Submitted by John Jones on Jan 23, 2010, 12:41 PM

Last semester, I had the opportunity to present at the Association for Integrative Studies Conference in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, with fellow HASTAC Scholars Chris Hanson and Joshua McVeigh-Schultz.

Submitted by John Jones on Aug 04, 2009, 05:41 PM

Cathy Davidson's post on her use of crowdsourcing techniques to facilitate grading in her courses has sparked a lot of interesting commentary, both on the HASTAC site and on this post at the Chronicle of Higher Education's "Wired Campus" blog.

In her first paragraph, Cathy provides a concise summary of what many of us find to be the major flaws of traditional grading:

I can't think of a more meaningless, superficial, cynical way to evaluate learning than by assigning a grade. It turns learning (which should be a deep pleasure, setting up for a lifetime of curiosity) into a crass competition: how do I snag the highest grade for the least amount of work? how do I give the prof what she wants so I can get the A that I need for med school? That's the opposite of learning and curiosity, the opposite of everything I believe as a teacher, and is, quite frankly, a waste of my time and the students' time.

Submitted by John Jones on Apr 16, 2009, 11:11 PM
The Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk) gave an amazing performance tonight at the opening reception for the MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Competition. Here's some clips from the question and answer session that followed the performance: Part one:

Part two:

Submitted by John Jones on Feb 23, 2009, 03:01 PM
Andrew Trotter has a recent article in Education Week's Digital Directions titled "Mobile Devices Seen as Key to 21st-Century Learning" in which he describes some of the findings of the report "Pockets of Potential: Using Mobile Technologies to Promote Children?s Learning" by Carly Shuler and published by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center. While I haven't had a chance to read the entire report yet, I'm encouraged by its proactive approach to integrating mobile devices into the K?12 classroom. I don't have a background in K?12 education, yet in my college experience I have found that too often new technologies are seen as interfering with learning processes rather than imagined as a means of supplementing those processes. (As if non-digital technologies like pen and paper weren't also potential sources of distraction.)

Submitted by John Jones on Jan 23, 2009, 02:03 PM
The New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative have released the 2009 Horizon Report which ?seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, research, or creative expression within learning-focused organizations.? The 2009 report identifies six technologies to watch: mobile devices, cloud computing, geo-tagging, the ?personal web,? ?semantic-aware applications,? and ?smart objects.? The entire report can be accessed online; additionally, Steve Kolowich has summarized the report?s take on the technologies above over at the Wired Campus blog.

Submitted by John Jones on Jan 05, 2009, 07:30 PM
One drawback of any academic conference is the constant feeling that you are missing something. Typically, multiple panels are scheduled at the same time, and it can be difficult to know what knowledge is being produced and exchanged in sessions you are unable to attend. Last week's MLA conference, where I was on a panel on microblogging with Brian Croxall, Matt Gold, and David Parry, was no exception. Because of the quality of the discussion session following our presentations, however, we wanted to take a step toward rectifying this situation. We decided that we would do our best to provide the details of our talks and discussion--as well as the subsequent blogged conversations that have arisen out of the panel--for those who weren't there. Since the event was initiated and then organized using different social and collaborative media (Twitter, Skype, Pageflakes, etc.), we created a Google Doc of our notes and the following conversation. If you were able to attend the panel and would like to edit and update the document to cover something that we missed, please email the panel chair, Brian Croxall at b.croxall [at] gmail [dot] com, and he will be glad to give you editing privileges on the Google Doc on which this post is based. Otherwise, please feel free to continue the discussion in the comments section below. What follows is our best attempt at a recreation of the panel based on our recollection and notes. Update: Cathy Davidson blogged about the panel on HASTAC a few days ago. Here's a link to her post.

Submitted by John Jones on Dec 23, 2008, 10:34 AM
I will be participating in a panel on microblogging at MLA 2008 this weekend in San Francisco. To help promote our session, fellow panelist David Parry has created a page with the panel d

Submitted by John Jones on Dec 19, 2008, 04:54 PM
Jason B. Jones has posted an interesting response to Mark Bauerlein's comments concerning the role of social media in teen narcissism on his Chronicle.com blog. In his post, Bauerlein cites recent psychological studies that indicate teens are more narcissistic now than they have been in the past. While Jones points out that these studies provide "multiple causes for this" narcissism, Bauerlein suggests that it can be attributed to the tools of social media. Jones counters

More generally, I think that this is a moment for education, not for condemnation. Iâ??ve argued before that I donâ??t think students are as familiar with technology as grown-ups tend to think, and this is probably a good example. It may be the case that students turn to such tools as Twitter for endless self-validation or for mere self-expression--but I donâ??t think thatâ??s the best use of such technologies. Merlin Mann gets at the crucial issue:

And, you know. Just since it bears repeating: If you think you know people from reading Twitter, you probably donâ??t get Twitter. Or people.

One of the things social media let us do is reflect in more sophisticated ways on self-presentation and on the differences, perhaps, between the self we present to the public and the self to whom all the meaningless events of a day happen. In other words, thereâ??s no reason at all why Twitter, like everything else in a liberal education, canâ??t help us learn to get over our small shivering selves.

Of course, Bauerlein's comments are timely: in the U.S., the holidays are the traditional season in which we are reminded that adulthood is an alternating series of tragedies and disappointments which only serve to underline our ultimate insignificance. As Bauerlein notes, "maturity means outgrowing" the belief that "your life is, indeed, something special and different and unique and worth sharing." I, for one, agree, and the sooner are kids can be taught how little their thoughts will ever matter to anyone else, the better. However, while I'm sure we can all support crushing the hopes and dreams of future generations, what I really wanted to comment on is the irony involved in Bauerlein's post. As a rhetorician, I would argue that all he has really demonstrated in this essay is that he is not a member of the target audience of teenaged bloggers, a fact that he then employs to criticize "MySpace page[s] and blog diar[ies]," all the while utilizing one of these very technologies to publicize said critiques. This merely serves to illustrate the paradox introduced by Walter Ong: critiques of high technology must always be made using that same technology. I wonder if Bauerlein ever stopped to consider that, like those poor, narcissistic teenagers, he himself was composing a blog entry. Why did he think those thoughts were of more intrinsic merit than some teenager narrating his or her life to friends? I, of course, have no access to Bauerlein's thoughts, but I imagine the reasons are these: he has a Ph.D. and is a Professor at Emory. He has published two books and numerous articles in respected newspapers. His blog isn't on MySpace, it's on Chronicle.com. In short, the (unstated) reasons underlying his assumption that his "opinion [is] just as valid as anyone else?s"--or, at least, more important than anything a teenager could possibly write on MySpace--is deeply dependent on centuries old publishing processes that have served for generations as gatekeepers of what information should be considered important or significant. Since its inception, the internet has destabilized these processes and brought into question the assumptions of quality which they support. To borrow Jones's phrasing, the technologies that Bauerlein is criticizing help us to reflect in more sophisticated ways on information and on the different ways that information is imbued with authority and meaning by technological and cultural forces. What's more, these technologies have demonstrated that in some cases they are able to produce superior versions of the products of the publishing culture they are replacing (cf. Wikipedia, The New York Times Online, etc.) So, having read Bauerlein's post, I wonder what is better: the tools that allow for Wikipedia, even if they also serve to convince teenagers that they might possibly have something special to say, or the traditional publishing establishment that places the authority of determining what is important to others in the hands of the few?

Submitted by John Jones on Dec 11, 2008, 03:45 PM
Tamar Weinberg at Techpedia has posted an Ultimate Handbook to the etiquette of interactions on a number of social media sites. Here?s part of Weinberg?s description of the Handbook:

Would you do the following within real face-to-face relationships?

• Jump on the friendship bandwagon without properly introducing yourself?
• Consistently talk about yourself and promote only yourself without regard for those around you?
• Randomly approach a friend you barely talk to and simply ask for favors ? repeatedly?
• Introduce yourself to another person as ?Pink House Gardening??

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you may need a refresher course on social media etiquette--and perhaps real-life etiquette also. Here are some egregious sins that you must not perform on social media sites. Avoid these violations and learn how to manage and maintain online relationships on a variety of popular social media sites.

At the very list least, this list of dos and don'ts is a great discussion piece for those interested in the evolving norms of online environments. via LifeHacker

Submitted by John Jones on Nov 12, 2008, 11:12 AM
Michael Wesch, the Kansas State professor behind The Machine is Us/ing Us and Information R/evolution, has posted an article on the Britannica blog about students' use of technology in the classroom.

Some time ago we started taking our walls too seriously ? not just the walls of our classrooms, but also the metaphorical walls that we have constructed around our ?subjects,? ?disciplines,? and ?courses.? McLuhan?s statement about the bewildered child confronting ?the education establishment where information is scarce but ordered and structured by fragmented, classified patterns, subjects, and schedules? still holds true in most classrooms today. The walls have become so prominent that they are even reflected in our language, so that today there is something called ?the real world? which is foreign and set apart from our schools. When somebody asks a question that seems irrelevant to this real world, we say that it is ?merely academic.?