Why use Twitter? I get asked this frequently when I’m on the road, meeting with teachers and administrators. On first blush, it seems like a ridiculous waste of time. “Micro-blogging,” a term coined to describe the process of posting in 140 character blasts, invites ridicule: I know, because I made fun of the process for two years before I thought it might be more productive for me to understand its appeal. The Dumb...
In the previous lesson, I outlined the good, the dumb, and the riskier aspects of using Twitter. The risk, you’ll recall, arises once you shift from being someone who follows other tweeters to being someone who tweets. In this lesson, I want to continue the discussion of tweeting as part of the process of self-curating. To begin, imagine that you’ve just finished writing something that you think others would benefit from...
My last post presented a case study of how print news reports on plagiarism in the university. In this post, I want to reverse the poles: a student paper publishes a letter to the editor; the letter is picked up by an online scandal aggregator and turned into a news story. And the story jumps from site to site, makes its way to MSNBC and from there jumps the Atlantic and appears in the Daily Mail. What can we learn about 21st century writing...
It’s early December, end of the fall 2011 semester. What’s above the fold in the paper version of the Sunday edition of New Jersey’s biggest paper, The Star Ledger? Herman Cain suspending his presidential campaign? In-depth coverage of the case against now disgraced former governor Jon Corzine and now former CEO of MF Global? A Rutgers student’s effort to clear her name of plagiarism? Plagiarism, of course. The...
Well, the new graduation procedure appears to have gone off without a hitch. Some 40,000 folks found their way to the stadium; parents and friends cheered during the conferring of degrees; Toni Morrison gave the address to the first students to graduate from the School of Arts and Sciences; no one got shot. Excuse me? The beauty of the academic calendar revealed itself once again, as it does annually: students arrive in the fall; time passes...
When you're all degreed-up, it's natural enough to feel that that signifies something. But what if the Internet Age really is one gigantic harpoon heading towards the Great White Whale of higher ed?
Without much effort, you can find images of how quickly life has changed for the people of Japan. New York Times Front Page, March 16, 2011 What is it like to experience such a disaster? One minute you’re sitting in your home; the next you’re washed out to sea. Do you want to survive, having seen your neighborhood erased? Do you know where your kids are? Your friends? Your past? * What does it feel like to wait for a tsunami to...
I need a show of hands. How many of you were outraged to learn that Alan Gribben, professor of English at Auburn-Montgomery, has edited an edition of Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, due out next month from NewSouth Books, that substitutes the word “slave” for the word “nigger”? This event sure has generated a lot of heat. The New York Times editorial board doesn’t mince words about this act of word mincing: “We...
“We are living through the most momentous change in human communication in human history.” Over the past couple of weeks, I have considered three of the four main responses Paul and I receive when we insist upon seeing the advent of Web 2.0 as a paradigm shift in human communication. So far, I’ve ruminated on: 1. We are not; 2. I can ignore it, so it can’t be that big a deal; and 3. It’s not a change at all, but a...
Admit it. This picture’s just the teensiest bit creepy. It accompanies John Tierney’s “When the Mind Wanders, Happiness Also Strays,” a NYT article reviewing research by Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert published last week in Science magazine. The image is, in other words, twice removed from the original research, which involves using an iPhone app to collect data on the relationship between attentiveness and...
