Crazy Update!

Well sorry I’ve been away folks. I travelled a bit on Spring Break and got to go skydiving! And bungee cord jumping (or dropping)! Ad underwater spelunking! And then I came home and slipped on a banana peel and broke my leg. So I’ve been kind of out of it for a while and now I’m stuck at home in a crazy cast watching old movies.

At any rate its been tough to keep up with digi-stuff on campus. Feel I’m trying to see what’s happening through a sort of electronic window instead of being there. Kinda bummed that there was never another video posted of a job applicant for the Digital Studies spot. I know some else applied and came to campus and gave a talk, but no vid! Oh well. 

I’m hoping to be on my feet and back in time for the New Approaches to the Text Conference. The deadline passed to submit proposals. I wonder who got in???? If you conference people are out there, let me know! I’ll post your program here!

Dave Szulborski

Someone messaged me saying she was concerned I was using someone else’s name to get my own project out. I didn’t really understand because I was just blogging about digital stuff on campus, right? Well it turns out there was someone named Dave Szulborski who I’m not related to at all, but he did A LOT of really amazing digital stuff of his own--creative, groundbreaking, and honestly inspiring stuff. He made Alternate Reality Games that amazed people who got to play them. People still talk about them years after the games ended. He wrote books about them, too. Anyone who works with ARGs these days owe a debt to Dave Szulborski.

Dave Szulborski died of leukemia 4 years ago. He is as fondly and respectfully remembered for who he was as for what he did. I never knew him, but I share that admiration of his work and respect his memory. As someone learning about working in the digital medium, I’m honored to have the same name, and would never want to sully it. I think of this sort of online story telling of my own as a tribute to him, if only a very very modest one.

New Approaches to the Text

Just caught word of a conference happening here in a little over a month. It's all Rutgers-Camden students and faculty, which is cool, and the general topic is "New Approaches to the Text." "new" text and "old" text and stuff like that. I thought it fit in with the digital news on campus because surely a digital text would be a "new" text, right? Things are really happening around here!

Unless...well...is digital already "old"? Does anyone still wear a "digital watch"?

Anyway, here's the link: New Approaches to the Text. They're still taking ideas until March 15. Maybe I'll write something about digital journalism?

Kimon Keramidas II

Here's the talk Kimon Keramidas gave about Digital Studies when he visited, partly dealing with what he'd like to do on our campus. Keramidas

What do you think--does he have The (kera)Midas Touch? ha ha ha...

Kimon Keramidas

OK, I mentioned the Center for Digital Studies is hiring someone to...well...to be in charge of the Center for Digital Studies. Three people who want the job will visit our campus to meet people and have interviews and stuff. But they will also give talks that everyone can go to. It seems interesting to know who these people are since they will be the ones Directing the Center for Digital Studies, so they’ll be pretty important in all this digital stuff.

The first one to come is named Kimon Keramidas, and his website is here: http://bit.ly/12tjCLj.

You can see he runs the Digital Media Lab at the Bard Graduate Center in NY, which is cool, but then get this: his PhD is in...Theatre! Crazy! And now he does digital stuff? 

And he thinks about games in education! He wrote this http://bit.ly/X5yeOC called “What Games Have to Teach Us About Teaching and Learning: Game Design as a Model for Course and Curricular Development.” Not sure what that means except I want to take his class!

Anyway, anyone who wants can hear him talk on campus when he comes. The schedule I got says he’ll be discussing his vision for the Digital Studies Center. So find out what the digital technology, theatre, and games in class guy want the new Center on our campus to be like! Find out at 2:00pm on Thursday, Feb 14 in the Fine Arts building, Room 110.

Oh, and for the assignment we also have to follow each other's news things and mention them in our own, so here are a couple of other digital journalism thingies that people in my class are doing.

Kevin Queezy: http://bit.ly/U6IRE6 Reporting on news through Twitter...as befits his attention span.
Molly Bang http://bit.ly/YoDUmZ Reporting on something, but only using pictures to do it! Should be pretty cool!

I'll let you know if anyone else bothers to do their homework--I mean, when other people get started. ;)

Digital News!

Well so here’s what I came up with. Since this whole class is supposed to be digital journalism and digital reading and writing and all that, and it’s supposed to be all the rage and everything, I figured there probably is something in the news about digital stuff that I could follow. Sure enough, I starting googling and found out that Rutgers is actually starting a Center for Digital Studies right here in Camden. I’m not exactly sure what that means but I guess that’s what I’m going to find out.

I do know that they already starting hiring someone to run it. (Apparently, they decide to have a center before they even have someone to be in charge of it, so that’s a little weird.) Here’s the link to job: http://bit.ly/14LNSnP (You have to scroll down a little.)

I figure I’ll try to find out who is putting this Center together and maybe interview them about it or something. Like find out what they’re going to do and all that. 

So look at that! Digital news in digital news! This is easier than I thought!

First Post

Well, hi everyone! Welcome to my new blog. I’m basically doing this for an assignment. I’m a journalism major at Rutgers and I’m this course on Digital Journalism. We have to pick  a topic and blog about it, I guess sort of cover a news story but in a digital way instead of on old fashion paper. And so this blog is supposed to be both newsy and, well, bloggy. SO here goes...

Like I said, I’m doing this for an assignment. I should probably explain, though, I’m calling this “The Rabbit Hole” because my name is Rebecca but when I was little, my little brother Dave couldn’t pronounce Rebecca and when he tried it kept coming out as “Rabbit.” Well it just stuck and ever since then my family has called me Rabbit. Now some of my friends call me that too! And so basically this is where Rabbit hangs out: The Rabbit Hole!

Right now I’m just figuring out this blogger thingie. Pretty cool that you can do this for free. I hope I think of something to say. I’m going to try to figure out what news story I want to cover in this thing but for now just wanted to get it set up. So watch this space for...whatever! I don’t even know!