Reading Writing Responding

I recently started my first MOOC focusing on Rhizomatic Learning and the topic for Week 1 was 'Cheating as Learning'. After seeing Michael Petroni's film adaptation of Markus Zuzak's The Book Thief today and it got me wondering, is seeing the film before reading the book cheating? Does the book come first or are they both completely different? It is usually argued that the book has primacy. Why else would the film be described as an 'adaptation'? The very term suggests that the book has some sort of pride of place, that it is the thing that is changed for a new medium. However, what is often denied is the place of the adapted text to be a text-in-itself. For example, can you watch the film Tomb Raider without having played the game? Can you listen to Cedric Gervais' remix of Lana Del Rey's "Summertime Sadness", without listening to the original album version? What is the place of the adapted when considering adaptations? After...

My wife and I sat and watched Argo   the other day. We had both read the hype and were dully rewarded, on the edge of  the couch to the very end. The question that it left me with though was how many other such stories exist through history of extreme risk that have failed and why are they not the stories that we are told? Having completed my rudimentary study of Joseph Campbell and The Hero with a Thousand Faces , I understand that there is a predetermined nature in all of us that wishes to succeed, a staple of the Hollywood film industry. However, how does this match up with the notion of failure? A part of me thinks that even a hero fails somewhere along the way, often this is making of their success. You don't have to look very hard on the Internet to find a discussion of some of the health benefits of failing every know and then. For example, Seth Godin states that, 'All of us fail. Successful people fail often, and, worth noting, learn more from tha...