Academhack

Last week I publicly (via Twitter—really what other venue is there?) mentioned that I might be leaving Dropbox. What ensued was a rather lengthy conversation between me and others as to why I would do such a thing. Soon after the conversation started, the folks at @Dropbox noticed and joined the discussion. Why would I …..

Sorry folks not much here as of late. That is because I have been working on another project.
At any rate for those who are interested on Monday at noon east coast time, I will be participating in a webinar on teaching Writing as Information Arts (sort of a way of thinking about teaching digital literacy).

As many of you know, The University at Albany (the place from which I received my PhD) has decided to close its French, Italian, and Russian departments. There are a range of reasons that make this an uninformed decision; for a rundown see Rosemary Feal’s The World Beyond Reach. More entertainingly, though, Jean-Luc Nancy, Professor of …..

My most recent pedagogical obsession is not, as you might think, social media fasts, but rather working out ways to effectively create group projects. Honestly I consider this one of my serious shortcomings as a professor. I really as of yet have not created a group project with which both the students and I were …..

Harrisburg University seems to be getting a small amount of press lately for announcing that it would as an experiment block all social media websites for a week (Inside Higher Education Article, Chronicle Article). Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, even AIM and chat features on Moodle will be unavailable on the University network (or more precisely the …..

The following is a summary of my talk, or more accurately, the short written version of my talk, “Burn the Boats,” which I gave a little over a month ago at the DWRL in Austin. You can read the post, or skip to the end and watch the videos (which last about 40 minutes) and …..

Yesterday, Dan Cohen’s tweet about the iPad and censorship, got me thinking about a drawback to the iPad for education argument.

What Dan made me wonder/realize is that by using iPads for educational purposes schools, both higher ed and secondary/primary ed, would be opening themselves up to censorship by Apple. In other words as I tweeted …..

So, I have been borrowing an iPad for the last couple of weeks. I realize given my critique of the device that it might seem a bit bizarre for me to be using one. But, I consider it research, a way to have an informed position, and since this is really one of our lab …..

Last week I sent Michelle Nickerson, a colleague of mine here at UT-Dallas , a link to Dan Brown’s “Open Letter to Educators.” Michelle like me, is concerned about the future of the University, and as someone whose opinion I respect, I wanted to see her response. After watching it we swapped emails back and …..

The following is a guest post from UT-Dallas graduate student, Barbara Vance (@brvance). This past semester Barbara taught an atypical rhetoric and composition course. Barbara teaches Rhetoric 1302, the standard introductory college writing course. She was given a course with a group of students who she was told, were struggling with writing and needed, “more …..