Welcome to the website. It feels kind of pretentious to use my name as the URL for this, but it seems like the common practice now, at least for the “Official” website. I have three or four blogs I’ve written on before, where you can find some of my other, earlier attempts at maintaining an internet presence.

There may have been an earlier page on livejournal or some other site, but the first blog I maintained regularly is http://overlynuanced.blogspot.com/. I began it in 2004 so there are likely a good many posts about the Iraq war and the George W. Bush presidency.

I began http://onculturalproperty.blogspot.com/ later that year to begin following the concept of cultural property, especially in relation to Intellectual Property Rights, which later became my dissertation topic. I also frequently posted about pirating software – especially around torrenting sites and the emergent philosophy of Internet piracy.

These became less important as I was actually writing the dissertation and beginning my tenure track position at Columbia College Chicago. I didn’t return to blogging frequently until I was awarded an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship and took two years leave of absence to work with the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE). There I worked with prominent education and technology practitioners and theorists – and librarians, who frequently sit at that intersection.  I started and maintained http://breakingculture.tumblr.com/ to catalog my writing on these topics.

This was also at the beginning of the (most recent) crisis in U.S. higher education – one that continues unabated – and at the height of the MOOC craze and the hegemonic narrative of disruptive innovation. But also marked the emergence of the Occupy movement and move of the pirate community into books, with library.nu (also known as Gigipedia, the archive of which is probably Incorporated into contemporary pirate book sites) and Aaarg beginning to spread theoretical and education materials far outside of official channels. In addition to my Tumblr above, I was privileged to write and think through some of these issues with my then-NITLE-colleague Bryan Alexander, who continues to be an important resource for thinking through the changes in U.S. Education and how they related to changes in media technology, political economy, and the role of educators and intellectuals in our current conjuncture.

I look forward to whatever role this space can play in the continuation of these conversations.