It had been a while since I’d attended a New Media Consortium conference — five years, to be exact. The approximate lifespan of a rabbit — or of any interest in Second Life as an educational platform. Way back in 2007 it seemed like at least every other session was … Continue reading
My favorite part of Through the Looking-Glass is Alice’s late encounter with a very clumsy and Lewis Carroll-like White Knight in a chapter entitled “‘It’s My Invention’” . The Knight offers to sing Alice a comforting song, and Alice reluctantly accepts (“‘Is it very long?’ Alice asked, for she had … Continue reading
Stray visitors may be forgiven for wondering what *did* happen during 2011: was disaster adverted? Is he alive, and if so did he have a thought? So: yes, yes, and yes; chalk up this still interlude to blogger’s block, pithier observation-release venues, and — most of all — the day … Continue reading
At work today: one of our periodic, inevitable, spirited conversations about the oft-ridiculed yet oft-cited notion of a “digital native.” We revisited Marc Prensky’s 2001 framing of such (first hit on Google, for all you “digital natives” searching for yourselves) called “Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants” — a piece festooned … Continue reading
My ladies and gentlemen please this CriticalCommons presentation of predigitalscholarshipdownfall to enjoy:
By now I’m something of a conference veteran, or, to be more precise, a repeat flâneur at a variety of conferences. Usually I’m presenting at these gatherings, but rarely do I feel like a true member of the community of academics, lawyers, technologists, or administrators that I happen to be … Continue reading
In the perfect world we never seem to live in, migration of scholarship to the web would mean endlessly networked citations. It would mean new metrics for gauging the impact of any given publication, substantiating tenure/promotion and grant proposals with hard evidence. It would give us new tools to map … Continue reading
It’s late January, another semester is gearing up, and yet once more I’m preparing another round of Lit Hum — must be time for Stanley Fish to say something risible about the humanities. Last year around this time, Fish reveled in the inutility of it all: “To the question “of … Continue reading
With some notable exceptions, the willingness of English Departments to seriously engage with current communication technology has advanced “one funeral at a time,” to quote one voice in the wilderness. Denial, nostalgia, tenure pressure: all part of the tweedy sluggishness. Meantime the hungry sheep look up and are not fed. … Continue reading
It’s taken long enough, but Clayfox has shaken off summer dreams to engage with a little edu-distopia, 2007-style. Michael L. Wesch, the Kansas State University anthropology prof who brought the YouTube-fueled world a much-referenced little primer on Web 2.0 some time back, has had his students produce a new video, … Continue reading