Notes:

Latest blog posts from digital digs

a pro-tools theory of composition
On Salon, Simon Reynolds reviews Kanye West's and Axl Rose's new albums. The review takes an interesting detour into the increasing role of digital tools in corporate music production, specifically Pro-Tools and Auto-Tune. Reynolds summarizes his negative review of Guns 'n Roses this way: "Rose...
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Published a day ago

neuroscience, posthuman pedagogy, and the "rhetorical mind"
Thanksgiving break is a good opportunity to catch up on some podcasts and write blog posts with immodest titles. So I was listening to Melvyn Bragg's "In our time" panel discussion on neuroscience. Though many histories might be written, the panelists suggested that neuroscience really only...
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Published 4 days ago

the long tail of research citations
Picked this up from the WPA listserv: a recent article from the Boston Globe cites research that indicates that contemporary scholarly work cites a fewer range of sources than work in the past.James Evans, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, analyzed a database of 34 million articles in...
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Published a week ago

not ready for spime-time pedagogy
I'm teaching Bruce Sterling's Shaping Things right now and thus thinking of his neologism, the spime. Spimes are Sterling's vision for the next generation of technology and draw their name from their unique ability to be precisely tracked in space and time. As Sterling suggests in his book (and...
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Published a week ago

Is there an education market bubble?
This is somewhat a follow-up to my previous meandering post about Declining by Degrees, the PBS documentary about higher education. At the end of that post I wrote myself into this question, and not being an economist, it's a genuine question. To reiterate briefly, one of the important points...
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Published 3 weeks ago

declining by degrees
Watching this PBS documentary, Declining by Degrees. The college has been showing it on campus, but I haven't had a chance to get to it, so I got it through Netflix. It tells a story about higher education that I think is familiar to faculty. There is a growing sense that higher education is...
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Published 3 weeks ago

online learning, writing, and student engagement
A new report was issued this week from the National Survey of Student Engagement. You can read the full report at http://nsse.iub.edu/NSSE_2008_Results/.  Part of the report deals with online learning, where the survey concludes Controlling for student and institutional characteristics, the...
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Published 3 weeks ago

what first-year writing can do for you...
The meta-conversation of the WPA listserv is disciplinary identity. It is not surprising that the expanding field of rhetoric/composition-cum-writing studies (or whatever) struggles with identity. 30 years ago or more, it was maybe understandable that rhet/comp functioned as analogous to other...
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Published 3 weeks ago

scenes from America's fourth republic classroom
On Salon, Michael Lind offers a historical perspective on the dawning of America's fourth republic.The first goes from Washington to the Civil War. The second then up to the Depression. And the third until 2004 (read the article, he explains). Basically they are all about 70 odd years long. Lind...
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Published 4 weeks ago

Blogging teleology
Some conversation around with Collin, Derek, and Jenny about what to do with this blog thing. Clearly there are many more options for user-generated content than there were when I started this 578 posts ago. There's the minimalist microblog and status update. Video. The various social networks....
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Published 4 weeks ago