I’ve been using blogs for a long time in my classes as a place for informal writing and reflection. I originally used the blogs as simply an online repository to store weekly response readings but the more I’ve used them, the more I find that the actual medium creates a particularly dynamic… Continue reading
Another new Britt! I’m excited to be here at Georgia Tech this fall, and looking forward to working with the group of students I have this semester. As promised, they are a great bunch (although we’re still in the honeymoon phase pre-grading!) Prior to arriving here I taught writing… Continue reading
You did as he who goes by night and carries the lamp behind him – he is of no help to his own self but teaches those who follow – “We need some positive, happy stuff.” … Continue reading
DIGITIZING RESEARCH INTERESTS FOR THE CLASSROOM AND THE JOB MARKET Katy Hanggi, Jennifer Holley, Kate Tanski, and Chris Weedman Evaluation and Academic Tension Between Traditional and Digital Scholarship (Katy Hanggi) “Digital Humanities” is a term I have heard frequently, but I have not given it much consideration. My familiarity… Continue reading
It’s that time of year and we’re all thinking “syllabus.” At least we were about a week or two ago – now with classes underway most of us have finalized our syllabi and distributed them to our new classes. Or did you? I didn’t. Well, distribute them that is. I’ve… Continue reading
The first week of never-completely-successful classes always prompts some serious, not necessarily helpful reflection. No harm in reflecting electronically, I guess. I don’t know how many others of you do this, but when I’m introducing myself to new students as their teacher of writing and communication, I become increasingly aware… Continue reading
Hello! I’m joining y’all at Tech from Eugene, Oregon. I just finished a two year postdoc at the University of Oregon, which is also where I received my PhD in English in 2009. Prior to that, I earned an MA in Classical Languages, Literatures, and Cultures from the University of… Continue reading
I’m thrilled to be joining a group of teachers and scholars from whom I can already tell I will be pilfering many valuable ideas and resources. In fact, the pilfering has already begun. Fellow Emory alums and current Britts Katy Crowther and Michelle Miles have been very generous with their… Continue reading
The temperature is hovering around 95 and we are hurrying to put the finishing touches on our course syllabi. Yes, it’s that time again: a new school year at Georgia Tech. And with it comes a new cohort of Brittain Fellows. They may not yet realize it, but they are… Continue reading
As we prepare for the new semester, we asked two Brittain Fellows to reflect on their teaching experiences during the last semester. Regina Martin Teaching Modernism at Tech Modernism lends itself really well to teaching multimodal communication at Tech because much of modernist art is heavily influenced by technological advancements… Continue reading
We asked Brittain Fellows who will be moving on from the program to reflect upon their experiences. Four Britts rose to the challenge; as you’ll see, the perspectives of Jo Anne Harris, Crystal Lake, Melissa Meeks and Paulette Richards are varied but share an enthusiasm for the time they have… Continue reading
“We already have an UnPress and it is called the internet” – Trevor Owens THATCamp Prime, at George Mason University’s Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, taught me that a word does not make a new publishing model. The UnPress session was, surprisingly perhaps only to my naive… Continue reading
I spend a lot of time trying to simplify how I work on computers. I know I’m not alone in trying to make sense out of how best to utilize and integrate my three computers, iPhone, and iPad for teaching and research. I expect we all have our favorite life… Continue reading
On Saturday, April 9, Georgia Tech’s Writing and Communication Program, The University of Florida English Department, ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies, and Xerographics Print and Copy Center present the First Annual Atlanta Comics Symposium. The symposium will feature Brittain Fellows, faculty from Georgia State University and the University of Florida, Georgia… Continue reading
March 17 was Celebrating Teaching Day at Georgia Tech. As part of the festivities, a number of Brittain Fellows presented posters of their successful approaches to improving student learning. Those whose work was displayed included Doris Bremm, Kathryn Crowther, Andrew Famiglietti, Jo Anne Harris, Robert LeBlanc, Jennifer Parrott, Paulette Richards,… Continue reading
As a master’s student in my introductory theory course, I became particularly enamored by Roland Barthes’s essay “Why I Love Benveniste.” At the end of the essay, Barthes says that Working with him, with his texts […],we always recognize the generosity of a man who seems to listen to the… Continue reading
Hours of browsing the web for information or entertainment have made us savvy clickers on the Internet highways. We intuitively know the most efficient way to navigate a page using colors, images, and hyperlinks as visual cues. Stop and think for a moment though. What if you cannot see or… Continue reading
This post continues the discussion begun by Andy Famiglietti in, “What does it mean to do the humanities?” I think the suggestive wording of Famiglietti’s question offers a useful means of approaching its answer. Instead of asking what we study—What are the humanities?—Famiglietti asks what we do as humanities scholars… Continue reading
L. Andrew Cooper writes in Gothic Realities, “Gothic fictions give form to social phenomena . . . but they are not the culpable cause for the phenomena’s reality” (19). This is what I see as the thesis of Cooper’s book, an idea he traces across continents and through four centuries, from Mathew Lewis’s Gothic novel The Monk (1796) to James Wan’s “torture porn” film Saw (2004). Continue reading
It’s so easy to condemn a believer. Thanks to the advent of modern science and the birth of post-Kantian rationalism, most of us no longer live in a world in which we might battle a demon, request an audience with an angel, or receive a vision of another cosmos from… Continue reading
This week, I’d like to continue my series of provocations by posting another short piece about a topic that raises questions I can’t easily answer. Earlier this week, a piece of natural language processing software, dubbed Watson, developed by IBM, successfully and decisively defeated two human opponents on the game… Continue reading
The Parachut<e> addresses broader issues of digital pedagogy in the context of an advice column for piloters of the <emma> LMS at Georgia Tech. For those of you who are new to The Parachut<e> and <emma>, you can find a more detailed discussion of both here. This week’s post evolved from… Continue reading
I’m a digital humanities scholar, but I have a bit of a quandary. I think I know what “the digital” is (mostly) but I’m having a harder and harder time finding a definition for the humanities that I’m comfortable with. This discomfort sometimes manifests itself in unfortunate and anti-social ways,… Continue reading
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
