Professor Vaidhyanathan's keynote address, entitled "'The Classroom is Sacred': Digitization Without Commercialization," addresses the myriad challenges facing university faculty, administrators and students in finding the best ways to embrace emerging digital technologies to improve teaching, research and learning without giving in to commercial pressures or arguments about efficiency or cost savings. Prof. Vaidhyanathan suggests that we approach the implementation of academic technologies in the classroom with a sense of experimentation and modesty.
Bio
Siva Vaidhyanathan
Siva Vaidhyanathan is a cultural historian and media scholar, and is currently an associate professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia. From 1999 through the summer of 2007 he worked in the Department of Culture and Communication at New York University.
Vaidhyanathan is a frequent contributor on media and cultural issues in various periodicals including The Chronicle of Higher Education, New York Times Magazine, The Nation, and Salon.com, and he maintains a blog, www.googlizationofeverything.com. He is a frequent contributor to National Public Radio and to MSNBC.COM and has appeared in a segment of "The Daily Show" with Jon Stewart.
Vaidhyanathan is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities and the Institute for the Future of the Book.
(born July 30, 1857, Manitowoc county, Wis., U.S.died Aug. 3, 1929, near Menlo Park, Calif.) U.S. economist. He grew up in Minnesota and earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University. Although he taught economics at the University of Chicago and other universities, he was unable to keep any position for long because of his unconventional ideas and the disorder in his personal life. In 1899 he published his classic work The Theory of the Leisure Class, which applied Darwin's evolutionary theories to the study of modern economic life, highlighting the competitive and predatory nature of the business world. With dry humour he identified the markers of American social class, and he coined the term conspicuous consumption to describe the display of wealth made by the upper class. His reputation was highest in the 1930s, when the Great Depression was seen as a vindication of his criticism of the business system.