Author: dogtrax

  • Social Lifestyle or Ad-fueled Construct

    via http://van-life.net/ I don’t know what to make of the piece by Rachel Monroe in The New Yorker about #VanLife, which focuses on people who have taken to living in their vans (mostly VW vans) for all sorts of reasons — economic, lifestyle, etc. These #VanLife folks then share their travels and world via social media, often…

  • Hashtags as Roots of Resilience

    A funny thing happened on my way to the Rhizome sometimes last year … the hashtag got switched. Now, normally, this would not be a big issue. But I have come to realize more and more how much I rely on the columns of my Tweetdeck app (sorted by hashtags) as a place to keep connected…

  • Making a PeaceLove& Twitter Bot

    Making a PeaceLove& Twitter Bot

    I had been writing about diving into the world of Twitter Bots for Networked Narratives, and my interest in creating my own Twitter Bot, if only to understand the process of how it is done. Well, I did it. Check out the PeaceLove&Bot bot. Every six hours, the PeaceLove bot will send out a new…

  • #CLMOOC #DigiWrimo: Sifting Through Words From the Margins

    #CLMOOC #DigiWrimo: Sifting Through Words From the Margins

    For the CLMOOC Pop-Up Make Cycle for #DigiWriMo, we invited people to help annotate an interview of Troy Hicks about digital literacies. The Edutopia article by Todd Finley is a few years old, but holds up remarkably well, I think. We have been using the Hypothesis annotation tool, which allows you to collaboratively add comments…

  • Vertices, Edges and Digital Nomads

    Vertices, Edges and Digital Nomads

      I don’t claim to understand all of the data analysis that goes on when people research and examine all of the elements of our social interactions in places like Twitter and beyond. Here, for example, is what the Innovator’s Mindset MOOC looked like from a data analysis viewpoint. I grapple with making sense of…

  • Never Enough Time in the Day of a Digital Writer

    Never Enough Time in the Day of a Digital Writer

      Keynoting and presenting in a virtual site like Blackboard Connect is sort of like hanging out with roomful of ghosts. They’re very friendly and curious ghosts, sort of like Casper if he were to become a teacher instead of just a cute spirit. You feel the presence of participants in the scrolling chat room as…

  • #WhyIWrite Digitally

    #WhyIWrite Digitally

    (This is a post for DigiLitSunday, a regular look with other educators at digital literacies. This week’s theme is connected to the upcoming National Day on Writing, which takes place on Thursday with the theme of Why I Write.) I write digitally to find the grooves between the spaces. Digital writing does not replace the…

  • #DigiLitSunday: Mentor Texts for Digital Writing

    #DigiLitSunday: Mentor Texts for Digital Writing

      This week’s theme for DigiLitSunday, facilitated by Margaret Simon, is “mentor,” and I was reminded of a blogging project that I took part in a few years ago, in which a handful of us educators explored and blogged about using mentor texts with students that would lead to opportunities for digital writing and composition. My…

  • Writing in Circles: Dot Day 2016

    Writing in Circles: Dot Day 2016

      Yesterday was International Dot Day, and this is the first year I had my students join the millions (6.6 million from 139 countries, in fact) people making circles and dots as a way to nurture a sense of creativity and imagination. The Dot Day idea stems from a picture book by Peter Reynolds, called…

  • Defining Digital Writing (A Modest Proposal)

    Defining Digital Writing (A Modest Proposal)

      It’s quite possible this is impossible. I am trying to narrow in on the affordances of what we mean by the phrase “Digital Writing.” I may even veer way off track here, and perhaps it is best for all of us just to drop the “digital” once and for all, and just call it…