jerz.setonhill.edu | blogs.setonhill.edu

Associate Professor
English --  New Media Journalism
Seton Hill University, Greensburg, Pennsylvania

You are in a large room, with a passage to the south, a passage to the west, and a wall of broken rock to the east. There is a large "Y2" on a rock in the room's center. --"Colossal Cave Adventure"

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Social Media and Young Adults -- Pew
None of this is a surprise to me, but I'm glad to have statistics to back up my impressions. A very small handful of students whose first introduction to online social networking was the SHU blogosphere, before blogs went really...

Google's Super Bowl Ad: A Romance in Search
I didn't watch the game, but I did catch the buzz about this ad. Yes, I did tear up. (Wired has details.)...

The great global warming collapse
It is dangerous to use local weather events (such as a heavy or light winter) to make judgments about global climate.With that caveat, I'm blogging the following because I've noted a shift in the online discussion about "global warming," or...

Snowstorm touches 'primal' fears - Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
Coming up... we'll tell you whether you'll be impaled by sharp, radioactive icicles hurled by mobs of rampaging robots in your neighborhood.  But first, people panicking, filling up three shopping carts of toilet paper and canned food.  Hear the techno-pop...

Jerz's Literacy Weblog
Since the spring of 1999, I have annotated web links on technology, humanities, cyberculture, journalism, academia, and everything else that makes my heart go thumpety-thump.

New Media Journalism @ Seton Hill University
The main portal for the blogging community at Seton Hill University. Any student, faculty, or staff member can get a free blog here.

Online Resource Room
A large collection of instructional handouts, covering academic writing, electronic text, and technical writing. Popular pages include the MLA-style Bibliography Builder, and handouts on blurbs, e-mail, and usability testing.

Interactive Fiction
Interactive fiction requires the text-analysis skills of a literary scholar and the relentless puzzle-solving drive of a computer hacker. People tend to love it or hate it. Those who hate it sometimes say it makes them think too much.

Other Major Resources

• York Corpus Christi Pageant Simulator
• (R.U.R.) Rossum's Universal Robots

• LA100: Basic Composition
• EL200: Media Lab & advising Setonian
• EL236: Writing for the Internet
  
• EL405: New Media Projects
  
• Teaching Archive
  

• Jerome McDonough, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Doug Reside, Neil Fraistat, Kari Kraus, Rachel Donahue, Dennis Jerz, Henry Lowood, Megan Winget. "Preserving Virtual Worlds: Models & Community." Digital Humanities, University of Maryland, 2009.
  
• "Teacher Tapestries: Reflections on Teaching Blogging Over a Decade" College English Association, Pittsburgh, 2009.
• "Thinking Inside the Box: Free and Open Source Alternatives to CMS" Presentation for the workshop "Course Management Systems: A Viable Reality in the Composition Classroom" Conference on College Composition and Communication 2008.
• "Somewhere Nearby is Colossal Cave: Examining Will Crowther's Original 'Adventure' in Code and in Kentucky" Digital Humanities Quarterly, 2007.
• "When Student Experts Remix the Discipline: New Media in the Composition Classroom" Panel co-chair, Conference on College Composition and Communication 2007.
• "Emerging Social Software." Special interest group chair, Conference on College Composition and Communication 2007.
• "Assessing Google as Teaching & Research Tool." Teaching & Learning Seminar, Seton Hill University. January 2005.
• "Football Slouches Toward a Former Women's College." Inside Higher Ed. January 2005.
• "The Bane of the President's Existence." Lore: An E-Journal for Teachers of Writing. [Digressions: Reflections on Teaching -- Academic Blogging.] January 2005.
• Professional biography (C.V.)