Keeping Up

It's tough managing all the interesting things to read - books, articles, newspapers, email messages, discussion list postings. It's also tough to manage all the things to watch - YouTube, movies, the cats. And then there are those "multimodal" artifacts that I both read and watch: webpages, Facebook, blogs.

I'm finding so many interconnections between the academic listservs I'm on (WMST-L and techrhet are my two most active), especially when it comes to discussing how our students use technology (most of them, anyway). One poster even said that to teenagers, 2 or three years is a generation gap. Sure, but an even bigger gap might be the one I've been living in: I remember using a computer when you couldn't see much on the screen (remember the Osborne?) or when I could watch the cursor speed greenish across a gray/black screen, stopping (throbbing!) to wait for me to type in a command (see this blog for an example). Doesn't seem that long ago, somehow, yet eons ago in other ways.

Here's an interesting take on this odd speeded-up time/gap, especially in terms of what kids are doing with communications technology/social networking (what we called "CMC" or "Computer Mediated Communication" in the old days): "The Death of Email" at Slate.com/

So the question for me now becomes, "How to teach?" Or maybe, "What to teach?" Or maybe, "What is teaching?"

And here's a random list of cool online things to make me think even more about change:
**a YouTube Video "Did You Know?"
**an online journal "Said It: Feminist News, Cuture, and Politics"
**a quasi-academic article "A Professor Pokes Fun at Copyright"
**a blog "Feminist Philosophers"