One of the pleasures of Grand Text Auto is the experimentation we undertake with the blog form. Last fall we spawned a gallery exhibition from the blog, at UC Irvine’s Beall Center for Art and Technology. Today, I’m happy to announce, we’ve begun an experiment in blog-based peer review — Expressive Processing — in collaboration with the MIT Press, the Institute for the Future of the Book, and UCSD’s Software Studies initiative. Jeff Young’s piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education does a great job of framing the questions we’re exploring.

The initial versions of the syllabi for Advanced Workshop in Communication Media (my graduate course, COGR 280) and Communicating and Computers (my undergraduate course, COMT 111a) are now online. In both course we’re taking a look at Mary Flanagan and Helen Nissenbaum’s Values at Play research project and curriculum — and at least one course (it’s not yet decided for the second) includes working with the new Metaplace tools being developed by Raph Koster’s Areae.