Composing Spaces

Via Ewan McIntosh, introducing Animoto, an application that mashes together the images you upload with music you select to create a unique video production. The folks at Animoto—"a bunch of techies and film/tv producers who decided to lock themselves in a room together and nerd out"—have developed "Cinematic Artificial Intelligence technology that thinks like an actual director and editor. It analyzes and combines user-selected images and music with the same sophisticated post-production skills & techniques that are used in television and film." Way cool, I think. The below video contains their 60 info bit as well as an extended introduction to the application and its features.

Due to popularity in education, Animoto (like Voicethread) has created an Educators site. The possibilities for video compositions are growing rapidly. I can’t wait to take advantage of this in the near future.

Johnny Chung Lee, grad student in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, at TED 2008 shows how the Wii remote can be used for more than just swinging virtual bats:

For more of Lee’s hacks as well as the code, see his Wii projects page. More on making any surface a writing space:

Teaching with computers just got a whole lot more interesting. . . .

I recently put together a grant proposal called, "Mapping Relationships among Web 2.0 Applications: A Preliminary Investigation into a New Information Literacy," to be consider for a Non-salary Faculty Grant. These grants are given annually at Rowan and provide up to $5000.00 to support the initial stages of faculty research. I have also recently submitted two conference proposals that consider similar issues and themes. The project summary:

As literate readers of web pages we understand that the hyperlink is used to connect together different web sites and that the web is a system of interconnected hypertext documents. When we hyperlink from one web site to the next we read these sites as discrete entities, each with unique texts, symbols, navigations, and artifacts that define it apart from others. CNN.com, for example, has a different look, feel, and usability compared to Yahoo! Other than the content of some reports we generally do not expect their features to overlap in any meaningful way.

Web 2.0 applications complicate our understanding of how to read web sites by requiring a sophisticated kind of reflective, elastic, semiotic eco-spatial information literacy that evolves with the web. This new (as yet unnamed) literacy involves, for example, becoming a critical reader of the similarities among Web 2.0 vocabularies (“widget,” “feed,” “reader”) from which new modes of composition are emerging. Literate users will be able to recognize Web 2.0 applications as writing spaces that contain multiple symbiotic genres, and will have an ability to transfer knowledge of application functionality from one site to the next. They will understand both the meaning-making and compositional possibilities of working with and among, for example, static pages, blogs, RSS readers, and social bookmarking sites.

Little, however, is known about the literacy of Web 2.0 applications. This project begins that process of understanding. The project requests $xxxx.xx. A portion of this money is to support two undergraduate student co-researchers. The remaining money is for computer hardware and software, which will facilitate our work. The end result will provide the seeds for a larger study that will investigate the processes of how web users (students, faculty, the general public, and so forth) become literate readers and users of Web 2.0 applications. The ultimate goal is to identify the characteristics of and name this new literacy. Doing so will have broad implications for the fields of composition, internet studies, rhetoric, ontological studies, and any discipline concerned with Web 2.0 applications.

The complete grant application will be available shortly on the Research page of this web site.

ReadWriteWeb recently had two posts on information visualization. Marshall Kirkpatrick addresses the question of information overload by looking at how new visualization media are adapting from gaming interfaces. Sarah Perez lists The Best Tools for for Visualization by breaking the tools into several categories: Visualize Social Networks, Visualize Music, Visualize the Internet, among others. The number of tools, applications, and plugins that are now available, combined with the increasing importance of being able to become critical readers and composers of visual information, suggests that we are going to start to seriously rethink (more than we have already) the place of information visualization in our curricula and its placement in composition as a whole.

(I will soon be making an argument to my department that the course that I (and a few others) teach, Writing, Research, and Technology, needs to be transformed from one in which students consider visual rhetoric and compose multimodal essays (at least in my sections, I’m not sure what happens in others—another issue to be addressed), into one dedicated to a critical understanding of information visualization. I’m still not sure the kinds of assignments that I would like to see or the applications considered, but I would like students to compose Adobe Flex applications that interact with XML data and/or engage with mapping in Google Earth, and/or one of the many useful APIs, and so forth. One question, among many, is how to ensure that such a course coevolves with current visualization technologies. Perhaps what we really need is an information visualization certificate where students take classes ranging from visual rhetoric to mapping and cartography to composing their own apps. Lots to think about.)

In a comment to Sarah Perez’ post, a reader pointed to Twingly’s screensaver: “Our screensaver is a visualization of the real time web… more precise a visualization over the blogosphere, real time, as a world globe.” The creators see this application as an evolution of the RSS Reader: “Forget RSS readers where you see only what you’re interested in. With Twingly screensaver you get a 24/7 stream of all (viewer discretion advised) blog activity, straight to your screen.” The installation is quite simple and can be run as a stand-along application as well as a screen saver. They include this video (there is no sound):

The Twingly screensaver compliments Jonathan Harris’ work (which I posted about below) but unlike Harris, whose applications segment out information based on preset conditions that often give an artificial sense of wholeness (for example, “We Feel Fine” only includes passages from blogs posted in English and therefore, despite his earnest ideals, only maps the “human emotion” of the English-speaking world), Twingly presents all posts in multiple languages from across the planet. As a result, we get a more authentic (re)presentation of the dissemination of the ideas of those on the planet who have a blog and care to share them.

I have been helping a colleague design her first Voicethread, and while I was on the site I came across a series of book reports by children that seem to be in the fourth grade. I have embedded one below and I don’t think I need to write why, though I will. Many of my students have been posting on their blogs about reading, my undergrads (who are primarily elementary education majors) most likely because March 2 was Read Across American Day and Dr. Suess’ birthday. Two posts were on the subject of reading difficulties. One student points to a very cool program called Reading Assistance Education Dogs, or R.E.A.D., in which dogs are trained to sit and listen to children with reading difficulties read aloud. Another describes, with great hilarity, what she calls "blue addiction"—the uncontrollable urge to click on blue links in hypertext fiction without care for the text in which a link appears.

The beauty of the below Voicethread is how wonderful it is to see an elementary school teacher use a multimodal social technology to provide a space for her students to articulate what they have read, what they think about it, and how it impacted their learning. They even composed their own avatars. Spectacular, really.

My graduate course, Writing for Electronic Communities is currently working its way through Richard Landow’s tome, Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization. This is my first time making my way through the third edition (published in 2006). Though it is always nice to go back and visit Storyspace again, I pleased to see Landow discussing some newer, fascinating, and ultimately useful applications. The first of those applications is the TouchGraph Google Browser, which according to TouchGraph’s web site "reveals the network of connectivity between websites, as reported by Google’s database of related sites." In short, you enter a search string and, using a Java applet, the application maps related sites in clusters colored by site similarity. Here is the map of the string "Web 2.0":

You can learn about the web site represented by a particular sphere by clicking on it; information will appear in the upper-left box. Right click on a sphere to open the web site in a new tab.

One of the URLs I happened to open was to a wonderfully useful site I hadn’t heard of: Go2Web2.0. It is essentially as advertised: The Complete Web 2.0 Directory. Web 2.0 applications are listed by logo (which makes it a bit image heavy) and can be sorted according to preset tags. The range of applications is spectacular—and makes me wonder when we are going to reach the point of too much redundancy:

From the great folks at CommonCraft, Twitter in Plain English:

An excellent explanation of Twitter—better than I ever could do when talking with students about it—but I must say that I do miss the “Hmm Hmm Hmm” that began and ended their prior videos.

Via if:Book, the current issue of First Monday takes a critical look at Web 2.0. The table of contents:

Preface: Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0 by Michael Zimmer

Market Ideology and the Myths of Web 2.0 by Trebor Scholz

Web 2.0: An argument against convergence by Matthew Allen

Interactivity is Evil! A critical investigation of Web 2.0 by Kylie Jarrett

Loser Generated Content: From Participation to Exploitation by Søren Mørk Petersen

The Externalities of Search 2.0: The Emerging Privacy Threats when the Drive for the Perfect Search Engine meets Web 2.0 Michael Zimmer

Online Social Networking as Participatory Surveillance by Anders Albrechtslund

History, Hype, and Hope: An Afterward by David Silver

More on this later.

In two of my classes this semester, Writing for Electronic Communities and Technologies and the Future of Writing, we spend some time thinking about mid-20th century predictions about the future of electronic technologies. We read Vannevar Bush’s (1945) "As We May Think," view Doug Englebart’s (1968) presentation that introduced the mouse, word processing, as well as many other personal computer technologies; and in WEC we read Understanding Me which is a collection of Marshall McLuhan’s speeches and interviews. Now, thanks to a brief discussion on the techrhet list, we have another text to watch and consider:

What I find fascinating about this video—from a Philco-Ford production "Year 1999 A.D."—is how the producers have attempted to transform existing technologies to function (and to a lesser extent look) as they imagine they would in the future.

Bolter (who we also read) writes about remediation as a cultural competition between or among technologies (I’ve read it so many times I have no idea if that is actually his or my words anymore) in which we see features of the old technology reified with the new. In this video, however, we see something different: a kind of anticipated remediation before the technologies or the cultures have been invented for remediation to take place. The 1960s microfilm technology, which was obviously used to project the imagines on the couples’ screens, is trying so hard to be something it is not—and the actors (including a young Wink Martindale) are trying to interact with the current technology as if it were more advanced that it was. It is too bad, as well, that though technology was to advance as such a rate by 1999 gender roles seem was to stay the same.

A student blogging at Care4Poor posted a link to this site as a humorous break from the all the technology frustrations she was having. Its an interesting video, however, to consider in terms of our reading for this week—Wenger’s (1998) Communities of Practice (interestingly, students have been blogging most about (read: complaining about) Wenger’s instructive style and also calling it "common sense"; more on that later)—and the below discussion of Siva Vaidhyanathan’s review essay "Naked in the ‘Nonopticon’" on the ubiquity of surveillance. Enjoy.