Bill Wolff’s Composing Spaces

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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Its the first day of classes here at Rowan and Blackboard is giving me issues posting Web links, so here are the videos we are going to show in Introduction to Writing Arts:

Updated 12/8/07, 9:48am. The New York Times continues its tradition of mapping traumatic spaces in its remediation of the shopping mall in Omaha, Nebraska, where Robert A. Hawkins killed eight people with an assault rifle.

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Via Roy Tennant’s Current Cites, the latest edition of the Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology special section on folksonomies:

This special section of four articles plus a substantive introduction by the guest editor focus on user tagging and what has been called “folksonomies” — or user-created taxonomies. The articles are an interesting mix of simple explanations of why users tag, tag usage in Flickr, and others that seek to explain various tagging systems and how they may or may not be useful in retrieval.

We’ve been talking a bit about tagging and folksonomies in my Technologies and the Future of Writing module, and students have been slow to see the reason for tagging and the comprehending just what folksonomies are, and to be honest I have often found myself at a loss for explaining it to them. I’ve yet to read the articles included in this special edition, but I’m hoping that they—and especially the guest editors’ introduction—will help us gain a better understand the implications that folksonomies can have on classification systems and writing technologies.

NPR’s Larry Abramson began a two part series this morning on Morning Edition on the growing trend of students taking courses online (according to a new Sloan-C survey, nearly 1 in 5 students take at least 1 online course). The first report is called “Online Courses Catch On in U.S. Colleges.” Abramson offers a surprising balanced report on the benefits and drawbacks (though, these were weaker, I think) of teaching online from the perspective of two college professors and one or more students.

The piece, however, does tend to fall back on the typical tropes of teaching, for example:

The process looks kind of awkward — the natural flow of a regular class is missing, as responses arrive onscreen in a digital flood. But at second glance, there’s something else here not seen in a regular college class: All of the students are paying attention and all are engaged.

Later he states that the professor “is part of the show” of face-to-face classes. Stating that students are “paying attanetion” and “are engaged” recapitulates several unfortunate ideas about what education is, notably that education is when students are listening attentively to the teacher espousing knowledge and that, for the most part, students are not engaged in their classes. Rather, it would have been nice if Abramson described the active learning experience (or, as he calls it, “a digital flood”) that is taking place is the classes he reports on, where the synchronous medium is encouraging all students to express their ideas, voices, etc—something that often does not happen in face-to-face discussions.

Tomorrow Abramson is going going to investigate the “growing sophistication of how to teach effectively online,” so perhaps he will address some of these issues.

I must say, however, that it is nice to see that at least one media outlet is catching up to what we have known for many years—synchronous and ansychronous communications enhance teaching and learning.

Update 12/2/07: The second installment is called “Illinois Schools Look to Tech Tools to Teach.”