Weekly Updates

The links below are the most recent additions to my collection of bookmarks that are relevant to this course. You can find a complete list of ENGL 5644 bookmarks on Pinboard.

How Not to Be Alone
An excerpt from Jonathan Safran Foer's recent commencement address: "Most of our communication technologies began as diminished substitutes for an impossible activity.... But then a funny thing happened: we began to prefer the diminished substitutes."
Reading comprehension just as good using a Kindle as with paper
Interesting study in cognitive psychology: "While new technologies have sometimes been seen as disruptive, these results indicate that students' comprehension does not necessarily suffer, regardless of the format from which they read their text."
Teens, Social Media, and Privacy
The latest report from Pew's Internet and American Life Project: "Teens are sharing more information about themselves on social media sites than they have in the past, but they are also taking a variety of technical and non-technical steps to manage the privacy of that information. Despite taking these privacy-protective actions, teen social media users do not express a high level of concern about third-parties (such as businesses or advertisers) accessing their data."
You Won't Remember This Article, Or Anything Else You Read Online, Unless You Print It Out
Fast Company: "[H]olding a book, it's obvious where the individual page relates to the whole of the text, which makes it easier to create that mental map of the text's meaning. We don't get this meaning-anchoring sense on screens. The infinite scroll of a website or clicked pagination of an e-reader doesn't supply the same cartographic clues."
Multitasking while studying: Divided attention and technological gadgets impair learning and memory
Slate: "Attending to multiple streams of information and entertainment while studying, doing homework, or even sitting in class has become common behavior among young people—so common that many of them rarely write a paper or complete a problem set any other way. But evidence from psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience suggests that when students multitask while doing schoolwork, their learning is far spottier and shallower than if the work had their full attention."
Brain, Interrupted
NY Times: "There’s a lot of debate among brain researchers about the impact of gadgets on our brains. Most discussion has focused on the deleterious effect of multitasking. Early results show what most of us know implicitly: if you do two things at once, both efforts suffer."
Why grad schools should require students to blog
Maria Konnikova: "Academia as a whole is still quite skeptical of popular writing and anything that takes time from *serious* academic pursuits.... It’s a shame—and it’s counterproductive. Instead of frowning upon blogging, popular writing, any intellectual pursuits that don’t seem immediately and narrowly academic, wouldn’t it make sense for academia to embrace it all—and embrace it enthusiastically?"
The Real Me
Fortunately, Doug Mack's story aout dating in the digital age *does* end well: "[T]he internet is both an unrelenting enabler and unforgiving archive of flaws. As a single 30-year-old in the era of online courtship, I’d been in similar situations before and, in fact, had often been unable to resist my own temptation to type names into the search box. Inevitably, I felt weird and creepy if I didn’t find anything noteworthy, weirder and creepier if I did. Things rarely ended well."
Own your identity
Marco Arment's approach to managing his online identity is a great model to follow: "I’ve always built my personal blog’s content and reputation at its own domain, completely under my control, despite being hosted on many different platforms and serving different roles over the years. It has never been a subdomain of any particular publishing platform or host."
If You Didn't Blog It, It Didn't Happen
Anil Dash: "[I]f most tweets are too ephemeral to reach their full potential as ideas, what do we do about it? Well, obviously, one big step would be to simply make sure to blog any idea that's worth preserving. It's perfectly fine to tweet about trivialities — I do it all the time! But if you're tweeting about your work, your passion, or something meaningful to you, you owe it to your ideas to actually preserve them somewhere more persistent."