http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home Thoughts on Technology and Higher Education Thu, 04 Mar 2010 18:10:40 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 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 ... http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home/2010/technology-and-affordable-education/ The following is a guest post from UT-Dallas graduate student, Barbara Vance (@brvance). This past semester Barbara taught an atypical rhetoric and composition course. Barbara teaches Rhetoric 1302, the standard introductory college writing course. She was given a course with a group of students who she was told, were struggling ... http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home/2010/a-model-for-teaching-college-writing/ "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 ... http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home/2010/be-online-or-be-irrelevant/ 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 ... http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home/2010/the-mla-briancroxall-and-the-non-rise-of-the-digital-humanities/ 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 ... http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home/2010/article-at-flow-tv/ 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 ... http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home/2009/dear-scholastic-since-i-am-a-mind-you-admire/ 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, ... http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home/2009/seriously-can-we-end-this-debate-already/ 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 ... http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home/2009/the-university-and-the-future-of-knowledge/ 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 ... http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home/2009/and-now-a-brief-thought-about-the-university/ 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 ... http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home/2009/launching-the-emerging-media-major/