Students spend a lot of time writing. Most everyone vividly remembers writing essays for school, and, for many, those memories are not necessarily pleasant. Talk of writing in the classroom often dredges up images of empty pages yawning to be...
Media activists Marisa Jahn and Julian Rubinstein recently joined us at the Center for Civic Media for our weekly Civic Media Lunch series. Marisa is the new director of the People’s Production House, a New York based project that works with...
Sean McCarthy is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of Texas, Austin, in the Digital Literacies and Literatures concentration. His dissertation explores the intersection between community literacy and digital...
Media activists Marisa Jahn and Julian Rubinstein recently joined us at the Center for Civic Media for our weekly Civic Media Lunch series. Marisa is the new director of the People’s Production House, a New York based project that works with...
Like many in the digital media and learning community, I am a fan of the free and open source computer programming language, Processing, which can be easily downloaded at Processing.org. Processing is an incredibly accessible computer...
In the Phaedrus, Plato famously objected to writing, noting that it would cause a number of ills: it would lead to the decay of memory, it would deceive people into thinking that they possessed knowledge merely because they had read about it,...
The Telegraph recently published an article announcing that, in the age of Facebook and Twitter, "ancient communication technologies" like handwriting "are current like never before." The title of the article -- "How Twitter made...
The following is a shortened version of a talk I gave at the "Engaging the Public" symposium held at Washington & Jefferson College on Oct. 1. According to Cathy Davidson's Now You See It, 65 percent of students entering school today will...
Not long ago, I was on an airplane waiting for takeoff. Due to the completely reasonable FAA restrictions on using electronic devices, I was reading the print version of a magazine while we waited to taxi to the runway. I soon found I was...
One of the great promises of the internet is that it allows for writing to be distributed outside of the restrictions imposed by traditional publications. On the internet there is no scarcity of resources, no oversight by editors, and no need...
In a 1987 paper, Robert Brooke argued that instructors needed to pay attention to the ways that students didn't pay attention, like passing notes in class or whispering conversations. Building on the work of Erving Goffman, Brooke argued that...
In my last post I wrote about what Derek Mueller calls the "digital underlife," the writing practices of students that fall below the radar of classroom practice, but which are crucial ways in which these students practice literacy. In...
In his essay, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?," Nicholas Carr relates an exchange between Nietzsche and one of his friends, in which the friend remarked that the philosopher's writing style had changed after he began to use a typewriter. As Carr...
In my last post I wrote about what Derek Mueller calls the "digital underlife," the writing practices of students that fall below the radar of classroom practice, but which are crucial ways in which these students practice literacy. In...
In his essay, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?," Nicholas Carr relates an exchange between Nietzsche and one of his friends, in which the friend remarked that the philosopher's writing style had changed after he began to use a typewriter. As Carr...
In my last few posts, I have argued that network writing—that is, writing that mimics the conventions of emerging, online genres—should occupy a larger place in writing instruction. However, it can be challenging to imagine how literacies that...
One of the challenges facing the digital media and learning community—in fact, all educators—is the rapid pace of technological development that makes necessary the constant evaluation and investigation of new information and communication...
For years, a common method for teaching writing in elementary and secondary school was the five paragraph essay. Lately this style of essay has fallen out of favor, for a variety of reasons. However, one of the most compelling reasons to avoid...
Sean McCarthy is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at the University of Texas, Austin, in the Digital Literacies and Literatures concentration. His dissertation explores the intersection between community literacy and digital...
Recently I had the opportunity to attend a symposium on the digital humanities hosted by the University of Pittsburgh's Digital Media research group. The occasion was the publication of "Debates in the Digital Humanities," a collection...
