Bill Wolff’s Composing Spaces

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.

The March 2008 edition of Harper’s arrived today, and in it is a wonderful example of how internet technologies are not value neutral. Ginger Strand’s annotation "Keyword: Evil" (which Harper’s has made available for free online) spans two pages as she uses call-outs connected to an architectural schematic to dissect the energy-use implications of Google’s planned server farm site, The Dallas, which rests on the Columbia River in Oregon. Two screenshots of the article:

Read the rest of this entry »

Some folks at Viz are having an interesting discussion about Will.i.am’s “Yes We Can” video which I blogged about below. Melanie also points to this hilarious (and somewhat frightening) parody in which the performers try to find three words from John McCain that can inspire as much as Obama’s “Yes we can”:

Marshall at Read/Write Web has a useful new post “Comparing Six Ways to Identify Top Blogs in Any Niche.” The real discovery for me has been the Ask.com Blog Search. For the last hour I’ve been looking at the results of a search for “education“—the link to Weblogs in Higher Education was worth the time. This will be a fixed reading for all courses where blogs are assigned, something I am doing more frequently as I try to better understand the relationships among multiple Web 2.0 writing spaces.

Via Mind the Planet, “Yes We Can” by Will.i.am, performed by Will.i.am and others:

This past Friday I was at Writers House at Rutgers talking with Richard Miller, Paul Hammond, Darcy Gioia, Elin Diamond, Carolyn Williams, and a few others about the future of the humanities, what Richard is calling New Humanities. Part of that future is the construction of multimodal video compositions. These compositions ask students to engage with a range of Web 2.0 technologies and challenge their understanding of composition, writing, authorship, scholarship, collaboration, text, as well as the role that computer applications play in determining the shape of the composition. Richard and Paul demonstrated the way that Final Cut Pro can be used to compose multimodal, multilayed texts by re-naming the application’s functions to map onto stages of the writing process that are often discussed in composition classes: pre-writing, research, storing citation, writing the text, reviewing, revising, and so forth.

The above video is one that is consistent with the kind of writing that we discussed: borrowing a source’s words/ideas that were presented in one medium and mashing them up in the medium in which the student is working and for the point that the student is trying to make. Will.i.am’s mashing up of certain phrases from one of Obama’s speeches with others saying, singing them in unison recasts Obama’s message to the other. The borrowing of his words (and the image of him saying the words) results in significant questions that can lead to classroom discussions of distributed authorship: Is Obama speaking the words that we have been saying? Or, are we recasting those words as our own because we believe in them?