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.

D is for Digital

More things I found months ago and never posted!

And this one is even publicly available, no university login or journal subscription required.

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center, part of Sesame Workshop, has a postdoctoral fellowship each year. Last year's fellow, Carly Shuler, produced the report D is for Digital, on the current state of the market of interactive digital learning media for kids ages 3-11. If you're used to reading heavy, dense, academic articles, it makes a nice light read that's nonetheless very enlightening.

Here is a list of other recent publications from the Center.