Category: Technology

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More of the end of my iBook?

I don’t know if this is an official or an unofficial post or not, but since I posted about the problems of my laptop here on the official blog in the summer, I guess I’ll post again about my latest problems. Assuming my power doesn’t cut out.

We were away seeing family for Christmas. I spent much of my time working on my (still incomplete) class web site for English 444, powered with WordPress on my office Mac, and I had no problems with my iBook G4 at all. Then tonight, after we got settled in the house after being on the road for nine hours, the power on my laptop was off (and I had not turned it off before). I restarted and then, after about five minutes, it shut off on me again.

Well, I did figure out the problem, and the good news is it appears to just be a loose battery. As long as I’m plugged in, I’m fine. My poor and battered and aging (any computer over 3 years old is “aging” in my way of thinking of these things) laptop has had a loose lock for the battery for some time now. I guess the trip and perhaps riding around in the trunk of the car made it worse. The bad news is that I’d really like to be able to reliably use my laptop without it being plugged in all the time. And I’d like to do this without having to spend a whole lot of money on getting this thing fixed.

Anyway, a trip to the Apple store is in my near future. In the meantime, plug in and/or save often.

Update:
I am beginning to think that what I need to do is replace/have fixed the lower part of the case on my computer. And while I’m at it, maybe I can get the touchpad on my computer fixed too. Here’s a handy site on this sort of thing, including tips for “doing it yourself,” something I am not inclined to actually do just yet.

Well, this will have to wait until my winter “cash flow situation” improves a bit. In the meantime, it looks like I’ll be shutting down when moving about and carrying an extension cord in my bookbag when I head off to a coffee shop or something.

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Hurray! Wikipedia is just as bad as real Encylopedias!

Wikipedia has faced a number of challenges to accuracy lately, particularly from supposedly more “accurate” sources, like newspapers and academics and such. But the scientific journal Nature had an article that said, basically, Wikipedia is just as accurate– or really, inaccurate– as Encyclopedia Britannica. There’s a good discussion about it on the if:book blog, and there was also a good story about it on NPR’s “All Things Considered” yesterday.

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Turkey Post #1: Majoring in Video Games

This is the first of what I am imagining as at least two (maybe more) posts today and over the next couple days during the holiday break. Which is a break in the sense that I have a couple of days off from school and I’m not teaching tonight and we’ll be enjoying some Thanksgiving cheer at a friend’s house this afternoon, but it isn’t a break in the sense that I have much grading to do, I’m trying to roughly speaking plan my classes for the Winter term, and I have a ton of stuff to do around the house.

I suspect that my “holiday” is similar to many of yours.

Anyway, Right now, I want to make note of this New York Times article, “Video Games Are Their Major, So Don’t Call Them Slackers,” which is about a couple of different places around the country that are starting full-fledged programs in “Video Game Studies” at both the undergraduate and graduate level. There is some “pooh-poohing” of this, but most of the article is praise; here’s one interesting passage:

“The skills and methods of video games are becoming a part of our life and culture in so many ways that it is impossible to ignore,” said Bob Kerrey, the former Nebraska senator who is now president of the New School, which includes Parsons.

Parsons has offered game courses to graduate students for five years and this fall began an undergraduate program in game design.

“But if you just look at the surface of people playing games, you are missing the point, which is that games are all about managing and manipulating information,” Mr. Kerrey said. “A lot of students that come out of this program may not go to work for Electronic Arts. They may go to Wall Street. Because to me, there is no significant difference – except for clothing preference – between people who are making games and people who are manipulating huge database systems to try to figure out where the markets are headed. It’s largely the same skill set, the critical thinking. Games are becoming a major part of our lives, and there is actually good news in that.”

This is all fine and good, and as a professor in a field where sometimes the exact application of the degree can be fuzzy, I appreciate Kerrey pointing out the critical thinking skills that can be applied to things beyond game design.

Still, I have to say that, for the most part, video games have passed me by. Oh, I go through phases with games like The Sims 2, and I might get Civilization IV when it comes out for the Mac (and it will probably be available for the Mac at about the same time as I’m ready to get a new home computer, actually), but I can’t get into any of the PlayStation games. On the other hand, my 8 year old son plays video and computer games about as much as he watches TV and/or reads. It is for him an equal mode of entertainment, and I suspect that this is also the case with a lot of my 20-something students.

Of course, here’s the question: will today’s 20-something video gaming students still be playing when they are near 40-somethings like me? Hmmmm…..

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TWITs / Amateur Podcasts (Who Listens to These?) / And Who is Watching These Things??

This is kind a “three-fer” blog posting about podcasting and the next wave, videocasting:

  • You might want to take a listen to the “This Week in Technology” podcast show; last week’s episode included Larry Lessig on the panel. It was a pretty interesting conversation, making accessible a lot of the rather complicated issues of copyright in the digital age. As Lessig pointed out, almost everybody– especially young people– violates the letter and/or the spirit of copyright law nowadays with the way that they download music from bit torrent technologies and the like, and that’s a bad thing.

    It was interesting to me because I listened to this show the day after I had had a conversation with students in my Thursday night class about copyright issues and Internet downloads. They seemed to be either apathetic or unaware that downloading music for free and without permission is explicitly against the law. This “criminialization” of a pretty common behavior is in and of itself a problem, and Lessig made a compelling argument in this podcast.

    Having said all that, much of this show and other TWITs episodes (I’ve listened to parts of a couple) really amount to listening to some smart guys sitting around in a bar talking about computer geek stuff. It works here because all of these guys are experienced in the media– the leader of the pack is Leo Laport, and while he and the rest of them might say they’re computer geeks and they kind of are, really, these guys are all old pros from radio and TV– and because they have some pretty high production values. Which brings me to my next point…

  • Who listens to these things? I’m not talking about TWITs or all the NPR and other network news sorts of things that are available as podcasts nowadays through iTunes; I’m talking about the complete amateur stuff. As I look through the iTunes “top 100,” I can see that most people are agreeing with me since most of what’s there is coming out from “the pros;” but take, for example, The Dawn and Drew Show, which is a couple in Wisconsin talking about stuff. I have been told it is “hillarious.” I dunno about that. Maybe I just don’t have the right gene for appreciating things like this kind of podcasting, the same way I just don’t “get” public access television.

    As I have written about here numerous times, I’ve been including audio for my online class this term and I am going to be doing so podcasting for my online (and not online) classes next semester. Based on what students have told me, these audio files (more or less “mini lectures” about some of the readings) have been a success for these classes. In the winter term, I’m going to do some podcasting of “shows” that sort of provide a wrap-up of my classes for the week. I think; I’m still trying to decide. And, like I said in a post about a week ago, I figured out how to do a podcast that can be listed with iTunes (and presumably other syndication services) with nothing more than an blogger account, an RSS 2.0 feed (via feedburner), and a cell phone.

    However, I am under no illusion that anyone other than my students would be at all interested in listening to these podcasts– and it is kind of up in the air that my students are even that interested. So who the heck is listening to all of these random podcasts listed on iTunes? Anyone?

    And I know what you’re thinking– “Oh yeah? What makes you think that anyone is actually reading this thing, anyway?” Good point. But I keep a blog in part as a selfish note-taking device, it’s a lot easier (and less time-consuming) to skim through some blogs (especially with an RSS feed reader of some sort) than it is to “skim” through some podcasts, and I guess I’m just more willing to read “random thoughts” than I am to listen to them. Maybe that’s just me.

  • Just to make matters worse, it looks like we might soon move beyond not so interesting audio blogs to not so interesting video blogs. Via boing-boing this morning (so I guess somebody is watching), I came across Drive Time, which is a weekly (or so) video blog about a guy’s commute into work in the Boston area. The camera is somehow mounted on his dashboard and what we see is him driving and chatting with passengers– in the episode I sorta watched, his wife and then, later on, some other person he picked up. (Deep sigh…)

    Look, I’m not saying there is no potential to this stuff– far from it. But right now, I think we’re at a phase of the technology in which “success” is being marked by only the ability to pull it off, and, as anyone who has sat through a painful video/slide show with some family member can telly you, the ownership of a video/still camera does not necessarily translate into “art.”

    • Enough of that for now. I need to go record some more audio for my class, maybe experiment with an “unofficial” podcast for my unofficial blog, and then maybe price some cheap digital video cameras….

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Coursecasting, Teaching Online, and figuring out Podcasting on the cheap (sorta)

I noticed this morning that the CHE has an article in the online portion called “Lectures on the Go: As more colleges use ‘coursecasting,’ professors are split on its place in teaching.” I don’t subscribe to the CHE, so I’ll try to see if I can snag this article from the copy in the English department (unless someone wants to email this to me– wink-wink, nod-nod….)

It’s funny how these things work. My CCCC’s proposal this year is tentatively titled “Broadcast Composition: Using Podcasts to Build Community and Connections in Online Writing Classes,” and back in April, it seemed like a pretty original idea. I suppose it still is, relatively speaking. But now it’s “mainstream” enough to be in the CHE, and I mentioned an article that appeared in the Ann Arbor News about podcasting in the U of M dental school a while back.

In a way, this is starting to remind me of one of my first big conference presentations at NCTE in 1994. Like the CCCCs, NCTE (this was the conference they hold in November) proposals are due almost a year in advance. A grad school buddy of mine, John Clark, and I had a presentation proposal accepted about how to use Gopher in the classroom. Remember Gopher? Yeah, those were the days…. Anyway, we had heard of this new-fangled “World Wide Web” thing, but in early 1994, there literally wasn’t anything there yet. But by the time the NCTE rolled around, nobody was interested in Gopher anymore.

Anyway, I’m not sure if podcasting will be everywhere by next March or not. I have been using audio files to supplement my notes for some reading materials for my online class, and I think it has worked out quite well. But they aren’t “podcasts” per se; they’re just audio files that are loaded on the CMS shell. Actually, eCollege would support streaming audio, but it’s easier for me to just record the audio and upload it myself.

I did figure out how to do a “low-fi” version of podcasting, though. I’m not going to go into it right now, but a blogger account, a few cellphone calls to audioblogger, an RSS 2.0 set-up from feedburner, and a visit to iTunes and I’ve got a podcast. Even if it is just me saying “testing testing, testing again, testing 1-2-3” so far…

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Sunday morning (now afternoon) links

Instead of reading the paper this morning, I decided to read through my RSS feed to see what’s interesting. I guess I was indirectly thinking about teaching in the winter term because I found a bunch of links that will probably come up in my computers and writing class.

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Misc. Post

I’ve been meaning to post about a variety of different things lately, but I’ve gotten a bit behind with school things (though I am about to come ’round the corner, too– I can sense it). So what I’m doing to do instead is post a few quick comments and links and such and let the chips where they may.

  • On the way home yesterday, I thought about what would happen if (for next year) I abandoned the eCollege software for teaching online and tried to do the whole thing myself with Moodle or Drupal or something. What would be lost? What would be gained? Would the powers-that-be at EMU be annoyed with me? Hmmm….
  • My routine has been thrown off by fund-raising time at public radio. Don’t get me wrong– I understand why they need to do it, and I am indeed a member of my favorite public radio station, WEMU. But I just find it annoying. So please, if you listen, give what you can so they can get back on with it.
  • Johndan observes that Apple computer controls are for lefties. He blames this on the mac, but aren’t the common short-cut commands for the PC (alt-x, alt-v, alt-c) all on the left too? Having this, I must say he might have a point. The touchpad on my laptop has been a problem for a while now, so I’ve been using a mouse, and the USB port is… on the left. But since I’m left-handed, this is totally okay with me.
  • Via Weblogg-ed cmes this article, “Web logs go to school” on C|Net News. com. It’d be interesting to share this piece side-by-side with the bad press that things like Xanga have been getting in high schools lately.
  • Speaking of which, via an email that Rich Rice sent to Tech-Rhet, I’ve learned that at least one school, Santa Clara University, is using the student blog angle in order to help market itself. Granted, Santa Clara U is a tad different from, say, EMU (SCU bills itself as “The Jesuit University of Silicon Valley”), but it’s interesting nonetheless.
  • Jenny Edbauer wrote about two interesting and free applications. First, there is a blog software called Blogsome, which gives users Word Press-like features. It’s worth thinking about instead of Blogger, that’s for sure (btw, now even Blogger is having spam problems! Is Word Press the last blogging software that seems to not have significant issues with this stuff?). Second, there’s Jot, which is another free wiki software. I’d like to compare it with PBwiki before using it, but I suspect that Wikis will play a role in my Writing for the World Wide Web class next time around.

Okay, enough catch-up with the blog. Time to catch up with the other things in life.

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Fuzzy Writing

Via Kairos News comes a link for something called fuzzmail. Here’s my lame little test of this app.

It’s kind of a cute little thing, the kind of thing that looks like it came out of a class on working with javascript, though it isn’t quite what I was expecting. Still, it might be kind of cool to show in my 328 class for a couple of reasons. First, this is kind of a very mini/junior version of the sort of usability software tools, the things that tech writers and psychologists and computer geeks use to study in depth the kinds of things that people do when they actually “use” web sites. Though what disappoints me a bit is that this is a very mini/junior version of that.

Second, it does potentially fit in with the project(s) we’ll be doing in that class regarding “visual” rhetoric. We’re going to read McCloud’s Understanding Comics and at least one or two essays from Handa’s collection on visual rhetoric, and we’re going to do at least one assignment– possibly two– in which playing around with this site might make sense. We’re going to do something (you can see how well planned this all is in my head!) that makes some kind of connection between images and words ala McCloud. But I’ve been thinking lately of making the last assignment in the class (at least in the “face-to-face” class, where I know I have access to some quasi-decent software in our computer lab and much better hardware/software at other places on campus).

See, I’ve been interested lately in learning for myself how to use Flash, iMovie, and other “moving pictures” sorts of technologies, I guess because I’m impressed with presentations like this one, “Identity 2.0” or the fabulous one that Lawrence Lessig did at the 2005 CCCCs. Neither one of these examples (and I’m sure there are many others) are using exactly rocket science technology (jeez, these two examples are basically PowerPoint), both of these presentations required the speakers to actually write something out ahead of time because you can’t just “wing it” (as so often is the case with conventional PowerPoint presentations) when you have a whole bunch of slides like these examples, and I think that these presentations are pretty effective. And really, beyond my students doing these projects, I’m interested in learning more about doing these kinds of things myself because I think it would enhance the online teaching experience.

But I digress. In the short-term, fuzzmail is kinda cute.

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"UnGoogleable"/Disappearing from the Web (not)

Jill has a useful post that has some good discussion and a couple of good links about trying to “disconnect” from the Web. Sorta.

  • First, there’s this Wired News article, ”UnGoogleables’ Hide From Search.” I think the headline makes it pretty clear what this is about; the Wired News article also has some very good links to previous Google-oriented articles, which makes me think that Google and its ilk might be a prominent topic of discussion in one or more of my classes in the Winter term.
  • The second link is to Michael Joyce’s web page, where he announces “Michael Joyce is no longer maintaining a public web presence.” Of course, he goes on to provide a bunch of links and even a CV that includes an email address, an office address, and an office phone number. In other words, Joyce’s “lack” of a web presence is significantly greater than the eb presence of most of my colleagues.

Personally, I am at a state in my career/life where I very much want people to find me via a Google search. I don’t see what the problem is. I do understand the privacy issues and I agree that there are some things about me that I don’t want to be out there for one and all to see, but go ahead and read my blogs, look at my class pages, etc.

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Fun with Safari and RSS Feeds

Instead of doing something I should be doing but I don’t want to do right now (e.g., grading essays), I think I finally figured out how to use the RSS feed feature that comes built into Mac browser Safari. It’s a pretty handy feature, although I do have two minor problems. First off, it seems a bit buggy to me. I’m not completely sure about why, but it seems like it doesn’t want to list all of the articles that would be in the feed. Second, I wish this was actually a feature that was in my prefered browswer (and the browser that works better with WordPress), Firefox. But it does what an RSS feed is supposed to do: it allows me to skim the headlines of a whole bunch of blogs while I’m drinking coffee in the morning.

In the course of reading my RSS feed the other day and looking at an entry that Collin had about Web 2.0 identity issues (and I think that Jeff has a good point on this stuff), I came across an entry from Random Tech Notes, “Web 2.0: Does RSS Decrease Page Views?” Here’s a snippet:

First, lower page view counts mean less ad revenue. Second, the importance of site layout and HTML may diminish somewhat. I suspect sites interested in making any ad revenue at all will begin providing headlines-only for their RSS feeds, but this won’t entirely eliminate the page count degradation problem.

This is all very good for the reader – you can now find things faster and spend less unproductive time browsing, if you so choose. But if you’re a web site operator who derives most of your revenue from ad dollars generated by HTML page views or clicks, I think you’re going to be in for a surprise as RSS uptake increases.

The first point– lower page views and less ad revenue– of course only matters if you are in this stuff for the money. Right now, none of the sites in my feed are money making ventures, though I might be adding things like boing-boing to my list soon.

The issues about layout and design are more significant, I think. It means that it probably isn’t worth a huge amount of time and work to put together a really snazzy layout for your blog because people come to your site via a headline. And if we’re all going to be reading each others’ blogs with various RSS feed tools and I’m going to be using tools on my computers that deliever the content with the look that I want, then we’re back to the power of the word. What will get a reader interested in my blog is a good headline and a snappy opening sentence or two.

And, in a weird way, doesn’t this move us away from “visual rhetoric” and just back to good ol’ fashion “words in a row” rhetoric? Hmmmm….