Writing

I am currently a freelance writer, and my work appears regularly on O'Reilly Radar, KQED's MindShift, and Inside Higher Ed. I've also written for ReadWriteWeb, The Huffington Post, and Edutopia. My writing focuses on education technologies, digital literature and archives, open source technologies, and open data. Sample post:  "How the Library of Congress is Building the Twitter Archive."

I founded my education technology blog Hack Education several years ago, believing there was a dearth of smart coverage of ed-tech. Hack Education is a mixture of news, analysis, and rants. Sample post: "The Wrath Against Khan: Why Some Educators Are Questioning Khan Academy."

I've been a blogger on-and-off for the past eight years. Here's the post that started it all: "The personal gets political."

Once upon a time, I wrote essays not blog posts.  Here's a sampling:

• “Can’t See the Forest for Her Tree" – Activism, Celebrity & Julia ‘Butterfly’ Hill:  This article examines the activism and the biography of celebrated treesitter Julia “Butterfly” Hill and compares her performance and her personal narrative to other treesitters and others within the radical environmental movement.
• Defamiliarizing Surveillance:  Using Bertolt Brecht's idea of Verfremdungseffekt, this paper analyzes the work of the Surveillance Camera Players, an activist group that challenges the prevalence of surveillance technology by staging public performances in front of cameras.
• Pagans and Pioneers:  Celebrating the Summer Solstice in Casper, Wyoming:  This essay traces the history of the Summer Solstice celebration at Crimson Dawn on Casper, Wyoming.
• Political Pranks:  Performing Anarchist Humor:  This essay examines the use of pranks and comedy by some anarchist activists and argues that their "riotous" actions might undermine the prevailing notion of anarchist-as-terrorist.
• "We Can Lick the Upper Crust": Pies as Political Pranks:  This essay looks at the history of political pie-throwing and examines the tactic as a political prank, an act meant to invoke laughter and invert power relations.
• “Whose Streets? Our Streets! Whose World? Our World!" — Narratives & Negotiation after the WTO:  This article surveys some of the narratives participants returning home from the WTO Protests in Seattle told and examines how these narratives tried to counteract the story that the mainstream media told about the events.

Updated December 2011