Check out Game Zombie TV

I promised to write this blog MONTHS ago. Over 3 months ago, to be exact. That's when a group of entrepreneurial students from the MIME program at IU-Telecomm returned from the Game Developers Conference with a dream of developing a computer/MU/video game review website. Actually, I suppose they had the dream prior to attending the conference because they came back armed with video of sessions and interviews of big names in the game world.

Since they have been back they have been busy keeping journals (although not a lot of them lately) and reviews of games. The reviews have been posted more recently and, although they have a little rougher language than I like...I realize I'm not in the target demographic.

If you like games you may want to add GameZombie.tv to your list of regularly surded sites.

And, if you are considering grad school...maybe you should consider a place where the atmosphere encourages following your passions in the same way these students have...check out IU's Dept. of Telecommunication. Read about our Mission and Culture and feel free to contact either Betsi Grabe the Director of Graduate Students...or send me an email.

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Today is the Internet Radio Day of Silence.
It's to protest huge increases in the amount of royalties that these audio outlets would have to pay, retroactively, on July 15.

Read more here, on the Radio and Internet Newsletter Site.

No Radio for the Audio Prof

I've just spent a week on vacation with the family. It's good to get away...and more than I have in years I truly tried to leave work behind. In the past we have spent up to 6 weeks on the road in our home state of Washington. When on the road for that long of a stretch...it was almost mandatory that I bring my laptop and reading along and try to carve out some hours to write while the family went to the lake, or swimming, or whatever.

But, this year, with the length of our visit cut back drastically for a variety of reasons...the laptop was primarily brought so the kids could watch movies on the plane. And it truly was a chance to just unwind. (Although I did have to spend a little bit of time finishing my grades for T340).
One of the ways this trip was differrent than my previous ones back to WA is the fact that I barely listened to broadcast radio at all. Now, you may have to know me pretty well to understand how big a deal this is. We spent time in the town in which I grew up...Richland Washington. Listening to the radio there during the 1980s while in high school was one of the reasons why...during the summer before my senior year...I sent letters to all the General Managers and Program Directors in the Tri-Cities (of which Richland is one...the others being Kennewick and Pasco) asking for any opportunity to be a part of their station operations. I eventually got an "internship" of sorts at a no-longer-existing country station: KOTY-AM and KHWK-FM.
I recognize voices of disk jockeys in the Tri-Cities, still. Enjoy hearing the tweaks in formats and positioning statements. The same is true for the Spokane Market...where I worked in formats ranging from CHR to jazz to sports talk. And so, every trip back would include listening to hear what was going on in my old stomping grounds.

But, like I said, this trip was different. No long periods of listening. No listening at all, to speak of. Why? Two reasons that perhaps highlight why my students similarly report NO radio listening. The first was my ipod, and the podcasts that I've been diggin' recently like (The Business, This American Life, On the Media, Radio Lab, and Science Talk).

But, the primary reason for my lack of listening was The first was that the rental car had XM satellite radio. Although I was surprised that several of the stations had COMMERCIALS in them...I was certainly only a few clicks away from music in the vein of the mood I was in due to their alignment of channels by genre (if I was listening to 80s and didn't like a song, checking out what was on the 90s channel one click away usually sufficed. When Nashville** went to commercials...Highway 16 or US Country had something on it that would do nicely). I can only imagine that my listening would have skyrocketed on the talk stations if the family hadn't been in the car...and I probably would have imposed the sports-talk stations ON my family if it was NFL season, not baseball season.

So, there really wasn't any reason to impose myself to commercials...voice-tracked DJs...or songs that I didn't want to hear. Even the nostalgia of listening to stations from my past didn't over-ride the easy entertainment that new technologies allowed me.


** Interestingly, when I was getting links together for this blog, I went to XM's page...of course. The Nashville channel (channel 11)... which was the most irritating in stopping for STUPID national commercials for dating services or car insurance...isn't listed as an option on their website. Wonder why?

Backward Glance on Summer School

I'm heading into the final week of my T340 summer school class. I love teaching the fundamentals of advertising course for lots of reasons. First of all, advertising is pretty much ubiquitous and there are always current examples for students to be able to relate to. telecommunications industry & management.> Another reason I enjoy advertising is that it is a medium through which some of the best example of modern-day creativity shine through. A third reason I like the class is that much of the work my colleagues and I conduct in the research lab is directly applicable to the task of persuading people to feel a certain way about a brand.

On top of all these reasons why I love teaching this course, this particular semester I have again been reminded how rare an occurrence it is for college students to read the chapters they are assigned in course textbooks. We use a good textbook , and although it suffers from the typical symptom of textbooks in a fast-moving field like Telecomm--namely having examples that are out of date due to the necessity of taking a snapshot of a rapidly moving field--it is filled with important vocabulary and concepts that a student interested in advertising should be aware of. They should especially be aware of them if they are planning on having a career in the field.

Anyway, as always, when I get to the end of a semester I look back upon it and think of how I would do things differently. I am more certain than ever that having periodic quizzes on the assigned reading is MANDATORY. I didn't have them as part of the course requirements this semester. As a result, I'm positive that my students don't read the chapters until about 24-48 hours before the exam. This really slows the learning process...and I'm sure makes it less effective.

What got me thinking about this was an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education that I read this morning which presented research suggesting regular quizzes-which require focused recall of recently...learned information.--lead to better recall for information learned. This improvement not only remains over time, it also occurs best for short-answer quizzes but (maybe surprisingly) even for multiple-choice quizzes. Here's a copy of the article.

Now, come the Fall semester, when I have 75 students rather than the 23 enrolled in the course for this summer session, I may regret having to subject me (or, maybe more precisely my graduate teaching assistant) to that much grading...I'm now just so sure that it would elevate the discussion in my classroom.

Great Day in San Jose

So, yesterday I lamented about not enjoying San Francisco during a recent trip there for the Interanational Communication Association conference. I've heard feedback from several of you who really like SF...and can't quite believe that I don't. Oh well, to each his own. For me, though, it's hard to compare the crowded streets, traffic, and cold temperatures to the wonderful day I spent in San Jose with my wife's cousin Tanya and her husband Chris. The two of them were graduate students at UIUC, and they visited our home in Bloomington once. So, when they paid me a lunch visit in San Fran and later suggested that rather than doing a sightseeing walk in the cold (but at least sunny) City by the Bay I should visit their house in San Jose, I was happy to agree.

Turns out that they had two dogs, Kaley and Zoe. Here's a family picture:

Their fun for the Memorial Day holiday was to take their dogs to a "dog beach"--a beach where dogs are allowed for certain hours...and on this particular beach the dogs could be off leash. It was a great location, with dogs going crazy:

And surfers catching waves:

While we were running on the beach, the three of us got separated by about 50 yards in different directions. All of a sudden, Chris...who was closest to the dogs...began yelling for Tanya. When we got up to him, we were startled to find this:

A beached sea lion. For a good amount of time I thought I was witnessing some sad event, and even contemplated whether Chris and I could possibly lug this huge thing down the beach and closer to the incoming tide. But, then, off to my right, I saw a pair of small, 8 1/2 x 11, signs on stakes stuck into the sand:

Apparently, this is something that sea lions just...well...do sometimes! It sure looked like it was in distressed...but this small laminated sign made me dispell any sense of guilt and turned back to enjoy the beach.

ICA=Hooray, San Fran=Yuck

Over the Memorial Day Weekend I hit the road...traveling to San Francisco for the annual conference of the International Communication Association. ICA is, by far, my favorite communication-related academic conference. The research being done is of high quality and that stimulates me to go back to my lab and continue my work. I must say, however, that this year I seemed to be much more focused on re-connecting with friends and former students and meeting new people (including a faculty member from Virginia Tech who told me he is an occassional Audio Prof reader!).


Here are some pictures of a bunch of us out for dinner at a place called Calzone's.


And when I say a bunch, I mean 15!!

Now, San Francisco is not one of my favorite cities. It's ALWAYS COLD THERE and seems pretty dirty and smelly to me. But, here's a few required shots of of a cable car and me riding on it (thanks to Johnny Sparks for letting me borrow the transit pass!)

Now, I look like I gained about 25 pounds by eating at Calzone's prior to taking this ride...

Not so. I just had to have on about 14 layers of clothing...did I mention that it was cold there.

Anyway, back home again in Indiana, and off to teach my summer school class.