As an erstwhile practitioner of zazen meditation, I can say one thing with a fair degree of certainty: humans suck at focusing on a single thing, or even worse, on no thing. PBS Frontline's recent, interesting and wide-ranging program Digital_Nation spent a fair amount of time on the theme of focusing: the price of multi-tasking, […]
Category: Assemblage Theory
Continuing from my previous post on the subject of literacy… As I began to discuss previously, what would it mean to approach literacy in the same way as Latour approaches society? That is, to begin with the critique that we conceive of literacy as its own special material and that we tend to leap from […]
As happens around the time of year, EDUCAUSE and the New Media Consortium have published their annual Horizon Report. By now, you are likely familiar with its methodology of identify six technologies "on the horizon" of adoption in higher education across three time periods: one year or less; two-three years; four-five years. This year's winners […]
I'm teaching Reassembling the Social next week (actually just Part I; Part II is next week) and so I'm going back through the text, looking closely at the various uncertainties. what are groups Bmg Online Payday Loans what is action what are objects what is natural/what is social how does one write an account of these […]
So to dispense with the critique of dismissal, yes, you could say Avatar is Dances with Wolves in 3-D, or any other narrative of the imperialist-gone-native with the beautiful native informant love interest. In face, one can go back to the Crusades to find Knights Templar "going native." More interestingly though, one can situate that familiar narrative […]
I've been out of town over the holidays and then racing to a meet a deadline the last few days, so now I'm getting a chance to catch up on a few things here. There were a couple interesting stories out of MLA, including the role of Twitter at the conference, @briancroxall's virtual participation (academhack has […]
Perhaps these days it seems like I am throwing assemblage theory into every post. Maybe I am. But I've been thinking about it more and (probably as a result) seeing it more in the things I am encountering. So here a couple things I encountered in the last couple days. Wired magazine's article: "Accept Defeat: […]
Alex Reid 