This week’s In Media Res line-up:

Monday, March 19, 2007 – Allison McCracken (DePaul University) presents: “‘A Trek for Our Time’: The Continuing Relevance and Resonance of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine”

Tuesday, March 20, 2007 – Avi Santo (Old Dominion University) presents: “The many (unauthorized) Faces of Superman”

Wednesday, March 21, 2007 – Michela Ardizzoni (University of Louisville) presents: “Blob: Ironic Meta-Television in Italy”

Thursday, March 22, 2007 – Hector Amaya (Southwestern University) presents: “Brown masculinities, quick and swinging”

Friday, March 23, 2007 – Kelly Kessler (CUNY Queens College) presents: “Friday Night Whites — Nighttime Drama Don’t Respect My Conway Twitty”

Please check out these wonderful contributions and offer your thoughts via
a comment.

A bit later today, we’re going to turn our attention back to the agenda for the editorial board meeting, which is coming up soon. In the meantime, however, this notice just arrived in my in box:

Thanks to funding from the Hewlett and Macarthur Foundations, Creative Commons is launching a new division called CC Learn, which will be devoted to open educational material and repositories — from kindergarten to graduate school, through lifelong learning. CC Learn’s goal is to break down the barriers - whether legal, technical or cultural - between different collections of open educational content. Our goal is to make material more “interoperable,” to speed up the virtuous cycle of use, experimentation and reuse, to spread the word about the value of open educational content, and to change the culture of repositories to one focused on “helping build a usable network of content worldwide” rather than “helping build the stuff on our site.” Please help us spread the news! Second, we need an Executive Director with experience in education to run the new division. The person would be located in San Francisco, working with the astounding CC staff. Details are here: http://creativecommons.org/about/opportunities#ccl Please pass this information along to the networks you are a part of and encourage qualified people to apply. Save the world and advance learning through open content, in San Francisco, while surrounded by extremely cool people. What more could one want?

This is a really exciting initiative. Imagine a global network of open and free educational content, with curricula customized to different states or countries, with experimentation across multiple sites and multiple platforms, so that someone else can find things to do with my content that I never thought of… Imagine bringing into the open educational content community hundreds of thousands of teachers, students and volunteers. Imagine pursuing ease of discovery and use of educational material with the same ingenuity and dedication that we invest in making e-commerce systems work well or in allowing teenagers to flirt with each other on social networking sites. Many of the pieces are in place, and there are great people working on the issue already, but there is a lot to do. Please help us by passing this along. (And if you can help fund it or donate to support it, so much the better!)

Just a quick post for the moment, to note that we’ve reopened our call for “papers,” which you’ll find in the sidebar on the right. The guys working on the backend have also gotten the proposals page in full working order, with comments from the previous site restored and the commenting function reactivated. If you haven’t yet had a chance to submit a proposal, please do, and if you haven’t yet read or commented on the proposals that are there, do that as well. The editorial board will be meeting next week, and among other things, we’ll be discussing these projects; the more input we have from you, the better!

This week’s In Media Res line-up:

Monday, March 12, 2007 – Vamsee K. Juluri (University of San Francisco) presents: “Bollywood for the Trees”

Tuesday, March 13, 2007 – Dave Parry (University of Albany) presents: “Racism, “Realism,” and High School Sports”

Wednesday, March 14, 2007 – Vicki Mayer (Tulane University) presents: “The Road Home, the Tourist Version”

Thursday, March 15, 2007 – Dan Leopard (St. Mary’s College of California) presents: “41 Shots”

Friday, March 16, 2007 – David Golumbia (University of Virginia) presents: “Put a Little Serotonin in Me”

Please check out these wonderful contributions and offer your thoughts via
a comment.

This week’s (abbreviated) In Media Res line-up. We will return with daily clips on Monday, March 12th:

Monday, March 5, 2007 – Craig O. Stewart (Old Dominion University) presents: “Bad Science. Bad, bad science”

Wednesday, March 7, 2007 – Walter Metz (Montana State University, Bozeman) presents: “Whiteness and Transcultural Sketch Comedy”

Please check out these wonderful contributions and offer your thoughts via
a comment.

Also, our apologies for running the wrong clip on Friday, March 2, 2007. Please check out the correct piece curated by Patrick Burkart (Texas A&M) with Brother Russell titled: “The Best of the Worst of Star Search”

I am about to hit the class room and I thought you all could use a dose of The Onion…

NEW YORK—In a cease-and-desist letter sent to Google’s attorneys last week, media conglomerate Viacom demanded that YouTube immediately pull 400,000 ex-TV viewers from its industry-leading video-sharing site.

“These viewers clearly belong to Viacom and its related entertainment subsidiaries,” stated the letter, which called the co-opted viewership “the result of an investment of hundreds of millions of dollars by our company.” “Should YouTube fail to adequately address this blatant infringement, Viacom will not hesitate to assert its ownership rights to its intellectual property.”