Regular visitors to this site . . . well . . . if such creatures exist, they probably need to get a life. At best, my blogging habits have always followed feast-or-famine cycles. And so regular visits — especially over the past year or so — would not have been a worthy use of most […]
Inside/outside
In 2008, some graduate students at the University of Minnesota organized a small conference on campus called, “Rethinking the University: Labor, Knowledge, Value.” Part of that conference was a roundtable on “The University and the Public Intellectual,” and somehow I got invited to be a part of the group on the podium for that session. […]
. . . of Surveillance of the University of Surveillance of the . . .
Dipping back into the archive once more, this time to the “Media in Transition 8” conference held at MIT in 2013. I began this talk with a “joke” intro that (shamelessly) I have used more than once. Partly, because it almost always gets a good laugh. But mostly because, in this case, it was definitely […]
Back in the saddle
The “spring” semester starts up for us again on Tuesday, though spring itself is still a long way away. And, if recent years are any indication, the weather won’t feel like proper spring until somewhere close to finals week. Maybe not even then. Still. It’s a new semester. There are updated syllabi (“Freedom of Speech” […]
Whose education is it?
As has often been the case when I’ve dived into my digital archives for purposes of this blog, I’d forgotten almost everything about the paper below (presented at the 2012 “Crossroads in Cultural Studies” conference in Paris). If you’d asked me 24 hours ago, I suspect the only thing I would have remembered about it […]
Wayback machine
I will admit that I was surprised to dig up this very old bit of ephemera — a paper on online pedagogy that I presented at an ICA (International Communication Association) pre-conference in 1999(!!) — and see how much of it still made sense today. Not all of it, to be sure. If nothing else, […]
Sharing is caring (syllabi version)
The fall semester began for us last week, and so there are some new syllabi online from me for the current versions of my undergrad course on media and technology and my grad seminar on cultural studies. I know some people are very protective of their syllabi, and don’t like to share them publicly . […]
18 Things
Larry Grossberg (who was my Ph.D. adviser) retired this year. There was a lovely gathering in May of 40+ years worth of his friends, family, colleagues, and students (past and present) to celebrate Larry and wish him well in this next chapter of his life. As part of this event, I was asked to moderate […]
How to plagiarize well (tips for my undergraduates) [Rerun Sunday]
Ideally, of course, this tip could be summed up in four simple words: Just Don’t Do It. But you know that already. The syllabus tells you not to do so. Pretty much every instructor you’ve ever had since high school has told you not to do so. And yet, in spite of all that, you […]
No one knows . . . [Rerun Sunday]
My friend Elena likes to tell a story about grading student papers while some Jacques Cousteau special was playing on the TV as background noise. While she was gawking at what her charges had managed to do to logic, reason, and the English language, Cousteau was commenting on one of the eternal mysteries of the […]