The Most Useful Grading Mark?

I think I may have discovered the best mark to add to add to my grading repertoire, the interrobang.

Meet the interrobang. Unless you happen to be a typographic expert, you probably haven’t encountered the hybrid question mark-explanation point. It was actually invented in the early 1960s by ad exec Martin Speckter but as language researcher Anne Trubek suggested last year, it just might be the symbol of our times.

So many uses.

The Relevance of Maps

Want to convince students that geography and cartography are still relevant? A piece by John Gravois in the Washington Monthly explores the controversies that still surround borders in many parts of the world and the role of modern technology in terms of interpreting and creating those controversies:

Just five years since the release of Google Maps and Google Earth, the corporation may well be the world’s most important mapmaker. More than 600 million people around the world have downloaded Google Earth. As a testament to ambition, that number alone would be remarkable. But Google is also intent on upending our very notion of what a map is. Rather than produce one definitive map of the world, Google offers multiple interpretations of the earth’s geography. Sometimes, this takes the form of customized maps that cater to the beliefs of one nation or another. More often, though, Google is simply an agnostic cartographer—a peddler of “place browsers” that contain a multitude of views instead of univocal, authoritative, traditional maps. “We work to provide as much discoverable information as possible so that users can make their own judgments about geopolitical disputes,” writes Robert Boorstin, the director of Google’s public policy team.

The piece seems like a very interesting springboard for a number of projects for students.  Just the idea that a map—something that must seem to be so objective and driven by science (like Google’s satellite technology) can be fraught with political and cultural calculations—would seem to offer a lot of avenues of discussion about digital literacy, ethnocentrism, and corporate power.

Of course, you could always add a little Conrad, too:

Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, ‘When I grow up I will go there.’ The North Pole was one of these places, I remember. Well, I haven’t been there yet, and shall not try now. The glamour’s off. Other places were scattered about the Equator, and in every sort of latitude all over the two hemispheres. I have been in some of them, and . . . well, we won’t talk about that. But there was one yet—the biggest, the most blank, so to speak—that I had a hankering after.

Seeking out the unknown and trying to understand a complex world seems like a decent way to spend an afternoon class to me.