Monthly Archives: October 2010

Are we media?

3 People Shared Their Thoughts

Someone once told me, “you have to know where you came from to see where you are going,” and while I don’t think that statement is completely true, it sure has been a valuable idea to reflect on recently. Specifically, in my six short weeks at the Human-Centered Design & Engineering department at the University of Washington, I have been (pleasantly) astounded at how much my background in rhetoric and media studies has impacted my learning environments. While I had no intention of studying rhetoric when I arrived at Willamette three years ago, the New Media and Technology class I took from Professor Nacho Cordova would change my life in more ways that I could have guessed.
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Young, Unemployed and “Educated” for how long?

3 People Shared Their Thoughts

Good Magazine recently published an article for their quarterly magazine titled “Young, Educated, and Unemployed” examining the current state of college graduates in today’s job market. Their tagline “The Lost Generation: What it’s like for 20-somethings to go in search of meaningful work – and not find it” resembles a similar sentiment that the New York Times expressed in their article “American Dream Is Elusive for New Generation.” Below, I have shared a bit of the articles as well as my own thoughts on the current recession and how it affects higher education. Continue reading →

Strong, weak, or necessary; the value of social media connections

1 Person Shared Their Thoughts

As soon as I read Malcolm Gladwell‘s New Yorker article “Small Change; Why the revolution will not be tweeted,” I knew a firestorm was about to be unleashed across the Internet. It wasn’t so much that I thought Gladwell was wrong, it was just that he seemed a bit confused, and I waited patiently for people like Jonah Lehrer and Henry Jenkins to respond, since it was inevitable.

I’ll start by saying that I’ve read Gladwell’s work and I have much respect for his ideas. I will also say that I’ve read Clay Shirky‘s Here Comes Everybody, the book (and main set of premises which Gladwell is attacking) along with other of Shirky’s work and I agree with him more. But I am going to leave my bias out of this and return to what’s misguided about Gladwell’s argument. Continue reading →