Whenever I talk to faculty and students about the use of social media in the academy, I advocate for a community building approach. The idea is relatively simple: communication has the power to enrich or…
Among its many affordances, Twitter can be a powerful public note taking tool. At the end of a rich and exhausting conference celebrating the work and teaching of Richard J. Bernstein, I used Twitter to…
Whatever else can be said of the PhD endeavor, it is fraught with anxiety and self-doubt. Everyone associated with graduate education knows this, many of us from first-hand experience, but rarely do we discuss it,…
If you are, as I am, in the habit of live-tweeting your own lectures using Keynote and the Applescript Keynote Tweet 2.5, originally created by Toby Harris and subsequently updated by @cogdog, you will need…
By the time we took the stage as the final panel of the day, we had heard the voices of expert educators, faculty, administrators, employers and alums speak about the value and importance of general…
As a graduate student in the digital age, you need a domain of your own. First of all, you will be Googled, and when you are, your domain should appear early in the results as…
Returning to Wittenberg for the first time since graduating in 1991, I gave an interactive, live-tweeted, lecture on Reading the Death of Socrates. The paper argues that the Phaedo is Plato's most eloquent political dialogue,…
Last year, there was some controversy over the question of live-tweeting at academic conferences and in academic settings more generally. The hashtag that emerged then, on Twitter of course, was #Twittergate. In this post, I…
It is going to happen. Maybe not today or this week, but eventually, you will be Googled. I am not talking about being Googled by an old friend interested in what you might be up…
They will tell you it is too dangerous, that you'll say something stupid and never be hired. They'll say it is too fast, too superficial, too full of snark to be of any value to…
As many of you know, I have long been experimenting with how to use twitter effectively in academic contexts. Many are skeptical of twitter's ability to add substantive value to academic conversations because of its…
The Liberal Arts are not so much a set of disciplines to be studied as they are a set of habits to be practiced. This is the central point and main theme around which my…
Words do things. What they do, depends on the manner in which they are said, written and received. What they did, and failed to do, last night is something that requires some reflection. That is…
From its earliest articulation in Ancient Greek thinking, the first principle and ultimate end of an education in the liberal arts has always been to live an excellent human life. Because, however, human life can…
On Thursday, October 25th, at 4:30 PDT, I will read a paper entitled, Plato and the Politics of Reading at the University of San Francisco. One of the main points of the paper is that reading is fundamentally a…
Facebook Originally uploaded by laikolosse A number of recent changes to the social media technologies I use daily force me again to reflect on the habits design decisions cultivate in us. The decisions made by…
Today in the Foster Auditorium of the Pattee/Paterno Library, my undergraduate research assistant, Lisa Lotito, and I gave a presentation about the workflow we use in doing philosophical research. I have written in some detail…
Writing Three Ways Originally uploaded by cplong11 New media technologies are transforming the practice of education, and our practices of education must change in the wake of the emergence of new media technologies. In this…