It’s not like K-12 doesn’t have enough to contend with these days: what with the bashing of public school teachers and curricula across media venues, the rush to try and satisfy (unsuccessfully at a large number of schools) No Child Left Behind testing standards, the hand ringing effects of Diane Ravitch’s turn around, the huge decreases in state funding for public schools in all states, the rumblings about state governments’ challenges to teacher unions and tenure and pay rates and pensions and health benefits. And now this?... read more »

[This essay was given as a talk at SUNY Buffalo, 28 January 2010, the day after Howard Zinn’s death. I have left the text unaltered, to better reflect the spirit of the talk.]

“I’m worried that students will take their obedient place in society and look to become successful cogs in the wheel - let the wheel spin them around as it wants without taking a look at what they’re doing.”
                                                      — Howard Zinn

The great social historian Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States, died yesterday of a heart attack. Zinn devoted his life to educating Americans in their country’s history, that they might better understand their place in its present. Such understanding is today at a premium. Ours is a time of confusion, of unprecedented changes that outpace our perceptions. As Zinn might have said, the wheel keeps spinning faster, and the faster it spins the harder it is to see.

At such times, and at such speeds, the task of educating ourselves becomes all the more urgent. We are citizens of a democracy, and democratic citizenship has always been a difficult skill to master. This is why Aristotle tells us that, in an ideal state, citizens would possess ample leisure time: the education of a citizen depends upon contemplation, deliberation, and training. Citizenship requires cultivation and, as any farmer would tell us, cultivation takes time.... read more »

I am very excited to announce a new feature on In Media Res that allows users to offer feedback on how IMR posts are being used (for research, in classrooms, for general edification, etc.).

On every post page underneath the video field, readers will find a FEEDBACK form (you must be logged in to fill out the form, though not to view the results). Once logged in, members can let curators know whether or not their post has been useful for their research, has been cited in a publication, has been used as part of a classroom activity, has been thought provoking, or, if there are structural/organizational aspects of the post that might be improved upon in order to make it more effective.

IMR members can also continue to engage directly with curator posts through the comment field at the bottom right of every page.... read more »

Just an FYI, I have been asked to contribute to Antenna, the University of Wisconsin’s blog on media and have begun to contribute. I think this will help me begin to blog again and occasionally I will cross-post my selections given the two different audiences. This week I blogged about the Super Bowl as Ritual and hope you all will visit this and other posts I plan to put there.... read more »

Each show begins with a disclaimer: hoarding is a mental disorder. That’s true, although the DSM-IV doesn’t describe an individual diagnosis for the condition. Instead, hoarding – or disposaphobia – falls under OCD. The hoarders appearing on each episode of the A & E series Hoarders do seem to suffer from compulsive saving behavior.... read more »

Here are some brief notes about adding publications to the MediaCommons publications database and having them appear on your profile.

1. There are two ways to add a publication. Both are in the submenu that appears when you click “Edit” while viewing your profile. You can either import XML or tab-delimited files in formats like Bibtex (“Import”), or you can enter information manually (“Form”).

2. If it is your first time loading publications, you may need to take an additional step and link your author record to your profile. Author records can be found here:... read more »

Hi,

here ‘s a link to my cyberdiva.org blog

The newest episode of the Digital Campus podcast, #44 - Unsettled, is up, and I’m thrilled that it mentions Planned Obsolescence. Digital Campus, produced by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, is a fantastic resource for those thinking about the future of technology and academic work, and I’m honored that Planned Obsolescence is included.

Today I have the pleasure of unveiling MediaCommons Press, a project we’ve been working toward for several months now. MediaCommons Press is the second major project hosted by MediaCommons, and it is dedicated, as the header has it, to open scholarship in open formats. MediaCommons Press hopes to promote the digital publication and discussion of texts ranging from article- to monograph-length, in forms ranging from the traditional to the experimental, serving all areas of scholarship in media studies.

Today’s also the day that I put my money where my mouth is, in more senses than one: I’m serving as the test case for MediaCommons Press by releasing, as our first major publication, the book that I’ve been working on for the last year and a half. Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy will, if all goes according to plan, come out in print sometime next year from NYU Press, but it’s available online right now, for open review.

And that’s the second way I’m putting my money where my mouth is. One of the key arguments that I make in the book is that the peer review of digital texts must be an open, conversational process, one that draws on the wisdom of a far greater number of readers than the usual two or three anonymous reviewers, one that focuses on discussion among the reviewers, and between the reviewers and the author, and one that allows the multiplicity of responses to a text to become part of the text itself.

I hope you’ll come by and join the discussion. And I also hope you’ll consider joining in by publishing with us. MediaCommons has developed into a thriving community network in media studies; we’re excited to take the first steps today in transforming that network into a viable, community-based scholarly publishing system.

Via Jason Mittell today comes news that the Society for Cinema and Media Studies has released a statement of “best practices” in fair use for publishing in media studies, to complement its previously released statement on best practices for fair use in teaching.

This is an extremely important step for the field; the fair use concepts SCMS argued for in teaching have not only affected the ways that many of us in media studies use these texts in our teaching, but they’ve also been looked to by a number of other fields and organizations seeking to educate themselves about fair use. Many such fields are likewise facing questions about permissions and fair use in the publication of scholarship, and this statement promises to serve as a starting point and an important source of support for their own investigations.

More immediately, however, this statement has an immediate impact on the ways that we work at MediaCommons, as our disciplinary organization has now announced, plainly, that “Media scholars believe that uses of copyrighted works in multimedia scholarship are transformative, and so constitute fair use.”

Thanks are due to the SCMS Public Policy Committee for their work on this statement. We at MediaCommons look forward to discussing these best practices and to seeing them come to be accepted as part of the way that scholarship in the twenty-first century is conducted.