Blogs

“Mom, take a video of me and put it up on Facebook!” My five-year-old daughter is a (relative) wiz with technology. She was using my iPhone with ease before she was even 18 months old, playing memory games, shape puzzles, and phonic lessons. Both she and her younger brother have our old iPhones for when we travel (said one nine-year-old to his mom when I took them out on one trip: “THEY have iPhones!”). She loves to take pictures with her phone, and complains bitterly that she can’t also take video. The two kids are used to interacting with screens, so to speak, as they regularly skype with their grandparents and other extended family members. We use Facebook to share pictures, videos, and funny stories about our family life with family and friends, most of whom live far away from us.

The National Bureau of Economic Research published the “College as Country Club” paper last week. It has gotten a lot of coverage already by IHE, the Chronicle of Higher Education, TIME, the Wall Street Journal, and Freakonomics.

This week, as I was starting to feel myself again after an intense bout of the flu, Ben came down with it. I had a comparatively light work week, so even when he wasn't that sick I was able to spend time with him, watching TV, talking when he felt up to it, and making tea, the closest thing to food he could tolerate for a few days.

Borrowing from Ta-Nehisi Coates, I'm looking for help understanding this phenomenon as it pertains to higher ed.

This month, students in my January course have been reading about books and culture. This week, as we’re wrapping things up, they speculated about what the world of books might look like in ten years, and came up with some intriguing scenarios and proposals. As I left the building where the class meets I chatted with some humanities faculty and mentioned what we’d been talking about. They seemed at first apprehensive, then surprised and relieved that students predicted a future for books.

When academic Twitter starts sounding too much like academia.

CourseSmart is the world’s largest platform for eTextbooks and digital course materials. CourseSmart has over 40,000 titles from more than 50 publishers and over 3.5 million student and faculty users. CourseSmart Analytics provides faculty with a platform to develop insight into how students are interacting with the digital texts that they assign. Robust analytics seems to be the logical next step of the move from print to digital in curricular materials.

One of the challenges to teaching with technology is helping students figure out the "who", "what", and "how" of internet messages. As a grad instructor of “Human Diversity, Power, and Schools”, a course that centers on issues of difference, this challenge coincides with a key concept: social construction, or the idea that dominant groups’ norms are positioned as natural, to the exclusion of non-dominant groups. I have stumbled into memes as one fruitful teaching tool for helping students to uncover the ways mass media shapes how we view ourselves, others, and the world around us.