The Writing that Waits
Each weekend, the ritual is to try and get the inbox down to 200. This is less time-consuming than it was in the past, because I no longer file anything. There’s just one folder: “read.” And the spam filtering system that Paul figured out has dramatically reduced the number of messages promising me a thinner, yet more engorged future I have to cull through. And still, the majority of the writing that remains is task-oriented–smother that brush fire, defang a complaint, get the supportive yet critical memo out. Given...
read moreThe Coming Apocalypse
Nice title, eh? * We are fortunate to be living through the greatest change in human communication in human history. This change is bigger and more momentous than our distant ancestors’ slow crawl from the muck to dry land where, over great swaths of time, they came to grunt at one another meaningfully. It is more significant than the invention of the alphabet. It is more important than anything that was set in motion by the grinding gears of the Guttenberg printing press. It is more transformative than the telephone, the television set,...
read moreThis Is How We Think: Learning in Public After the Paradigm Shift
This is How We Think: Learning in Public After the Paradigm ShiftIn “This is How We Think,” Richard E. Miller and Paul D. Hammond explore how education must change now that we live in a world where information abounds, where reading and research have moved from the library to the laptop, and where the act of learning itself is now making its way out of the shadows into the public eye. In this collaborative presentation, Professors Miller and Hammond discuss their efforts to invent new media teaching practices that encourage...
read moretext2cloud pdf downloads: articles for offline reading
Previously published articles on the teaching of writing and the future of higher education by text2cloud, ready for download. Reading_in_Slow_Motion Essay discussing teaching reading in the Age of Distraction. Includes assignments and examples of using Google Docs and Diigo to move the private acts of reading and writing into public, collaborative spaces. The Coming Apocalypse We are fortunate to be living through the greatest change in human communication in human history. How will the paradigm shift in human communication change what...
read moreOther Countries Heard From
I woke this morning to find notification of comments on four of the five sections of “Worlds End, Worlds Begin,” the video that eventually led to the launching of this blog. That’s a puzzler, I thought. The video is a remixed version of a lecture I gave at a conference on the humanities at Clemson early in 2007. It’s the first multimedia piece Paul Hammond and I worked on together; the first thing we posted to YouTube. We learned a lot of dos and yet more don’ts from that initial effort–the most important...
read moreThe Fear Factor
There’s only one certainty here. This will happen again. We all hope not at our schools. And when the news breaks, we will hope that no one we know was involved, that the shooter wasn’t moving among our friends and colleagues, wasn’t studying anything in our area, wasn’t anything like anyone we’ve ever known or been. It is sure to be a loner or set of loners, ostracized, picked on, at a moment of great stress—the end of the semester or the end of the year, with graduation or some equally significant transition looming on the...
read moreSo Much Depends on the Carriage Return: Publishing in the Digital Age
Is it crazy to pull the piece because it won't look the way you want it to? What would it take during the production process to make you withdraw an article that had already been accepted for publication? At what point would the intrusions of the copyediting just be too much?
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