Here is the equation you need to know to factor in technology costs:   If you think you are saving a dime by installing a lot of new technology into your classroom or your workplace, you are wasting a dollar. What often happens is that labor is outsourced, and often outsourced into what used to be called "leisure time."  

If you are a graduate student at Duke, UNC, NCCU, NCSU, or anywhere near the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke on Friday, September 10, at this writing there are THREE spaces left that we are trying to reserve just for you.   They will not be open twenty-four hours for now.   We are over capacity but wanted to make this place available for more graduate students.  All the details are below.   This will be an incredible introduction to a new way of thinking about how you teach, why you teach, what you teach-----and how, why, and what you learn from your students ever after.   You MUST register to attend.  Space is limited and over-subscribed.  All the information is below.  Good luck!

Another year begins!  I hope yours starts off feeling refreshed, after a splendid summer in whatever way that might mean for you.  May it be a year full of energy and inspiration.

Below is a list of public events for the Fall semester to which the Duke community is invited.

A "hack" is a reconfiguration or reprogramming of a system to function in a way different than that built into it but its owner, designer, or administrator.   The term can run the gamut from a clever or quick fix to a messy (kludgy) temporary solution that no one's happy with.   It can refer to ingenuity and innovation--or sinister practices that border on the criminal.    We hope to avoid the kludge and don't plan on breaking any laws.   But reprograming traditional learning institutions so they function in a different, more original, and more efficient way than is intended by current owners and administrators?   Sign me up!

This year, we encourage all HASTAC members to blog about and to report their HASTAC@events on the main HASTAC site.  We, as always, will then tweet and blog and facebook and do all we can to get out the word, to extend your reach throughout our network of networks.  Soon, as an example, we'll post our recent letter to the Duke community about HASTAC@Duke events.   There are a lot of them this Fall.   We hope you will follow this example and post your own and let us get out the word about all the good you do in the worlds of new media, critical thinking, and participatory learning.

So the issue is why have such a conference?  I think there is one big reason.   Kids now learn on line and they learn how to learn through self-directed and peer-directed searching, an inductive process of learning.   But the schools they attend, whether K-12 or 12-20, are based on the deductive and reductive logics of industrialization that are based on facts, expertise, hierarchies of knowledge, and one authority delivering the truth.   Learning institutions have just begun to address the ways we can take advantage of new ways of learning---and only begun to address the responsibilities and implications (from copyright and intellectual property to credibility to ethics to authorship and on and on) of remix learning.

Blogs should count for tenure and promotion . . . but the whole metric of what does or doesn't count needs to be reimagined for learning institutions of the future, for a digital future where learning is a community activity and one that, in multiple and important ways, counts.

Dan Cohen does it again!  Here's a NY Times blog post on his new method for online, web-based collective, crowdsourced peer review:   http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/24/arts/24peer.html?partner

Dan is on the HASTAC Steering Committee, leads CenterNet, runs the Center for History and New Media at George Mason, is a co-developer of Zotero, ran Hacking the Academy, lead One Week, One Tool . . . what DOESN'T Dan do?   Congratulations to one of our most brilliant, innovative, and courageous leaders!

Whatever happened to the "E" in the grading system?  What are grades anyway?   Here's the very interesting and entertaining piece in SLATE by Brian Palmer for which I was interviewed this week.

But what about this "Prototrip"?   We're thinking there has to be a way that we can expand our experiment in a new form of practical-because-deep education beyond Duke, even beyond HASTAC.  Depth is practical in a radically changing, global world where "traditional" forms (how we read, write, publish, communicate, interact, create our communities, online and offline) are all changing moment by moment.  Culture and context matter in a work world changing this fast. So we are playing with ways that we can take our prototype on the road.  Roadtrip.  Prototripping.   Stay tuned!  We hope to be coming to a community--virtual or actual--near you.