academhack

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 one [...]

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 the [...]

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 [...]

Scholastic recently chose to censor a book (or more accurately ask an author to alter her book-which is a form of censorship) because one of the characters, wait for it . . . has, gasp, “two mommies.” The School Library Journal has the background story. Normally I would stop at passing this article around and [...]

Yesterday @SybilV posted a comment via Twitter during a library orientation for her class:

An innocent enough of a gesture one could assume. What I took Sybil’s point to be, was that Britannica is not a good scholarly source, and that the library should be encouraging other/more appropriate research practices (like, you know using scholarly sources, [...]

A couple of weeks ago I gave a talk as part of a lecture series here at The University of Texas at Dallas. The series is part of the events commemorating the 40th anniversary of the University, and as such I thought it would be a good opportunity to take a stab at looking at [...]

This morning on Twitter I engaged in a brief dialogue about the University and the ethics of doing research work outside the University context (i.e. in corporate America). This was prompted by danah boyd’s explanation of why she works for Microsoft. I might have much more to say about this later, but for those who [...]

So as most of the readers of this blog know, we launched a new major here at the University of Texas at Dallas: Emerging Media and Communications. (Sorry the website is not as informative as it ought to be, yet. We have been busy getting the program structured and have not had time to work [...]

“During the course of this long volume I have undoubtedly plagiarized from many sources–to use the ugly term that did not bother Shakespeare’s age. I doubt whether any criticism or cultural history has ever been written without such plagiary, which inevitably results from assimilating the contributions of your countless fellow-workers, past and present. [...]