Apparently 80% of the professors at my university forced online in March had never taught an online course before. Now they have been seasoned, left to marinate all summer, and, I am assuming, are ready to be grilled. I’m sure you know Chekhov’s gun. With that in mind, there are two approaches to understanding Chekhov’s […]
Unsurprisingly, when you search the web for information about “discord” in the online college classroom, you get results about unruliness or some such, but I’m talking about the application. There’s an insightful piece on the Digital Rhetoric Collaborative titled “Discord: Gaming App to Rhetoric Class,” by Kristin Ravel and her students, that details their experience […]
After a week or so of emailing and chin-scratching, this appears to be the title of my forthcoming book: Rhetorics of the Digital Nonhumanities. Not sure when it will appear yet–copy editing, indexing, etc., etc. But someday I expect. So what’s it about? Well, it’s along the lines of what you might expect if you’ve […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Tomorrow I’m participating in a SUNY Writing Council webinar (at 2pm Eastern) on the challenges of teaching writing online, so here I’m working through some ideas of what I might say in my little 10-minute spiel. (If you are interested and want to know how to join, email me at Alex dot Reid at gmail […]
Yesterday my grad class began its discussion of Liza Potts’ Social Media in Disaster Response. It is an excellent and (sadly) timely book that examines how people work across a variety of social media platforms during periods of disaster. In particular, she looks at Hurricane Katrina, the London bombings in July 2005 and the Mumbai […]
