Occasional reflections on how teaching is changing and being changed by the spread of Web 2.0.
Shut Down the Web! 1.0 Responses to Contemporary Teaching Practices
After I gave the “This is How We Dream” talk at the MLA, an audience member wrote seeking advice about how to handle a situation at her university involving copyright. She’d asked her students to produce compositions that included images taken from the web; she’d worked out, with a librarian’s assistance, a plan for advising her students on how to search flickr and the importance of sticking to work that was in the creative commons or copyright free. The students sort of complied, but more importantly produced...
read moreWhat Is a Paradigm Shift? And what does this have to do with teaching? (1 of 5)
Over the past two years, there have tended to be two responses to the work that Paul and I have been doing with multimedia composing and publishing. The first response is defined by tremendous enthusiasm, expressed in the form of ticker-tape parades on Madison Avenue, babies tossed in the air, meetings with the President, free trips to Disney. Reception following the talk The second response, much rarer to be sure, is skepticism and puzzlement. What does the teaching of writing have to do with technology? Let me summarize some of the reasons...
read moreDistraction versus Wandering
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 happiness. In context, you might say the image itself is a distraction from Tierney’s article,...
read moreWeb 2.0 and/as The Apocalypse: What The Terminator Has to Teach Us About Our Future
“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 continuation of a process that dates back to Gutenberg, the codex, papyrus, the cave wall, the ribbiting...
read moreOn Word Choice and Context: Tidying Up Huck Finn
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 are horrified, and we think most readers, textual purists or not, will be horrified too.” The...
read moreThe Mea Culpa Tweet: Cappie Pondexter Gets Twitter-Famous
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 hit? Mr. Jones-Jennings is a power forward for Pure-Youth Construction Basketball Team in the Super...
read moreMilitarization not Corporatization
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?
read moreThe Pursuit of Meaningfulness and the Grim Meathook Future: Reflections on Toni Morrison’s Commencement Speech
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 inexorably; and just as inexorably, students depart in the spring. This year’s graduating class...
read morePlagiarism Above the Fold! Cheating Justice in the Digital Age
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 timing is perfect. Just as pressure is rising during finals and the temptation to cut corners is at its...
read moreCut and Paste Reportage: The Rise of “Whatever Journalism”
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 practices by following this process of translation and dissemination? What is the proper name for...
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