This piece first appeared on Educating Modern Learners [http://modernlearners.com/on-social-media-silence-and-things-that-matter/]. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I want to talk about Ferguson [http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dana-milbank-ferguson-tragedy-becoming-a-farce/2014/09/12/e52226ca-3a82-11e4-9c9f-ebb47272e40e_story.html] . We need

I am not a scholar, at least not in the traditional sense. Almost 5 years ago, I wrote How Highered Makes Most Things Meaningless [http://collegereadywriting.blogspot.com/2010/07/how-higher-ed-makes-most-things.html] . It

Last year, my then-employer, Charleston Southern University [http://www.csuniv.edu/] (CSU), instituted a new social media policy. Though I believe it was largely unintended, that policy (which is still available on CSU’

Consider the tangible violence technology has wrought upon grammar. We rely on automated grammar and spell-check tools in word-processing software (so much that they’ve become a crutch). E-mail shorthand fails to live