Mmmmm memes. I love that I do not have to explain them. Yet there’s much more to just passing them around or responding to someone’s tweet/email/text message with one you yank off the web. I’ve tried to make the case that there is a use for silly media (and again). We put them to use in #NetNarr as a creative act and a means of messaging the medium. But this morning one of those little gems happened, when a student […]
We are literally frogs in the internet pan of water, with Google at al just incrementally turning up the surveillance capitalism flame every so gently that we just never notice the boil. So yes, it’s a tad creepy to see ads show up in say Instagram for products I have recently been searching for in Google (never stopping to think how this data is traveling between 2 of the big data competitors). But I keep on clicking, Maybe even marvel. […]
I was a tad skeptical when I saw the tweets being reshared from a student who was (rightfully if true) upset that his university was having dead professors teach classes. It was the macabre right out of a Netflix series idea of the Teaching Dead but then it is amplified by this Slate story, How a Dead Professor Is Teaching a University Art History ClassThe fact that the dead can literally replace living faculty members is a perfect metaphor for […]
Oops. Speaking of slacking on the blogging, the last post here on this year’s Networked Narratives class was the first one about this year’s class. Net Mirror is the New #NetNarr This fourth iteration of this change it up every year course co-taught with Mia Zamora at Kean University mixed things up from previous years. More on that soon. From the start, the theme/metaphor is a 100% rip off (done with total respect, natch) of Black Mirror. And what we […]
There you go, try guess the nature of this blog post from a word heavy vague title. Better yet, just go first and try the thing I will be ‘splaining right here. Well, are you back? Did anything happen? Because one of our students in class (she too a teacher) asked as well as my twitter dog pal I hope you will write about how you set that up in Glitch (does it require an Airtable account? What’s Airtable?) You […]
Each week I buy a package of cheap storebrand sugar cookies, I call them my “Horrible Cheap Cookies.” I eat 2 or 3 when my blood sugar dips. My wife laughs at me, but I kind of like those no-name maple cookies. I have no idea what’s in them. I can guess, but do I really know? Can you see the metaphor coming? Web browser cookies, invented originally as a means of convenience to remember preferences from a web site, […]
It’s back. It’s dark, reflective, you are looking into it. It looks “off”. CCO image from Pikrepo But it’s not. It’s looking at you. Is it? This is the 2020 iteration of a recast Network Narratives, the course I’ve co-taught (completely remotely) at Kean University with Mia Zamora. Things are different this time around, start with the intro that leads you to the new site. Here’s what it’s about. Through my own fascination with the dystopian future as now series […]
The whole notion of learning from failure is a motivational speaker industry. And it’s been part of my messaging, just recently for a talk to education students at the University of Regina. I often start technology talks with a promise that the technology will likely fail: If it does fail, then I met my expectations. If it doesn’t then I have exceeded them. Still sounds cliché, yes. But I firmly believe in the value of messing up in front, be […]
We have some fun in Networked Narratives with coded messages using rot13. Just look at the Daily Digital Alchemy 243: An encoded challenge today, what the ***** is “Pna lbh pbairefr va EBG13? Ner lbh pyhrq va?” That’s much more than an Alan typo… It’s just a simple cipher that works by changing each letter in a word to the one that is 13 letters after (wrapping around after Z). It’s nifty, because being half of the number of letters […]
One of the most rewarding things I have gotten to do the last few years (and this may be a blog post lacking mention of SPLOTs, hah!) has been teaching co-teaching the Networked Narratives open course with Mia Zamora. In first version in 2017, Mia was present with the class at Kean University and I was remotely beamed in (thought I did make a surprise visit); students blogged, tweeted, created digital art, and experienced creating alternative personas in our mirror […]
Better than getting an A on the geometry test, it’s more exciting to use a magnet to attach Episode 218 of the Teaching in Higher Education podcast to the front of my fridge. I was excited when Bonni Stachowiak DM’ed me asking to record a session. I’ve seen a number of folks I know get an interview, and had crossed paths with Bonni (I think) at the last DML conference I went to. Without too much more self horn tooting, […]
It’s been longer than it should have been since my Networked Narratives class at Kean University wrapped up, but as I did ask my students for a final final reflection, I turn the assignment about on me. For anyone not following along (I’d round that up to everyone); this is the second year I taught the class. Last year, I co-taught with Mia Zamora, who was on site with the class in New Jersey. I beamed in remotely from home […]
On a long distance driving trip this week I’m getting a good chunk podcast listening time. One of my favorite ones is Song Exploder: Song Exploder is a podcast where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. Each episode is produced and edited by host and creator Hrishikesh Hirway in Los Angeles. Using the isolated, individual tracks from a recording, Hrishikesh asks artists to delve into the specific decisions that […]
I might be a broken record but again and again I return to David Wiley’s description of the disposable assignment (and what the potential is to be the opposite): These are assignments that students complain about doing and faculty complain about grading. They’re assignments that add no value to the world – after a student spends three hours creating it, a teacher spends 30 minutes grading it, and then the student throws it away. Not only do these assignments add […]
Gee whatever happened to venerable “yellowed lecture notes” that profs supposedly rely on decade after decade? I dunno. I don’t have a yellow pad. Tuesday was the first class of my Networked Narratives class at Kean University. It was more than wild and thrilling last year when I co-taught with Mia Zamora; she was in the room with students in New Jersey, and I beamed in via Google Hangout. That was then. This year, I’m teaching the class myself as […]
