Last fall in my English 1101 course on celebrity culture, I had my students analyze the real-time media discourse surrounding the Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear”. Once again I find myself drawn to teaching current events as they unfold. This term I am teaching ENGL 2400:… Continue reading
What is the Parachut<e>? This semester, the Director and Assistant Director of the Writing and Communication Program here at Georgia Tech approved a pilot program for a learning technology that I have been helping to design and build for the last several years. <emma> is a learning management system that… Continue reading
This semester I taught a course on collaborative consumption. According to Rachel Botsman, who coined the phrase in What’s Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, collaborative consumption has emerged from “digital interactions” that have enabled consumers to “experience the concept that cooperation does not need to come at… Continue reading
At the end of the semester I like to take some time to look back at the classes I just taught and evaluate how they actually turned out. It always feels like a leap of faith to me, trusting that the syllabus I created in the quiet summer months and… Continue reading
My class this semester revolved around the idea of people, material artifacts, and information that are “born digital.” As my class blurb explains, “for people, this means that they are born into, and have only ever known, a world that prioritizes all forms of digitization; for materials and information, it… Continue reading
On November 18, the Georgia Tech Writing and Communication Program hosted the Fall Communication Colloquium in which two Brittain Fellows presented on work their students have been doing in class this semester. The presenters did such a wonderful job generating discussion during the sessions (a link to an archive of… Continue reading
Last month, while attending a Caribbean Island Cultures conference held at the University of Guyana in Georgetown, Guyana, I was jolted out of my usual polite conference attentiveness when a series of papers suddenly shifted away from the usual focus on such traditional island cultures as Storytelling, Carnival or post-colonial… Continue reading
On November 18, the Georgia Tech Writing and Communication Program hosted the Fall Communication Colloquium in which two Brittain Fellows presented on work their students have been doing in class this semester. The presenters did such a wonderful job generating discussion during the sessions (a link to an archive of… Continue reading
To mark Open Access week, on Thursday, October 21, Georgia Tech’s Library and Information Center sponsored a panel, “Expanding the Reach of Your Research: An Open Forum on Authorship and Your Intellectual Property.” Evans Harrell (School of Sciences, Mathematics) facilitated, and TyAnna Herrington Continue reading
Zach Whalen is Assistant Professor in the English, Linguistics and Communication Department at the University of Mary Washington, where he teaches courses in video games, the graphic novel, media studies, and electronic literature. He is co-editor (with Laurie Taylor) of Playing the Past: History and Nostalgia in Video Games. I… Continue reading
This semester, I have been using YouTube as a pedagogical tool while also reading about views on the worth of this site and others like it in the classroom. These experiences have given me a good sense of the ideals that we as teacher-scholars bring with us in our encounters… Continue reading
The Future Media Fest emphasized, for me, the increasing tension between the public sphere and private enterprise or, in other words, the struggle between corporate profit and public good over the move to more collective forms of identity. In my first post, on the Startup Technology Showcase, I looked at… Continue reading
The Digital Media Skills panel underlined the importance of communication skills for all students looking to get jobs in media and technology. Eric Berger argued in his introduction that, in the future, communication will be the skill employers will look for when hiring. Most of the panel agreed. Rebecca Burnett… Continue reading
Does a virtual world require “real” morals and ethics, or do virtual worlds demand virtual ethics? What does an ethics of the virtual look like? Continue reading
How can crowdsourcing and social media applications be used to provide more personalization over media content? That was the focus of the Startup and Reception Technology Showcase, which featured several new companies exploring the odd middle-ground between collaboration, control and privacy. Continue reading
Wiki software, as I’m sure most of us are already well aware, is a tool for creating websites that users can quickly and easily edit. First introduced by computer-scientist Ward Cunningham in the mid 1990s, wikis have become an important and visible part of the internet landscape. The free encyclopedia… Continue reading
Here is a brief overview of social networking tools I have used in my classes this past year. flickr flickr is an online photo-hosting site similar to Photobucket or Picasa. I prefer flickr because it offers a number of free features and the possibility of adding Creative Commons licenses to… Continue reading
In a recent discussion on “The Real Cost of College Textbooks” in the New York Times, Anya Kamenetz, author of DYI U, suggests that professors abandon print textbooks in favor of eBooks and online resources. In “Get Rid of Print and Go Digital,” Kamenetz asks: Why should we be content… Continue reading
