bomphiologia
Exaggeration done in a self-aggrandizing manner, as a braggart.
Dissertations are hell on non-school writing, you know? This poor blog has been neglected for far too long. I’m going to try and see if I can use it to work through some ideas that have come up over the past few months.
aka “Why I love my students (sometimes)” This year, I’ve had some of my classes read excerpts from “The Precession of Simulacra.” Most of the students struggled with it, but after a few discussions, a few in each section really got into it. I’m not sure if I’ll do such a large chunk of it [...]
My Friday began with a text from a fellow Mac-head friend. “U gonna b in line 2morrow?” Ignoring his irritating use of abbreviations (dude, you have an iPhone with spellcheck and auto-complete!), I tapped out the same response I’ve given, in various media, to other friends, colleagues, and family members: the iPad’s not for me, [...]
“People who used the web turned strange. In public panels, they disguised their sexes, their ages, their names. They logged on to the electronic fray, adopting every violent persona but their own. They whizzed binary files at each other from across the planet, the same planet where impoverished villages looked upon a ball-point pen with [...]
Brian McNely twittered (tweeted?–this verb form always gives me trouble) a link to the Complexity and Social Networks Blog at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science. In light of the fact that I just came from a meeting with my diss. director in which we discussed Bourdieu’s conception of the four types of capital–economic, social, [...]
Even lolcats…even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat what it essentially says is ‘If you have some sans serif fonts on your computer you can play this game too’. And that’s a big change, right? I could [...]
As I was reading the entries for the most recent Teaching Carnival, I felt a jolt of excitement that has been missing from most of my reading this semester. Prepping for comps means delving into The Classics. Of course, many of my classics aren’t typically recognized as such. Sherry Turkle’s Life on the Screen and Allucquère [...]
Welcome to the third installation of the 2009 Teaching Carnival! Spring Break is looming (for some of us, it’s already here), which is the perfect time to take a breath and explore the academic blogosphere. Just as a reminder, here’s some definitions and a few words of wisdom for academic blog readers. And thanks again [...]
I love it when I have data to back up my vague feelings. As I mentioned in the last post, I find e-book readers to be fascinating and believe that they could someday be a viable future form for texts. That said, we are still in the “Mr. Watson, come here, I need you” era of [...]
In a surprisingly uncommented-upon (as I write this) essay for IHE, Lev Gonick predicts 11 IT trends for 2009. Most are fairly straightforward—I think anyone paying any attention to the inroads Gmail has made in universities (including my own) knows that more cloud computing is on the way. But there are two that I think [...]