I’ve been working on text2cloud for coming up on a year now and I’m finally in a position to write up some brief accounts of the lessons I’ve been learning as a result of taking on this project of learning in public.  Unlike the majority of the posts that populate the site, these “lessons” will be brief, direct, and informational. Because I spend the majority of my professional life working with teachers, I know...

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...

Ready for your test? Describe YaWifeyLovesMe, the videographer/citizen journalist/ringside announcer, who excitedly recorded “This is Just 2 Crazy,” the four-minute video of the brawl in front of the Rutgers Student Center that has racked up over half a million views on WorldStarHipHop.com over the past eight days. (If you’re lagging the action, I’ve been writing around and about this video over the first three posts in...

In Culture and Anarchy, Matthew Arnold’s foundational act of public criticism, the author looks on in horror at the society that is being brought into being by the Industrial Revolution. Nearly one hundred and fifty years later, although most of Arnold’s observations are about practices, institutions, and factions long gone, Culture and Anarchy remains an object of interest because Arnold had a way of categorizing that would now be...

Is this when it begins, the end of civilization? I had the ringer on my phone turned off, so I didn’t wake at 3:14:53 when the string of text alerts came in announcing a shooting on campus. As it turns out, the three text messages were lagging reality: at least four people had been shot in separate incidents hours earlier. Here the technology provided not so much early alert as eventual alert. What’s a few hours on a Saturday night?...

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...

So, here’s where we are on the timeline: it’s 6:44pm (1:44PM, EST)*, the day before Tyler Clementi commits suicide and Clementi has just posted to the “college roommate spying” thread on Just Us Boys that he will speak to the dorm RA that night. cit2mo’s next post is Wednesday, September 22nd, 4:38AM (Tuesday, September 21st, 11:38PM). It’s fair to say that it is full of surprises. Although there have been...

The following entry is the “SFW” (i.e., PG-13) version of: This Blog Entry Has Been Rated NSFW What is “age appropriate” viewing? Who determines when you can see what? Let’s begin with some representative vignettes. The first from the print-centric paradigm of my youth. When I was a teenager in the seventies, growing up in the South, there were visible, physical boundaries marking what was fit for consumption by...

What is “age appropriate” viewing? Who determines when you can see what? Let’s begin with some representative vignettes. The first from the print-centric paradigm of my youth. When I was a teenager in the seventies, growing up in the South, there were visible, physical boundaries marking what was fit for consumption by those who were “under aged.” At the back of the local used paperback bookstore, a curtain...