when the internet implants childhood memories

This post is archived at my new site, making edible playdough is hegemonic. Go here: http://www.jennamcwilliams.com/2010/07/01/when-the-internet-implants-childhood-memories/.

Here's my beautiful niece Morgan playing in her grandma's backyard:




I spend an awful lot of time wondering what it's going to be like for Morgan, growing up surrounded by a digital footprint that already includes more photos and videos of her than her mother and aunts had of their entire childhood. They say that our brains aren't very good at knowing the difference between something that happened "in real life" and something that happened "in media." I have some childhood "memories" that I know were implanted through family stories; but knowing I don't actually remember these events doesn't make the memories any less vivid.

And those memories--'authentically' remembered or not--make up the fabric of my identity, so that it doesn't matter how the memories got there. I imagine the same will be true of Morgan, except to an exponentially greater extent, since huge chunks of her life will be indelibly imprinted on that greatest of collective memory tools, the internet.

Lord knows how differently she and other members of her generation will remember their childhood. For anyone over 30, the terrain of childhood feels fleeting, tough to pin down, and dependent on the memories of people who loved you and paid careful attention to what you were doing. For lots of people under 30, the memory of childhood will no longer be so intergenerationally woven. It will exist independent of family, friends, and collaborators in experience. It will even exist from a neutral, third-person perspective: the perspective of a detached observer (the camera) capturing a scene. When our memories feel like movies, when we feel like we're watching ourselves experience something instead of being inside of the experience ourselves, how does that change how we see ourselves within the world?

I'm not necessarily worried; I'm just wondering.

People tell me to stop wondering about these sorts of things. A lot of the people who tell me this are parents of young children, and this probably means that my biggest mistake is in bringing this issue up all the time to people who just want to post videos of their kids to YouTube. And I'll admit that I don't want my sister to stop capturing my niece's every milestone. Another phenomenon of the 21st century is increased mobility paired up with increasingly cheap and ubiquitous tools to keep in touch with the people whose lives have touched ours.

omg I just talked to Howard Rheingold

You can keep your Robert Pattinsons and Miley Cyruses and whichever other beautiful prepubescent sexy people you young people idolize these days. My idols are people like these folks:

That guy in the lower lefthand corner is Howard Rheingold, who is by just about all accounts one of the kindest, happiest, most curious, most fascinating, most colorful, and most thought-provoking media theorists around. (If you want proof, take a look at this little gem of his writing.)

Because Howard is kind and supportive of other aspiring intellectuals, I've had email conversations and twitter conversations and blog conversations with Howard. There's this interesting feature of the new technologies that swell around us, see: They efface the distance--perceived and real--between our idols and our selves. If you're patient enough and quick enough, you can use these new technologies to climb right up on the pedestals your heroes are standing on and tap them on the shoulder.

And today in a webchat I got to talk to Howard--with my voice--about crap detection, participatory culture, and pedagogy. It. Was. Awesome.

It may soon enough be the case that the structures and norms that allowed us to toss up celebrities and intellectuals as cultural heroes--well, it may soon enough be the case that those structures crumble, leaving our heroes in the rubble at our feet. I'm young enough to hope it'll happen in my lifetime but old enough that I may not be able to fully shake the notion of the celebrity as icon. After all, I grew up alongside this:





And yes, I know that a huge chunk of Americans have never even heard of Howard Rheingold (or Lisa Delpit or Paulo Freire or Jim Gee or Henry Jenkins or Yasmin Kafai) and that these people don't count as 'celebrities,' as least not in the "zomg the paparazzi are everywhere" sense. I don't care. As Intel explains, our rock stars aren't like your rock stars.

things I'm trying to do this summer

• Cut down on my caffeine consumption
• Wash my dishes before bed each night
• Step away from my digital communication devices from time to time
• Read more novels

I believe that it practically doesn't matter what changes you decide to make, as long as they help you become more reflective about how you live your life. I'm not a spiritual person, which is to say that I don't have religion and don't feel a need to get some, but I do believe in the holiness of the moving body. I do believe that moments of total presence in one's life are rare and sacred and therefore are to be pursued with all one's might.

So little things--not letting dirty dishes stack up, reminding myself how to sit still and silent, re-learning the natural rhythms of my body and brain--can be tools in the pursuit of those sacred moments.

event announcement: Noah Iliinsky and "beautiful visualization"

If you live or work in the Bloomington, IN, area, please consider attending this upcoming conversation and workshop with information visualization expert Noah Iliinsky.

Special Event: "Practical Design of Complex Information: How to Make Lasagna Instead of Spaghetti"

Please join us for a conversation and workshop with visualization expert Noah Iliinsky this Friday, March 26, 3:30-5:00 p.m. in room 1084 of the Wright Education building at Indiana University-Bloomington.

About the speaker: Noah Iliinsky works in interface and interaction design, all from a functional and user-centered perspective. Before becoming a designer he was a programmer for several years. He is the co-editor of Beautiful Visualization: Looking at Data through the Eyes of Experts, recently released by O’Reilly Media, and a Senior Program Manager for User Interface for VMWare, a leading provider of virtualization software. You can see some of his work on his website at http://complexdiagrams.com/.

If you are interested in attending the workshop and have an in-progress information visualization project you'd like to have discussed, please send it in advance of the event along with a brief (1 paragraph) description of the project to Joshua Danish at jdanish(at)indiana.edu.

This event is open to all students, faculty, and staff and is hosted by the Learning Sciences Program at Indiana University. For more information, contact Jenna McWilliams at jenmcwil(at)indiana.edu.

tubby fingers and serious cheeks

There's a lot that makes me mad, but there's one thing that makes me consistently happy: My niece Morgan, who's seven months old. Below is a video of her eating her afternoon snack, which is Cheerios.

a poem John Ashbery wrote

Alcove

Is it possible that spring could be
once more approaching? We forget each time
what a mindless business it is, porous like sleep,
adrift on the horizon, refusing to take sides, "mugwump
of the final hour," lest an agenda—horrors!—be imputed to it,
and the whole point of its being spring collapse
like a hole dug in sand. It's breathy, though,
you have to say that for it.

And should further seasons coagulate
into years, like spilled, dried paint, why,
who's to say we weren't provident? We indeed
looked out for others as though they mattered, and they,
catching the spirit, came home with us, spent the night
in an alcove from which their breathing could be heard clearly.
But it's not over yet. Terrible incidents happen
daily. That's how we get around obstacles.



Lifted from Poetry Daily.

One year and 235 posts later...

Today is the one-year anniversary of the establishment of this blog. I count my decision to start this blog, and after that decision the decisions to cultivate it, populate it, and spread the word about it as the most significant aspect of my developing identify as an academic.

And I don't mean "academic" in the stuffy, yes-quite kind of way, either. I mean that the decision to start this blog--a decision that came suddenly, without much by way of any warning--was a decision to speak. It was a decision to move from "Yes, that's something I care about, and I wish there was something I could do about it" to "Yes, I care about that, and here's what I think about it and here's what I'm doing to change things."

I love blogging. It has opened doors for me. It has allowed me to say things I wouldn't have otherwise had the space to say, to people I want to hear those things. And if I sometimes go a little overboard on extolling the virtues of blogging, it's only because I hope for everyone to experience a similar falling away of the weights and chains that for so long kept me close to the earth.

I have a dim memory of the person I was before--a much smaller, much timider person who was horrified at the prospect of taking up too much space or too much of your time. I know that version of me is killed for good, and I'm glad for it. I hope that all of you have the chance, at least once, to experience this kind of total transformation. I hope you get the chance to experience the power of some tool, some network, some community, some practice, online or off, to change your life and trajectory and goals and plans for good.

you have to watch this vlogpost

file under: world's most awesome 16-hour vlog project


This link to pure awesomeness comes to you courtesy of my buddies, Jeffrey Kaplan and David Phelps. If you care about literacy or the learning sciences, you will die of joy.

some stuff I like

Lest I open myself up to accusations of being that kind of graduate student (or, for that matter, this kind of graduate student), I want to point out that I don't hate everything, despite evidence to the contrary. Below, in no particular order, is a list of five awesome things that I've encountered so far as a graduate student at Indiana University.

1. The opening page of Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology: The Digital Revolution and Schooling in America. Open up to the preface of this excellent new text by Allan Collins and Richard Halverson, and you read this epigram:

I have not even intended to judge whether this social revolution, which I believe to be irresistible, is advantageous of disastrous for mankind. I have acknowledged that this revolution is already accomplished or about to be so and I have chosen among those people who have experienced its effects the one in which its development has been the most comprehensive and peaceful, in order that I may make out clearly its natural consequences and the means of turning it to men's advantage. I confess that in America I have seen more than America itself; I have looked there for an image of the essence of democracy, its limitations, its personality, its prejudices its passions; my wish has been to know it if only to realize at least what we have to fear or hope from it. (de Tocqueville, pp. 23-24)

The alignment with de Tocqueville, the great chronicler of democracy in early America, is significant. The drive of the Collins & Halverson text, as with many new texts focusing on the social revolution, is to identify and describe, without making a judgment of value gained or lost, a fundamental shift in the large-scale and day-to-day operations of a culture. The authors hope to observe and describe, not to judge, and if Collins and Halverson tend at times to follow de Tocqueville's lead in revealing their underlying attitudes toward this revolution (about which more later), the effort to approach the ongoing cultural shift toward participatory practices and cultures is valuable and necessary.

2. Early September in south central Indiana. Here in Bloomington, it's been 72 degrees and sunny for about a million days in a row, and at night the church clock's quarter-hour chimes slide through my open window. If I could only get my neighbors to close up their beer-pong table on Saturday nights, I'd be able to listen to the chimes and the crickets all weekend long.

3. Seymour Papert. I liked him already for explaining back in 1984 that he believed the computer would blow up the school, but now I'm grooving on him for his foundational work on constructionism. In attempting to define this movement, he explains the challenges of describing someyhing that is based on the premise of learning-through-making:

[I]t would be particularly oxymoronic to convey the idea of constructionism through a definition since, after all, constructionism boils down to demanding that everything be understood by being constructed. The joke is relevant to the problem, for the more we share the less improbable it is that our self-constructed constructions should converge. And I have learned to take as a sign of relevantly common intellectual culture and preferences the penchant for playing with self-referentially recursive situations: the snake eating its tail, the man hoisting himself by his own bootstraps, and the liar contradicting himself by saying he's a liar. Experience shows that people who relate to that kind of thing often play in similar ways. And in some domains those who play alike think alike. Those who like to play with images of structures emerging from their own chaos, lifting themselves by their own bootstraps, are very likely predisposed to constructionism.

Because the work of educational research is often grim, sometimes excruciatingly so, Papert's sense of play and delight in his work is not only refreshing but very deeply necessary.

4. Week 7 of Kylie Peppler's class, Learning in New Media. The readings for that week look like this:

Literacies as Multiple and Situated
Scribner, S., & Cole, M. (1981/1988). Unpackaging Literacy. In E.R. Kingten, B. Kroll, and M. Rose (Eds.) Perspectives on literacy. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 57-70.
Scribner, S. (1984). Literacy in Three Metaphors. American Journal of Education 93, 6-21.

The New Literacy Studies
Lankshear, C. & Knobel, M. (2003). New Literacies: Changing Knowledge and Classroom Learning. Berkshire, England: Open University Press, 3-49.
The New London Group (1996). A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures. Harvard Educational Review, 66(1).

Multimodal Literacy
Kress, G. (2003). Literacy in the new media age. New York: Routledge, 35-60.

For me, one of the most fantastic features of graduate school has been its promise to help me situate the various, undisciplined readings I've gathered up into respective schools of thought: to sort my knowledge, fill in the blanks, and build a backbone into my education.

5. The yellowjacket nest just outside my bedroom window. jk jk jk I actually hate the yellowjacket nest just outside my bedroom window. If they don't cut it out, I'm going to smack those yellowjackets down on my blog and with this can of Raid I have sitting right here.

luddites hate jetskis

Today my sister and I almost missed the opening scene of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince because she misread her watch. I don't wear a watch, see, and she wears an old-fashioned analog wristwatch so it was her job to keep track of time.

As our timekeepers get increasingly digital, it appears, we have a tendency toward being less capable of quickly interpreting analog time markers. So at 1:00, she thought her watch said noon. She caught her error five minutes before the show was scheduled to start and thanks to our ability to bustle when required and theaters' tendency to start movies much later than scheduled, we got there with enough spare time for me to get my popcorn and for my sister to settle her smuggled-in candy on her lap before the previews started rolling.

The argument that relying on technologies makes us dumber is not a new one; Plato kinda started it by opposing writing because he believed that it would

introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have came to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.

It was downhill from there, of course; and it may be that we hit bottom, at least in terms of networked technologies, with Nicholas Carr's June/July 2008 Atlantic piece, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

In considering the changes to his own orientation toward text (he's less able to read lengthy articles or books; he gets fidgety when he tries to focus on one text for an extended period of time), he writes:

The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

In fact, in drafting this post I zipped along the surface of multiple different texts, from Plato's Phaedrus to Carr's piece on Google to Jamais Cascio's response piece in this month's Atlantic, "Get Smarter." (It argues that technologies and pharmacology can help boost our intelligence.) I may not know what swims beneath the surface of any of these pieces, but I am familiar enough with all of them to use my spare cognitive energy and time to craft a blogpost that links the three. And I did it by typing (without watching the keys) at a rate of approximately 100 words per minute. I employed some basic html code, some of which I know by heart and some of which I keep on an electronic clipboard. I was able to publish it immediately, to the delight or dismay or general apathy of my intended reading public. I could (and, if you're reading this, probably did) direct traffic to this post via Twitter, Facebook, or any number of other blogs.

God knows I could have spent the time reading Plato's Phaedrus in its entirety, and I'm not disputing that I would have been enriched by the experience. But you can't argue that what I did with my time instead (synthesizing, devising an argument, increasing familiarity with html basics, crafting the argument with an intended public in mind, then circulating it among that intended audience) was not an enriching experience.

Back to the jet ski metaphor: Comedian and philosopher Daniel Tosh argues that it's impossible not to be unhappy on a jetski. "You ever seen a sad person on a waverunner? Have you? Seriously, have you?...Try to frown on a waverunner."



Watch the clip till the end. He talks about how people smile as they hit the pier--and they hit the pier because you're supposed to hit the gas to turn--"it goes against natural instinct," he says. Well, maybe at first, but once you get the hang of it, I imagine you learn how to use the gas in ways that keep you from hitting the pier. It's just that most of us hit the pier once and once is enough: we stick to dry land, which is safer but far less fun.

Okay, I'll confess: This entire post is really just a plug for Daniel Tosh's amazing new show, Tosh.0. It airs Thursdays at 10:00 P.M. ET (9:00 Pacific) on Comedy Central, and it may be the funniest half-hour show I've ever seen in my entire life. Even so, it might get canceled because of low viewership. Please just give it a try. I guarantee you'll laugh out loud at least once or your money back.

Tosh.0	Thurs, 10pm / 9c
Motorcycle Granny
www.comedycentral.com
Daniel Tosh Miss Teen South Carolina Demi Moore Picture

Tosh.0 is my favorite new show

Why? Because it has included a puke scene in every one of its first four episodes, that's why.



In case you haven't been following along on Comedy Central, Tosh.0 is a new show hosted by comedian Daniel Tosh. The main conceit is that Tosh introduces, and comments on, a series of viral videos.

It's funnier than you think, even if you think the premise is a downright hoot. But you do have to kind of like watching people throwing up, people making idiots of themselves, and goats that sound like humans.

If you do, you also need to think it's funny when comedians revel in the most humiliating aspects of the human attraction toward spectacle and performance.

If you do, you'll agree with the Reuters review of Tosh.0 by Dan Carlson, who exclaims that

it succeeds on the strength of host Daniel Tosh, a talented stand-up comedian who isn't above poking fun at the show's premise even while gleefully introducing a fresh batch of clips. He's self-deprecating and quick-witted enough to keep the action breezing right along.

Carlson writes, and I agree, that the best part of the show is the weekly "Web Redemption" segment, in which someone whose humiliation has gone viral gets a chance to come on the show for an opportunity to regain her or his dignity. Guests on this segment have so far included Afro Ninja, Miss South Carolina, the famous tumbling-table star of the video "Scarlett Takes a Tumble," , and my personal favorite so far, Tyrone Davies, most recently known for his massive puke-puddle on a morning news show. Davies gets his shot at web redemption here:

Tosh.0	Thurs, 10pm / 9c
Web Redemption - Puke Guy
www.comedycentral.com
Daniel Tosh Miss Teen South Carolina Demi Moore Picture

Simple redemption's not enough for Daniel Tosh, oh no. He has to take it one step farther and take on the "60 minute milk challenge"--drinking a full gallon of milk in under an hour, which everybody knows is physically impossible.

Puke News Kid Does Milk Gallon Challenge - watch more funny videos

Why do I love this show? Mainly because of Tosh himself, who takes such obvious delight in excoriating the self-humiliation drive. If you like his new show, you'll love his recent stand-up movie, "Daniel Tosh: Completely Serious." Here's a teaser:

Actually, "Snakes on a Plane" wasn't that bad... jk jk jk

Coming late to the game, I finally watched that Samuel L. Jackson vehicle, Snakes on a Plane, this weekend on cable. It was--turns out the critics were right on this--the worst kind of bad movie: schlocky without wanting to admit it, seemingly unaware of how to spin absurd lines like "we have to put a barrier between us and the snakes."

Back in 2006, paying ticketholders could at least endure by holding out the hope--indeed, the certainty--that they would get one crystalline moment of Jacksonesque indulgence when they would hear that immortal one-liner uttered by Jackson himself. My version of the line, as viewed through the dubbers of basic cable, was this:



Actually, I think I got the better end of the deal. Pre-release publicity efforts spread the original, unedited version of Jackson's line across the entire interwebz, and the only uncertainty left for moviegoers was when Jackson would say the line. I got the extra layer of anticipation in wondering--since I knew the language wouldn't pass cable censors--how they would dub the line, since they certainly couldn't just edit it out entirely.

The dubbed line was one of two bright spots in what was otherwise a thorough waste of time. We--basic cable subscribers--get the joy of knowing what Jackson really says, even if we hadn't had access to the pre-release hype. We also get the added layer of pleasure in knowing that the dubbers, knowing we know what Jackson actually says, decided to get a little playful. I expected Jackson to say "motherfreaking" or "motherfragging" or something of that ilk; "monkeyfighting" and "Monday to Friday" were such a surprise that I felt something that may have come close to the kind of joy the filmmakers were hoping for in writing the line--and, indeed, the entire movie--in the first place.

The second bright spot comes just after Samuel L. Jackson has had enough of the monkeyfighting snakes. (I don't remember the name of the 'character' he ostensibly 'plays' in this film, and really there's no point in pretending it's worth my time to find out.) It turns out the plane is lacking a pilot and the surviving passengers need to find the most qualified person to try to lane the plane.

It also turns out the most qualified person is a young man named Troy, a bodyguard for the rapper 3Gs. As 3Gs points out, Troy has logged thousands of hours of flight time--though admittedly, it was all on a flight simulator program for PlayStation2. It doesn't matter, though, because by the time this fact is revealed Troy's already at the controls--and his command of the language of air control is nothing short of pure beauty. See, because it would be one thing if he had only enough competence to manipulate the controls, but his embodiment of the language, the body movements, the mindset of a pilot demonstrates near-mastery. It's just...so well played.

Here's the unedited version of the final minutes of the film. If you want to skip ahead to Troy's landing, it's at 5:25.

While you're watching, do NOT question why Samuel L. Jackson thinks it's a good idea to shoot the windows out of an unsteady airplane. Do NOT question why the flight attendants choose not to strap themselves in before the windows get shot out. And actually, don't worry too much about why there might be monkeyfighting snakes on a Monday to Friday plane. It really doesn't matter.

headline: Hillary Kolos brings the awesome. Awesomeness ensues.

One of my favorite young media scholars is Hillary Kolos, a graduate student in MIT's Comparative Media Studies Program. Because I have had the great, great luck to get to work with her over the last year as part of my day job, I've had the joy of watching her blossom as a thinker, writer, and media scholar.

Recently, Hillary had a personal essay posted to Henry Jenkins's blog. The piece, "Bouncing Off the Walls: Playing with Teen Identity", focuses on her experience with gender and identity play through a consideration of how she decorated the walls of her bedroom as an adolescent. The piece is a gem. One tantalizing snippet:

As a teen, I used many resources to play with new identities. Fashion ads served as inspiration. My walls were a place to exhibit them. I did also, on occasion, leave my room where I had other experiences that helped shape the woman I am today. But having a space of my own to play and then reflect was very important to my process of identity formation. What seemed like goofing off at the time was actually a process of exploring who I thought I was at the time, as well as who I thought I should be.

My experience in my room is one of countless examples of how teens use their available resources to explore potential identities through play. This kind of play can happen in private, but often young people use media to capture their experiments and share them with others. In this way, they can gauge reactions and refine their performances. I used my walls to reach a limited audience, but today teens can easily reach millions of people online and receive feedback instantly on how they represent themselves. It will be interesting to see the new possibilities, as well as the new concerns, that emerge as teens use new resources to play with their identities online.

You can find the rest on Henry's blog here. As I mention in the title of this post, the piece is filled with awesome and well worth the read.

our rock stars are not your mother's rock stars

I saw this video for the first time yesterday while watching the season finale of "Fringe" on Hulu.



Our rock stars, the commercial explains, aren't like your rock stars.

Let me tell you a story: In my day job, I work with media scholar Henry Jenkins. Last year, I was sent to the South by Southwest Interactive Festival, where Henry and Steven Johnson were scheduled to hold a discussion at the front of an enormous room, which filled up fast. As Henry and I were chatting before the event, a woman walked up to Henry and girlishly asked, "would you mind if I got a picture of me standing next to you?"

"Sure," said Henry, as if this sort of thing happened all the time. (I later found out that it does.)

Here's Henry Jenkins:




What I like about the Intel commercial is that it points to an interesting characteristic of our culture: that when people are as immersed in a field as the Intel employees of the commercial clearly are, they have their own set of rock stars who aren't like "real" rock stars. Well, at least they don't look like rock stars. But they do share certain common features with pop icons: They are generally very, very talented; they have achieved something we fantasize about; and they are famous among people who care about their field.

I'm going to come clean and admit that I have my own rock stars, and I suspect that many of my readers do too. Here's the deal: After I list my rock stars, you have to list yours. But make sure to identify your field, so we can all know how and why these people are superstars to you. I chose to stick with 3 because I didn't want to look like some sort of crazy groupie, though of course I could go on.

Jenna's Rock Stars
field: education / new media / participatory culture / technology / creativity
1. Educational researcher, games expert, and social justice theorist Jim Gee
2. Technology writer Clay Shirky
3. Insane genius philosopher Bruno Latour


Your turn.

PSA: in support of post-punk laptop rap

Here's a new release from MC Lars, who calls himself a "post-punk laptop rap artist."



I found out about MC Lars's work via my day job as educational researcher for Project New Media Literacies. I worked with literary scholar Wyn Kelley and media scholar Henry Jenkins, among others, to develop a teachers' guide for integrating new media literacy practices into the classroom while teaching Moby-Dick. Henry introduced us to an MC Lars song called "ahab," and later, he posted an interview with Lars on his blog.

Here's the "Ahab" video, which makes me so very happy. My favorite part is when Queequeg dances, surrounded by the crew of the Pequod.

branding sleeping alone and starting out early

My colleague and fellow evil genius Nick Seaver has been helping me work through the issues related to branding. He provided me with this image to serve as a logo for sleeping alone and starting out early. I'm undecided on whether this aligns with the image I'm attempting to convey of a serious thinker with a sense of humor. I'd love to know what you think.

Hurry up and say goodbye to the Boston Globe

It looks like the Boston Globe's days are numbered after down-to-the-wire negotiations between the Globe's union and its parent company, New York Times, Inc., failed to produce a tenable solution to the budget crunch stemming from faltering subscriptions and ad revenue.

Readers of this blog know how I feel about newspapers' old-media attempts to remain viable in the midst of a new media revolution (hint: annoyed and dismissive). This doesn't, of course, mean that I'm a fan of media outlets shutting down entirely; after all, it's true that new media journalism models rely on the work of reporters in the field, gathering stories and reporting them via some platform. But the traditional approach to journalism--two to three major papers in every major city--is no longer viable and may be unnecessary in a culture where everyone's a potential media outlet. We don't yet know what kinds of journalistic models are sustainable, or what approaches to reporting will matter to those who are joining the social revolution.

In related news, my blog got noticed by an editor at The Guardian, who solicited me to write for an online section of the paper called Comment is Free. My first post, a condensed version of my review of State of Play, is up here. I don't find my thrill at the awesomeness of getting picked up by a major media outlet at all contradictory to my stance on print media.

What would a fireside moonbat do?

I just caught the last several minutes (I was going to say "the tail end" and thought better of it) of the 2008 film "Zombie Strippers!" starring Jenna Jameson and Robert Englund. If you haven't figured out the plot yet, then there's no point explaining it to you. I only want to focus on a scene late in the movie where the Army commandos have shot the heads off of the zombie strippers and walk into a room where two people are clutching each other in the corner. It's not clear to the commandos whether these guys are humans or zombie strippers, so one of the muscleheads walks up to the pair and says "Say something human--and it better be ontological."



I'm officially claiming this quote as the motto of my reading group, the Fireside Moonbats.


Two key members of the Cambridge, Massachusetts,-based reading group, the Fireside Moonbats
You know how Art Garfunkel keeps a running list of every book he has read since the 1960's? I think I may start doing that for the Moonbats, too--especially since, if our motto is public, our reading list should be as well. Below, I've included the beginnings of that list. I hope to continue to build this for anybody who wants to follow along.

The Fireside Moonbats Reading List: First Draft

Shirky,Clay. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. Penguin Press, 2008. Introduction and chapters 10 & 11.

Ito, Mizuko, Heather A. Horst, Matteo Bittanti, danah boyd, Becky Herr-Stephenson, Patricia G. Lange, C.J. Pascoe, and Laura Robinson (with Sonja Baumer, Rachel Cody, Dilan Mahendran, Katynka Martínez, Dan Perkel, Christo Sims, and Lisa Tripp.) Living and Learning with New Media: Summary of Findings from the Digital Youth Project. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning, November 2008.

Latour, Bruno. On Interobjectivity. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 3.4, 1996. Available at http://educ.ubc.ca/faculty/bryson/604/Latour.pdf.

Latour, Bruno. On Recalling ANT. Keynote speech for the Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, Nov. 30, 2003. Available at http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/papers/Latour-Recalling-ANT.pdf.

Barton, David, and Mary Hamilton. Literacy, reification and the dynamics of social interaction. David Barton and Karin Tusting (eds.) Beyond Communities Of Practice: Language, Power And Social Context. Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Clarke, Julia. A new kind of symmetry: Actor–network theories and the new literacy studies. Studies in the Education of Adults Vol. 34, No.2, October 2002

Leander, Kevin M., and Deborah Wells Rowe. Mapping Literacy Spaces in Motion: A Rhizomatic Analysis of a Classroom Literacy. Reading Research Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 2006), pp. 428-460

Francis, Russell. The Predicament of the Learner in the New Media Age (2009). Dissertation being prepared for publication.

Wertsch, James V. Mediation. The Cambridge Companion to Vygotsky, Daniels, Harry, Michael Cole, & James V. Wertsch, Eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Nardi, Bonnie, Steve Whittaker, & Heinrich Schwarz. NetWORKERS and their Activity in Intensional Networks. Computer Supported Cooperative Work 11: 205–242, 2002.

Nardi, Bonnie A., Diane J. Schiano, Michelle Gumbrecht, and Luke Swartz. Why We Blog. December 2004/Vol. 47, No. 12 Communications of the ACM.

Nardi, Bonnie A., Stella Ly, & Justin Harris. Learning Conversations in World of Warcraft. Proceedings of the 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2007.

Davydov, Vasily V., and Stephen T. Kerr. The Influence of L. S. Vygotsky on Education Theory, Research, and Practice. Educational Researcher, Vol. 24, No. 3 (Apr., 1995).

Edwards, Anne. Let’s get beyond community and practice: the many meanings of learning by participating. The Curriculum Journal Vol. 16, No. 1, March 2005, pp. 49 – 65

Engestrom, Yrjo. Knotworking to Create Collaborative Intentionality Capital in Fluid Organizational Fields. Collaborative Capital: Creating Intangible Value Advances in Interdisciplinary Studies of Work Teams, Volume 11, 307–336 (2005)

Gee, James Paul. A 21st Century Assessment Project for Situated and Sociocultural Approaches to Learning. Grant Proposal for the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative.

Gee, James Paul. Human Action and Social Groups as the Natural Home of Assessment:Thoughts on 21st Century Learning and Assessment. Draft paper for the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation's Digital Media and Learning Initiative.

This is just the beginning of the list, and I'm going to summon the Fireside Moonbats to help me build on it. Stay posted for an longer and more detailed list.

Bigot update

They're losing.

Over at Talent Imitates, Genius Steals, Faris Yakob is promoting a New York-based campaign called Equality and Justice Day because, as he writes, "Social media seems like a good place for social causes." The video below provides the rationale for the one-day rally in Albany on April 28.




And just in case you haven't been following the recent news about various legislative and court actions legalizing gay marriage in several states, the following Daily Show clip should catch you up nicely.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
I Now Pronounce You Ben & Jerry
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And let's see, in case you're not yet fully convinced, plz to watch this 2007 video of San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders--a Republican--reversing his position on gay marriage and indicating, his voice breaking with emotion, his intention to sign a bill legalizing gay marriage. I've yet to find a more compelling argument for gay marriage.

POW! POW! POW! It's official: I'm a Hoosier

I've just received official confirmation from Indiana University's Learning Sciences Program that I have been accepted into the doctoral program beginning Fall 2009. Among other things, the letter indicates that:

For next year, you will be working with Dr. Daniel Hickey as a research assistant. You will probably be hearing from Dr. Hickey. Feel free, however, to contact him before you come to IU to learn more about the exciting research opportunities.

I wonder who this Dr. Hickey character is. I hope he's okay to work with. And I do hope he contacts me soon. I have some questions about the field research we've been working on together for the last year and the blogposts we've been drafting together for the last month.



addendum:
Here's how it feels to be me right now. I'm the kitten, in case you were wondering. Dan, that means you're the bloodhound.