So if you’re looking for more information on me and my whereabouts and thoughts, thanks! You might find out more by visiting my Friendfeed, my public Twitter account, or my Facebook page. I am more active there than here, mostly because I’m saving all my writing energies for the book manuscript I’m working on. Trying to be a diligent junior academic, you know.

And if you’re just looking for some quick information on who I am and what I do, visit my “About” page here. The gist: I’m an assistant professor of English at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona, where I am a member of the Rhetoric, Composition, and Linguistics Program. I teach first-year writing courses and graduate courses on videogames and social media.

Before I came to ASU I was a postdoctoral fellow in the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, where I worked with Henry Jenkins on the New Media Literacies Project. I did my PhD in English (Rhetoric and Composition Studies) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I was a founding member of the Games+Learning+Society program in the School of Education. It was directed by James Paul Gee and Kurt Squire, with whom I worked to develop some of the early research on videogames and literacy learning.

My work has shifted a bit from videogames to social media more broadly. I consider myself a digital literacies researcher, especially with regard to how people use language in social media spaces, both online and off.

Thanks again for stopping by!

At this year’s Conference on College Composition and Communication, I presented some work I’ve been doing at ASU’s SMALLab. (More about that later.) I also went to South by Southwest Interactive, which was good times. I hadn’t been to that conference in 15 years! I’m glad to see that it’s grown so much.

Next up is a trip back to Cambridge for the Media in Transition conference at MIT at the end of the month. After that is Games for Change in NYC, a trip to PBS for a meeting with the Engage board of advisors, and perhaps a visit to Beyond Broadcast in Los Angeles. But I might just cancel all of that and work on my writing instead. Looking forward to a summer devoted to that.

For anyone who’s never done a full, formal academic job search, let me just say that it’s one of the most grueling and emotionally exhausting things I can think of. No doubt it pales in comparison to the stress of writing a book or preparing a tenure case, but at least in the ten years I’ve been in the academic world the job search was the toughest thing I went through. (I often think wistfully about how wonderful it was to be able to just do nothing other than teach and write my dissertation.)

The Main Drag’s music came with me as I waited for flights, trudged across unfamiliar campuses, and woke up early in cold hotel rooms. There were many times I didn’t want to hear anything but Yours As Fast As Mine. I was exhausted. I wanted something familiar but still fresh and interesting. I wanted something imperfect enough to hold my interest but predictable enough to keep me calm as I tried to remember boarding passes, faculty names, job talks, itineraries, receipts, thank-you-notes, dog-sitters, and phone numbers.

The day after I finished my last campus visit I couldn’t do anything but sleep. That night, The Main Drag played at T.T. the Bear’s, a great little bar up the street from me in Central Square here in Cambridge. I nearly missed the show because I was still sleeping at 10:30 when they were about to go on. Luckily Matt sent me a quick text reminding me to head over. I did, and it was one of those just totally comforting moments. Those guys are just good. Good, good, good. And of course they’re very white and ridiculously over-educated and funny and gracious and sensitive and all those things that college bands are. It’s everything you want in this genre. They are everything you’d want them to be.

So I write about them now to say that although I’m not traveling as much, I’m surprised that I’m still wanting to listen to my friend’s band. Ever since I was a teenager I’d had friends who played in terrific bands. A lot of them were actually great. But with The Main Drag I find myself asking over and over again why they’re still not signed to some great little indie label. They don’t play out as much as they should and they all have fairly decent day jobs (I think–could be wrong). So I suppose that’s part of it. But I noticed not too long ago that XM Satellite Radio started playing their song “Love During Wartime” with some regularity. Cokemachineglow gave their cover of LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends” a fantastic review, even saying that it’s better than the original. It is. Now if I could only get it some regular airplay on SOMAfm’s “Indie Pop Rocks!” then I’d be very, very happy.

If you read this and know someone who needs to hear something great and new and good, visit their MySpace or just download the MP3s from Amazon. And then go see them play next Friday night at the Middle East (downstairs) with Freezepop, another Cambridge band (and comprised of colleagues from Harmonix, where Matt and bandmate John Drake both work). Details here or on Facebook. It’s spring. Time to rock out. Here’s a preview.