Feed on
Posts
Comments

Posts tagged as 'today'

Wild day

We finished the McLuhan video in New Media Studies today, and the students learned that MM had children (six, in fact) with a very charming and intelligent wife who both marveled at her husband and waxed rueful about his idiosyncracies. We learned that his son could not convince MM that in fact Brasilia was now […]

Read Full Post »

“Our Cells, Ourselves”

Today’s Washington Post features an unusually fine article from Joel Garreau (registration required) concerning the ways in which cellphones have changed, and continue to transform, our lives as a species on this planet. Twenty-five years of cellphone technology have brought us to the point that Google CEO Eric Schmidt can say, “Eventually there will be […]

Read Full Post »

Mistakes as portals

The Intro. to New Media Studies class today was pretty explosive. I had assigned excerpts in The New Media Reader from McLuhan’s Gutenberg Galaxy and The Medium is the Message. I was up this morning about 5, reading some insightful and tremendously inspiring blog posts from the class. A couple of the posts were especially […]

Read Full Post »

The Art of Software Modeling

The book arrived from ILL today. (Carla Bailey, Queen of ILL, comes through once again. Please do not hire her away from us.) I ran across the title in a Google Book search on “cognitive resonance.” I’m starting more or less from a dead start here, but from a quick read of the first chapter […]

Read Full Post »

St. Valentine 2008

Interesting two days, in this respect anyway: I did a presentation on Brian Wilson for Elderstudy yesterday, then explored “I Get Around” all the way through “Caroline No” for my Rock/Soul/Progressive class today. From senior citizens (I really don’t like that term much) to 18-19 year-olds. Brian spoke to all of them. This of course […]

Read Full Post »

New Media Studies class today

Rangey stuff today. I hope it cohered. A partial list of what we discussed:
Several books–What the Dormouse Said, The Dream Machine, Dealers of Lightning, Tools for Thought.
The Engelbart Demo–GUI’s, alternate keyboarding devices (the five-key “chord”), display technologies, the various diegetic worlds inhabited by Engelbart during the demo (the text he was working on, the display […]

Read Full Post »

Struck by Engelbart again

Back in the office today after the ELI 2008 Annual Meeting, I met my first class at 9:30 this morning: Introduction to New Media Studies. Today was our first day on Doug Engelbart. In one moment, two-thirds of the way through the class, the synchronicities became unexpectedly piercing.
A student in the front row marvelled with […]

Read Full Post »

Eric Miller and the Semantic Web

Courtesy of the University of Mary Washington Computer Science Department, I and an SRO crowd of students, faculty, and staff got to hear a fascinating talk today by Dr. Eric Miller (CSAIL, MIT). There’s no questioning the depth, intelligence, or intensity of his commitment to a data web; he made the best and most inclusive […]

Read Full Post »

Today’s Social Research Colloquium at Mary Washington featured Tom Fallace of our Education Department talking about his research on John Dewey. I know a mere thimble-full about Dewey and was keen to learn more, and Tom certainly delivered: it was a fascinating and lucid talk and sparked many ideas and questions in my mind. The […]

Read Full Post »

Those of us who work in technology and faculty development know that there are huge challenges if one wants to move beyond the “low-hanging fruit” (low-hanging? I practically jumped into the harvester’s lap) and get to truly systemic innovation and progress. The UMW Teaching, Learning, and Technology Fellows’ program is our effort to get to […]

Read Full Post »