Digital Skulduggery & more
One of the greatest mistakes we make in literary studies---and as teachers of literature---is privileging one form of literacy above all others. Namely, literacy as silent reading. In our classrooms, we view reading aloud with disdain. Asking students to take turns reading a text aloud offends our sensibilities as literature professors. It's remedial. Childish. Appropriate… Continue reading On Reading Aloud in the Classroom
On September 8, the DigitalCultureBooks imprint of the University of Michigan Library and University Michigan Press released the online edition of Hacking the Academy. Conceived of by Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt at GMU's Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, Hacking the Academy is an experiment in publishing. It's a crowdsourced book, in… Continue reading Hacking the Academy: The Ebook Volume
Mark Z. Danielewski’s debut novel House of Leaves (2000) presents a paradox to the literary scholar working within the digital humanities. On one hand the massive, labyrinthine novel offers so many ambiguities and playful metaleptic moments that it would seem to be a literary critic’s dream text, endlessly interpretable, boundlessly intertextual. On the other hand,… Continue reading Renetworking House of Leaves in the Digital Humanities
I'm excited to announce the print side of my post-print fiction reading list: Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler Don DeLillo, Mao II Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves Salvador Plascencia, The People of Paper Anne Carson, Nox Each of these works offers a meditation upon the act of reading or writing,… Continue reading Post-Print Fiction Reading List (the print stuff, at least)
Often dismissed by its critics as low-brow pulp, science fiction is nonetheless a rich, dynamic literary genre which deserves our attention. In this class we will move beyond the stereotypes of science fiction in order to examine novels, stories, comics, films, and videogames that question the global commodification of culture, the fetishization of technology, and… Continue reading Fall 2011 Course Description for ENGL 451: Science Fiction
Last week I was a guest of the Davidson College Teaching Discussion Group, where I was invited to talk about my pedagogical strategies for teaching large classes. I mostly focused on how I use technology to preserve what I value most about teaching smaller classes. But many of the technique I discussed are equally applicable… Continue reading Followup to the Ever-Expanding Classroom Discussion
I always find it difficult to select the texts for my graphic novel courses. Narrowing the choices for my Spring 2011 undergrad class bordered upon an existential crisis. Perhaps it's because so much seems to be at stake when you're likely introducing students for the first time in their lives to the critical study of… Continue reading Graphic Novels and Narratives for Spring 2011
Here's the course description for my Fall 2010 graduate class on graphic novels (ENGL 685:003): This course considers the storytelling potential of graphic novels, an often neglected form of artistic and narrative expression with a long and rich history. Boldly combining images and text, graphic novels of recent years have explored divisive issues often considered… Continue reading Fall 2010 Grad Class on Graphic Novels
The folks at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) have posted an audio podcast of my recent Digital Dialogue presentation, "The Open Source Professor: Teaching, Research, and Transparency." As entertaining as it might be to hear me talk for thirty minutes, I thought it would be better to see the visuals that… Continue reading The Open Source Professor (Screencast)
HNRS 353: Videogames in Critical Contexts T/R 1:30-2:45pm In this Honors Seminar we will study the history and cultural impact of videogames from a number of critical perspectives. As products of a complicated network of social, economic, and technological forces, videogames are dense cultural texts, deeply layered with multiple meanings. Whether we consider early arcade… Continue reading Spring 2010 Course Descriptions
Last week I described the intensive role of social networking in my teaching. Although I explained how I track and archive my students' Twitter activity, I didn't describe what they actually do on Twitter. That's because I wasn't sure myself what they do. I mean, of course I've reading their tweets and sending my own,… Continue reading Twitter is a Snark Valve
I'm five weeks into the new semester, and it's time to consider how my ambitious technology-heavy Graphic Novel course is going. And I'm serious when I say it's technology-heavy: we're doing a blog, a wiki, Twitter, and rigorous Pecha Kucha presentations. About the only thing we're missing is a MMORPG. I plotted out the major… Continue reading Reflections on a Technology-Driven Syllabus
Julie Meloni over at Prof. Hacker has a good rundown of the kinds of questions a professor should think through when he or she integrates a blog into the classroom. I've been using blogs in my teaching for several years now, so I wanted to share a few ideas that have worked for me. I'm… Continue reading Pedagogy and the Class Blog
My previous post about making my teaching evaluations public generated some thoughtful commentary, both here and elsewhere. Brian Coxall's post on Prof. Hacker and the ensuing comments raised some key questions, and I've briefly responded there, saying: [Regarding who owns the rights to the evaluations] ...in my case I think that answer is easy: it’s… Continue reading Followup on Public Teaching Evaluations
I recently wrote about why I'm making even the earliest scraps of my research public. It's a move, in theory, that most academics would not object to. Nobody is going to give me funny looks for suggesting we share our research problems. After all, scholarly collaboration is something we're almost all willing to profess a… Continue reading Transparency, Teaching, and Taking My Evaluations Public