As the semester is whizzing by with getting the word out about next year's CTL seminars, working on the college's Middle States accreditation process, co-leading the Designed For Learning 2.0 seminar and most of all, re-designing the CTL website, I have wandered far from posting here on any kind of regular basis.
But I have to write about yesterday's conference "The Digital University: Power Relations, Publishing, Authority and Community in the 21st Century Academy", organized by CUNY "faculty members, researchers and doctoral students affiliated with the CUNY Graduate Center’s Digital Media Studies Group, in collaboration with the Center for the Humanities and the New Media Lab".
It was interesting to hear a range of perspectives on the intense ripple effect that digital media is causing in academic culture. With pedagogy, these discussions are very familiar even though the technologies change - but the issues around academic publishing were intriguing.
One outstanding presentation was by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Assoc. Prof. of Media Studies at Pomona College, and the author of Planned Obsolescence:Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy, which is available via Media Commons.
Several times during the day I mentioned our Commmunity 2.0 project, and there was great interest in it.
BTW, if you're affiliated with CUNY and have not already done so, you can join the CUNY Academic Commons, which is how I learned of the conference. It's a great way to connect with innovative folks around the University.
Some of the conference documentation occurred in "real time" via twitter. I tried tweeting during a couple of the sessions. It was interesting to have divided attention (and also at times to read who was tweeting what. It's tough to tweet from my phone, and I noticed that my tweets don't appear in the collection from the conference. Whether they were deemed unworthy or there was some tech glitch is a mystery. At any rate, if I do any more intensive tweeting for an event, it will be with a laptop or some device with a manageable keyboard.
