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Thursday, September 16, 2010

Lady Gaga, Literary Criticism, and Why the Internet Really Is Changing the Learning Game

On March 11, 2010, the 9.5-minute-long music video for Lady Gaga's new single "Telephone" was released to much fanfare.

On March 12, this blog post went up on the literary criticism blog "Only Words to Play With." The blog's tags include terms like Nabokov, Nietzsche, Academia, and Freud - and now Lady Gaga. The post itself is an extensive breakdown of the symbolic imagery in the Telephone video, with subsections titled "Prison and Identity (Foucault's Discipline and Punish, Technological Entrapment, etc.)" and "Commodifying and Commercializing Murder," among others. (There is now a second part posted, and the blog had previously posted an essay on Gaga as Mythological Trickster.)

But what is really cool is what happened on March 13.

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

I am on the ballot.

I passed my dissertation proposal on Monday, so I am now officially a doctoral candidate. I hope everyone will vote for me when the election comes up, which probably won't be for another two years.

My dissertation is on the connection between science literacy and science media - in particular, whether engaging in authentic scientific practice in the classroom leads to changes in how middle school students interpret representations of science they see in various media. I'll be looking both at non-fiction news-type media and fictional television shows that contain "scientists." I'll certainly be posting more about this in the future!