Via the Web Worker Daily (and I got the point here from the techrhet email list), “Who Needs Photoshop? 6 Free Graphics App Gems,” which is just that. It’s interesting how much this free/share/open source -ware has flourished. When I was first teaching classes like “Writing for the World Wide Web,” I always spent a fair amount of time on Dreamweaver and PhotoShop under the theory that students needed to have some working knowledge of these packages to do stuff for the class, even though students generally couldn’t afford to get this software legally. Nowadays, that stuff really isn’t that necessary, is it?
Juggling at TED (or, this one goes out to Bill)
The TED conference is going on right now, one of these events that I’ll never ever get invited to, but hey, whadda gonna do? Anyway, what’s cool is that they are putting up all these smart talks up online, and what’s even cooler is it even features juggling. Dig in Bill HD, dig in.
It’s more than a book store; it’s a really big book store with gadgets
As a winter break family outing yesterday afternoon, Annette and Will and I went to the new Borders after we picked Will up from school. And yes, our family is such that going to a book store is considered a “family outing.” This new store is a “concept store,” and fairly accurately summarized in this CNNMoney.com article, “Borders Celebrates Grand Opening…” Borders, which has its headquarters in Ann Arbor and which has been hemorrhaging money for a few years now, sees the store as at least one of the futures of the business. I guess.
Anyway, the store is located in a big-box strip mall over near Ann Arbor-Saline Road in the space that used to be a CompUSA store. One of the reasons why Borders opened this store here is because the Borders suits are here, and when we were there Tuesday, there seemed to be tours of various Borders employees underway, which was a little weird. It’s a big store with snazzy lighting and furnishings and all of that, kind of arranged in a sort of wheel/spoke pattern. In the middle, there were sections of food and wine, travel, exercise and diet, and something else I’m not remembering.
My wife the Children’s Lit professor scholar noticed that a good half of the book space of the story could be included in her classes: besides a big children’s book section, there was a lot of “young adult” and whatever the book category is called for the kind of junior-aged high school kids, and a very large section on Manga, Anime, comic books, and graphic novels. So much for the “kids today” not doing any reading– or I guess the “kids today” just aren’t reading “Literature,” which was sort of shoved off into a corner of the store.
But probably more than half of the store was devoted to the miscellaneous stuff that all big box book stores sell nowadays (stationary, candy, bags, notebooks, etc.), music, and “gadgets.” Over in one corner they had a LongPen station, which was (apparently) invented by Margaret Atwood to do virtual book signings. I couldn’t find a picture on the very bad LongPen web site, but basically, it’s kind of a station sort of thing a bit bigger than an ATM with a camera and a microphone, a screen that would presumably show the author doing the signing, and a surface where you put your book and the mechanical pen thing. I dunno. The argument is that these people are saving the environment by reducing travel. It seems to me though that they’d do a lot more environmental benefit by publishing fewer books on paper and making eBooks compelling and affordable. Really, I think the main reason for the device is that Margaret Atwood (and others like her) must really hate to travel.
And then on the other side of things, somewhere between a half and a third of the store, is a very large technology stuff/gadget section. They had the Sony Reader on display, which makes sense as a book store techno-gadget (and after playing with it for about 10 minutes, my reaction to the grey and $300 price tag was who in the hell would want to buy this thing?), and they also had a display of those frames with the electronic pictures in them and some exercise gadgets, too. They were selling FlipVideo cameras and other digital cameras (I knew way more about the FlipVideo than the sales dude), and there probably were some non-iPod mp3 players in there too. They had some computer kiosks where you could download mp3s to your iPod (or whatever) right there, or you could burn them to a CD, for about a buck apiece, and they had a station where you could print out your digital pictures. And then they also had a station where you could print a customized book (I couldn’t get that thing to work) and a station where you could do family genealogy (??).
Anyway, it was an interesting idea and I’m sure it will evolve, but right now, it had the look and feel of a bunch of stuff thrown against a wall to see if it would stick. eBooks and custom printing of trade books hasn’t quite taken off yet, and it seems to me that the only people who would use an in-store/f2f service to do things like download mp3s to a disk or print digital pictures are folks who aren’t all that comfortable with technology in the first place. And genealogy? Seriously?
So we’ll see what happens over the next couple years. We did all spend some money there. I bought Blogging Heroes more or less as a risky but potential BAWS resource since I have not had any luck so far getting high profile bloggers to participate in my survey or case studies. Though after looking it up on amazon.com (which is what I link to above), which features some free chapters and a $5.38 price tag, I feel like I’ve been ripped off, which is not a good feeling to have upon reflecting on a new store.
Intellectual property is a silly euphemism
I’m tempted to claim that line as my own and see what happens, but alas, it comes from this Cory Doctorow column in The Guardian. It’s well-written and to the point, probably something I’ll be assigning in 516 this term..
Blogged.com launches
From the site Webware, this info/review on a new blog directory and review service, Blogged.com. I dunno, this may or may not be useful. I will probably play around with it as a means of coming up with “quasi-random” blogs to solicit for my BAWS survey and I will admit that I don’t think there’s a very good service that does this now. Still, is it necessary?
Laptops are for wimps
From Improve Everywhere, a “mission” involving desktops being mobile:
On a less humorous note, I do sometimes wish I could/would do this. I’m working on a desktop now and will switch to a laptop soon to go and do some work elsewhere, and I know I will inevitably forget something….
Skills o’ yester-year
This has made the rounds on blogs/etc/ lately, but it’s an interesting less anyway: Obsolete Skills.
Scrivener reviews and news
One more post for now, in the spirit of posts that catch up on things I’ve been meaning to note here: Via one of the blogs I read listed below (I can’t remember which one), Merlin Mann at 43 Folders (a blog I haven’t read for a while now, but that perhaps I’ll get back to one of these days) has a favorable review of the writing software Scrivener. This post lead to this one, “NYT Magazine covers Scrivener, other OS X writing apps.” I haven’t read it yet, but will after I finish here.
You know, I’ve had a demo copy on both my desktop and laptop computers for over a month now and it has been on my “to do” list for quite a while to finish the tutorial/figure this thing out, and for whatever reason, I haven’t done so yet. Perhaps my writerly head is resisting new techniques; or perhaps that’s just evidence that I haven’t been writing enough lately. In any event, since we are entering winter break and this is going to be a chance for me to catch up on all sorts of things, maybe I’ll have some of my own thoughts to share on this by next weekend. But I do have probably 100 items on my current to do list, so….
The fuzzy line between cognitive psychology and rhetoric with PowerPoint advice as an example
One of the many MANY things I need to think about dealing with on my lengthy “to do” list is to start getting my presentation for this conference I’m going to in mid-April. It’s a little early to start planning, but my intention is to put together an elaborate PowerPoint presentation with lots of cute and clever slides so that it can move at a fast pace, etc. I’ve done this sort of thing before; I’m not as good as Lessig is at it, but it’s fun to do nonetheless.
Anyway, this crossed my mind again today because I came across this (via boing boing), “How Cognitive Science Can Improve Your PowerPoint Presentations,” via a blog called i09. It is a summary of some of the work of cognitive psychologist Stephen M. Kosslyn and his book Clear and to the Point, which is about psychological principles and PowerPoint. Go read the blog post, but basically, the four rules discussed here are The Goldilocks Rule (the “just right” amount of information on a slide), The Rudolph Rule (make important things on a slide stand out), The Rule of Four (no more than four pieces of information on a slide), and the Birds of a Feather Rule (if you want things to be identified as being together, group them in terms of colors and proximity and the like).
Now, this is all fine and good, and I realize that I am only looking at a very brief summary of some principles that, for all I know, might be a lot more complicated than this. But I have to wonder: is this psychology or is this rhetoric? I’ve wondered this before about things like “usability design” for web sites. As far as I can tell, a lot of the usability folks out in industry see this as something that is (in terms of an academic pursuit) about psychology, but from my point of view, this stuff is clearly about texts, literacies, and rhetorics. So what’s the scoop?
Maybe in my next academic life/pursuit, I’ll try to study up on psychology and have a better answer to these questions.
How strange is “Learning from YouTube”?
Via this entry on Alex’s blog, I came across a list of the “Top 25 ‘Strangest’ College Courses” (many of which don’t sound that strange to me, frankly), and clocking in at #25, was a course at Pitzer College called “Learning from YouTube.” I haven’t had a chance to look at it yet, but there is a YouTube site for it here. I’m going to have a unit on things like YouTube in my current Computers and Writing, Theory and Practice class, and this is going to be one of the first sites I browse when I start figuring out what I’m going to include. Looks cool to me.