Article Topics
My thoughts and the thoughts of talented others on digital strategic communication, digital & media literacy, information design, education & instruction, and the field of human communication.
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Academically Adrift (Arum & Roksa, 2011)
Academically Adrift: Limited learning on college campuses (by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, 2011) Almost half of students in college may not learn anything in their first two years, say authors Arum and Roksa. In a discussion at Queens University of Charlotte’s Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL), faculty members from around the…
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Building a Class Twitterfall
Mobile phones keep surfacing in the classroom. As students multitask (or just get bored) they often turn to the closest iPhone for a brief moment of respite. Instead of discouraging phone use, I wonder if it could be harnessed. Twitterfall served as my most recent attempt to do just that. In my integrated strategic communication…
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What happened to the #OSCARS?
James Franco walked onto stage carrying his iPhone — his live tweets part of a strategy co-host Anne Hathaway revealed as “appealing to a younger demographic.” Names of award winners were tweeted out in real-time by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. And before every commercial break, the web address for oscars.com and…
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Wikileaks: Secrecy, Technology and the Right to Know
“It’s always a daunting time at a newspaper when you decide to publish something the government says you shouldn’t publish,” says Scott Shane, lead national security reporter for the New York Times. “One of the really interesting, unknown facts is that all of the fallout about WikiLeaks was from about 2% of the documents in…
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Taming the Social Media Beast
“Can the benefits of social media outweigh the risks involved in its use?” Thus began the conversation about social media at Center Stage in Charlotte’s NoDa District on Tuesday night. The National Public Radio (NPR) affiliate, WFAE 90.7, hosts a Public Conversations Series in Charlotte to encourage community dialogue on current events. On Tuesday, February 15,…
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Made to Stick (Heath and Heath 2007)
Made to Stick: Why some ideas survive and others die (Heath & Heath, 2007) To make the book stick in our minds, Jim Shoff and Miranda Ervin turn back to an interview with the authors on NPR. “The curse of knowledge is the arch-villain in our book,” they say. “If you know something, it’s hard to…
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Employees First, Customers Second (Nayar, 2010)
Employees First, Customers Second: Turning conventional management upside down (Nayar, 2010) “Usually business books focus on the what,” says Stacey Randall. “This book is focused on the how – the process.” Employees First, Customers Second is a vehicle for transparency in an organization. Nayar describes the process utilized by his company, HCL, to create a…
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When Egypt Went Dark
“Media can instigate change, but media cannot topple governments. People topple governments,” remarks Dr. Mohammed el-Nawawy to a standing-room-only crowd that gathered to discuss the precarious situation in Egypt, a country el-Nawawy calls “the heart and center of the Arab world.” On Friday, January 28, 2011, the Egyptian government shut down 90% of Internet access…
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Running (not-so) Alone
I like to run 5Ks. The distance provides me with an appropriate level of challenge and reward. I enjoy running among groups of thousands who gather to promote active lifestyles. And yet, even among a crowd of thousands, I can still feel like I am running alone. Onlookers often suggest to me that social and…
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Offices Don’t Need Walls
On my commute this morning, I noticed the most curious of offices. Naturally, I photographed and tweeted my haphazard discovery: Offices. Increasingly mobile and no longer constrained by walls: http://twitpic.com/3r6q86 — John A. McArthur (@JAMcArthur) January 18, 2011 The result of my single, innocent tweet has been a backlash of comments about the cultural and sociological…
J.A.McArthur 