Weblogs in Higher Education

Beyond dictatorship

A little Storify essay, four tweets and three comments long, about language, imagination, and revolution, starring the writing of Libyan novelist and political observer Hisham Matar.

The silence of the citizen

Perhaps this is true: Silence is the basic mode of the citizen, largely unallied with others, in possession of no regular civic audience, skilled in no genre of public address, in possession of no reliable stream of information or of one so contested and poisoned and vexed as to be more problem than aid, susceptible to cynicism or despair or indifference every moment that is not spent in laboring or consuming entertainment or tending the beautiful or bare walled garden of the...

Radio radio

A fine example of a small story told well, from This American Life--a four-year-old grows very interested in Jesus and what he taught, and then she sees a connection to a new person she learns about, Martin Luther King. Go to Kid Logic (Episode 188) and skip ahead to 13:10 in the audio. What takes this from a story to a good story?...

Moving day

It's official, I guess. I'm moving on over to a little more modern blogging software. The new site is: akaKenSmith.com (...also known as...) pMachine, you've been a gem.

Pirates and social media

Innovative collaborations? Movement of information across the world via new technology? Exchanges between groups previously unable to work together? New jobs created by access to new information? Disruptions of market values due to new forces and actors? Sure, but are we talking about pirates here? Yes. See the later paragraphs of Chana Joffe-Walt's 5/22/09 story, "After A Pirate Negotiation,...