Alaine Martaus

Someone made this for a school project, and I found it while writing up the section of my dissertation on fan communities, and it made my day.

John Green recommendations books on YouTube and other social media platforms.
Then someone collects a list of those recommendations, which John then shares on Facebook.
When my dissertation talks about the Vlogbrothers promoting social reading practices using social media in ways that provide space for their fans to contribute and participate, this is exactly the kind of thing I am talking about.

Reading about how STEAM, which used to be STEM, is about to become STREAM with an R for Reading – and I can’t help but wonder how many more rounds of scrabble we have to play before we acknowledge that it’s just useful to be a broadly educated human being.
Maybe we should skip straight to: Civics, Reading, Engineering, Arts, Math, International History, Economics, Science, Technology. Schools can start competing over whose curriculum is the “CREAMIEST”.

I am a long-standing fan of this comics series, and I’ve been teaching the first volume  in my young adult literature class for years. It works perfectly in the unit on Independence. So I am very excited to see how it functions as an adaptation. (And it makes me a little sad that I’ll be teaching media literacy instead of  young adult lit in the spring.)

I have a real love-hate reaction to this article. I love the appreciation for D&D and all it brings to the people who play it. But I utterly despise the techno-phobic rhetoric, the idea that the game is valuable because it can fix your kids and/or teach them something, and the idea that games are best worthy of praise when they are pro-social and offline.