21st Century Scholar

As this blog is being published, I find it amusingly coincidental that I am traveling through some of the United States’ most earthquake-prone areas to get to the USRio+2.0 Conference: Center for Social Innovation (CSI) at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. It is a conference that is co-sponsored by the U.S. Department of State that [...]

Today’s Thursday is TechDay is a glimpse into understanding the academic utility of Facebook to support college success. Of course, Facebook’s academic liabilities are all too familiar discussion points. Yes, students login to Facebook during class and some spend hours cruising the network instead of writing that term paper that’s due tomorrow. But the prevalence [...]

In late December, Collegeology game designers Elizabeth Swensen, Sean Bouchard and I traveled to Texas  to conduct a case study at a Houston area high school. Our goal was to playtest the card game (Application Crunch) and soon-to-be launched online game (Mission: Admission) with a group of predominately African American, low-income students. We arrived right [...]

This post is a look back at the web of 2011 (dominated by Web 2.0) and a look forward to the web of 2012 (welcoming Web 3.0). If you’ve heard of Web 2.0 and aren’t sure what that means, here’s a quick refresher. The World Wide Web in its initial incarnation (retroactively dubbed Web 1.0) [...]

Today’s Thursday is TechDay is a critique and a celebration. I recently attended the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) annual meeting in Charlotte and there is much to report about the role online communication technologies are (and aren’t) playing in the postsecondary research community. The critique is the obvious stuff: No wifi [...]

Technology is changing the ways in which people communicate their thoughts and experience their surroundings. Augmented reality apps, for instance, add layers of information to places like museum exhibits and sporting events. Twitter connects individuals to trends. Social networking sites provide quick access to information about nearby places including parks and movie theaters. In their [...]

Thursday is TechDay Today’s Thursday is TechDay blog is an introduction to the future of qualitative research software: the online platform. If you haven’t heard the news, there’s a new qualitative software player in town. It’s called Dedoose, and it’s worth a look for two reasons. First, within the qualitative research community, it pioneers the [...]

I. In 1974, Carol Stack published All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community. The groundbreaking ethnography chronicled the adaptive strategies of poor African American families. Stack provided thick descriptions of women struggling to raise their children. In doing so, she indicted poverty as pathology and inadequate public policies. Since then, ethnographers have [...]

Thursday is TechDay Today’s blog is a digital etiquette primer on making a digital presentation in a conference or classroom setting. It’s ultimately about storage. These days, there are lots of options for porting files. Not all of them are suited to every digital situation. The digital storage faux paus There’s always one guy who [...]

When today’s college students were born, hardly anyone used e-mail or had a cellphone. Modern communications have evolved so much since then that many young people now consider e-mail to be passé, and they would be mortified if they had to use a landline. They prefer to stay in nearly constant communication via texting, Facebook, [...]