Category: Technology

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If Twitter ever had a purpose, see #IranElection

Of course, I’m mostly interested in the idea that there is something resembling democracy and free elections in Iran, but as someone also keenly interested in new media and writing technologies, what’s been going on with Twitter and the Iranian Election is just fascinating.

Here’s a link to but one article about it, a NYTimes piece, Social Networks Spread Iranian Defiance Online. Basically, the unwashed masses of the Twitterosphere (it hurts to type that word) have more than cleaned the clocks of Main Steam Media in keeping people in touch and involved. I don’t know if the Iranian election was rigged or not (I think it probably was though), but I have learned a hell of a lot more about what’s going on in 140 character bursts than I have listening to NPR.

So, if you haven’t done the Twitter thing yet because you thought it was a waste of time along the lines of Facebook (and, truth be told, it probably is a waste of time mostly), sign up and do a search for #IranElection. You’ll immediately see what I mean.

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Just how does Twitter make money, anyway? (and a couple good Twitter links)

I came across– via Steven Johnson’s Twitter feed, actually– this article in the New York Times yesterday, “The Tweet Smell of Success.” The article is about how Twitter has in “the last few months it has plucked a few hundred users from a sea of more than 30 million and put them on its A-list, deeming them particularly worthy of being followed.” Johnson included, by the way: “It’s funny, everybody has been asking me, you got your Twitter ID on the cover of Time magazine, you must be getting an insane amount of followers,” he said. “And I say it’s nothing compared to the steady influx you get from being on the suggested user list.”

Also via Johnson’s feed this morning, I came across Andrew “The Daily Dish” Sullivan’s post about Iranian protesters using Twitter, and in this NYTimes article, I found the link to Johnson’s Time Magazine article on Twitter, “How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live.”

Anyway, there was one paragraph in the NYTimes piece about how Twitter is not believed to be profitable, which made me wonder: how doe these people make any money at this? Do they make any money? Am I going to start to see 140 word ads pop up on my feed sometime soon? And if I do, will I (or anyone else) still use the service?

This is certainly something that will come up in 516 next winter, maybe in 444 this summer too….

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The internet doesn’t work on a daily schedule and it likes a voice

One of the many many things I need to worry about in the next couple of weeks is getting my summer section of English 444: Writing for the World Wide Web up and running. It’s increasingly difficult for me to decide what “counts” as “writing” for the “world wide web,” but generally, I have stayed pretty literal with exercises that focus on coding, blogging, and wiki-ing. Last year, we read a number of things about citizen journalism, and, since we locally have a front row seat to the demise of print newspapers (the Ann Arbor News is calling it quits after 174 years), I might include even more on journalism and the ‘net.

All a long prelude to a very good commentary by Dan Froomkin, “Why ‘playing it safe’ is killing American newspapers.” Besides talking about the money issues, Froomkin says smart stuff like this:

But we’re hiding much of our newsrooms’ value behind a terribly anachronistic format: voiceless, incremental news stories that neither get much traffic nor make our sites compelling destinations. While the dispassionate, what-happened-yesterday, inverted-pyramid daily news story still has some marginal utility, it’s mostly a throwback at this point — a relic of a daily product delivered on paper to a geographically limited community. (For instance, it’s the daily delivery cycle of our print product that led us to focus on yesterday’s news. And it’s the focus on maximizing newspaper circulation that drove us to create the notion of “objectivity” — thereby removing opinion and voice from news stories — for fear of alienating any segment of potential subscribers.)

The Internet doesn’t work on a daily schedule. But even more importantly, it abhors the absence of voice. There’s a reason why opinion writing tends to dominate the most-read lists on our “news” sites. Indeed, what we’ve seen is that Internet communities tend to form around voices — informed, passionate, authoritative voices in particular. (No one wants to read a bored blogger, I always say.)

Oh, and this is via what looks like a nice site, Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University.

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Sign up for Technology for Teaching and Learning!

In the shameless self-promotion department: if you are an undergraduate or graduate student at EMU who has an interest in technology and teaching and who likes the idea of spending a week in August in Traverse City, sign up for a class I’m teaching, ENGL 479/592: Technology for Teaching and Learning. I’ve set up a blog and a wiki for the class, though both are drafts at this point– I’m already pretty sure I’m going to make a few changes. Here’s the description I have right now:

This will be a “hands on the keyboards” workshop on using technology for the teaching and learning of writing, and it is designed for Composition, English, and Language Arts teachers K-College. We will have extensive in-class activities designed to learn how to use a variety of internet applications in present and future teaching– email, web sites, blogs, wikis, bookmarking sites, image sharing sites, podcasing, online video, and so forth. Students will build their own basic web sites and complete a post-class exercise on using technology in their teaching. No previous experience with the technologies covered in this class will be necessary.

As a “special topics” course, our regular ongoing undergraduate and graduate students could take the course as an elective. However, it is not be a suitable substitution for required courses in either the undergraduate programs in writing or the graduate program in written communication (e.g., courses like ENGL 328, ENGL 444, ENGL 516, or the “Topics In” courses in the MA program, ENGL 517, ENGL 518, ENGL 526, and ENGL 527).

The CRN for the undergrad version of the class is 41988 and the CRN for the graduate version of the class is 41989. We’ll have a month worth of online discussion starting July 1 (mostly discussing some readings about how we use technology now to teach and learn and how we want to after the class) and we’ll meet in Traverse City from August 1 through August 7.

These Traverse City classes have declined in numbers in recent years as online classes have become more workable and popular. As much as I like teaching online, I think it’s a shame because the Traverse City environment is a really great way to both teach and learn. The class is “on the bubble” in terms of getting enough students to make, so if you are reading this and are thinking that you were going to sign up eventually, do so right away! Like yesterday!

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Ann Arbor city council doing stupid emailing during meetings

This was an amusing way to wake up this morning:

Some question appropriateness of mocking e-mail banter during Ann Arbor City Council meetings in the AANews. Here are the opening paragraphs:

After his presentation to the Ann Arbor City Council, Washtenaw Audubon Society member Will Weber had every reason to think city officials shared his views about protecting birds during migratory season.

But while they publicly endorsed the efforts, the same City Council members who backed “Safe Passage Great Lakes Days” in March mocked its significance in e-mails that flew back and forth during the council meeting.

“The highlight of Hohnke’s legislative career a non-binding resolution to dim your lights to help birds,” Leigh Greden wrote in an e-mail to fellow council members Carsten Hohnke, Margie Teall and Christopher Taylor.

Greden’s March 16 missive prompted a dozen messages in which the four council members made sport of environmental or wildlife protection measures that they had passed.

The article goes on to recount a couple other conversations in which Ann Arbor City Council members walk a fine line between being just human, childish and/or assholes. I think my favorite part of the story is how these emails came to light:

Sent from city e-mail accounts, the messages were released by the city in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center.

The Detroit-based law center was seeking communication about the city’s planned underground parking structure on Fifth Avenue. What it got, in addition, were a series of live e-mail exchanges among council members during three meetings in February and March.

So, what have we learned here today?

  • Be careful about your email because it never ever goes away, even if you think you deleted it. I worry about this with my colleagues, actually. I’ve been on committees where fairly private/sensitive information found its way into email. I’ve been guilty of sending some of those emails myself. I recently had a conversation with a quasi-administrator-type person about a way to get reimbursed for something (I ended up getting paid the old-fashioned way, taxes and all) and this person told me to erase all those emails because they might get us in trouble. (Deep sigh) Well, if Kwame taught us anything it should be that stuff like email and text messages simply do not go away. Oh, and I don’t think those emails would have gotten anyone into trouble anyway.
  • People just can’t resist back-channel discussions, even when they really REALLY should know better. So maybe we really shouldn’t be that hard on students who don’t pay attention 120% of the time, especially when the instructor is just standing there going blah-blah-blah.
  • Many of the folks on Ann Arbor city council kinda seem like Douchebags, and, according to this wikipedia entry, I believe douchebag is the correct slang term: “The term implies a variety of negative qualities, specifically arrogance and engaging in obnoxious and/or irritating actions without malicious intent.”

Anyway, besides the local political/humor angle, I will have to remember this for English 516 or maybe English 444, some kind of class where we talk about how uses of email can go wrong.

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Twitter is one of my summer projects

Via Shaun Slattery on Facebook, I came across two potentially interesting/useful Twitter links:

First, there’s “10 High Fliers on Twitter” from CHE is about some popular academic Twits– or Twitterers, I guess. The most active Twit(terer) is Sarah Evans, director of PR at Elgin Community College. Over 20,000 followers. Jeesh.

Second, there’s “Ten Handy How-To Resources for Twitter” by Traci Gardner on the Bedford Bits blog. Basically, a list of good links about what Twitter is and hwo to use it for teaching and beyond.

I’ve had a Twitter account for a while now, but I really have as of yet to see what the hype is about, even compared to something like Facebook (which, given the fluff factor of the book o’ face, is sathing something). Things weren’t helped much by my winter 2009 section of English 516, which was generally (and rather curiously) somewhat Luddite in terms of technology and teaching. They were pretty resistant to Facebook, actually, and we never got to Twitter because, well, we just had a lot of stuff to do.

Anyway, I know we’ll deal with Twitter next winter, and I might find a way to include it in 444 this summer and 505 in the fall term.

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“Take a walk on the wired side”

From Inside Higher Ed, Rob Weir offers advice on teaching online in “Take a walk on the wired side.” I think his advice is reasonably accurate, and it contains some good links to other sources on advice for online teaching. I especially agree with what Weir says at the beginning of the article. Even though online teaching is being sold to “young people” as another “cool” thing they can do with the internet and as “fun” way to learn in your pajamas, the reality is that those who succeed best in in online classes tend to be older students who are organized and highly self-motivated.

The only thing he doesn’t cover in this article that I would have brought up had someone asked me for advice about teaching online has to do with course size. Basically, I think the rule of thumb is to keep the numbers low, lower than you would in a comparable face to face class. Anyway, potentially some good reading for English 516 next year.

So far, my online class this term is going reasonably well, though it is tough to get the work all done in such a short term….

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Project New Media

Just catching up on some blog reading the other day, and I came across on Henry Jenkins’ blog this post, and then this morning this post, both about participatory culture. Both of these posts also talk about a ton of resources, examples, etc. available at Project New Media Literacies. Given my approach to teaching 121 right now and stuff I am certain we’ll talk about in 516 in the winter, this is a mighty mighty useful set o’ links for teaching. And if my CCCCs proposal gets accepted, it will good for that too.