Blogs

Some of what I am thankful for this year.

“Meet me at the site.” “Ok I’ll log on.” “Oops, gotta go. My mom’s home and she’ll kill me if she finds me online.”

My initial response to an invitation to review the new Livescribe Sky wifi smartpen began with a polite rejection: "Thanks for the email. I have to be honest, I'm just not that interested in this technology." The reason for my pushback was that I am already fairly entrenched in my note-taking habits. A classic Moleskine with a Uni-Ball Signo is my preferred method for jotting down ideas, notes, etc. When I'm sans paper and pen, I tend to use my iPad with a Bamboo stylus and either Paper (by FiftyThree) or the Bamboo Paper app. I outlined this to a very nice public relations rep. Undeterred, she informed me that the new smartpen allows notes to be automatically synced (via wifi) to Evernote which makes them readily available on tablets and smartphones.

Guest contributor Steve Davenport, Associate Director of the Creative Writing Program at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, counts the ways he and his dissertation got to know each other.

What might a water well used traditionally in rural Spain teach us about how to make the most of MOOCs?

I will not be using this tool because I don’t care if my students read the materials assigned in class.

I get uneasy when I read calls for ‘transformative leaders.’ They strike me as taking far too much for granted.

Markdown, a text formatting syntax designed for easy readability but also transformability, gets a lot of love from geeks. Lincoln Mullen has written a great introduction to Markdown for Profhacker if you are unfamiliar with the syntax. My big question when I made the shift away from traditional word processors and began using plaintext and markdown was if it would be flexible enough to support the conventions of scholarly work.