I thought this was kinda cool: Wikimapia, which is basically a merging of Google maps with a sort Wikipedia-spirited open source editing/notation system. I created this entry for the Ypsilanti Water Tower, which, btw, is what’s pictured in the background of the image at the top of this blog. Just in case you’re curious.
QuickMuse (I am not)
From the “about” page, QuickMuse describes itself like this:
QuickMuse is a cutting contest, a linguistic jam session, a series of on-the-fly compositions in which some great poets riff away on a randomly picked subject.
Well, okay, I guess. Still, it seems like a strange kind of party trick to get famous poets to write quickly. I mean, why not the rest of us? Why not ask me? (Steve asks as he falls further and further behind in his projects because he writes too slowly….)
Buzz-kill
I went to an informal workshop/discussion this afternoon held by some folks in Continuing Education about audio files, podcasting, and some other multimedia technologies for teaching, mostly for teaching online. Mostly, a good time was had by one and all– mostly. I think the tech support guys for CE did a good job, and, while I was very much non-prepared and experienced some technical problems (which, on the plus side, gave me a chance to mock Windoze), I think at least some people got something out of what I said. So it was mostly good.
But not completely. Thus the title of my post.
Here are what I saw as the problems:
- Podcast frenzy! Podcast frenzy! Not all but many of the faculty at this event were there because they had heard of this thing called Podcasting and, based on the buzz, they figured they had better get on the band-wagon and get on right now. But it seemed pretty clear to me that many of these folks– again, not all, but many– really did not know what they would do with a Podcast or if they would ever Podcast or, really, at the end of the day, what a “Podcast” was. I didn’t ask, but it might have been interesting to ask how many of the attendees had actually heard a podcast.
- Tangent-Land. Somewhere along the line, someone brought up one of those issues, maybe the issue, that always comes up at sessions that involve teaching with technology: what about copyright, what about fair-use? For me, the main reason why these issues are always so frustrating are because no one— certainly no one has not made IP and copyright their full-time business– knows the answer. Furthermore, no one– certainly no one in academia– wants to admit that they don’t know the answer. So what ends up happening is people talk about things they may (or may not) know about IP and copyright, at least until someone says something like “we can’t solve that now, so let’s just move on.” Ultimately, I think this fear of the rules and not knowing them and being afraid of some unknown consequences are enough to chill innovation. But that’s kind of a tangent in itself, so let’s move on.
- We can’t do that, real and fake. Okay, there is a lot of things we really can’t do with online classes and with things like podcasting. We can’t assume that all of the students have a high-speed internet access (though most of them do). We can’t assume students have this or that kind of computer, which is also probably true. But then there’s the fake can’t due. For example, it became clear after a while that there were any number of things that were just a lot easier to do with a Mac. So someone asked at one point “So, does that mean we can’t do this stuff if we don’t have a Mac?” (And, of course, my answer is why don’t you have a Mac already?)
The most troublesome “we (or really, you) can’t do that” of the afternoon for me is I was told that it was “against the rules” for me to use a non-EMU server space to host teaching materials, as in any of the pages available here. The conversations I had after this event with various folks suggests this is just wrong, but again, it’s another example of a knee-jerk “we can’t do that” for no good reason sort of rule. Sounds like an administrator to me….
MySpace losing the "cool" factor
See this article from the June 3 NYT, “MySpace No Longer Their Space?” Basically, the article reports that, while MySpace is still enormously popular, its use has fallen off since April. Blamed in the article are the fact that MySpace is “going corporate” (Ruppert Murdoch bought it a while back) and is thus no longer a “cool” activity for teens; users are realizing that it might not be a good idea in the long-term to post drunk pictures of themselves; and users are starting to realize that it’s annoying to browse web sites that blare bad music at you and that are cluttered with eyeball-numbing graphics. (I’m paraphrasing here).
Congrats to Clancy; What else happened in Lubbock?
Congratulations to Clancy at CultureCat winning the “blog of the year” prize handed out at the Computers and Writing Conference this year in Lubbock. A deserving winner, certainly. But I have to say I haven’t found a whole lot else out about this year’s events. Can anybody recommend a link for me?
To Conference Or To Not Conference
Right now, Bill H-D (when he isn’t eating, drinking, or juggling) is at a conference in Denmark, Collin is getting ready to go to the Rhetoric Society of America conference, though he is writing here about the Computers and Writing Conference, and, more specifically the “Get Info” project, where presenters offer one minute “teases” or “trailers” on their presentation. Here’s an example from Dan Anderson, though I’m not sure if all of these have to be or are going to be electronic.
I, on the other hand, am trying to get myself motivated to do a little house-cleaning and a little more gardening. I’ll check in on my online class today, though the big day will be tomorrow (a rough draft for peer review is due). I have a couple of meetings next week. And I know I’m playing golf on Monday, at least. In other words, I am most certainly not preparing for a conference.
Originally, I had planned on going to the Computers and Writing conference this year. C&W is easily my favorite annual conference. In short, these are my people. But I didn’t go last year because I couldn’t justify/afford two trips to the San Francisco Bay area in one year, and I’m not going this year also because of money. Mostly.
What it boils down to is the support at EMU for travel, like many under-funded universities, is less than stellar. I can generally get enough money to cover one conference, two if one of those two is cheap. I had originally planned on going to the CCCCs in Chicago and to C&W, but while the CCCCs was not too expensive for me this year (I drove), it wasn’t exactly cheap, either. And Lubbock was going to pretty expensive. Before I even thought about the conference registration fee, I think travel and lodging was going to be close to a grand.
So basically, I did a cost/benefit analysis and Lubbock came up short. Not to be too crass or anything, but I don’t really need to go to conferences anymore, certainly not in the way I did when I was seeking a job and then seeking tenure. And, no offense to the folks in Lubbock (Lubbockers? Lubbockians? Lubbockites?), at this stage of my life, if I’m going to spend $1,000 of my own money to go someplace, that someplace has to be one where I’d actually want to visit on purpose. C&W and the Buddy Holly Center just isn’t enough of a draw for me.
Besides, I’ve got enough going on this summer. I’ve already mentioned my online teaching; beyond that, my “to do” list includes getting a research project on blog writing going, getting my defunct textbook online, revising the layouts of my blogs, setting up a blog/web space for stuff on writing for the web, setting up a blog/web space for an online version of a graduate course I’m going to teach next year, getting geared up to be the interim writing program administrator, etc., etc., etc. There’s a ton of things to do around the house, it is golfing season, and there’s family travel plans, including an August trip to Europe. Looking at it now, it kind of feels like going to C&W this year would have just been “piling on.”
Oh well, have fun in Texas. And I’ll certainly see everyone next year at C&W in Detroit. In fact, since I will more or less not have any travel or lodging expenses, I might even just “attend” and not present….
Screencasting software for the Mac?
Check out iShowU. It’s still in beta and everything, but it looks like an interesting and free (for the time-being) solution to some screencasting things on the Mac. I figured out how to use it in about two minutes.
Top Web Domains (I guess…)
As reported in the Washington Post (I don’t know the date), here’s the top ten web domains by visits in February 2006:
- Yahoo.com
- Google.com
- MSN.com
- AOL.com
- EBay.com
- Microsoft.com
- Passport.com
- Mapquest.com
- Hotmail.com
- Myspace.com
Let’s assume this is accurate for the moment. First off, I personally only use one of these sites– google– on a daily basis. Six of these sites I almost never ever use. And I had to do a search (with Google, naturally) just to figure out that “Passport.com” is probably referring to a “Passport Network,” which I guess people use with Hotmail, one of the six sites I never ever use.
It’s weird; it would appear that my relationship (or lack thereof) with the “most popular” web domains is similar to that of my even weaker relationship to the “most popular” music right now.
Bill's excellent adventure
Colleague and friend Bill Hart-Davidson is in Amsterdam Denmark and he’s blogging about the experience. Feel free to check in and say howdy.
What my iBook makes me think about Web 2.0
Like I know no one here cares, but I’m still happy to report that my laptop should arrive back home this afternoon. The Apple web site is cryptic about what was repaired; I’m curious to see if there will be any more details with the paperwork they send me.
Obviously, I’m very pleased with its pending return, and it has me thinking right now about some of the assumptions/ideas behind the term “Web 2.0.” Now, as I understand it, the whole concept with this is to make web applications/sites more like desktop applications, in part in an effort for people to be able to share and collaborate and stuff like that. You could put various social networking software into this category, but I’m also thinking about sites where you can share bookmarks or store files or even word processing files– I can’t remember the site for that software right now.
This is all fine and good, and I’ve been making use of delicious lately, I think I want to figure out CiteULike, and I’ve found the Google RSS Reader to be very useful. As someone commented earlier, it isn’t exactly a “feature rich” RSS Reader, but the fact that it is a web-based (e.g., Web 2.0) app means I can get to my feeds from anywhere. And I do use two or three different computers on a regular basis.
But still, as this experience with my laptop has taught me, I want to use my computer. Oh sure, I’m not lacking from access, I’ve gotten by. But the PC doesn’t have any of the software I want to use, and my wife’s iBook (which also lacks some software) has a keyboard that feels, well, wrong. Plus her computer doesn’t have my “stuff” on it, doesn’t have the desktop configured the way I like it, doesn’t have the same default colors, etc. I certainly haven’t been able to do any writing of any meaning on these foreign machines. In other words, I guess I still have a physical attachment to my computer, not just any anonymous and universally accessible computer (e.g., Web 2.0).
BTW, the painting at the top comes from “The Playful Painter” blog, which I discovered via boing-boing.