New Media Faculty Development Seminar

David Foster Wallace’s a supposedly fun thing i’ll never do again, Little, Brown and Company, 1997.

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I recently watched again the great movie The Third Man (1949) directed by Carol Reed and starring Joseph Cotton, Alida Valli, Orson Wells, and Trevor Howard. It is a commonplace to say that such films show the power of using stark images in black and white, but it struck me anew in watching the movie. [...]

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Just a quick test a WordPress’ application on the iPad. Seems to be working quite nicely. Learning a new (for me) style of typing – a sort of one-handed touch typing. More later, but this application has interesting ramifications for a number of nascent projects here at Baylor. Hmmm – wondering how to post this. [...]

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Last December I bought a Blue Ray version of the 2001 restoration of Fritz Lang’s classic film “Metropolis.” So it is with mixed feeling that I now learn of an even better restoration. The 1926 original version was 153 minutes and was not a commercial success. To improve ticket sales it was repeatedly cut and [...]

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I have begun exploring the Europeana site maintained by the European Commission (http://www.europeana.eu/portal/). It contains images, texts, sound, and video from archives, museums, and libraries from around Europe. This includes the Rijksmuseum, the British Library, and the Louvre among others. With it I can read a 1777 universal history in the Staatsbibliothek in Munich. Or [...]

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The April 8 issue of The New York Review of Books has an article entitled “The Corrupt Reign of Emperor Silvio”  written by Alexandre Stille, a professor of journalism at Columbia. It is about Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and his enduring popularity in the face of repeated scandals. It may just be the Italians, but [...]

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If I understand McLuhan correctly, electronic media change the way we experience the world. We get beyond sequential, linear thinking and restore an earlier, almost mythical, way of dealing with the world but at an enhanced level. We recover the tribal and move toward a global village. I am ambivalent about this. I think I [...]

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This acceptance speech by Michael Giacchino for “Up”, Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures (Original Score), seems to make a lot of sense in our context of media literacy and allowing children room for creativity with media. Seems like there are infinitely more options available now, and embracing rich media as a creative and [...]

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A shout-out for Gardner, and then my first dialog with a respondent to my blog post! First off – kudos to Gardner for being the major contributor to a nice little article about technology at Baylor and TSTC in today’s (3/8/10) Waco Tribune-Herald, found here. Great comments, and a superb plug for the Educational Technology [...]

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I agree in principle that we who work in education should be able to describe what we intend to do, and that it is important that we find a way to demonstrate to what extent we have met those goals.
But that principle is a principle of almost unimaginable complexity.
Rather than proliferate crude measures of recall [...]

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