doctoral candidate in rhetoric and scientific and technical communication
technology
the internet: then and now
010 months ago
Last week, students and I listened to a 1993 podcast from NPR’s Science Friday and watched a video from a 1994 NBC Today Show. Each of these was taking a look at the Internet at the time, forming questions around “what is this thing” to “what can this do for me?”
While the Today Show clip reminded us of a time when many people didn’t know what the Internet was or how it worked, the Science Friday showed us that some of the same issues that concerned issues then still concern issues today.
Some of the topics we found pertinent:
information
-ignore (usually advertisements)
-disinformation/misinformation
-trust
-amount of information
-size of information (files/streaming, etc.)
prime sources
-copyright
–direct contact between creator and consumer
commerce
media of the people (democratization)
-public access
–accessibility speed (modem)
synchronous/asynchronous communication
MUDs/MOOs/MMORPG
Machines know everything about you
This was not only a great exercise in listening, but in also assessing what the real issues were and are in understanding the Internet.
which comes first?
01 year ago
Concepts of pedagogy are reflected in nearly everything I do that requires interaction with others, with technology, and with media in general. Having had a background in educational technology / instructional design/technology, I find that every decision I make in regards to technology comes down to a few basic questions that I ask of that technology:
- What is its impact on the targeted audience?
- Does it fulfill a need that is not otherwise fulfilled?
- Am I engaging technology for the sake of the technology, or for the sake of improving communication?
- Who does this implementation benefit?
- What is the purpose of the implementation?
I think some of these questions come from my technology background, some arise from my rhetorical training. In all dilemmas, I am thinking about audience and purpose. While doing so, I’m considering new ways to engage my audience (whether that is in the classroom, at a conference, or with colleagues).
It boils down to the question of “Am I using the right tool for the right situation?”
I think, with all of the tools at our disposal, we often rush in without considering the need or purpose of the tool. Why should we? It takes 2 seconds to make it happen.
But the ramifications are that we may establish a foundation that leaks. If that technology is not kept up, if it is abandoned mid-building, what does that say to the authority of the developer, the construction of a cohesive identity, and the ability of us, as rhetors and instructors, to anticipate the needs of our audiences?
I love technology. I often rush into it with abandon when applying it to my own desires. This often helps me define how it will be used in a larger setting. When it comes to implementing it on a grander scale, especially in the classroom or for colleagues, I’m much more restrained and thoughtful, using the knowledge I’ve gained from personal use and interactions, to determine its purpose within the greater network.
Finally, I adhere to the adage that “just because we can, doesn’t mean we should.”
copyRIP!
22 years ago
Sound Unseen screened rip! a remix manifesto, a film by Brett Gaylor, last night in a small, intimate theater recently established (this was the premiere showing) in Minneapolis, filled almost to capacity.
View the film at http://www.ripremix.com/. Pay what you think it is worth (and it is worth the money, I promise), then can rip it, do a mashup, or simply watch it. Just don’t sell it.
Figuring prominently in the film are Lawrence Lessig (@lessig on Twitter), Professor of Law at Stanford Law School, Cory Doctorow (@doctorow on Twitter), science fiction novelist and blogger, and GirlTalk (aka Gregg Gillis), mashup artist, who not only give us information about remixing and mashups, but give us background and historical references to copyright laws. Each of them also shows how complex this subject is, from Lessig commenting on the illegality of segments of the video, to Doctorow discussing the Dickens / Twain copyright issues of the 19th century, to GirlTalk’s previous career in a field steeped in intellectual property issues (biomedical engineering).
The movie is informative and entertaining. The music is amazing, the sound bites are funny, and Gaylor discusses the reasons behind his advocacy of a remix manifesto. What he doesn’t do is discuss in depth the middle of the road between complete copyright control and no copyright control and what the differences are. There is a sense of US versus THEM to this film, but in the end the lines of US and THEM are definitely blurred.
At the end of the screening, the audience was given the chance to talk to the filmmaker over Skype. The conversation was lively and interesting.
In other news in the copyright fight, BoingBoing reported today the USA, Canada, and the EU attempted to kill a treaty to protect blind people’s access to written material. Doctorow writes
At issue is a treaty to protect the rights of blind people and people with other disabilities that affect reading (people with dyslexia, people who are paralyzed or lack arms or hands for turning pages), introduced by Brazil, Ecuador and Paraguay. This should be a slam dunk: who wouldn’t want a harmonized system of copyright exceptions that ensure that it’s possible for disabled people to get access to the written word?
Doctorow amends the piece and says there is victory (for now):
Victory! — the treaty proposal survived this meeting and will be back on the agenda at the next one. We’ve got a couple months to lobby our governments and make sure that the next time they show up, they don’t embarrass us by opposing this.
See the the final conclusions of the SCCR Eighteenth Session at Knowledge Ecology Notes.
And finally, the Chronicle of Higher Education, news was posted about different copyright law curricula being offered in higher education. The author, Marc Beja, discusses the Recording Industry Association of America’s (RIAA) curriculum for teaching copyright law, and the response of the Electronic Frontier Foundation in releasing their own curriculum. He writes,
The foundation’s program, “Teaching Copyright,” includes a Web site and five 60-minute lessons that the foundation hopes will give students what it calls “the real story” about their rights when it comes to downloading movies, music, and other media from the Internet.
Interesting that Brazil figures predominantly in both the rip/remix issues and the copyright issues. While Lessig was in Brazil talking about Creative Commons, he said
I come from the land where we talk about being free. I come from a land where we are lost. You are our brother in this debate, and you must remind us of what we have lost.
Brazil, again, has reminded us. Now it is up to us to listen.
identity crisis
04 years ago
I have recently been asked to present to several campus groups (at different times) regarding the issue of identity in social
networks. I guess, in some way, I’m considered the campus expert on this issue because it is what I’m doing my research on and it is something I’m constantly thinking about, working on, and researching. One of the things that one of the groups asked me to cover is the issue of problems that we can create with a seemingly innocuous identity construction. In particular, it seems that they want me to use the scare tactics to show how dangerous it can be to do certain things with your online identity — how it can cause the loss of a job, the denial of credit, the missed opportunity of graduate school.
Phoenix news channel 5, KPHO, ran a segment at the end of November about some Phoenix area school teacher’s MySpace pages (you can see the video at the link and read the article). The first sentence of the article states
CBS 5 Investigates discovered some Valley teachers making their private lives public by posting them on the Web.
Our private lives have often been public. We go out to bars, hang out with friends, take pictures, do stupid things. The thing is, we’re now posting it on the Web where it can be found by nearly anyone. In the past, it used to be only the people who were physically present who could be a danger to our careers. Now it’s any person who gets upset by someone taking a drink, dressing in a silly costume, or flipping someone off. Unfortunately, the biased perspective of the reporter made this whole thing into a witch hunt.
Today’s NYTimes shared an article about Stacy Snyder, a 25-year-old student teacher who’s MySpace page had her dismissed from her student teaching program.
In the absence of strong protections for employees, poorly chosen words or even a single photograph posted online in one’s off-hours can have career-altering consequences. Stacy Snyder, 25, who was a senior at Millersville University in Millersville, Pa., offers an instructive example. Last year, she was dismissed from the student teaching program at a nearby high school and denied her teaching credential after the school staff came across her photograph on her MySpace profile. She filed a lawsuit in April this year in federal court in Philadelphia contending that her rights to free expression under the First Amendment had been violated. No trial date has been set.
Her photo, preserved at the “Wired Campus” blog of the Chronicle of Higher Education, turns out to be surprisingly innocuous. In a head shot snapped at a costume party, Ms. Snyder, with a pirate’s hat perched atop her head, sips from a large plastic cup whose contents cannot be seen. When posting the photo, she fatefully captioned her self-portrait “drunken pirate,” though whether she was serious can’t be determined by looking at the photo.
This kind of snap judgment on the part of a school worries me. I know that the students in my classes have had MySpace and Facebook pages. I have seen some of them. I know that some of them have created YouTube videos. I have seen them. While I would not put up the same things on my pages, I understand why they are doing it. I have a feeling that if I had had access to the Internet when I was younger, I may have been doing the same thing. I wouldn’t have been thinking about the consequences but I would have been thinking about having fun and enjoying my time with my friends.
They are adults. They do need to take responsibility. However, I also believe that we, as a society, need to lighten up. We are so judgmental about these kinds of things. We are so hypocritical about them. I can bet that the same people who are angry about a young woman being photographed with a cup in her hand have probably had a drink or two in their lives as well. Heck, I’ve been out drinking with some of my instructors. It made me like them more because I knew that they were just like me–human, fallible, flawed, and fun.
I’m not a first grader or the parent of a first grader. I know that my view may be skewed because of that. But there needs to be a balance. Or do we have to start hiding everything? Are we going to go back to J. Edgar Hoover’s time when we had to be secretive about everything so we wouldn’t be brought before Congress, and yet the very man doing the hunting had his own skeletons?
Online identities do need to be considered. We also need to be a bit more balanced and less reactionary.
money for nothing and books for free
04 years ago
Most of my readers are bibliophiles in the most delightful sense of the word. I know that most of you absolutely adore your books and many of you do poetry, book, or article reviews and/or references on your sites. That being said, I wanted to share some sites with you.
My gift to you is places where you can either read or listen to books for free. As someone who listens to books on my iPod daily and who reads articles/websites/journals more often than I care to admit, finding these free treasures is a joy.
Many of you may have already discovered the Google Books site. I talked about it in a presentation I gave in May and quite a few people in that presentation already knew about it. I have used this site to find scholarly books on the issues I’ve been researching — anything from feminist studies to identity to rhetoric — and found plenty to keep me reading for years. In addition, you can find segments or whole books on a wide range of topics. Google Books opens a book up in a reader and you can read the book right on your desktop. You can even save the book to your library to return to later (I have done that for research).
One thing that I did find unfortunate is that when I put in key terms to search for in the books, they are all highlighted in the same color, unlike Google searches where each term has its own color. This is only a problem when you are searching for multiple terms, however.
DailyLit lists books that are more literature based. For instance, when I did a search for “rhetoric and identity,” I didn’t get any scholarly papers. Instead, I got books by D.H. Lawrence, Somerset Maugham, and Virginia Woolf (although I have to admit that the Descartes book did pique my interest).
DailyLit works by sending you pieces of the book on a daily basis either in email or through an RSS feed. It’s not meant for a “sit down and read this book all at once” type of setting (and I can’t imagine reading Descartes that way anyway).
Book Glutton is a new service that is still in beta. However you can sign up to take part in their beta testing. Or, alternatively, you can watch the video below and see if it’s something you’re interested in.
Say you don’t want to sit and read, though. You’re busy and on the go. How do you get your reading done (and be cultural) and still keep going? Audiobooks are great for that. There are pay services (just like there are for buying books) but there are also some great free sites, too many to list here. If you do a Google search, you can and will find thousands of sites (that link will take you to a search).
Out of the many audio book sites out there, my favorite is the Gutenberg Project. You can choose from human-read or computer-read books (and it does make a difference).
I have also listened to a few at Oculture.
Do you have any favorites you’d like to share? I’d love to hear about them.
who are you?
04 years ago
This morning on NPR I heard a segment on creating avatars in virtual worlds. I’ve had a lot of interest in this because 1) my field of study is understanding how we create identity – particularly online; 2) my friend, erin, has really dived in to second life and I’m curious about her choices of avatars; and 3) I’m interested in why people would want to be someone other than they really are.
Erin recently had a post about creating a Simpsons avatar for herself and that comparison to her Second Life avatar. Since she did it, I just had to create my own Simpsons avatar on the Simpsons movie website.
As I was going through, creating this virtual “me,” I was really focused on making it as close to me as possible (I mean, as close as you can with Matt Groening‘s rendering). I could have made my avatar anything: a boy with blue hair, a little girl, an old man with a mustache. I chose “me,” though. Just as I do on this website, depicting “me” with my real name and real situations, I chose an avatar that was as close to me as possible. I didn’t feel a need to be anyone but me.
Why would we choose to be someone else? The segment on NPR had some great insight into this (and I really want to dive into the book). I can understand if you have cerebral palsy and want to project yourself sans wheelchair, breathing apparatus, etc. I get that. I also understand wanting to have some authority in online role-playing because women are rarely (even in real-life online situations) given any authoritative roles or the respect that goes with that.
I don’t, however, understand wanting to be someone other than me as I am. Am I comfortable in my skin and like who I am? Pretty much. I’ve worked really hard to get where I am and am working hard to get where I want to go. I like me, overall. I’m not such a bad person. Am I stunningly beautiful? No. I’m your girl-next-door. I’m ok with that, too. In fact, I like it. I love my freckles (and would have given my avatar freckles, if I could have), my strawberry-blond hair, and even my need for glasses due to an astigmatism. I’m not skinny. I’m not perfect — but I’m me. And I’m ok with that.
I don’t feel the need to be anything other than that even in the virtual world. But I recognize that for many, this is an escape, an enabling tool to allow them to get to new places. I also realize that for some, it is like being an actor. You get to put on a persona for a certain amount of time and get to act out in different ways. I am probably not creative enough for that. I find it time-consuming enough to be me. I’d have a difficult time portraying myself as another for too long (and I think, for me, five minutes would be too long). But I can understand the draw.
Do you use avatars? If so, who are you online versus your in-person persona? If you don’t, would you be someone else online if you did create an avatar?
sleeping on the job
04 years ago
I was proselytizing zooomr during the early parts of the summer. I wrote about the amazing actions of some companies to assist the zooomr team in overcoming their upgrade emergencies. And I cheered them on when people were tearing them down. I was a zooomr evangelist – and excited about it.
But I’m not anymore. In fact, I’m feeling a bit shamefaced in urging you to go check it out. Remember when I quoted Thomas Hawk? He said,
It’s easy for people to take potshots at Zooomr when we are down. But we will be back up. We will get back online. And these growing pains will be a part of our history. But we will always remember the people who stood by us in our troubles and I think the support that they are giving us is something that you can’t understand because what they know that you may not is that we are doing this for them.
And I agreed with him. And they are back online. But the growing pains are still going on, nearly two months after they began.
Services are still not restored. The only way to see who has commented on my photos or favorited them is to actually go into EACH photo SEPARATELY and look.
The IPTC information is still not coming in totally. Sure, tags are coming in. But the titles, descriptions, and copyrights of my work are not being attached in zooomr. In fact, I have to set these with each upload that I do for each photo that I upload.
Not only that, but when I do create a description, it is not holding the HTML that I put in it.
These are all things that work pre-MarkIII.
Sets and Favorites JUST started working this week. And even then, they aren’t great. I don’t know who favorites my work without looking at each photo. The sets are limited in how you can create them.
The site REALLY needs good usability testing. The usability sucks. Really. I’m not just saying this. Others have said the same to me (and it probably doesn’t hurt that we’re all trained in usability, either).
They took commenting off of the zooomr blog because they wanted people to use the groups more. However, it’s hard to see groups in action. I see every single group in zooomr, whether I’m subscribed to it or not. I have to weed through to find my few groups. And I’ve never once had Thomas or Kristopher reply to me in either a group, the Zipline, or email. I don’t even know if they read what I have to say. Probably not.
To say I’m disappointed is an understatement.
I think, at this point, it has turned into a “hey, look at me” venture for Thomas and Kristopher and not a “lets create a wonderful online experience for our users.”
I don’t care that you’re at party schmoozing with other geeks. I don’t care that you’re attending a blog camp that has nothing to do with zooomr. What I do care about is that the site you set up functions and functions well.
I’ve been patient. Now I’m just annoyed.
xtimeline
04 years ago
I happened across this web site yesterday in my feed travels. It’s a relatively new site that is geared toward making timelines. xtimeline allows you to make timelines for anything.
This started me thinking about the uses in education. History is a given, right? I mean, I have a few history classes that I’m working on and I can imagine a faculty member either using this or having her students use it to make a relative timeline to a paper or to what they think is the important information in the class. What amazing feedback that could offer.
But imagine that you’re a literature teacher (ahem, miss ashley, are you paying attention???). Say you’re teaching Pride and Prejudice. Well, we have two obvious things here (probably many more now that I really start to think about it). We have the timeline of the book itself. Can we track the characters and what they are doing, with whom and when? Also, we can look at Austen’s life and track where she was when she wrote it and where she lived, traveled, etc. while this book was being written, published, promoted, etc. But we could also track world happenings at the time that might have influenced Austen – what other books were published, what societal happenings occurred, what the weather was like, etc. We could track the literary criticisms of P&P over time and how those changed according to time periods, social influences, and political environments. This could get students thinking outside the box, which is really good when critical thinking is a new concept to them.
Physics, chemistry, geology, business admin, psychology — I can see this being a useful tool in any of those area. Getting outside of “traditional” education (those darned liberal arts), I could see this being used in forestry, recreational education, or even dental hygiene classes (track the progress of patients over time).
We use timelines in a lot of our classes. Typically an instructor will request a timeline to be developed and we do so according to their request. But what if the power was put back into the students’ hands and they created timelines to show what they are learning in the classroom? This is the kind of assessment tool that could be fun and interesting — and educational.
This is not a paid advertisement. I just found the site and thought it was cool and wanted to share it with my readers.
greeting card spam
04 years ago
by dawn
in technology
I’ve been getting a lot of these at work. Some of the names are well-known names. I don’t want you to get caught up in the phishing.
travel and safety
04 years ago
No, this isn’t a post about homeland security or TSA agents giving me the wand (although that always seems to happen when I travel, strangely enough). It is about two different online services that I’m curious about.
The first site is Tango Diva. It is a travel site for women, by women, and about women’s
issues in traveling alone. The about page states
Teresa took to the friendly skies to find some solace and inner peace, and this time alone. She hit London, Paris, and New York on a whirlwind summer tour, but with no guidebook for the solo gal available, she had to overcome the treacherous travels she encountered all by herself.
This got me to thinking…are there really treacherous travels in London, Paris, and New York? Especially for a single woman? I haven’t been to Paris but I lived in London and I traveled that city on my own for almost all of the time I was there. I never felt unsafe or that anything was remotely treacherous.
I’m heading to NYC in July (by way of Boston and Troy, NY). While I have a cousin there, I will be driving in on my own, depositing my car at JFK, and then doing a lot of things on my own while my cousin works. Out of any city that I’ve ever visited, NYC is probably the only one that carries a little fear for me…and mostly it’s because of what I’ve read or heard on TV. My friends and family have said that because I’ve traveled so much, I will be fine. I know how to act, how to check out my surroundings, etc. But…do I need a web site for women about traveling alone? Would it be wise to be a part of a community of solo female travelers? Have any of you or the women in your life ever used that site?
The second site is Clipperz. It’s an online password / secret storage manager. I thought this might be a good idea for several reasons, not the least that I have so many passwords and they aren’t totally secure right now. I know, I know — I should have them much more secure than they are. And I should know better (well, I do).
I’ve read up on this and other online password management systems quite a bit. This one was reviewed in Lifehacker and it sounds promising. It sounds like there are quite a few safeguards to protect me and my secrets.
Has anyone used this one? What kinds of concerns or questions would you have about it?