http://www.clayfox.com Tue, 19 Feb 2008 21:28:21 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 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 ... http://www.clayfox.com/2008/02/18/where-english-is-going/ From its earliest days, the promise of the Semantic Web has been to bring networked computers closer to the forms and priorities of human inquiry. This promise depends on mark-up language that gives data some structure, and frameworks that bring such structure into recognizable relationships. As a ... http://www.clayfox.com/2007/11/23/life-in-the-taggregate/ 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, ... http://www.clayfox.com/2007/10/20/the-silence-of-the-cyberlambs/ 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 ... http://www.clayfox.com/2007/06/20/trailing-comments/ Virginia Tech's Center for Digital Discourse and Culture recently debuted The April 16 Archive, with some help from the prolific Center for History and New Media at George Mason, ...in order to support ongoing efforts of historians and archivists to preserve the record of this event by collecting first-hand accounts, ... http://www.clayfox.com/2007/05/03/archiving-a-tragedy/ 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 ... http://www.clayfox.com/2007/04/14/taking-it-to-go/ A little while ago, the semi-ubiquitous learning management system Blackboard announced it was going 2.0 – in its own proprietary fashion. Lumped under the name BeyondInitiative are a series of properties that are designed to connect users worldwide, across education segments and disciplines, and thus leverage the wisdom of ... http://www.clayfox.com/2007/02/16/netgeners-loosely-joined/ It's a trainwreck, of course, but I can't look away: Penguin Books and a creative writing program in Leicester have launched "A Million Penguins": a crowd-sourced wikinovel. Don't worry, you know it's a real wiki because all the usual Wikipedia pieces are in place, including the ... http://www.clayfox.com/2007/02/07/a-million-little-penguins/ In our last episode, we beat up a bit on the notion of "learning object repositories" (LORs), wondering whether the well-meaning assemblage of modular bits and pieces of educational materials was actually a frustration of coherent teaching. Educational practices, after all, are still grounded in settings and customs that ... http://www.clayfox.com/2007/01/18/communing-with-objectives/ The pendulum has certainly swung far away from the early days of digital learning happytalk, which was all objects all the time. In them dotgone days, "strategic futurists" such as Wayne Hodgins proclaimed that "the ability to learn and apply the right stuff faster is the only sustainable competitive ... http://www.clayfox.com/2007/01/04/learning-objections/