Rantings

This weekend The Chronicle of Higher Education published an opinion piece by Michael Morris arguing that in the name of campus security campuses should start data mining all student internet traffic. Or as the not so subtle, fear mongering, almost fit for Fox News title says, “Mining Student Data Could Save Lives.” Morris’s article to …..

As many of you know, The University at Albany (the place from which I received my PhD) has decided to close its French, Italian, and Russian departments. There are a range of reasons that make this an uninformed decision; for a rundown see Rosemary Feal’s The World Beyond Reach. More entertainingly, though, Jean-Luc Nancy, Professor of …..

Harrisburg University seems to be getting a small amount of press lately for announcing that it would as an experiment block all social media websites for a week (Inside Higher Education Article, Chronicle Article). Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, even AIM and chat features on Moodle will be unavailable on the University network (or more precisely the …..

The following is a summary of my talk, or more accurately, the short written version of my talk, “Burn the Boats,” which I gave a little over a month ago at the DWRL in Austin. You can read the post, or skip to the end and watch the videos (which last about 40 minutes) and …..

Yesterday, Dan Cohen’s tweet about the iPad and censorship, got me thinking about a drawback to the iPad for education argument. What Dan made me wonder/realize is that by using iPads for educational purposes schools, both higher ed and secondary/primary ed, would be opening themselves up to censorship by Apple. In other words as I …..

So, I have been borrowing an iPad for the last couple of weeks. I realize given my critique of the device that it might seem a bit bizarre for me to be using one. But, I consider it research, a way to have an informed position, and since this is really one of our lab …..

Last week I sent Michelle Nickerson, a colleague of mine here at UT-Dallas , a link to Dan Brown’s “Open Letter to Educators.” Michelle like me, is concerned about the future of the University, and as someone whose opinion I respect, I wanted to see her response. After watching it we swapped emails back and …..

“For [the theoreticians of photography] undertook nothing less than to legitimize the photographer before the very tribunal he was in the process of overturning.” -Benjamin, Little History of Photography I want to explicate some of the issues I raised in the last post, address some of the comments, walk back my position on at least …..

Two Things about the MLA conference I want to connect here: 1. Clearly one of the themes that has developed in the MLA post-mortem has been the rise of social media and the influence of technology at the conference. Both The Chronicle and Inside Higher Ed noticed the prominence of Twitter at the convention, or …..

Jut got back from MLA, much writing, blogging, and reflecting to follow, but in the meantime I seem to have overlooked mentioning that an article I wrote for Flow.TV was published (published is this the right word for it in the age of the internet?) last month. For those who are interested I make the …..