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Cosmopolitan Magazine recently released an article titled "28 Mind-Blowing Lesbian Sex Positions." Where was this vital information when I was a teenager? How much more fulfilling would my young life have been if I had known about "The Rocket," "The Kinky Jockey," or "Defying Gravity," a position in which one receives oral sex while performing [...]

You write about things that are deep and painful. Do you emotionally relive the painful feelings and experiences? Does the process of writing your novels bring pain or relieve it? I write about things that make us human. There is a great Zen saying that goes: when you meet someone, look them closely in the [...]

  The 2012 class of Guggenheim Fellows was announced this week by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, inciting some exuberant responses on the part of several winners (check out Terry Teachout’s Twitter feed). The Guggenheim has long been hailed as the “mid-career award,” honoring scholars, scientists, poets, artists, and writers, who have likely published a book or three, professed a fair amount of research, and are actively engaged in projects of significant scope. The fellowship possesses some tortured origins—(John) Simon Guggenheim, who served as president of the American Smelting and Refining Company and Republican senator from Colorado, seeded the award (1925) following the death of this son John (1922) from mastoiditis (Guggenheim’s second son George later committed suicide, and more infamously his older brother Benjamin went down with the Titanic). Among this year’s crop (we dare say more forward-leaning than previous years?) is a roster of standout “professionals who have demonstrated exceptional ability by publishing a significant body of work in the fields of natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, and the creative arts,” affiliated with the University of Chicago Press: Creative Arts Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry magazine and author of three poetry collections, coeditor of The Open Door: [...]

A few things I’ve wanted to blog about in-depth but am just throwing out there for now.

• Paul over at ResearchQuest beat me to the punch to post about Carnegie Mellon University’s Library Arcade. This is a must-read, must-play combo for all library staff interested in using gaming in instruction. Heck, maybe we should have a leaderboard on this one. I love the idea of adapting an old school style game (like “Diner Dash”) but putting a library spin on it.
• When I wasn’t looking, Penn State turned its Virtual Worlds blog into a big ol’ Educational Gaming Commons, now with forums in addition to the blog.
• Chris attended the Games, Learning, and Society Conference back in July (the one that I also went to), and you can read his notes over on LibLaureate. In his reflections on James Paul Gee’s opening keynote, Chris wrote, “When do we reach a threshold and go grab a walk-through or a cheat code? Is this the importance of social networks - I’ve reached so far and now I need some help?” That’s a great question, and I think the answer is yes.
• At Learning2007 later this month, they’re going to do a Rapid Learning Game Experiment. While the exercise itself is fascinating, it’s the last sentence that intrigues me most (emphasis is mine).

  “We are going to push Gaming for Learning Development to the max in an upcoming experiment. Here are the ingredients:

  • Take several undergraduate students from Champlain College’s Electronic Gaming & Interactive Development Program in Vermont and bring them to Orlando for Learning 2007.
  • Give them an assignment to create a Learning Focused Game, defined by a group of companies at Learning 2007.
  • Over the next 58 hours, in full view of 2,000 participants - with feedback every few hours - they will build an web based immersive learning game.
  • This learning activity will then be reviewed, edited and released into Open Source for the entire global community to use.“
• The following video is just awesome in every sense of the word. I laughed, I cried, and then I laughed some more. Watch the whole thing to find out who’s behind it. Not only is it an object lesson in how social gaming can be and how libraries could implement it, but it’s also a great marketing lesson for us. I’ll definitely be showing snippets of this one in my presentations.