Tag: media theory

Teaching to (the) code?

So, in about six weeks, I’ll begin teaching an online course– Introduction to Language and Linguistics, aka, LING 101. The course is fully online asychonous, which means that students go through the course at a self-directed pace, so most of the lectures, readings, and grading are automated. It’s not quite that loose, but close enough. The course

Teaching Digital Skillz

Digital Humanities. Blah blah blah, digital humanities. This coming Wednesday, I’m going to put up this great post about how the notion of “Digital Literacy” isn’t really a kind of literacy at all. I’m going to play devil’s advocate and tell you that maybe people don’t need to learn how to code. I’m going to

More Fuzzy Logic

When bad science begets bad journalism This just in… journalists over 30 mislead readers and misinterpret sources to support their belief that “Kids today are worse off because that’s not how we did things in my day!” Meanwhile, the irony of dissing the Internet on a newsBLOG is as unchecked as reporters’ facts! Seriously, though,

Talk talk talk

So, I was talking… …with my Significant Lover the other day, too early in the morning for us to be cordial, and, well, things got ugly… here’s how it went: SL: This granola tastes like coffee. me: It’s toffee. SL: Yeah, it tastes like coffee. me: Yeah, it’s toffee. SL: You got coffee flavored granola?

Wisdom of the Crowds.

Two Things. (1) Crowds are only wise in the sense of generating a statistical bell-curve around an absolute point. Crowds have no ‘wisdom’ about subjective things, like whether or not high-collars will be fashionable in 2012, or whether or not the world will end in a mayantechosingularityclusterfuck. Crowds are not wise, nor are they even