Comments on: Serendipity & Generativity: Twitter at Its Best

By: Andrew Spittle

Andrew Spittle — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 23:53:00 +0000

Hi Brian-

Nice post and as the author of “My case for moving beyond a printed senior thesis” I appreciate the link and analysis.

I think your point that “[knowledge] lives in what we do with it, what we think, what we learn, what we make, how we remix and share it with others” is spot on and a perfect representation of what I was arguing for in my post. Thanks!

By: Andrew Spittle

Andrew Spittle — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 18:53:00 +0000

Hi Brian-

Nice post and as the author of “My case for moving beyond a printed senior thesis” I appreciate the link and analysis.

By: Brian Frank

Brian Frank — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 19:05:52 +0000

I definitely agree with doing online versions differently to take advantage of links & conversation.

I'm going to stand up for the word "essay" though. Scholarship has destroyed it. What pass as essays in school should be called "papers" or "articles"; they're pieces of material, units of measure.

"Essay" literally means "to try"; it means to experiment or explore. It's an act of imagination -- as you put it well, "open and alive."

The web may actually facilitate an "essay renaissance"...

By: Lyaeus

Lyaeus — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 09:42:17 +0000

Hi Brian
I agree. It's an odd thing to get across though. If you say, why not make your work entertaining, the immediate reaction is - but that would dumb down or dilute or confuse the message. Actually, if done right, it would make the message more memorable, sharable, discussable, but old habits and all that. Maybe you have to work on another level or start with the little things. Like I have some colleagues who blog. They write great content. Challenging, insightful. And then, because they're academic or academically trained, they stick an essay dull title on it. And the result: no one comments. No one gets past that yawn inducing heading. It might be the best heading to suit the post, but it's not an essay. It's going to be read online. And online, you're in the conversation business. If you take this further from blog posts to digital scholarship, the same rules apply. Even at the research stage, you can enrich the experience and start the conversations. How about writing it on a wiki and invite collaborators and friends to track its progress and slip in challenges or enrich it with alternative avenues as it's being done (see Lisa Spiro's here: http://www.pageflakes.com/lspiro/20929737/.) Include all the links to the stuff that didn't go into it - sometimes as rich or illustrative of the process as the things that did. Have an image gallery. Insert a video summary of the findings. Indicate whether it's full of stats so stat averse readers don't waste their time. Then wrap it all up and submit it in the dull print version if you have to, but keep the digital version open and alive. Put that on your CV. Employers are just as interested in students with ideas as they are students who know how to use the latest tools to put their ideas across. A skill that hits most students like a train when they enter business. Which itself needs some BizPunks of its own. I could go on!

By: Brian Frank

Brian Frank — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 19:37:47 +0000

Thanks for the comment & link. I bookmarked the post and followed your feed — some great-looking links there I have to explore. As a long-time de facto lone-wolf edupunk I'm still very new to the conversation and very excited about it.

For me there is no difference between what I consume for education and what I consume for entertainment. Some things I do for pure education, some for pure entertainment, but overall I keep coming back to the places where they meet.

I think a lot more people would appreciate that and society would be a lot richer if we didn't have so many entrenched mindsets & institutional constraints preventing it from happening.

By: Lyaeus

Lyaeus — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:52:09 +0000

Hi
This is great stuff. The act of doing and saying it online creates so many possibilities closed off to paper forms – each work more a world to enter than a thing to pick up. I also think there are 2 points here too: the act of this kind of creation has a great teaching value for the warrior scholars of the future – it's also intrinsically social, which is better pedagogy; it also teaches students to think much more about the value of entertainment as scholarship, or scholarship as entertainment. I go into this at length here on PsychFutures if you have a mo: http://psychfutures.ning.com/profiles/blogs/the...