Praxis
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At our upcoming Digital Scholarship Institute, my colleagues and I will explore the theme of alternative argumentation. At our institution, Occidental College, all frosh are required to take an interdisciplinary cultural studies seminar that focuses on honing argumentation skills. Traditionally, the curriculum has focused on text-based argumentation (reading texts and writing about them), but CSP…
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I recently took a new job as a consultant for social sciences in the department of Scholarship Technology at Occidental College. Part of the job involves helping faculty and students to incorporate new information technologies to advance their teaching, learning, and research and other part is to help students find the information they need by…
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When I was young, I used to make home recordings of pop songs by layering track after track on a karaoke machine. By the time I got the drums, bass, rhythm guitar, lead and piano, and vocals there was eerie bleed through on the cheap Memorex tapes I was using. It would take me an…
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There have been several articles relating the latest cognitive and neurological investigations into how multitasking affects the brain, from the NYT article to PBS’ Frontline special Digital Nation. As studies (as yet largely speculative) are translated into lay terms, we are told that multitasking is the message of interactive media – that the logic of…
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This week at Prof Hacker, Billie Hara suggests that service learning is not just for students. Service can also enrich the life of faculty. Specifically, service can help faculty break out of the ivory tower, teach us new things about “industry, community, populations, or activism,” and help us create work-life balance. In addition, I would…
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A colleague of mine commented today on facebook that it is better to give than receive, and this is particularly true during exams. But I often find myself nervous to see how my students perform. Did my intentions for their learning get realized? This semester I taught a new course on Community Arts that had…
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Today in my Social Problems class I let students choose a topic for me to discuss. They chose drug abuse. Since drug abuse is not really an area I study, I was at a loss for a good hook that could get me interested in the topic. I found that hook when I caught the…
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This semester while teaching an upper level seminar on Media, Culture & Society, my students and I have been reading and discussing the social effects of new media. We mostly talk about what is “new” to us, such as digital media and social media, but we also think historically about radical changes in media technologies…
jacob alden sargent 