I travel a lot. I’m not a global jet-setter or a frequent-flyer million miles, but I take trips throughout the US. I drive. I train. I bus. I cajole my friends to go to places I want to see by offering to pay for gas. I prefer to see where I’m going instead of flying.… Read More Audiobooks, Music, and My Phone
Last semester, my students had a really cool conversation about whether tattoos are a medium and/or rhetorical.As I teach a new semester of digital rhetoric, I’m contemplating the nature of media and new media. Of course, I always return to Marshall McLuhan’s “The Medium is the Message.” If we accept McLuhan’s premise that how a message is… Read More Skin as Medium
I still read the news. I currently get most of my news via the news aggregator, Feedly. The app collects news stories from a variety of sources and puts them all in one place. On a daily basis, I get stories from The Atlantic, The New York Times, NPR, Jezebel, and The Commercial Appeal. I used… Read More Still Reading the News
This series began because I was going through my keepsakes and photos the other day. As I dug through a waterproof bin that holds some of my most mundane but meaningful treasures, I was struck by the power of writing to evoke memory. My mother and grandmother are both deceased. As I dug through photos,… Read More Writing by Hand and Memory, Part 2
I saw a post on Facebook that said, “For teachers, August is like a month-long Sunday night before work.” This resonated with me because I am in the process of trying to wrap up a bunch of crap from the summer (weekend) and prepare for the fall semester (Monday). In other words, my plate is… Read More Writing by Hand and Memory, Part 1
A few days ago, the news blew up with a story about a chapter of ΣAE at the University of Oklahoma. The fraternity members were recorded singing an obviously racist song about not admitting African Americans. What strikes me most about this story is the power of an individual with a cellphone. The individual must have… Read More Greetings from the Panopticon
I’m currently rereading Jürgen Habermas‘s (1991) The Structural Transformation of the Public Space and thought about writing a post about that. However, I’m not sure I’m ready to tackle German philosophy in this space … yet. Instead, I want to talk about photocopiers. This boingboing article by Mark Frauenfelder highlights how Xerox did not anticipate… Read More Photocopier
As we start reading Wikinomics, I find the news full of stories about collaboration and prosuming. In 1980, futurist Alvin Toffler coined the term “prosumer” to describe the type of work new technologies would enable us to do. Prosumers produce and consume the information marketplace. Or, that they actively participate in the creation new idea, products,… Read More Prosuming News
Alison A. Lukowski 