Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Jan 25, 2010, 08:56 AM

Yesterday's blog has taken off and is getting lots of comment all over the blogosphere.  It was called "Why Is the Information Age Without the Humanities Like the Industrial Revolution Without the Steam Engine?"   This is one of those blogs that takes off and has wings of its own and I'm interested in how it is being interpreted.  It is loose and deliberatively provocative, but I am being literal  in the analogy--and also the opposite of literal in its provocation.  It is also a homage to Tim Berners-Lee's original conceptualization of the World Wide Web and is not intended as a commentary on all the Web's subsequent iterations.

 

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Dec 27, 2009, 07:32 AM

Just because thnking is continuous in the Search Decade, doesn't mean that it should not be attributed.   In fact, as every good English teacher knows, in the era of search, plagiarism is very, very easy to do---but even easier to find! Which leads me to a final point, since every culture has a different limit on what it defines as "plagiarism, " do we think the American English Teacher definition will change in this digital era of continuous, contiguous, search-driven associational thinking?

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Apr 04, 2009, 06:35 AM
I've blogged several times this semester about my undergraduate class, "This Is Your Brain on the Internet."  Not so much on my wonderful grad class, "Early American Novels and Other Fictions."   But it is as inventive and imaginative and field-changing as the course on cognition and digitality since both come from the premise that digital learning is not about throwing a lot of technology at students--it is reconceptualizing how we think and should be thinking given a changed set of learning tools already part of the repertoire of everyday life.

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Mar 18, 2009, 08:47 AM
Clay Shirky, in HERE COMES EVERYBODY, makes the point that the "logic of publish-then-filter means that new social systems have to tolerate enormous amounts of failure."  That's not a bad thing.

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Feb 03, 2009, 05:56 PM
This is a reblog from the MacArthur Foundation's Spotlight blog, including videos and lots of URL's for digital tinkering, brought to us by one of the most imaginative and thoughtful explorers of the technological imagination,USC's Anne Balsamo. Here's the url, and see the reblog below: http://spotlight.macfound.org/

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Dec 16, 2008, 07:14 AM
Yesterday I was telling someone about the book I'm working on, a new model of mind for the digital age, and she asked how I spent my days. Was it at a lab conducting experiments? Or interviewing subjects? Doing ethnography? Sorting through archives? It was an excellent question. If I had been one notch more pretentious, I think my answer might have been: I've spent the last eighteen months making like Kant.

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Aug 16, 2008, 11:17 AM
Virtually everything we hear about a globalized, networked, interconnected world emphasizes the importance of collaboration, learning by doing, working together, thinking and talking together. Yet so much of our educational system, our measures for achievement, our strategies for assessment, and our standards of excellence are based on individual accomplishment. Are we really preparing for our future? Can't we all just learn to get along?

Submitted by Cathy Davidson on Aug 18, 2007, 07:23 AM
IT is great and important. Is it "digital learning"? Sometiimes. Not often. Usually it is top-down learning, facilitated by technology. What we mean by "digital media and learning" is more collaborative, customized, bidirectional thinking and learning that uses digital means to enhance those interactions and, where possible, to think about technology too.