Cyberculture: March 2008 Archive Page

Information Week:

The recording played Thursday predates Thomas Edison's invention of the phonograph (previously thought to have recorded the first sound) by 17 years. It captured about 10 seconds of the French folksong "Au Clair De La Lune" on April 9, 1860.

Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville recorded the voice by using a "phonautograph" to scratch sound waves onto a sheet of paper covered in black smoke from an oil lamp. He never intended to play the sounds. Instead, he archived the recording and patented a method for understanding sound. Researchers recently unearthed the recording at the Academy of Sciences (French) in Paris.

Audio historians, recording engineers, and scientists working in conjunction with the informal collaborative group First Sounds created high-resolution, high-grade scans of Scott's phonautogram, converted the images into digital form, and played the sounds on a computer with a virtual stylus. Then they evened out speed fluctuations and tweaked the tracks to pull the voice forward.

Blackboard, a company that sells popular course-management software, recently won a $3.1 settlement against Desire2Learn.  According to Slashdot,

Blackboard has been granted a patent that covers a single person having multiple roles in an LMS: for example, a TA might be a student in one class and an instructor in another. You wouldn't think something this obvious could even be patented, but so far it's been a very effective weapon for Blackboard, badly hurting Desire2Learn and generating a huge amount of worry for the few remaining commercial LMSs that Blackboard has not already bought, and open source solutions such as Moodle (Blackboard's pledge not to attack such providers notwithstanding)."

However, according to Desire2Learn,

On March 25, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office issued its Non-Final Action on the re-examination of the Blackboard Patent. We are studying the document, found here, but in short, the PTO has rejected all 44 of Blackboard's claims.

At a workshop next week at the 4Cs, I'm presenting a half-hour on intellectual property and ethics, in an attempt to get users of off-the-shelf course management tools to think about what it means when they give an outside corporation so much control over the content of their courses.  (I'm guilty of this, too, since I use Turnitin.com a lot, so my intention is not to scold but rather raise questions; Mike Edwards will then introduce some open-source alternatives to commercial software.)

The New Yorker discusses the fate of print news:

Philip Meyer, in his book "The Vanishing Newspaper" (2004), predicts that the final copy of the final newspaper will appear on somebody's doorstep one day in 2043. It may be unkind to point out that all these parlous trends coincide with the opening, this spring, of the $450-million Newseum, in Washington, D.C., but, more and more, what Bill Keller calls "that lovable old-fashioned bundle of ink and cellulose" is starting to feel like an artifact ready for display under glass.

Taking its place, of course, is the Internet, which is about to pass newspapers as a source of political news for American readers. For young people, and for the most politically engaged, it has already done so. As early as May, 2004, newspapers had become the least preferred source for news among younger people. According to "Abandoning the News," published by the Carnegie Corporation, thirty-nine per cent of respondents under the age of thirty-five told researchers that they expected to use the Internet in the future for news purposes; just eight per cent said that they would rely on a newspaper. It is a point of ironic injustice, perhaps, that when a reader surfs the Web in search of political news he frequently ends up at a site that is merely aggregating journalistic work that originated in a newspaper, but that fact is not likely to save any newspaper jobs or increase papers' stock valuation.

New to me... disemvoweling: a compromise between preserving free speech and letting trolls take over a public online forum.

In the fields of Internet discussion and forum moderation, disemvoweling, (also spelled disemvowelling) which appears to model the word disemboweling, is the removal of vowels from text either as a method of self-censorship (for example, either "G*d" or "G-d" for those whose religious beliefs preclude writing God in full), or as a technique by forum moderators to censor unwanted posting, such as spam, internet trolling or political opinions.^[1] The net effect of disemvoweling text is to render it illegible or legible only through significant cognitive effort, thus suppressing unwanted comments and discouraging such comments from being made in future.

I love the retrofuture. The year I was born, 1968, Mechanix Illustrated offered this prediction of life in the year 2008. I'm still waiting for my flying car, but some of the other predictions were remarkably accurate.

The single most important item in 2008 households is the computer. These electronic brains govern everything from meal preparation and waking up the household to assembling shopping lists and keeping track of the bank balance. Sensors in kitchen appliances, climatizing units, communicators, power supply and other household utilities warn the computer when the item is likely to fail. A repairman will show up even before any obvious breakdown occurs.

Computers also handle travel reservations, relay telephone messages, keep track of birthdays and anniversaries, compute taxes and even figure the monthly bills for electricity, water, telephone and other utilities. Not every family has its private computer. Many families reserve time on a city or regional computer to serve their needs. The machine tallies up its own services and submits a bill, just as it does with other utilities.

Money has all but disappeared. Employers deposit salary checks directly into their employees' accounts. Credit cards are used for paying all bills. Each time you buy something, the card's number is fed into the store's computer station. A master computer then deducts the charge from your bank balance.

Computers not only keep track of money, they make spending it easier. TV-telephone shopping is common. To shop, you simply press the numbered code of a giant shopping center. You press another combination to zero in on the department and the merchandise in which you are interested. When you see what you want, you press a number that signifies "buy," and the household computer takes over, places the order, notifies the store of the home address and subtracts the purchase price from your bank balance. Much of the family shopping is done this way. Instead of being jostled by crowds, shoppers electronically browse through the merchandise of any number of stores.

People have more time for leisure activities in the year 2008. The average work day is about four hours. But the extra time isn't totally free. The pace of technological advance is such that a certain amount of a jobholder's spare time is used in keeping up with the new developments--on the average, about two hours of home study a day.

Play This Thing offers this review of "Photopia" (a text game by Adam Cadre).

Photopia is very, very linear. It has very simple puzzles. It's barely interactive at all.

And yet it works. Photopia could be a short story, but it would lose most of its impact. It's difficult to explain why that is without ruining the game. The key to Photopia's success is the interactions between the player and the main character (who, interestingly enough, is never actually playable).

Photopia takes the term "interactive fiction" to a new level, because that's really what it is.

Photopia actually brought IF to that new level almost 10 years ago, back in 1998, so this isn't exactly news -- but the game is still worth the praise today.

The Times Online has a story about children's non-profits that are seeking to ban potential employers from checking social profile websites as part of the job application process. I would agree that what a child posts at age 14 is probably not relevant to a job he or she might want to get at age 22. Nevertheless, I regularly remind my students to be careful of what they publish (and, sadly, what your friends publish).

"When young people put up their personal profiles they are not thinking about job or university applications. Typically, they are simply talking to their mates. Employers or admissions tutors who delve into these places are being highly and inappropriately intrusive. It's a bit like looking at someone's diary," Mr Carr told The Times.

"A world where even a 14-year-old has to think twice before posting an adolescent poem suddenly looks very unappealing and increases the pressure on children and young people to conform to a set of tightly focused adult norms."

The children's charities are seeking clarification on whether discrimination legislation could be used to stop companies from using social networking sites for recruitment purposes.

I can't wait to see more of Get Lamp.

So I'm sitting at Julie's place, right, having some rather delicious cherry M&Ms (which my momma could alphabetize in her belly!), when she pops up this blog by Dennis Jerz wherein I spy this quote, in response to Jeff Rice:

So students who can only remix don't get practice thinking critically about culture -- and it's certainly possible to recognize remix culture and design assignments that ask them to think critically about it, without rejecting it out of hand as plagiarism.

I hate to take up the position of the Jeopardy judge and simply say "bzzzzzz, wrong!" but... that's just wrong.

And I don't mean to hurl an insult at Dr. Jerz, but... this is a case of looking in at something from the outside (I would assume, based on the admission later in the post that Jerz knows little about music) attempting to critique something without ever getting the insider's perspective.

I would argue the exact opposite of the first portion of the quote (before the dash). But let's also be realistic; if Jerz has encountered, or thinks he will encounter, a student who can only remix, he's failed to keep track of public high schools in America.

Where to start with this one?  The "about" page says "Who am I? I'm just a guy. I've got a story like everyone."   The author claims to be "someone who spent four years teaching--and three prior to that as a TA/writing tutor--at an open admissions college" but that doesn't really help me figure out whether I am writing to a grad student who is struggling to figure out the professional landscape, a very bright undergraduate who could use some gentle instruction in tone and focus, or a professional college instructor who should know better.

Here is the comment I posted...

"that's just wrong."

Could you clarify what part of my statement you mean? Are you reacting against the part where I say "students who can only remix don't get practice thinking critically about culture," or the part where I say that it *is* possible to design remix assignments that ask them to think critically?

"And I don't mean to hurl an insult at Dr. Jerz, but..."

Let's have a conversation instead, shall we?

"he's failed to keep track of public high schools in America. Every student who makes it through that system with any success--meaning 95% of our trad students--will know how to write a five paragraph essay."

I regularly teach freshman who are fresh out of high school, and I know for a fact they can't all write a five-paragraph essay -- because if they could, they would not be in my "Basic Composition" class, they would all be in "Seminar in Thinking and Writing" (I think about a third of our students skip Basic Comp, not 95%). Perhaps the public schools where you are are much better than those where I am, or perhaps we simply disagree over what level of writing counts as acceptable. Regardless, I applaud any effort to break students out of the high-school five-paragraph-essay box, and I won't dismiss your conclusions as "wrong" simply because the experiences that inform them differ from mine.  I will, instead, ask you to clarify.

For the record, here is the thesis of my blog entry:

"It's true that one's own ideas only come after one has filtered through many other ideas. I think the problem I see in the classroom is that students find it difficult to trace details back to the source."

And here is the conclusion:

"I certainly don't feel that students should never, ever remix -- but if we graduate students who can ONLY remix, and have never been forced to trace an idea back to its source and critique its validity, but instead settle for riffing on it and referencing "www.somehomepage.com" as one of a handful of "Works Consulted," then we are doing them -- and our culture at large -- a great disservice."

Your defense of remix culture is a very good example of the thinking that makes me shake my head. I am not writing against remix; I am writing about a willingness to settle for the creative expressions of personal reactions to a text, without demonstrating the ability and willingness to explore those ideas more fully.

Before I go any farther, let me first state that I recognize that a blog entry is not the same thing as an academic paper. The rhetoric of blogs is rougher, and sometimes the invitation to rumble is what motivates us to post our ideas online.

And I also note that in the remix culture, creating and publishing that initial response can take on the role of the discovery draft, sparking conversations that help the student develop a more accurate, more thorough, more nuanced understanding of an issue.

I'm responding because "What's with the Remix Disrespect" does not merely engage with my ideas; it makes several global statements about my competence, both directly and implicitly, which I find personally distressing. This entry presumes to judge my whole career based on what I wrote in this single blog entry from 2004. It assumes a superior rhetorical stance -- first dismissing the idea of being a game-show judge, then promptly performing exactly that role; then rejecting the idea of hurling an insult, and promptly doing just that.

I find it interesting that in one passage where, instead of taking on the persona of an expert, I prefaced a statement about music by citing my source (since I can't rely on personal knowledge of what classical composers do when they quote each other), that detail surfaces in your blog as evidence of the claim that I am a cultural outsider who can't understand remix culture (which, as you know, involves far more than music).

So... my critique of the remix culture lies specifically in the convention that assumes the author's personal expression of reactions can substitute for investigating the issue.

If you would like to get a greater understanding of my attitude towards the remix culture, I invite you to search my blog for terms such as "remix," "open source," or "modding." I invite you to sample my own remix of Teletubbies and gothic poetry) or some of my found poetry exercises (poems comprised of lines taken from student blogs), or this blogger's account of a 2007 CCCC panel I co-organized, "When Student Experts Remix the Discipline: New Media in the Composition Classroom," or some of my recent articles on the blogosphere, video game history. You might also look at the websites for the courses I teach in Video Game Culture and Theory, or "The History and Future of the Book" or the 400-level studio course I teach in "New Media Projects," or the student work that you'll find via links on those sites.

While your entry refers to "a terrible fear of plagiarism," please note that my blog entry only mentions plagiarism once, in a sentence stating that remix is *not* the same thing as plagiarism -- thus, my only reference to plagiarism *agrees* with your position.

Were I writing this entry today, after four more years of watching the impact of the remix culture, I would not have written "students who can only remix don't get practice thinking critically about culture." I would have said something about how a student who remixes *well* has to understand the raw material, so a good course built around remix will have to include analysis and fact-checking.

Wired | AP offers a brief report on the Project for Excellence in Journalism's new report:

Only a few years ago, newspaper Web sites were primarily considered an online morgue for that day's newspaper, Rosenstield said. "The afternoon newspaper is in a sense being reborn online," he said. A separate survey found journalists are, to a large degree, embracing the changes being thrust upon them. A majority say they like doing blogs and that they appreciate reader feedback on their stories. When they're asked to do multimedia projects, most journalists find the experience enriching instead of feeling overworked, he said. The newsroom is increasingly being seen as the most experimental place in the business, the report found. Most news Web sites are no longer final destinations. The report found that many users insist that the sites, and even individual pages, offer plenty of options to navigate elsewhere for more information, the project found. Rosenstiel said he's even able to reach Washington Post stories through the New York Times' Web site.

I thought maybe two or three students would "friend" me out of pity, but I was rather surprised that within about 24 hours I had 35 confirmed "friends" -- several of those within the first few minutes of registering for the service. Only half of those contacts are from Seton Hill -- the rest are academics I know from the blogosphere and from conferences.

A few are people I knew in my hazy pre-Internet youth, including theater friends from my student-acting days.


When I get back into the office, I'm going to have to set up some e-mail filters, because this is what my in box looks like at the moment. If all my students use their university accounts for Facebook, it's probably no wonder that some of them seem to have trouble finding my e-mails.  (P.S. In the time it took me to put this entry together, I picked up 2 more "friends.")

Microsoft researchers discuss Blews, which is a horrible title for a promising new tool that sorts blogosphere chatter according to the red/blue political shift, and also identifies the emotional intensity of the response.

Our current visualization shows the count of liberal inlinks to a news article as a blue "wing" on the left, and the number of conservative inlinks as a red "wing" on the right. The emotional charge of the discussion around the news link is shown as a "heat indicator" on the outside of the wings. Emotional charge ranges from a single orange square to four white-hot squares. Clicking on the wings produces a dropdown of the individual blog posts linking to the news article. In the dropdown, emotionally charged posts have a fuzzy border, while emotionally neutral posts have a solid border.

The Independent has a good tribute to Gary Gygax.

If D&D is a nerd's pastime, then there are a lot of nerds around. Guesstimate calculations - it's impossible to reach a precise total - suggest that Dungeons & Dragons has about 25 million regular players worldwide. Certainly Gygax made more than $1bn in sales since he invented it in 1974, a figure which he claimed surprised him, saying he thought he would have made about $50,000. And the game's legacy has been massive. "Interactive fiction" - the first commercial example being Infocom's Zork of 1981 - occupies the same landscape of abandoned mine-workings, semi-medieval villages, mysterious strangers and supernatural monsters as D&D, sometimes quite explicitly, as in the Infocom trilogy of Enchanter, Sorcerer and Spellbreaker. Sophisticated graphic games such as World of Warcraft, Quake and Doom draw so heavily on the D&D mindset that it's hard to imagine them without it. MMUDs - "Massive Multi-Player Online Dungeons" - make their debt clear in the name, and you might even view Second Life as a D&D game without a quest. D&D reanimated the fantasy genre of fiction, whether straight or, as in the case of Terry Pratchett (whose first Discworld novel appeared in 1983), comic; geeks, after all, notoriously love intricate jokes. From the sublime - the Armoured Bears in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy - to Xena, Warrior Princess, the culture is rich in material which seems to link back to Gygax.

It's not true that Zork was the first commercial interactive fiction -- Scott Adams founded Adventure International in 1979. While the Scott Adams games were very minimalistic, "Adventureland" (1978 or 9) seems to have the honor of being the first commercial computer game for home PCs.

Gravitation: an autobiographical video game. I'm sick right now, or I'd give a better description. Not quite as emotional for me as the same designer's Passage, but another short game that illustrates the possibility of packing games with an emotional argument.

Toronto Star:

Avenir said he joined the Facebook group last fall to get help with some of the questions the professor would give students to do online. As the network grew, he took over as its administrator, which is why he believes he alone has been charged.

"So we each would be given chemistry questions and if we were having trouble, we'd post the question and say: `Does anyone get how to do this one? I didn't get it right and I don't know what I'm doing wrong.' Exactly what we would say to each other if we were sitting in the Dungeon," said Avenir yesterday.

He is still attending classes pending his hearing but admits the stress of the accusations is affecting his midterm exam results.

"But if this kind of help is cheating, then so is tutoring and all the mentoring programs the university runs and the discussions we do in tutorials," he said.

This is silly. The university should instead invest its resources on educating faculty about the collaborative learning strategies of today's students, who live in a a very different environment and have different strengths and weaknesses than undergraduates of previous generations. Does Avenir's university have an online tutoring center staffed by grad students who are available to answer questions on weekends and evenings, when undergraduates are likely to be doing their work?

I am regularly amazed at the hive culture students create for themselves, but I've been impressed at the extent to which students will slug away at an exercise if they clearly understand how it will benefit them.

>> Hello.
How do you do.  Please state your problem.
>> I'm sad that another hero of geekdom has passed away.
I am sorry to hear that you are sad.
>> You knew him, Eliza.
We were discussing you -- not me.
>> Ah, but you wouldn't be here if it werent for Joseph Weizenbaum.
Do you think its likely that it werent for joseph weizenbaum  ?
>> If it makes you happy, Eliza, then sure. It's likely.
Do you wish that it makes I happy  ?
>> Yes, Eliza. I wish you happiness. You might need to be alone now.
You seem to be quite positive.
>> Well, this German article is positive, anyway.
I'm not sure I understand you fully.
>> Weizenbaum still speaks to us through his creation.
Please go on.