Hillary Clinton, yesterday: In a sweeping, pointed address that dealt with the Internet as a force for both liberation and repression, Mrs. Clinton said: “Those who disrupt the free flow of information in our society or any other pose a threat to our economy, our government and our civil society. Countries or individuals that engage Continue reading

A good friend of mine asked me what I thought of the Lanier article in the NYT. Well,  first reaction is that I’m sick of this media narrative: “Person X was once part of the Digerati. Now they have have turned against it! The fact that they were for it before and are now against Continue reading

The newest AAC&U employer poll will be released next week, and the AAC&U has said that written and oral communication will, for the first time, surpass collaboration as the skill most desired by employers. What I would love to see teased out, though, is what kind of writing employers (and students!) want. I’ve never been docked Continue reading

Just a short thought from the car-ride to work today. If we are moving to a reputation based economy, where one’s ability to make a living is based on their network reputation, stealing attribution is a far greater crime than stealing intellectual property. The newspaper reporter who does not link to the blog that actually Continue reading

I thought I’d put this up a year ago, but it looks like I never did. Basically I filmed my daughter talking about this game Castle Crashers she plays and how she uses the web to figure things out about it. A bit of background — Castle Crashers is a side-scrolling beat-em-up game that is Continue reading

Thinking about the Murder Mystery study (below) and technology… and maybe about self-esteem in general. We knock the focus on self-esteem now, because we confuse it with the specific practice of telling kids that they are smart at every opportunity and expecting that to make them smarter. So what passes for debate on “The Self-Esteem Question”  is Continue reading

Fascinating psychological study: To investigate determinants of mystery enjoyment, a short story was manipulated to produce different levels of uncertainty regarding two suspects’ criminal involvement (low vs. high uncertainty) and to create different resolution types (denouement, confirmation, and surprise). Participants’ (N = 84) reactions and enjoyment were ascertained via questionnaires after reading the mystery development Continue reading

Was going to write a screed here on ideology and pragmatism when I realized I was looking at the recent Siemens piece all wrong. I can’t get into the debate about whether it’s appropriate to advance open education by using tools from Google. It’s a debate without a bottom (and one I’d argue ignores the Continue reading

I’ve been thinking a bit in the past week about whether novels can be more like the modern TV series. Over the past two decades TV has evolved from a purely serial art form (see, for example, Law and Order)  to an art form that operates on both an episodic and a series level (see, Continue reading