life skills for the Technium

I have sometimes, in these pages of pixels, expressed frustration with Kevin Kelly, but his post on “Techno Life Skills” is just fantastic. My favorite point: You will be newbie forever. Get good at the beginner mode, learning new programs, asking dumb questions, making stupid mistakes, soliciting help, and helping others with what...

the end of typewriting

Now that the making of typewriters has come to an end, nostalgia is setting in. I am not wholly immune to it. I still have warm memories of the Smith-Corona Slient I used throughout college and most of graduate school — in fact, it’s safely stored in my basement, in its original case. I used it happily, looking with scorn on those...

about Tumblr

“This Is Why Your Tumblr’s Down” — because, if I read the piece rightly, David Karp doesn’t want to spend the money to hire more engineers to keep the backend functioning smoothly. Well, whatever. I started my tumblelog more than four years ago, and for a long time it was a great place for me to store and present quotations and...

yet another post about making distinctions

This proposal for a conference panel on lo-tech teaching seems to be focused on the teaching of writing, but it prompts me to record my thoughts about the literature classroom instead. In my (admittedly odd) mind there’s a clear distinction between the technologies that are appropriate inside the classroom and those that are...

broken

Kevin Kelly: My friend had a young daughter under 5 years old. Like many other families these days, they have no tv in their house, but do have has lots of computers. With his daughter he was visiting another family who had a tv, which was on in another room. The daughter went up to the tv, hunting around it, and looked behind the tv....

Holy Week, visualized

My former student Stephen Smith made this remarkable timeline for Holy Week. See his explanation of how he did it here. Trust me, the closer you look the better it’ll be, so click through to the larger version.

listen to Tom

teaching from the Kindle

So, I did something dumb a couple of weeks ago: when packing up some books to sell at a nearby Half-Price Books, I accidentally added, and then sold, my annotated copy of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Imagine my surprise when I took a copy off the shelf in preparation for class only to discover that it was pristine...

pleasant surprises in the archives

Earlier this week I was at the Harvard University Archives, reading some letters from W. H. Auden to Theodore Spencer, a rather interesting fellow who taught English at Harvard from the mid-1930s until his death, from a heart attack, in 1949, when he was just 46 years old. Throughout the Forties Auden relied on the advice of Spencer,...

apologies

Sorry for the light posting, folks: I’ve been traveling and have come back to a world of work. Also, my old MacBook died, which means that until the shiny new MacBook Air just ordered arrives through the Byzantine channels of Wheaton’s purchasing system — they won’t let me drive four miles to the Apple Store and put...