My article, “Is a Niche Social Network Right for Your School?” has been published over at Link: The Journal of Higher Education Web Professionals. The article lays out a number of questions to consider before signing your school up for a niche social network (smaller and less well-known sites targeted to certain populations) using our experience with Goodreads at UChicagoLaw as an example.
My Paperback Debut
During the year after I graduated from Oberlin College, while I was working for the Office of College Relations, I was able to take one course per semester for free. One of the courses I took was called “Teaching and Tutoring Writing Across the Disciplines.” Aside from our own writing and discussion, part of the class consisted of working as a writing tutor for college class (I tutored Paula Richman‘s “Introduction to Religion”).
The primary text for the class, Working with Student Writers: Essays on Tutoring and Teaching, was a collection of essays that had been written by previous students in the class, edited by the instructor, Len Podis, and his wife, JoAnne Podis. I still have my copy, filled with the enthusiastic scribblings of my 22-year-old self, who could imagine no other path than going on to graduate school and eventually becoming a professor himself.
Now, just over ten years later, Peter Lang Publishing has released a second edition of Working with Student Writers featuring the essay I wrote for that class: “The Hero With a Thousand Voices: The Relationship Between the Narrative and Academic Styles.” The book is also available on Amazon. In the essay, I attempted to mediate the tension so many young writers encounter between the academic discourse community they’re suddenly expected to inhabit and the narrative discourse that they’ve been consuming and producing their entire lives; I did so by highlighting the commonalities between the two forms of narrative and academic writing, and by reframing the writing process itself as a narrative.
It’s actually a lot more entertaining than it sounds, I swear.
“Mapping Memory” Finds a New Audience
My A List Apart article “Mapping Memory” has been republished on the Taxi Design Network, in its “The Driver Speaks” section. Based in Singapore, Taxi is a web publication devoted to design across disciplines with a global focus.
Found in Translation
My A List Apart article has been translated into Italian by Federico Melosi, an Information and Communications Technology Trainer at Università di Pisa, on his new tech blog lo Scaffale Razionale. Incidentally, Federico is also a musician — check out his bands, Egon and gli Ambasciatori dell’Amore.
Mapping Memory: Web Designer as Information Cartographer
My article “Mapping Memory: Web Designer as Information Cartographer,” has just been published over at A List Apart, the premier online magazine “for people who make websites.”
I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. Zeldman. 🙂