One for the local lib ed folks. We don't do numbers, right?

In this cluster of The New Everyday we examine new everyday inscriptions, both the scholarly and the utterly mundane – from the grocery list to the collaboratively organized and annotated archive. The nine essays in this cluster focus on notes both physical and virtual, found and made, formal and informal, collaboratively and individually created, means-to-ends and ends-in-themselves.

Optimistic photo- and voice essay on how to see.

PLE/Critical Literacies open course from Plearn CA. Start here to see how the model works.

Martin Weller on six principles to keep in mind while designing networked instruction.
1. <embed> is the universal acid of the web – we should build around it.
2. Simple with reach trumps complex with small audience.
3. Sharing is a motivation to participation - so make it easy and rewarding to do.
4. Start simple and let others build on top
5. Providing limitations frames input (Cf twitter, 12seconds, etc)
6. Complexity resides in the network not the application

OV of the Stanford study, and the usual suspects comment on facility v quality.

A set of filters for working with word frequency of the congressional record. By cloud, by time, by speaker. Get your George Lakoff ready.

An interesting demo of combinatory prose.

A history writing project at Richmond.

"the most tendentious part of Birkerts's argument has little to do with the Kindle or context. It's that he believes humanity would wittingly adopt deficient tools at the expense of effective ones. This fundamental cynicism is, to a point, understandable; much of marketing and advertising, after all, devotes itself to convincing us that what's new is necessarily superior ... But Birkerts underestimates, I think, the functional and aesthetic requisites of an average reader. If Heidegger is right, then the catastrophic, decontextualized info-culture of Birkerts's imagination is patently absurd -- readers won't, in the short- or long-term, shutter our libraries just because some novel, convenient alternative has asserted itself.

I see in the turning of literal pages—pages bound in literal books—a compelling larger value, and perceive in the move away from the book a move away from a certain kind of cultural understanding, one that I’m not confident that we are replacing, never mind improving upon.

"Dettmer's sculptures invite us to think about deeply-held taboos around the sanctity of books as objects; a conversation that recurs - especially in the context of e-readers - around discussion of digitized text."

After New York University journalism student Alana Taylor wrote her first embed report for MediaShift on September 5, it didn’t take long for her scathing criticism of NYU to spread around the web and stir conversations.

Embedded student reports on NYU: "NYU does not offer the kinds of classes I want. It continues to focus its core requirements around learning how to work your way up the traditional journalism ladder. Here is the thinking I find here:

1. Get an internship at a magazine or newspaper. “This is good for your resume.”
2. Bring the New York Times to class. The hard copy. “It’s the only way to get the news.”
3. Learn how to write for a magazine or newspaper. “Writing for blogs or websites is not journalism.”
4. Become an editor at a magazine or newspaper. “This is the only respectable position.”

Read an excerpt from Cult of the Amateur in a flash mock mini-book. Wanna see a metaphor?

A superlative resource for Participatory stuff: weblogs, wikis, RSS, social bookmarking. Howard Rheingold

Transliteracy might provide a unifying perspective on what it means to be literate in the twenty–first century. It is not a new behavior but has only been identified as a working concept since the Internet generated new ways of thinking about human comm

Review of NetNewsWire that has extra interest in *how* and *where* and *when* Shawn uses it.

It's about the content, and the degrees of choices. Constraints are good; they help construct meaning.

"network literacy and how blogging is not simply keeping an electronic journal, it's distributed and collaborative; it's learning to think and write with the network. I'll also talk a bit about the ethics of insisting students blog in public."