My recent DMLcentral post focuses on the National Writing Project’s Digital Is site. I’ve been excited about the increased engagement with this community of educators recently and I am encouraging teachers of all disciplines and ages to consider participating within the Digital Is community. Cliff, my colleague at UCLA, and I are currently working […]
I’m pleased to announce that I am co-editing a special issue of Learning Media and Technology with Ernest Morrell. The theme for our issue is “City Youth and the Pedagogy of Participatory Media.” You can read the full CFP here and I will also paste it below. If you are a researcher, teacher, or student […]
I’m both intrigued and troubled by the prevalence of stories like this one. At once I am fascinated by the voyeuristic look into the rigorous lives of “the other” while also concerned about what the prevalence of these narratives say in maintaining the competitiveness from a capitalistic perspective in the United States. We’re still #12, […]
I finished this book today. The book is so immersive, and funny, and poignant and somehow not read by anyone I know. I called the Hobo Hotline from within the book. I went to the crazily interactive website (once you pull the lever). And as excited as I am to jump into The Magician King, […]
Like many of you, I am experiencing an interpretation of the riots taking place in London through a mediated lens of retweeted photographs [see image above], blog posts, +1d news articles, and forums sharing freshly sparked memes. Nested commenting across online sources-like this video/blog post/tweet-are rich and inherently different from how information is shared and […]
As teacher layoffs have become a frustrating norm for several of my friends, I wanted to find a way to personalize for the public the mass layoffs that affect the teaching force. Peter and I sat down for an afternoon trying to figure out a way to clearly explain the mess that has been his […]
Last week’s episode of This American Life described the troubling problem with innovation and ownership of patents*. Specifically, the show questioned, how we protect our intellectual work and our ideas. In listening to this, I realized how closely the challenges of patents are to the current struggles of ownership of textual products in an age […]
As critical as I get about depictions of race, class, and gender in media, I have a real problem with the thrust of this article. While I think the author is trying to be inclusive in his vision of the need for non-White heroes (and I agree with him on this point), I think bashing […]
[As should be obvious, the images and quoted text in this post were not made by me.]* As schools are being cleaned, painted, prepared for the new year and as many of my friends collect unemployment and search for teaching jobs in charters and small non-LAUSD schools, I want to spend some time on this […]
A novel is a tricky thing to map. At times the invented landscape provided me shelter from the burdens of having to chart the real world in its entirety. But this escapism was always tempered by a certain emptiness: I knew I was deceiving myself through a work of fiction. Perhaps balancing the joys of […]