Blog Juice for Educational Technology

A dangerous site called Flex Your Rights has a Google Video up that basically instructs the My Space generation on how to strategically handle those pesky police officers who show up trying to bust them for pot smoking and other criminal acts (including “ghetto art”). What’s the net coming to? This is an infuriating example of rhetorically presenting subversize materials under the guise of civil responsibility. By the gods, you’re being a better citizen if you know how to stash that bong and finagle your way out of an arrest or jail term.

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Ron Eglash is one of those smart types at RPI who’s doing insanely cool and innovative things to get kids into math and science. I was just reading about some of his work involving “Culturally-Situated Design Tools,” which, as the name implies, attempt to bridge the gap between abstract stuff like numbers and stuff that matters to kids, like corn rows, Native American beads, and snowflakes. Culture + Math = Ethnomathematics. Just check out the Corn Row Curves program and see for yourself.

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Although news of these two blogging events have appeared separately, it is quite useful to make note of them again, together, as an important signal of the power of the internet, specifically of bloggers and writing in the cyberworld. There was wonderful news last week about Glenn Greenwald, which also represented yet another sign of the growing, persuasive influence of writers on the internet. On the same day of the announcement that Andrew Sullivan's daily social/political commentaries on his blog, The Daily Dish, had reached over 2,000,000 readers during May, it also was reported that Greenwald's book, How Would a Patriot Act, had just made the New York Times' Best-Seller List. In addition, his book had climbed into the Top-100 of all books then being sold by Amazon.com. Greenwald is a writer who has reached a readership mainly through his blog, Unclaimed Territory.

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I have no idea what I think about this. No, that’s a lie. This is amazing. I…only…wish…I…had…been…there. I would definitely have been proud to be one of the 80 pseudo-Best Buy employees wreaking havoc in New York! All my base belongs to these folks. What really gets my juices flowing is thinking about how all this pertains to identity (yes, my panel just finished revising our proposal for 4C’s). How can we possibly place this in a theoretical framework?

But seriously…Take a few minutes and see the wonder that is Improv Everywhere.

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Well, looks like JibJab has done it again–check out Matzah, another satirical FLASH from the folks that brought us This Land. I’m not sure what to make of this one yet. It’s probably much funnier if you know about Jewish traditions–it reminds me of Weird Al’s parody “Pretty Fly for a Rabbi.”

Gurdy Leete is an art professor who recently decided to switch to FOSS: Last semester I embarked on an exciting new adventure by erasing Mac OS X from nearly all of the Macintoshes in our digital media lab and installing Ubuntu in its place.. Apparently, he was quite successful, and only hit a few snags. This is definitely encouraging for those us trying to spur new media production in state schools!

I posted this earlier on TechRhet, but thought it was important enough (to me, at least!) to crosspost:

Greetings, folks. We’re currently in the process of planning a new media lab for our English department. We have a budget of about $50,000, though there are hints that we could get more if we could make a compelling enough case. My thoughts are that we should try to design this lab with a new media production mindset. I had the pleasure of discussing these issues with Madeleine Sorapure at GPACW, and she recommended Photoshop, Dreamweaver (or perhaps Fireworks), and Flash Pro 8. These sound like good choices to me as well, though I’d like to hear from others who might have other thoughts. (Naturally enough, my FS proclivities make me want to yelp “GIMP” and “GNU/LINUX!”, but I’m not sure anyone would take me seriously.)

Deadline: May 10, 2006

Kairos, A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy is pleased to announce the Kairos Awards for Graduate Students and Adjuncts, sponsored by Bedford/St. Martin’s Press. (These awards were formerly titled the Kairos/Lore Awards for TAs and Adjuncts.)

Graduate students and adjuncts often face institutional constraints that undervalue the work they do. For many, their service, scholarship, and teaching often do not translate into simple acknowledgment, let alone higher pay, more travel funds, and better working conditions. These awards serve to ameliorate some of those conditions through recognition and compensation.

Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy is pleased to announce that it will again recognize outstanding webtexts with awards to be presented at Computers and Writing 2006 in Lubbock, Texas.

Please see the full text of this announcement for criteria.

For the past several years, many scholars have been making a significant contribution to the knowledge in rhetoric and composition via their weblogs. Academic bloggers are conversing about topics such as professional issues in the discipline, best teaching practices, electronic discourse, and cultural criticism of digital space. Weblogs
are also making a significant contribution to the public intellectual commons. Because weblogs do not have the same gatekeeping checks as traditional scholarly publications, they have heretofore not been considered scholarly work and thus are not often recognized for the contribution they make to our discipline(s).

NB: Mike Edwards contributed heavily to these notes. In fact, most of what’s here is his work, so I want him to get credit for it.

The CCCC Blogging SIG had a large and productive meeting Thursday night in
Chicago. We began by discussing some of the initiatives the SIG had proposed
the previous year, including the one-page paper handout guide for teachers new
to blogging (which, we might hope, will continue to be revised collaboratively and kept up to date as necessary), as well as thoughts about assessment of weblog writing,
outcomes of weblog use in writing courses and professional endeavors, and a possible large multi-institution study investigating the
classroom uses of weblogs.

Following the initial discussion, we split up into five small groups focusing on
action in specific areas. The groups discussed their areas and reported back when
we reconvened. Here are the results of our discussion:

Another plug, but I couldn’t resist after reading Matt Barton’s review of the Steven Johnson book a couple posts down. I’d like to alert Kairos readers to a thread recently begun at if:book — the blog of the institute for the future of the book — where we have mounted a multi-post, ongoing critique of EBIGFY, in which Johnson himself is participating. We were moved to do this after witnessing the near-universal acclaim the book has received since publication. We’ve already come across numerous instances of it being assigned as essential reading for new media and design classes, in some cases by teachers who haven’t even read it. It seemed time for a more rigorous discussion…

Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You is a quick read. It’s a few days’ worth of tub & toilet reading for folks like me who do 90% of their reading in the bathroom–the only room in their house without a computer or TV. EBiGfY is fun, well-written, and self-described as an “old-fashioned work of persuasion” (meaning that you’re not going to get the other side of the argument.) The basic idea is that popular culture media (television shows, videogames, films, the internet, etc.) have been steadily increasing in complexity (but not necessarily sophistication) since the 50s. He calls this “The Sleeper Curve,” a joke borrowed from a Woody Allen film. Johnson reveals that TV shows now have more characters, threads, and subplots. Games are so complicated you need a strategy guide just to beat them. Films haven’t changed as much as the rest of pop culture, but even there we can see how the LotR trilogy is far more complex than Star Wars. Not to put to find a point on it, kids and couch potatoes are sucking wholesome Vitamin D milk from their boob tubes.