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.

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:

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I was reading the latest issue of Smithsonian Magazine this morning and found an article called "Aerosol Art" which details a fascinating new exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery called RECOGNIZE! Hip Hop and Contemporary Portraiture (runs through October 26, 2008). The exhibit includes portraits and paintings of Hip Hop artists, film, poetry, and the one medium that really caught my attention: the graffiti art of taggers Tim Conlon and Dave Hupp. Jobyl Boone, the exhibit’s guest curator, argues that

graffiti tags function as self-portraits. "We want to present the notion that individuality and portraiture might not be someone’s face or body," she says. Conlon agrees: "Graffiti is based on choosing a name and making it as prolific as possible."

Two of Conlon and Hupp’s tags:

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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.

Richard Miller (at about 1:35 in) to the Rutgers Board of Governors (1/24/08): “It goes without saying that we are living at the time of the most significant change in human expression in human history.”

The latest issue of The Chronicle has an article called "Blog Comments vs. Peer Review: Which Way Makes a Book Better?" which describes an interesting experiment: to see which is more effective for reviewing a book, blog comments by a community of online peers or traditional peer review. Noah Wardrip-Fruin is posting portions of his upcoming book, Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies to his blog at Grant Text Auto and with the aid of The Future of the Book’s CommentPress is asking readers to comment.

After browsing quickly through the comments—just to see if they appear in the expected range of nit-picky and expository—I came across the following:

From Wardrip-Fruin:

The surface of a work of digital media is not transparent — it does not allow for direct observation of the data and process elements created and selected by the work’s author(s), or of the technical foundations on which they rest. Given this, adopting only the audience’s perspective makes full engagement with the work’s processes impossible. Some systems, through interaction, may make it possible to develop relatively accurate hypothesis of how the internal systems operate (in fact, some works require this on the part of the audience). But this is a complement to critical engagement with the operations of the work’s processes, rather than a substitute.

An a comment from Lev Manovich (whose wondeful book, The Language of New Media was removed at the last minute from the required list for my grad course Writing for Electronic Communities):

To a significant extent, modern thinking about culture can be characterized as “surface studies.” This is true of film studies, media studies, art history, literary studies, etc. Although each of these disciplines produced some work which engages with the production processes which led to the outputs presented to the audiences - films, literature, television programs, etc. - these works are a minority. A great majority of books, articles, and academic papers take these outputs as given; they are then interpreted using different methodologies (Psychoanalysis, Marxism, Feminism, etc.). What is not considered are the theories and concepts of the people involved in production, the technologies involved, and what can be called “cultural logistics” – the organization and consideration of networks of people, machines, media, distribution systems, etc. I think that one of the goals of Software Studies is to focus on all these dimensions and to demonstrate to the rest of humanities why their study is crucial.

If this is the kind of blog-based peer review we can expect, then I think traditional peer review could potentially have a formidable distributed competitor. Obviously the thing that makes it work here is the reputation and quality of the author, the blog, and the blog’s readers’ commitment to devloping new knowledge and exploring new ideas. For blogs with fewer readers it wouldn’t be as effective. But, Noah is starting a discussion that is very much worth having.

Another gem from Common Craft (which I saw back in November but never pointed to it—odd):

On 18 January 2008 I presented a workshop entitled, "Preparing Writers for the Future of Information Systems," with Diane Penrod at the 4th International Conference on Technology, Knowledge, and Society in Boston. The workshop was planned thinking that we had an hour: 15 minutes for me, 30 minutes of workshop and exploratory discussion, and 15 minutes for Diane. On the way to the conference location I realized that we actually had 30 minutes. So, we had to revise the session on the spot, removing the workshop portion and drastically cutting the talks down. Though it felt quite rushed, the presentation went well, overall. I present the talk I was to give in full here as I think it better showcases what I have been thinking about than what I was able to discuss at the conference. I welcome all comments and suggestions.

"Preparing Writers for the Future of Information Systems"

Several weeks ago my sister gave me a Wii as a combined holiday and birthday present. Ten years younger than I and a graduate student at Columbia living in Manhattan it has been rare in the past several years that she had been able to afford to buy me a gift of any kind. To help support tuition payments that student loans do not come close to covering she has been working at Planet Hollywood, waiting tables, running orders, exhausting herself on weekends. However, now that she is in her third year she is only required to register for one course. This, combined with a weak dollar that brought many tourists over the holidays to New York City and to the tables of Planet Hollywood created a kind of a tip-infused cash-windfall the likes of which my sister has never seen (and will probably never see again). When the stores were out of Wiis, she bought it on eBay-a palpitating thrill as she won her first eBay auction. It arrived in a box that once held a Sharper Image 1x/5x Mirror with Variable Lighting for Daylight, Office, and Evening.

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