At the start of the new year, my partner turned to me during dinner and casually changed the topic from the discussion about school work for the children. From her demeanor and tone, I knew that this was something far from casual and that she had been wrestling with something for some time. “I’m thinking…
The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them — especially not from yourself. Daniel Dennett In Dennett’s book, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, he suggests that we need to build up our cognitive toolkit to help solve wicked problems. He expands on this in this interview in Brain Pickings.…
Doxing is an abbreviation of the word documents. It is an Internet-based practice of researching and publicly broadcasting private or identifying information about an individual or organization. As a web literate individual, it is your responsibility to try to understand the tools and practices used online. This includes some of the sinister components, not just…
I recently wrote a meditation for The Ethics of Digital Literacy, edited by my good friend Kristen Turner. My meditation for the text was focused on the challenges and opportunities in building ethical communities. You can review the submitted version here. In this post, I am sharing materials for a virtual series on the Ethics…
Educators must prepare students to be the multiliterate individuals that they will need to be successful in their futures. Schools are ultimately responsible for preparing students to be critical users of available technologies (Damarin, 2000; Leu, Kinzer, Coiro, & Cammack, 2004), problem solvers, and good communicators in networked civic spaces (Mishra & Kereluik, 2011; Binkley…
To behaviorists, the mind is a “black box.” In science and engineering, the term black box refers to any complex device for which we know the inputs and outputs, but not the inner workings. For example, to many of us, our mobile devices are a black box. We push the buttons on the phone, select the app…
If you’re a regular reader of this blog and my social feeds, you’ve noticed the topic of the “IndieWeb” showing up quite a bit. Chris Aldrich has an excellent post defining the IndieWeb that I recommend you checking out if you really want to understand what this all means. Aldrich indicates: In broadest terms I…
I’ve written quite a bit about blogging, and my creation of open education resources over the past on this website. A lot has changed in my blogging habits, and general digital identity construction since those posts. Most of the response that I get from colleagues, students, and tenure committees is “why in the world would…
I’m teaching a course on slam poetry as part of our first year experience (FYE) initiative here at CofC. This course is titled the “Revolutionary Poets Society” and it is a reboot of an after-school club I facilitated when I was teaching middle school. The Revolutionary Poets Society focuses on global opportunities to respond to…
First principles thinking is the act of boiling a process down to the fundamental parts that you know are true and building up from there. Learning, developing, and planning from a set of first principles is an effective strategy that you can employ to break down complicated problems and generate original solutions. Great thinkers throughout time have…