Center for Digital Learning & Research

Mellon Digital Scholarship Speaker Series: Mark Sample

February 20, 2012

Mark Sample will be visiting Occidental on Thursday, February 23rd to give a talk on “Building and Sharing When You're Supposed to be Teaching and Writing.”

Mark will talk about his move toward assignments and projects in the undergraduate humanities classroom that emphasize making—as opposed to simply writing. He will also address the sharing aspect of these projects, which he sees as a critical intervention into the enclosured experience most students have in higher education. In addition, he will consider how this emphasis on making and sharing drives his own scholarly production.

 

Mark Sample Bio

Mark Sample is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at George Mason University, where is he also an affiliated faculty member with GMU’s undergraduate Honors College, its Cultural Studies doctoral program, and the Center for History and New Media. Professor Sample’s research focuses on contemporary fiction, electronic literature, and videogames. His examination of the representation of torture in videogames was recently published in Game Studies, and he is working on a collaboratively written book about the Commodore 64 home computer. Mark has work in Hacking the Academy, a crowdsourced scholarly book forthcoming in print by the digitalculturebooks imprint of the University of Michigan Press. Mark has recently remixed the entire text of Hacking the Academy as Hacking the Accident.

Professor Sample is also an outspoken advocate of open source pedagogy and open source research. In recognition of his commitment to innovation in teaching, Professor Sample was the recipient of George Mason’s 2010 Teaching Excellence Award. Professor Sample is a regular contributor to ProfHacker, a feature at the Chronicle for Higher Education that focuses on pedagogy and scholarly productivity, and he also writes for Play the Past, a collaboratively edited scholarly blog that explores the intersection of cultural heritage and games. Professor Sample can be found online at samplereality.com or on Twitter as @samplereality.

  • Email: [cdlr@oxy.edu]