Today there is little need to make a specific reference for the first term in this list. We are in the midst of an impeachment trial over an attempted insurrection. More locally, in my class, we are in the midst of How We Became Posthuman and N. Katherine Hayles’ historical investigation of how we got […]
Category: Teaching
This is the second in a series of posts about Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman aimed primarily at my students this semester, and this one focuses on chapter three, which traces the Macy Cybernetics Conferences in the 50s and 60s and discusses, among other things, the challenges of observation and the “man in the […]
n.b. I’m teaching a course on media theories and approaches this semester, and this post is, in part, designed for them. Right now, we are reading N. Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman. This post focuses on Chapter 2. Hayles straightforwardly announces the thesis for this chapter, writing “The contemporary pressure toward dematerialization, understood as […]
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Chekhov’s panopticon
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 […]
On FB yesterday, some of my friends were sharing a piece of research the suggested the optimal length for instructional videos was around six minutes. The specifics of the research aren’t really important here. What is relevant is that academics are trying to come to terms with the realities of fall online instruction. Others are […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Alex Reid 