The occasion of a little makeover for good old Clayfox (thanks Jai in New Delhi!) has me thinking back over all its incarnations, most of which have been slightly hideous. Without WordPress and its myriad of free themes, I hate to think of the garish rags that might be tricking … 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
Every once in a while Clayfox drifts into the tag clouds. And yet its heart has never quite followed. Maybe that’s because most often those clouds don’t prove to be so very informative after all. Let’s review: tag clouds are a way to visualize the frequency of application of (usually … Continue reading
Clayfox has never been deluged with comments, despite some provocatively insouciant — if not downright ignorant — claims. It’s a quiet place, this blog, offering arcane pondering that trips barely a ripple in the chat-o-sphere. But let’s consider quality as an inverse of quantity. Indeed, I’ve been honored to net … Continue reading
The web is spinning ever-faster, shards of content are scattering every which way, RSS and podcast feeds radiate in all directions, each new day brings new ways of grabbing & saving & sharing digital bits shorn of context. It can seem so… centrifugal. Now that web content has slopped out … Continue reading
Participatory is the lodestare for those trying to steer the social networking juggernaut towards actual improvement of education. As described in Henry Jenkins’s Confronting the Challenges of Participatory Culture: Media Education for the 21st Century (a white paper on the MacArthur Digital Media Learning site), participatory culture is our technologically-delivered … Continue reading
If you agree that Wikipedia presents more thorns than roses to academic experts, you have good company: one of Wikipedia’s two founders. The split between Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger has a certain Old Testament character: Wales (the Web 2.0 brother) reigns over the miraculous worldwide flourishing of the anonymously … Continue reading
Yo, can I borrow your notes? Harkening back to the salad days of college, I seem to remember a free-floating faith in the power of someone else’s notes to fill in cracks of attendance & attention. I doubt that much significant learning took place in power-cramming sessions entirely reliant on … Continue reading
You’ve wrangled that paper to a plausible conclusion — a bit of sleep is just around the corner — but hold on, not so fast, you’re Sisyphus after all. Citation formatting is a special curse, the inane labor at the end of hard work that holds all your effort hostage. … Continue reading
…the trumpet that once announced from afar the laurelled mail, heart-shaking when heard screaming on the wind and proclaiming itself through the darkness to every village or solitary house on its route, has now given way for ever to the pot-wallopings of the boiler. That’s Thomas DeQuincey, mourning the shift … Continue reading