NCTE offers a recent report by Kathleen Blake Yancey on Writing in the 21st Century. Overall this is an interesting report and I am hopeful that it will spark some useful conversation in writing programs, English departments, and perhaps across campuses. Yancey ends with an identification of the cha...

So I just returned from a curious panel on "multimodal literacies" featuring Ethna D. Lay, Ann Jurecic, and Jay David Bolter. And as was germane to the presentations, and with all due humility about (indeed specific statistical awareness of) the size of this blog's readership, I am certain more will...

Yesterday I was watching my seven year-old play basketball. In that game, there were some kids who were already exhibiting some sense of naturalness with dribbling the ball. No prodigies mind you, but a sense of being able to walk/run and dribble without undue conscious focus on the ball. Other kids...

On Salon, Simon Reynolds reviews Kanye West's and Axl Rose's new albums. The review takes an interesting detour into the increasing role of digital tools in corporate music production, specifically Pro-Tools and Auto-Tune. Reynolds summarizes his negative review of Guns 'n Roses this way: "Rose want...

We are looking to relaunch Kairos' PraxisWiki. Here's the idea. If you are teaching a graduate course addressing computers and writing, or if you are a grad student in such a course, then PraxisWiki is for you. The idea is to open accounts for faculty and graduate students in our field to compose th...

As Richard Florida notes, while nations are based on imaginary boundaries, you can basically see mega-regions by looking at the night-side of the planet. In other words, you can see here what Florida means by the Boston-NY-Washington mega-region. You can also pick out the sparser (less-mega?) mega-r...

In my reading, one of the primary critiques of social media lies in its exploitation/monetization of "immaterial/free labor." What is that? Simply put, it is any activity that you do without getting paid (most likely for fun) that makes money for someone else. Many activities related to social netwo...

The latest issue of First Monday offers critiques of the Web 2.0 concept, including this article by Trebor Scholz. I hope to get to the other articles but wanted to write some about this one. I agree fundamentally with Scholz's observations about Web 2.0, including Most of the qualities associated w...

My sabbatical project has been thinking and writing about public networked pedagogy, meaning specifically the practice of teaching writing/rhetoric in publicly-accessible, online spaces from blogs and wikis to YouTube and Second Life. In part clearly one would have to say that each networked space h...