Apple is hyping its new “mighty mouse.” It has the advantage of being a “real product” for sale right now with at least one decent review.
But if you ask me, this keyboard (still a concept until 2006) really REALLY rocks.
Yahoo! versus, well, everyone?
While procrastinating, I stumbled across Yahoo’s new service/interface 360º. I don’t have that much time to goof off and look through this thing right now, but it looks like this is Yahoo’s attempt at taking on the blogging, rss-feed, photo-sharing, Facebook, Xanga, Live-Journal, and everybody else in one web site. I’m skeptical.
Grade school podcasting (and other technologies, too…)
From Canada’s Globe and Mail web site comes this article, “Web logs, podcasts and virtual classrooms.” Really interesting piece. Two quick highlights:
The “Room 208” podcast may just have the youngest production staff in the history of broadcasting. Written, produced and performed entirely by the third- and fourth-graders in Bob Sprankle’s class at the Wells Elementary School in Wells, Maine, the podcast — an on-line radio show that can be downloaded to an MP3 player — began in April, has 171 subscribers for its weekly 20- to 30-minute shows and includes regular features like Student News, The Week in Sports and Word of the Week.
and…
When Joel Arquillos, a social studies teacher at the Galileo Academy of Science and Technology in San Francisco, started his 11th-grade American history students blogging, he didn’t know what to expect. Mr. Arquillos set up a group blog as a joint project with David Boardman’s English class juniors and seniors from rural Winthrop High School in Maine for students to post assignments on-line, comment on each other’s work and expand their cultural awareness.
At first, the students needed to be prodded to post. But the blog took off when Mr. Arquillos had them write about their neighbourhoods. A student who lives in the Tenderloin district in San Francisco described her feelings about the drug dealing and gang violence in the neighbourhood. The Maine students posted that they had thought neighbourhoods like the Tenderloin were urban legends.
Soon, the students started posting on their own to find out what their peers cross-country thought about various subjects (the structure of the new SATs, good reasons to skip the prom, among many), discussions that almost came to match the assigned writings in volume.
“I want to give these kids the tools to say, ‘Hey, my voice is important in this world,”‘ Mr. Arquillos said after the year-long experiment. “This blog helps me do that.”
Hey, how cool is that, huh?
More electronic paper news?
See this article from Tom’s Hardware Guide, “Fujitsu develops electronic paper with non-volatile image memory.” I’m not even going to pretend to understand all the technicalities of this, but it looks like a step closer to something that might really be a viable e-paper technology.
A wiki on the fly with pbwiki?
Mark Crane posted a link to something called pbwiki.com to the Tech-Rhet mailing list. The “pb” part of things comes from their motto/catchphrase: “Make a free, password protected wiki as easily as a peanut butter sandwich.”
I haven’t quite figured out what I would use a wiki for in my teaching, but I did set up a wiki with this site in about 3 minutes, which strikes me as being kind of a good and cool thing.
Going "all laptop"
Rich Rice posted a link to this article in Boston.com, “Arizona school will not use textbooks,” to the tech-rhet mailing list. I saw a similar (more in-depth?) article in The Arizona Daily Star, “All-laptop high school to open in Vail.”
I guess my first reaction to this is “it ain’t gonna happen,” at least not entirely. Sure, there’s a lot of textbook info you could replicate electronically, but there’s a whole bunch of information that is either most practically available or only available in good ol’ fashioned books.
And I don’t understand why it’s an “either/or” kind of thing, either.
Miscellaneous links I came across today
In lieu of doing something a bit more productive, I cleaned out my email inbox today, and in the process, I came across a bunch of links to stuff I thought would be worthwhile to post here:
- The Future of the Book web site. Some good info, but what I thought was especially cool was the java-script powered graphic at the top.
- Journals in Rhetoric and Composition. Lists and links to different publications in the field. Hey, it’s from BGSU, so it must be good.
- Today’s Front Pages. This is a pretty nifty little flash-driven site that show you the front pages of a bunch of different newspapers all over the world. It’s an interesting melding of traditional print and electronic media that might be a good topic of discussion in a class like 328.
- 826 Michigan has opened up (and has a web site, too). I’ve been trying to find some time work with these folks, and I really want to find a way to make some sort of connection between the work that they’re trying to do (tutoring writing to young folks on a drop-in basis) and the work my colleagues and I are trying to do (teach future high school and junior high teachers). I do wish they had opened up the center in Ypsi, but that’s another issue.
- TiddlyWiki. A friend of mine sent me a link to this. To be honest, I haven’t had a whole lot of time to mess around with this, but it looks to me like it has some kind of cool potential as an interesting way to write hypertext.
We're not Afraid web site
While watching ABC Nightly News last night, I heard about the “We’re not Afraid” web site, which includes a whole bunch of images that express support for Londoners in light of the recent terrorist attacks. I’m linking it here because I think it’s a worthy tribute and also because I’m planning on including a unit/project/discussion in a class I am redesigning this summer on “visual rhetoric.” This site and a few others might be interesting to talk about.
One thing to think about though: in the ABC News story, they showed a bunch of images from the site– individuals, couples, animals, etc.– but they did not show one person of color. All white folk. When I went to the site itself to look around a bit, it took me a while to find anybody who wasn’t white. I don’t know exactly what that has to say, other than perhaps that’s a commentary on “we” and who ought to be “afraid.”
I've been beaten to the punch at Ivan
I’m still in “vacation mode” because the in-laws are here and my wife and I just returned from a getaway to Niagara Falls— oops! too much information for Ivan “the worst ‘not his real name’ name ever” Tribble, at least according to an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Bloggers Need Not Apply.”
Jeff, Jenny, Collin, KF at Planned Obsolescence, and many others have already said what needs to be said, so I’ll just add a few more thoughts:
- Tribble does have a point in that there are a lot of bloggers out there, academic and otherwise, who are not as aware of the potential downfalls of their vast and unintended audience as they perhaps ought to be. Lots of people have lost their jobs as a result of their blogs, and it is probably true that others have been passed over for jobs because of their blogging. Of course, most of the academic blogs I know of that share a bit too much– ah… problematic “personal” information– are anonymous anyway (and I’ve certainly complained about the problems I have with anonymous academic blogging in the past). So, assuming that the anonymous academic blogger applying for a job isn’t going to be promoting his or her anonymous blog in a cover letter or on a campus visit, Tribble et al could have easily hired the exact kind of blogger he and his colleagues were trying to avoid and not even know it.
- I don’t know what field Tribble is in (though I must say that he sure sounds like a pretty old-timey/traditional Literature– with a capital “L”– kind of guy to me), but in my field, I’m pretty sure that we’d look quite favorably on a candidate who kept a blog. Many of the folks I list as comp/rhet bloggers are doctoral students or newly minted Ph.Ds, and I’m betting that they’ll land decent jobs.
- Finally, Tribble reminds me of one final piece of unsolicited advice I’d like to offer in my role as The Happy Academic: while the academic job market is extremely tight, always remember that job candidates have to evaluate the people who are doing the hiring, too. Afterall, there is a decent enough chance that you will have to spend the rest of your working life with these people, so you had better have a sense of what they’re like. I have had MLA interviews with a variety of different schools where, about half-way through that half hour sitting in a hotel room someplace, I thought to myself “there is no way I would be willing to work with you people.” I freely admit that it’s perhaps a bit too easy for me to say this now that I’m happy and tenured, but I guess what I’m getting at is I’m pretty sure that Tribble and his colleagues at “a small liberal arts college in the Midwest” wouldn’t want to hire me, and I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want to work with them.
Update:
Here’s a link to the newsgroup style discussion about all this on the Chronicle site. I stumbled across it while looking at Clancy’s site, though I don’t think I have the same sort of patience as Clancy does to actually read what people wrote there….
What the Grokster decision might (or might not) mean to me
Jim Porter and Martine Courant Rife have a paper on the WIDE resource at Michigan State about the recent Supreme Court decision against Grokster and what it might mean for universities. It’s interesting reading. Three thoughts:
- Sure, I downloaded some music (illegally) from sources like limewire and napster back in the day, but I gave up on it pretty quickly. I thought that the time it took to download illegal tunes and the poor quality of the dowloads just wasn’t worth it. I have been happy with what I can get from iTunes though. It’s not free, but it is reasonably priced, it’s clearly legal, and the sound quality is good. I dunno, maybe it’s because I’m middle-aged and (reasonably) well paid, but I am just not willing to put up with the hassle of free downloads.
- During my recent travels (I think while I was in southern Minnesota), I heard this story on “On the Media,” an NPR news show about (duh) “the media.” In this report about the decision, the legal expert basically suggests that a) the Supreme Court’s decision was actually a “non-decision” in that what this decision really does is put off the question of “legitimate” file sharing for another day, and b) it boils down to the idea that Grokster (et al) were ruled against because they were kind of jerks. Here’s a quote from legal expert Michael Madison about that:
“I have a lot of confidence that firms that are already in mature markets, say for example Google, which is a company that takes advantage of intellectual property rights in a number of complex ways, Google is likely going to be able to innovate without a lot of concern, in my opinion, from this Grokster ruling. What the court is really trying to do in a not particularly elegant way is distinguish good guys from bad guys.”
- Personally, I’d like to see the Supreme Court rule on copyright and such for universities once and for all. Porter and Rife write in the summary of their paper:
Clearly universities are not promoting copyright infringement by their students, as were Grokster and StreamCast – and universities could just as easily use the Court’s opinion in Grokster to defend its practices. However, the recording and film industries are likely to use the ruling as a basis for litigation holding universities responsible for copyright infringements by students – and such action could well have an unfortunate chilling effect on universities.
I am no copyright attorney, that’s for sure, and I haven’t studied this stuff to the extent that other people (like these two) have. But I guess I’d still like to see a test case where some copyright holder goes after a university for promoting “fair use.” I have to think that the courts, even the conservative ones, would value the promotion of ideas at a university more than the film industry. And I guess I’d also like to see this ruling because, as far as I can tell, no one really understands what is or isn’t “fair use” of copyrighted materials. Maybe if there was a test case, some of this confusion could be cleared up.