Yarn Bombers, Wooly Taggers and Guerilla Knitters
I first learned of the Church of Craft way back in the good old days of 2008. I was in San Francisco to give a presentation at the...
Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
The beat poet Randall Jarrell fought a war all his life with technology. Jarrell felt that what we call progress, the rise of mechanical...
Cult of Death
Is it still a “free” country if everybody does what they’re told? If you do only what the society and the advertising and the church and...
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead and Hamlet is Petrified
Hamlet is perhaps the most recognized name in the world, a play everyone knows. There is a danger in being old and famous: Hamlet is...
Frame-up: Using Sequential Framing to Teach Multimodal Writing
In the evolution of written communication, conventions come and go, riding on the back of the available technology of the time and...
Ghosts in the Classroom
On the first day of each new semester we teachers gaze out upon a sea of new faces, all of them here to make a better future. We assume...
Death by Propriety
American education, like the nation as a whole, is choking in the death-grip of propriety. The word “appropriate” comes up a hundred...
The Age of Distraction
I spent New Year's Eve in a crowd of professorial types and teachers. One of our number, a classic bald physics professor, announced that...
Whose Work Is It?
Students are up to their necks in expectations. Family, school, advertising, religion, hormones... all make demands on them, on their...
Why Teach Vis-Ed?
Advertisers know that images can be a powerful tool for planting ideas. Back in '67, for example, this image gave me the idea that I...
