Catching up with the Zeitgeist…finally! – by Neil Baldwin

The CRC has been so busy for the past six months producing our critically-acclaimed one-hour documentary on The Scientific Imagination that we have fallen behind in our annotated readings. [Not an excuse…a reality.]

So, herewith a curated selection for your interest prior to archiving into our Web-Bibliography/Living Document.

– The “buzz” on technology in the classroom, and the concomitant blurring of information with knowledge, has become significantly more noisy of late: Learning How to Learn, by Neil Baldwin, The Teaching Times in Higher Education, I.2, Spring 2012; Search Gets Lost, by Anthony Grafton, The Nation, May 29, 2012; The Trouble with Online Education, by Mark Edmundson, The New York Times, July 19, 2012; Don’t Confuse Technology with College Teaching, by Pamela Hieronymi, The Chronicle of Higher Education, August 13, 2012; Future of Data: Encoded in DNA, by Robert Lee Hotz, The Wall Street Journal, August 17, 2012; In Defense of the Living, Breathing Professor, Adam F. Falk, The Wall Street Journal, August 29, 2012; Back to the Future: Will distance ed be the future of higher ed? by Cynthia Eaton, AFT on Campus, September/October 2012; For Better and for Worse, Technology Use Alters Learning Styles, Teachers Say, by Matt Richtel, The New York Times, November 1, 2012;  Hey, Academic Writers, You Can Have Style and Substance, by Julie Dalley, The Teaching Times in Higher Education, III.1, Fall 2012; Face Time at the MLA Convention [launching the MLA Commons], by Rosemary G. Feal,  MLA Newsletter, Fall 2012; Highlights of the Tenth Anniversary Report, by the New Media Coalition Horizon Project, Fall 2012.

– These fascinating, timely new/forthcoming books from university presses caught our eye as pertinent to the mission of the CRC: Being Given: Toward a Phenomenology of Givenness, by Jean-Luc Marion (Stanford University Press);  Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, by Sianne Ngai (Harvard University Press); The Total Work of Art in European Modernism, by David Roberts (Cornell University Press); Virality: Contagion Theory in the Age of Networks, by Tony D. Sampson (University of Minnesota Press); The Digital Condition, by Rob Wilkie (Fordham University Press); and a dynamic new journal series from Northwestern University Press: FlashPoints, IDIOM, and LitZ.

– Four new Web sites that CRC friends will definitely want to visit: The Creativity Center at the Plains Art Museum in Fargo, North Dakota; The Motion Bank, a new four-year project of The Forsyth Company; The Agency of Unrealized Projects; and The Journal for Artistic Research.

– A forthcoming conference at the Beinecke Library of Yale University, April 26-27, 2013, free & open to the public, registration required: Beyond the Text: Literary Archives in the 21st Century.

– A lively debate [still open for comments] about Walter Benjamin’s seminal 1936 Work of Art essay and the perennial question of “The Aura” on New Media Narratives.

– And last but definitely not least, a visionary book that has been out for a while but only just came to my attention, thankfully; imagine my surprise when I found a citation from my book, Edison: Inventing the Century, on p. 69 of Rhythm Science, by Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid (MIT Press/Mediaworks, 2004).