Castells represented 500 page of network goodness, and I savored (quickly) every morsel. I struggled to limit what I planned to include in this week’s mindmap, settling on a tried and true method: I use the table of contents to organize my new nodes. I linked Castells to Foucault, Latour, and aspects of ecology. I…
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My Digital Brain? The network made of neurons is digital. That’s what I took from this statement about neuron firing: “A neuron can only fire or not fire; there is no ‘slightly activated’ signal from a neuron” (“Neurobiology” 2013, p. 6). I took this activity to be analogous to digital 0s and 1s: a digitally…
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I’m sticking with Google Analytics as my object of study. I’m too invested in the object, and it remains an important part of my professional responsibilities and therefore an object that I need to study, whether for this class or for professional development. In fact, this month I earned another certificate of completion for a…
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The ecology of my mind map seeks homeostasis, a natural balance among its many theories. My mind map has become, in Charles Darwin’s words, a “web of complex relations” (cited in Spellman, 2007, p. 4). Well, maybe not as complex as all of nature, but if we follow the formula for the value of a…
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I plowed through all of these readings in a single sitting, which did not help much with comprehension, but which did affect my experience reading. I’m a composition teacher who prefers to grade all assignments in a single sitting, an web manager who prefers to make changes that affect multiple parts of the navigation structure…
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I sense the least connection between the two concepts of ecology and affordances this week, likely because I don’t feel I gave these readings justice. One issue is the reading affordance – I’m using iPad rather than print, and the readings this week were not great scans. As a result, I didn’t annotate as completely,…
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On Wednesday nights this semester I teach ENGL 201U, Critical Writing and Research, at the University of Richmond School of Professional and Continuing Studies. The class is offered face-to-face for 15 weeks, although there are online requirements. I teach the class in Jepson Hall G20, a collaborative computer lab originally designed for English writing classes…
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Literature Review: Google Analytics, My Beloved OoS In general, researchers appear to use Google Analytics™ (GA) web analytics service as a tool for measuring web visits and, to an extent, visitor behavior. In discursive terms, GA collects and visualizes an archive of traces of user interactions with web pages. The discursive activity of visiting (and,…
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This week’s mind map is, I believe, a week late. I really didn’t think about posting until I saw others post theirs, and it dawn on me that I should have added some nodes and connections in my map. So I did, but I didn’t try to add anything more specifically related to ANT. Instead,…
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Bateson Bateson, G. (1987/1972). Steps to an ecology of mind: Collected essays in anthropology, psychiatry, evolution, and epistemology. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, Inc. To separate the individual from the society, or the individual mind or thought from the global mind or thought, is to deny the ecological unity of creatura, of the creative self. Individuals…
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