Posts that focus primarily on teaching and pedagogy.
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
A persistent challenge I face when teaching my course “Media, Culture, Society” is talking to students about “bias”. Students are routinely taught that bias is fundamentally a bad thing; it’s associated with illicit behavior, with secret motivations, hidden agendas, an invidious ideology. Its typical counterpoint–and one that is imbued with… 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
