Author Archives: admin

Code Apnea This summer, I’m learning how to design and code mobile apps.  It’s freakin awesome. Awesome in the Kantian sense: standing on a precipice and looking down, gauging the likelihood that gravity will clutch your knees and yank you … Continue reading

This fall I’m piloting at the University of Southern California a class that explores the unique properties of face-to-face [f2f] and online [OL] learning environments.  35% of the term I’ll meet with students f2f in Los Angeles; 65% of the … Continue reading

Urban Outfitters sat on their hands yesterday while their brand equity hemorrhaged cool. In three hours, UO lost 17,000 followers on Twitter; #urbanoutfitters and #thieves became a trending topic. The tweet that started it all: Urban Outfitter’s meager response–this one … Continue reading

Excerpts from Linda Tischler‘s Fast Co. Design interview with JOI ITO, the recently-appointed Director of MIT Media Lab. Read the full interview. “My whole life has been about connecting things that aren’t connected.” Obviously there were a few raised eyebrows … Continue reading

On April 25th, my local school board voted to close just one elementary school, Palisades, in Sept. 2011. This decision surprised the 250 people crowded in the high school library, where board members, seated behind a long table, faced them … Continue reading

Jason Jones, co-founding editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s ProfHacker, sent me a Tweet today: Which led me here: Jason and I met at MLA11 and have chatted intermittently since January about public school education. We both watch what’s … Continue reading

Hi readers, I welcome comments on this work-in-progress. F2F In/And the New Media ClassroomSyllabus for COMM 499: Special TopicsAssoc. Prof. Kathi Inman BerensFall 2011Class meets Tues./Thurs. 9:30-10:50 in ASC 223 When Socrates and Plato invented the tutorial, face-to-face was the … Continue reading

As my participation has increased in LO United–a group of parents crowdsourcing solutions to our school district’s $6.5M shortfall–I find I’m leaving more and more digital traces of our work. Collectively edited letters, notes and comments on FB, videos to … Continue reading

As radicalized Egyptians massed in the streets and Mubarak shut off internet for 92% of his citizens, Dave Parry (Asst. Prof. of Emerging Media, UT Dallas) wrote a post called “It’s not the Public Internet, It’s the Internet Public.” Parry observes: While … Continue reading

 I was struck, during our live session about Infotention in Howard Rheingold‘s Mind Amplifiers entirely OL class, how much of the discussion was about our bodies: the retention/”software” limits of our brains, the ways exercise awakens our bodies and augments … Continue reading