Back eons ago (i.e. on Thurs in NC, today is Sat in La Jolla), at the CHAT Festival at UNC, John McGowan and I had a dialogue with a ferociously interesting audience on "The Future of Learning Institutions."  We made a radical decision before our panel to not have prepared papers or even prepared remarks and to not use any other form of technology either.  Nada.  Unscripted.  Unplugged.

Terse eloquence and wisdom in 140 characters a less, many times a day, from a man who takes sustenance through a feeding tube, who speaks in Tweets.   That is a parable of our time.   He tweets:  For Lent I am giving up eating and drinking.  When I read that, I had no idea how witty that was, in a mordant sort of way.

This is a concise and really useful compilation of Tweets for a presentation on "How To Turn Your Dissertation Into a Book" by Ken Wissoker, Editorial Director at Duke University Press.   The list is fantastic, and the mash-up sequence is fascinating--and I don't know where to begin giving credit.  Ken (who happens to be my partner) gave the talk.  Someone (Chris?) microblogged/tweeted it,  FHI Twitter "follower" Matt Gold then compiled them, I believe, and then Christy in Australia put them together into her blog, and then I found out about it from an FHI post, and now I'm reblogging it here.

The point is a great and highly innovative ideas are not really ahead of their time, they are catalysts in their time.

This is just a very silly blog post as I'm killing time. . .   a cut-and-paste of some tweets two hours before the Digital Media and Learning Competition, "Reimagining Learning," closes at www.dmlcompetition.net. 

On January 6, I was invited to give a short talk at Fayetteville State University on using social media in the classroom as part of our annual mid-year conference.  My talk focused on the use of blogs, Twitter, and wikis.  To illustrate some of the core strengths of these tools, I outlined my talk in a blog post, which I am re-posting here.

With all the talk of the importance of the digital humanities at MLA I'm surprised there hasn't already been a post here on the subject of Brian Croxall. Brian, a visiting assistant professor in the Department of English at Clemson University, decided to present his paper at MLA by proxy as a combination stunt-protest over the catastrophic job market...

I've spent the morning rereading some of Howard Rheingold's ideas on 21st century literacies, the skills required to navigate the digital age.  Attention, participation, collaboration, network awareness, and critical consumption of information are the key skills he discusses.  Where do we teach those skills?  How do we learn them?  

A new model for digital scholarly publishing jumped online tonight, created by Dan Cohen, Director of the Center for History and New Media, GMU.

What's amazing is that Dan created this new publication in a few days. I like his approach: he had an idea and implemented it immediately. I think this is one trait that is shared by many digital humanists/scholars--the willingness to experiment and just do. He is assuming there will be adjustments, but wasn't afraid to go forward with an idea. I'm proud to be one of the 274 founding editors, together with some other HASTAC scholars.