In the news today, via The Washington Post and GQ, is the story of a viral video of Biden. It's a heavily-edited 19-second video that attempt to depict Biden as celebrating white nationalist values by ripping phrases and sentences out of context. This is a technique every first-year composition instructor has seen where students quote... Continue Reading →
hindsight is 2020: twenty years of ed tech banter
Audrey Waters writes today listing "the 100 worst ed-tech debacles of the decade" (h/t Seth Kahn). Coincidentally I learned today I had been nominated to be one of UB's SUNY Online Teaching Ambassadors. This got me thinking about the 20+ years in which I've been teaching online and hybrid courses (which is basically the span... Continue Reading →
partisan politics in an object-oriented democracy
Possibly in an effort to save folks some grief over the holidays, Trish Roberts-Miller offered this recent explanation of what she terms "GOP loyalists" and the effective impossibility of engaging in a rational argument. The basic yet intractable problem is that they are ensured in a propaganda feedback loop extending from their attachment to a... Continue Reading →
the principle of illectracy?
Perhaps Ulmer has a more elegant puncept for this, but basically I'm thinking here about the analog of illiteracy within electracy. I.e.: literacy -----> electracyilliteracy -----> illectracy? For the first 25 years or so that we have discussed electracy, I don't think there was a pressing need to imagine the operation of illectracy. For one... Continue Reading →
non-metaphorical wayfinding and writing studies
Jonathan Alexander, Karen Lunsford and Carl Whithaus have a new article in Written Communication, "Toward Wayfinding: a Metaphor for Understanding Writing Experiences." I think it's a great article, and I'm planning to share it with my WAC colleagues. It provides a useful overview of important ideas in the field and adds wayfinding to that list.... Continue Reading →
anti-anti-utopian rhetoric
Kim Stanley Robinson as this great essay, "Dystopias Now," which covers a lot of ground, but one of the central topics is his discussion of anti-anti-utopianism. Basically, you have to imagine a Greimas (or semiotic) square. I'll just borrow the diagram from KSR. As KSR explains it, dystopias are the "not-concept" of utopias, where things... Continue Reading →
distributed vs. centralized incompetence
Here's the basic thing. Humans are in/competent. I mean: it's all relative, right? As I (cynically) tell my students, in terms of being "digitally literate:" you don't have to outrun the bear; you just have to outrun your friends. Let me be more specific. At my uni (and I imagine most others), the IT folks... Continue Reading →
media theory and the Video Assistant Referee (VAR)
For the American sports fan, the instant replay is a familiar feature of our viewing experience. The use of replays in the NFL actually goes back to 1986 and has been steadily employed for 20 years. I think it's about the same for the NBA and even MLB has used it for a decade to... Continue Reading →
pharmakon poisoning in the electrate collective experiment
http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436105 Without going into too much depth about it, I write ~30K words in May and June. It wasn't fun. No one told you writing was fun, right? I mean, generally speaking we don't get paid for doing things that are fun. Or as Julius Erving once said ‘Being a professional is doing the things... Continue Reading →
