Archive Fever: Writing and thinking with oceans, memory, and attention.

Library usage is on the rise...check out this KIRO 7 video at Seattle Public Library.

As I was surfing the web this a.m. I ran across a story about a recent study at the University of California, Los Angeles. The study set out to measure brain activity of older adults as they search the Web. The findings were interesting and operate as a nice antagonism to Nicholas Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stupid" published last summer in The Atlantic . The link to CNN's coverage of this study is here . The study was paid for by the Parvin Foundation and was published by Gary Small and Susan Bookheimer , both UCLA professors, and Teena Moody, a senior research associate at UCLA's Semel Institute. The paper was published in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry . But I really was drawn to this piece, which I've only skimmed, because it seems to touch on how new practices of literacies do enable, sustain, and maybe even sharpen minds of all ages. Often the popular press argues for the legitimacy of digital natives' critical thinking skills tha...

Ok , here's a hard sell. TechDirt recently ran a story, " Rejected From College Because of Your Facebook Profile ", in which anecdotal evidence shows what has been rumored for much time...that admissions folks gander more than occasionally at applicants' online social network profiles. The author, Mike Masnick , gives a pretty fair accounting though ultimately concludes that applicants shouldn't expect their profiles to exist in a vacuum and that as much as applicants strive to "put their best foot forward" they should include their Facebook profiles in such efforts. Yeah, yeah, yeah...I think most individuals get this. Sure, there will be those that claim this is out of bounds and not appropriate use of admissions staff time. That aside, I'd like to argue that such snooping and censure is simply out of step with with what we need to be critical of in our cyberculture present and future. If our young digital native scholars are as much the p...