The title of this post refers to a color theory about how retinas process antagonizing information from three cones; in short, differences in the three are perceived first. When green and red are on top of each other, some users may not be able to distinguish between the two colors; plenty of whitespace for heavy contrast eliminates this issue.

When I give a very brief overview of color theory to my introductory classes in Media Studies for their first web design projects, I encourage them to think about how to cross the color wheel. The tension between traditional complementary color pairs (purple/yellow, blue/orange, green/red) may be easier for my students to grasp since the University of Virginia’s colors are blue and orange—they grapple with ugly implementations of this color scheme daily. More »»

Last spring Peter Kline of the UVA MFA program read two triolets (a poetic form in iambic tetrameter with the rhyme scheme ABaAabAB that was new to me) at our graduate conference. The first two lines are also the last, but their meaning the second time has shifted slightly. The first line is repeated half-way through the poem, marking this shift; I used this rule in my triolet to indicate the cyclical nature of these behavior patterns.

I’ve spent the afternoon reading Edna St. Vincent Millay, regretting we do not spend more time with female authors and poets in the advanced Modernism survey I’m teaching this semester; how fresh Millay’s work reads—she always begins her poems in the middle of situations. This week in class we are discussing Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, a pleasant respite from the Joyce/Yeats/ Eliot trajectory of recent weeks. Rereading Dalloway I’m reminded of the significance of her details; Woolf builds elegant unsaids into her neatly crafted exchanges and we forget that as readers we are privy to the free indirect discourse unavailable to the characters. I thought about Clarissa’s joy at the beautiful London morning, her embrace of ceremony, her unfailing politeness, and I wrote my triolet.

“A Pretty Hewn Town” is posted in the portfolio section.

This semester I am teaching 2 sections of MDST110, the introductory digital methods class for the competitive Media Studies major. My friend Jim Cocola, the Wikipedian publisher of Mirador Press, has convinced me of the efficacy of teaching media studies courses with wikis. So we set up a wiki for the hundred strong MDST110 class and the program to build resources and the community.

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The kthread Summer 2006 Web Design Intensive at UVA has sprung. Today, the class accepted the League of Awesomeness’s Earth Sandwich Mission. More on our superpowers and more of our power moves soon on the class site: http://hooscode2006.com; for now, we humbly submit the TJ Sandwich gallery.

Congratulations to Danielle Marisa Blundell, Michael Hagos, Wesley Reed Harris, Ashley Joost, Jenna Martin, Joe Mier, and Mica Swyers, 7 of the 18 students selected for the highly competitive Media Studies major at the University of Virginia that I had the good fortune to teach in an introductory major class last fall.

Happily, I’ve taught many thoughtful, engaged members of the Virginia community in the past few years. Former students are studying abroad, accepting internships and invitations to join other departments, and publishing online and elsewhere. I’m also grateful to the surrounding wordsmiths and webgeeks that have taught and continue to teach me.

Today, for obvious calendrical reasons, is kthread Delurker Day. Please, especially if you haven’t before, comment on this post and share your news.

*Note: due to shy potential Delurkers, Delurking Day has been expanded to Delurking Week.