The digital natives (I happen to dislike that term, if you have not guessed) in my class seem to be inquisitive, engaged, and critical in their thinking-----not at all the unthinking technophiliacs that, in the literature, they are often assumed to be.  In an inventory of their email and text quotas, they lamented information overload.  Several insisted they are not innately good multitaskers all the times at all things.  And several said they looked forward to a Spring Break unplugged and off the grid.

Michael Weschs talk at the CHAT Festival opened my eyes to how little I know about the internet.

Yesterday I received the sweetest gift of all:  two of my deans wrote me a formal letter of "heartfelt appreciation," with cc's to my department chair and my DUS, letting me know that my teaching evaluations from last spring's "This Is Your Brain on the Internet," were among the "top 5% of all undergraduate instructors at Duke."  That blew me away.   For about a minute.  And then I began to wonder (and put this in my letter back to my deans), what does it mean that a prof who has become infamous for a blog about "how to crowdsource grading" is beaming with joy that she got a great grade?   Methinks it's time for a blog!

What cognitive skills are crucial for educators to attend to in our digital age?   Media theorist and practitioner Howard Rheingold has talked about four "Twenty-first Century Literacies"--attention, participation, collaboration, and network awareness--that must to be addressed, understood and cultivated in the digital age (see http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/rheingold/category?blogid=108&cat=2538). Futurist Alvin Toffler argues that, in the 21^st century, we need to know not only the three R's, but also how to learn, unlearn, and relearn.  Expanding on these, here are ten literacies that seem crucial for our digital age.   None of these are tested in the normal metrics of our educational system, yet all are crucial skills for our time. 

Who knew that letter grades began being assigned at Mt Holyoke and then five years later someone decided it was such a good idea that it was time to start assigning letter grades to grades and cuts of meat.     Now that's a metaphor!

That's one of the "big think" questions in ISIS 120, "This Is Your Brain on the Internet."  To think big, you have to begin by understanding what communication as a process really i

ISIS 120S-01, English 173S-05: This is Your Brain on the Internet (HASTAC Tag 1SIS 120)

This is Your Brain on the Internet is an experimental, innovative, adventurous, non-traditional, multidisciplinary, student-led, contract- and peer-evaluated course open to any student fascinated by how we come to know the world and how we may or may not know the world differently in the Information Age.  It is not for the faint of heart.  If you are not up for what John Seely Brown calls thinkering (thinking while doing, project-based thinking, evolving and progressive thinking), this is not a course for you.

A research paper is an end product.  A blog is a process.  Substituting one for the other in every class would be as ridiculous as the current one-size-fits-all-requirements of a conventional humanities course.   However, in "This Is Your Brain on the Internet" we are postulating a new method of collaborative, process-oriented, associational, iterative thinking based on the original architecture, as invented by Tim Berners-Lee, of the World Wide Web, the open end-to-end principle architecture that not only invites participation but has grown because of it.  In that rubric, in that world, in that class, in the great battle of Blogging vs Research Paper, blogging wins by a knock-out.  It's not even a close call.  I'm calling the fight right now, in round one.  In "This Is Your Brain on the Internet," blogging rules.

For those following our course online on the HASTAC site, here's my opening welcome post to the students.  To find all of our posts, remember the tag to search for is ISIS 120.

If you are interested in the content and conversation in ISIS 120, please follow me and my students in the course on this HASTAC site.  We will be using the tag "ISIS 120" on our posts and that way you can easily find all of the different posts we make.