I’m lightly participating in Hybrid Pedagogy’s moocMOOC today, so this is in part about that but mostly about the familiar MOOC conversation about the scalability of writing instruction. As a WPA with 80+ instructors and 2500 students per semester, I…
on writing massively for #moocmooc

writing and acceleration
Today I will take an early summer detour through the analogy of athletic training. This is familiar territory for rhetoric and composition, perhaps most famously in David Russell’s “Activity Theory and Its Implications for Writing Instruction:” To try to teach…
MOOCs and aesthetic experience

In the humanities at least, and especially in conversations around first-year composition, the opposition to MOOCs focuses on the value of small, face-to-face classes. But what is it about these classes that we find valuable? I want to answer that…
the seminar is the worst form of pedagogy
…except for all the others. Churchill’s famous line about democracy reflects well the general sentiment I’ve seen in the wake of the recent announcements about the expansion of Cousera into SUNY and other state university systems. Jeff Rice has an…
SUNY and Coursera
As reported in the NY Times: Joining Coursera will be the State University of New York system, the Tennessee Board of Regents and the University of Tennessee systems, the University of Colorado system, the University of Houston system, the University of Kentucky, the…
boredom, anxiety, and pedagogy

Right now I am teaching a summer online course on videogames. Along the way, we have discussed Csíkszentmihályi’s concept of flow, and the matter has come up in relation to the course itself. As teachers, we’ve all had the experience of…
writing a monograph? who is your audience?
I’m about 30,000 words into my second book. The subject matter of this book will not be a surprise to anyone who reads this blog. It will deal with digital rhetoric, speculative realism, and the challenges that digital media pose…
general education and user experience
Yesterday xBox announced its new console. I watched a few minutes of the video as I am a little interested in how these technologies imagine themselves (or at least how they market that imagination). You can go watch it if…
Levi Bryant’s Dark Ontology
Levi has been on one of his prolific blogging tears again, including a couple posts listing axioms for a dark ontology (here and here). You can read through them all of course, but here are the ones that interest me…
MLA and open scholarly communication
Earlier this week, Kathleen Fitzpatrick presented a statement to the National Academy of Sciences on the MLA’s position on public access to scholarly work. I was particularly interested in this line: we may in coming years operate under a model…



