Technology – Page 14 – Steven D. Krause

March 31, 2009

MEGAUPLOAD site looks useful…

This just goes to show you what you can learn from your students:

In the two online sections of English 328 I’m teaching right now, I’m having students working collaboratively to make short videos that they are going to then upload to YouTube. I know, it’s a logistical ~~nightmare~~ er, challenge. So far, things seem to be working fairly well. The groups are figuring out a lot of different ways of collaborating and interacting with each other– on the eCollege course site, in/on chat rooms, via email, via the phone, and in person. Since about 80% of these students are taking classes on campus along with the online classes, the “outside of class” meeting time has so far seemed to work.

Anyway, I have a lot of thoughts on the implications and possibilities of this assignment that I haven’t really processed yet, and I am very interested to see how this comes off. But I’ve already learned at least one useful tip: MEGAUPLOAD. As far as I can tell, the goal of the site is to host giant files that others can download for various reasons. The “top 100” downloads on the site seem to mostly be game demos and movie trailers. But it is also a site where you can upload the kind of huge files that are difficult to handle via email– you know, things like huge movie files. They’ll take things up to 1 GB for free, and bigger than that if you opt for the premium version.

It’s not a perfect solution of course, but if I am remembering Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, Ellen Cushman, and Jeffrey T. Grabill “Infrastructure and Composing: The When of New-Media Writing” article correctly, one of the big problems there was a computer lab that wouldn’t allow students to save these giant files. This might help with that, and it certainly helps with the online class sharing, too.

March 22, 2009March 23, 2009

Steve Krause was surprised by his students’ negative reactions to facebook

Last Monday was Facebook/social networking night in English 516. I had meant to post about this earlier, but it’s been another one of those weeks. In any event, I was somewhat surprised by the generally negative reaction my students had to the ol’ book of face.

As a course requirement, I made them sign up for a Facebook account at the beginning of the term so that they could get a sense of what it was all about. Out of 14 students, I’d guess that about 8 of them didn’t have Facebook accounts already. There were folks who were not crazy about jumping into the Facebook thing at all. And, as became clear last week, the majority of students in the class either didn’t care about Facebook one way or the other, or they were pretty vocally against it. As far as I can tell, there was only one student who considered themselves “addicted” to Facebook, and that student seemed to think it to be a habit like smoking, something that would be best to quit. Generally speaking, most of my class is 20 to early 30 somethings. Most of them are teaching college first year writing or in secondary schools, and they seem more than aware of the extent to which social networks expose them to the world. This is actually quite a bit more aware than my students were just a few years ago.

This group’s reaction makes me think that the Time Magazine article “Why Facebook is for Old Fogies” is surprisingly true, and I think it is also why I predict Facebook is sooner than later going to take a nosedive. It’s a toss-off article, but I think that Lev Grossman has it about right. I am of an age where I like that Facebook allows me to catch up with people from my past (a lot of my students expressed dismay about this), I no longer care one way or the other about high school (though I do like the idea of reunion-type activities), high school and grade school pictures of me are now cute, I’m no longer cool, etc. In contrast, I think that a lot of my students are just young enough to think differently.

And this is why I think that Facebook is going to tank. The original target audience for Facebook, college students and younger, have wised up. I have no idea where they are going to nowadays or what is coming next, but I do know that when the fastest growing group on a social networking site are in the 50+ demographic, you’ve got a “hipness” problem.

March 8, 2009

More Twitter stuff

“Twitter Nation Has Arrived,” by Alexander Zaitchik on Alternet.org. I found this in large part by first finding Chuck Tyron’s response, “Why You Should Be on Twitter.” I haven’t really read either one yet– I’ve been doing stuff all day and now I’m kind of watching Flight of the Conchords— but I have a feeling I will end up assigning some of this in 516 by the end of the term.

March 6, 2009

A couple of useful (potentially) Facebook links

A couple of Facebook articles that might come in handy for English 516 or maybe even 444:

“Why Facebook is for Old Fogies” from Time magazine. This is one of those little blurb articles that is not exactly “news” but it’s still kind of funny and also kind of true. Which makes me wonder: if Facebook has become something that “grown-ups” do, what are “the kids” doing nowadays?
Will Richardson’s take on an article from Ed.magazine, “Thanks for the Add. Now Help Me with My Homework.” Here’s my favorite passage for me because it rings very true in my experiences:

In a recent survey of one of his graduate classes, Blatt found that 100 percent of these future educators were enrolled on Facebook — and 30 percent of them even checked their profile more than once a day. Just becoming familiar with social networking sites, however, doesn’t mean that teachers will be able to directly use them as a tool for formal class discussion or collaboration. In one of Wiske’s classes, in fact, students experimented with doing just that, using Facebook as a forum to “coconstruct” meanings of readings. “It didn’t feel like the place to have that conversation,” says Wiske. “The structure of the tools wasn’t as conducive to that discussion, and the pictures and other stuff on the screen were kind of distractions from that work.”

On the other hand, there are other social networking tools that may be more directly appropriate for use in class. Some teachers are already using wikis, technology that allows students to take turns editing group projects to facilitate the often-difficult task of working together as a group, as well as to provide a trail of who does what on a project. Another new social networking site called Ning.com allows organizations to create their own closed networking sites that can be adapted for a school or even a course.

A more likely use of SNSs within the educational context, however, is to use them as supplements to the formal in-class learning, building upon the spontaneous sharing that students are already doing. “I can imagine teachers saying, ‘I know a lot of you are on Facebook; I’d love to encourage you to share your draft work with friends, do whatever revisions are warranted, and then post your first draft on the class website,'” says Wiske. “That would be a design that took advantage of some affordances and patterns of behavior Christine is noticing without trying to commandeer these social networks as a location for structured class work.”

March 1, 2009March 1, 2009

NCTE/CCC Online Web Editor Positions (or, I still don’t think they quite get the internets and that worries me)

I found out via Jenny Edbauer Rice on Facebook that the NCTE is searching for two web editor positions: one for CCC Online and one for CCCC MemberWeb. It is the latest in a curious saga, one where I have even had a very minor role.
Continue reading “NCTE/CCC Online Web Editor Positions (or, I still don’t think they quite get the internets and that worries me)”

February 17, 2009

“The Library Web Site of the Future” and the Espresso Book Machine

I am basking in the semi-warm glow of being vaguely caught up with my teaching for the first time in two weeks. Not that it means that much; I still need to get back in gear with research and writing, we need to get ready around here for our an annual function for this weekend, and we still haven’t quite figured out what we’re going to be doing when we go to D.C. next week. But none of this has stopped me from posting something that might actually be useful to the ol’ blog. Besides posts about bacon, of course.

First, there’s this Inside Higher Ed article, “The Library Web Site of the Future” by Steven J. Bell. I can imagine this being handy for English 516 for the electronic library angle on things, but I can also imagine it being interesting for English 444 too. Most of the article is about how academic-types find most university library web sites/portals are not user-friendly and/or useful. I don’t know if I agree with that or not when it comes to EMU’s Halle Library web site, to be honest. I have always found it pretty easy to find journals and such through it– though oddly, there seems to be some glitches in the book catalog. Of course, part of my comfort-level with the library’s web site comes from the librarians: when I have questions, I ask; when I take students to the library for orientations about doing research in the library, I inevitably learn something myself. So maybe part of the “usability” part being left out of Bell’s article is the fact that most academics– certainly faculty but also students– don’t interact exclusively with the university library web site. Most of us manage to get over to the building once in a while to talk with actual librarians and occasionally touch actual books.

I did think this passage was kind of interesting though:

Several years ago academic institutions shifted control of their Web sites from technology wizards to marketing gurus. At the time there was backlash. The change in outlook was perceived as a corporate sellout, a philosophical transformation of the university Web site from candid campus snapshot to soulless advertiser of campus wares to those who would buy into the brand. I observed that academic librarians feared what the marketers wrought, and would resist efforts to let any advertising consultant or marketing vice-president take control of the library Web site. They might just make it more about marketing than connecting people to information.

I was one of the resisters. Now I think the marketing people got it right. The first thing librarians must do after ending the pretense that the library Web site succeeds in connecting people to content is understand how and why the institutional homepage has improved and what we can learn from it. Doing so will allow academic libraries to discover answers to that first question; how to create user community awareness about the electronic resources in which the institution heavily invests.

Of course, instead of just talking to the marketing people, the library-types could talk to people in academic programs interested in usability and web design… just sayin’….

The other thing I heard earlier today that I thought might be good to bring up in 516 at some point was a story on Michigan Public Radio about the Espresso Book Machine. It was actually on the “Environment Report” because the angle was on how these machines can save paper. The story also took the angle of how these machines would replace browsing for paperbacks in Borders or something, but that strikes me as unlikely. No, the real value of this sort of “on demand publishing” machine is clearly in academic publishing where the press runs are already pitifully small and expensive.

Quite frankly, I’m surprised there aren’t any academic publishers now using this technology; or am I wrong about that?

February 14, 2009

New Kindle thoughts lawsuits, pirates, and PDF wishes

Amazon has released Kindle 2— or rather, they’ve released the opportunity to buy one (I’m not sure when they are actually going to be available). There was a NYTimes article about this last week.

Among other issues/controversies, it would seem the Authors Guild sees the new Kindle’s potential/ability to read text aloud is some kind of copyright violation. I like this response from Neil Gaiman about this via boing-boing. I also thought this article was interesting: “Why aren’t ebooks taking off? Not enough pirates,” which I found via Stephen’s Web. Very smart article, pointing out the differences between the music industry and the book industry when it comes to pirating and sharing of files. Besides the fact that it is a ton easier to “share” and/or pirate music than it is to do the same with a book, there are places right now “for sharing this information that’s wholly supported by the industry (you might know them as libraries).”

My friend Troy has a Kindle and absolutely loves it. In fact, I toyed with the idea of buying one myself back in November/December. I might try to get EMU to buy me one (it wouldn’t be easy to do though) because it really is something I’d like to have to demo in the classes I teach. Or who knows? Maybe a bunch of money and/or a Kindle will just fall on me from the sky.

At this stage, I’ll probably wait for a while. For one thing, since me and the Mrs. just got iPhones, I’m a little tapped-out right now gadget-wise. But the other thing that I want that I don’t think is quite there yet for the Kindle is the ability to handle PDFs well. Quite frankly, I don’t read that many of the kinds of books that are readily available for the Kindle. I do read a lot of academic stuff, particularly journal articles that are increasingly available in PDF format, or things for my teaching that I make available as a PDF and post on eReserves. So what would be very useful is if this thing would handle PDFs as well as Apple’s Preview does– allowing for highlighting, notes, etc. It’d be very nice to have all of these articles and chapters in PDF format for my teaching right there on one device instead of the mountain of paper I forget to file.

Oh, and maybe they should put a phone in this thing.

February 13, 2009

“There’s an app for just about anything”

Via boing-boing gadgets comes this video of “31 fart apps in 90 seconds:”

I am happy to report that my new iPhone is fart app free. As I type this, at least….

January 29, 2009

Scott McCloud at TED

Via Johndan’s blog, I came across Scott McCloud’s talk at TED:

I only got a chance to watch the first few minutes of it (another crazy busy day ahead of me, though soon the craziness will end and it will settle back to just busy), but it looks a lot like the talk McCloud gave at EMU a few years back. I may very well have to teach this in English 328 or English 516 this term. Maybe both.