge.

effective reading, rather than effective writing.

Without experimenting, I’d get bored, and a bored instructor is a sure-fire recipe for unengaged students, which results in an unhappy instructor, and then we watch the vicious circle turn.

Contract grading seemed like a potentially useful tool in combating student anxiety over grades by putting control of the grade firmly in students’ hands.

More of their time goes more toward figuring out what they want their students to show they can do and at what level.

Here is an even simpler system with only four bundles of assignments and tests, ranging from relatively easy/basic to very challenging/advanced.

Many students regard it as a game and want to hoard their tokens.

Now, nothing students do matters much to them.

The specs may be as simple as “completeness”: for instance, all the questions are answered, all the problems attempted in good faith or all the directions followed (that is, the work satisfies the assignment), plus the work meets a required length.

Rather, imagine that they define truly “satisfactory” as at least B work -- maybe even A minus work. This assures rigor.

The way students stress over the points their work does or doesn’t get. The way they challenge our grading decisions in the hope of squeezing more points out of us -- despite the agonizing care and attention to detail we give to their work. For students, it’s all about maximizing partial credit.

feminism

this Uber-ification of education, in which everything we do now is trackable, extractable, and monetizable by other platforms, by private, for-profit companies.

now you own nothing. You just rent. You just borrow. You just subscribe. You just share. You owe, not own.

President George W. Bush once exulted an “ownership society,” a promise for all Americans, he said.

When it comes to all our digital data, the answer to the question “what do you own” is probably “not much.” You do not own your Amazon Kindle books; you’ve purchased a license to access the content. Your heirs will not inherit your digital reading library. You do not own the music you stream; you’ve paid for a subscription. Your heirs will not inherit your digital music library. You don’t own the movies you watch via Netflix; again, it’s a subscription and unlike a print magazine subscription, once you stop paying the bill, you won’t have stacks of old copies lying about.

What data and/or content can you take with you when you finish a class or when you graduate?

the need for a place to write and create without fear?

These fees must all be paid monthly or annually to maintain access and functionality

teaching them about Web standards like HTML and CSS.

These portfolios can contain text, images, video and audio recordings, giving students opportunities to express themselves in a variety of ways beyond the traditional pen-and-paper test or essay.

Gardner Campbell, then a professor at Baylor University, called for a “personal cyberinfrastructure” where students:not only would acquire crucial technical skills for their digital lives but also would engage in work that provides richly teachable moments

the domain and all its content are the student’s to take with them. It is, after all, their education, their intellectual development, their work.

Domains initiative enables student to build the contemporary version of what Virginia Woolf in 1929 famously demanded in A Room of One’s Own — the necessity of a personal place to write. Today, UMW and a growing number of other schools believe that students need a proprietary online space in order to be intellectually productive.