Harper's Magazine published a letter signed by 150 journalists, authors, artists, academics, and related folks basically in defense of free speech as we conventionally understand it and in opposition to cancel culture, broadly conceived. American Conservative followed with an op-ed in support of that letter (which, rhetorically speaking, probably doesn't do many of the people... Continue Reading →
modeling workflow in a synchronous online writing class
I know, I know... me and the sexy, clickbait-y post titles. I just can't help myself. This is a brass tacks thinking through of something I've very rarely done, which is to teach an online course with a synchronous element. Of course many of us did it in an emergency way last spring, but now... Continue Reading →
on the decision to teach online in the fall
In the end, when it came down to it, the decision to teach online in the fall was not hard. Many of my colleagues teach courses that cannot be successful without some in-person element (e.g. science labs, theater and dance, filmmaking, many others). Other classes may need to be in-person because they are important for... Continue Reading →
planning an a/synchronous class for the fall
At Buffalo we received some guidance yesterday on our campus plan for the fall. It is similar to those proposed elsewhere. There is a commitment to being "place-based." Courses that really require in-person activities in order to work, graduate courses that "support UB's research mission," and courses that support undergraduate recruitment and retention (e.g., first-year... Continue Reading →
what would valuable digital deliberation look like?
One of the subjects I (and many other digital rhetoricians and scholars in adjacent fields) write about is digital deliberation--that is, how does deliberation work (if at all) online, in social media for example? One of the concepts I've discussed in the past is "distributed deliberation," which is a way of investigating how machines and... Continue Reading →
getting on(line) with the tasks of teaching and learning
I know, as if the world needs another foray into this topic, but here goes. In the NY Times there's an interesting piece that follows the deliberations at Kentucky about how/if to open the campus in the fall. We're all in similar circumstances inasmuch as no one knows what the circumstances will be. We do... Continue Reading →
when every university change their motto to Ubi Sunt
In The Atlantic Graeme Wood ponders the risks as university administrators weight whether or not to return to some version of normal in the Fall. Of course it is hard to make an informed decision without information and we just don't have enough information about COVID-19 to really understand the risks. He concludes with the... Continue Reading →
exposing assemblages: ten years on
A decade ago I published an article in Enculturation titled "Exposing Assemblages: Unlikely Communities of Digital Scholarship, Video, and Social Networks." It concluded with this. Through the mapping of the social-material assemblages of scholarly video production, one can develop tactics for investigating and activating these thresholds, these relations of exteriority. From this perspective, one would... Continue Reading →
zoom, distance, and productivity theater
I'd be curious to know if other institutions are running surveys similar to the one UB has run. Since I can link to it here, I assume there are no state secrets within. It's a survey of students (there's another for faculty) after one week or so of this online existence. 20% of students say... Continue Reading →
