Technology: August 2008 Archive Page

I'm teaching a 200-level "Writing for the Internet" class, with students ranging from seniors to first-semester freshmen.  Our opening unit is on social, academic, and professional conventions, foregrounding the fact that the internet on which young people play and learn is the same internet in which the adults in their lives are teaching and working (and playing, and learning).

Senior Denamarie Ercolani, responding to an April NYT article about the prevalence of IM shortcuts in high-schoolers' written work, writes

I, personally, have never used emoticons, text shortcuts or omitted proper grammar and puncuation in my schoolwork, but outside of essays and other schoolwork, I find myself using this new form of communication frequently. Any type of writing is real writing even if it is improper.

You can see for yourself what some other students had to say about that article.  In a comment on Denamarie's blog, MS replied:

As an English teacher, all that I have to say is that these IM's and text messages are destroying the English language faster than anything else... This abomination of our language is not cute, hip or expressive; it is dangerous.

I sympathize deeply with MS, and expect that any student of MS's will be well prepared for the rigors of college writing.  Yet I can't share MS's hatred of txtspk -- a wildly successful, specialized offshoot of English, characterized by its reliance upon thumb power, creative use of abbreviations, and the expectation that any useful bit of communication will likely involve numerous rapid back-and-forth sallies.

The possibilities make the mind reel.

YouTube Comment Snob is a Firefox extension that filters out undesirable comments from YouTube comment threads. You can choose to have any of the following rules mark a comment for removal:

• More than # spelling mistakes: The number of mistakes is customizable, and the extension uses Firefox's built-in spell checker.
• All capital letters
• No capital letters
• Doesn't start with a capital letter
• Excessive punctuation (!!!! ????)
• Excessive capitalization
• Profanity

I'm preparing to introduce a class of English majors to Blender3D. Many of the online tutorials I've found spend way too much time introducing the interface, which is of course worth some attention because it is non-standard, and in the days before YouTube, I remember being so confused by it that I gave up on Blender, only to come back again later when I found James Chronister's awesome tutorial (sadly a little out-of-date now). At any rate, this video crash course does a good job.

From a recent study of university libraries. There's plenty in this report on digital scholarship, print journals, and comparative approaches of the various disciplines.

Neither faculty members nor librarians expect e-books to constitute a viable substitute for print books; they are more generally seen as complementary.

Somewhat oddly given this low level of faculty interest in e-books, many librarians consider the provisioning of e-books an important role, and substantially more expect it to be one in five years (see Figure 16). This enthusiasm is notably higher at the largest institutions, with one-quarter of librarians anticipating a transformative role and two-thirds believing that licensing and making available e-books is an important library function, both numbers well above those of smaller schools. Librarians' enthusiasm in the face of a relative lack of interest from faculty may indicate that librarians are responding to student demand or expecting future faculty demand.

It is also possible that librarians believe wider use of e-books will improve their ability to provide library services in a cost-effective manner, and are interested in driving the transformation of the book medium.

Thanks for the link, Rosemary. From The Atlantic.

Economists and ecologists sometimes speak of the "tragedy of the commons"--the way rational individual actions can collectively reduce the common good when resources are limited. How this applies to traffic safety may not be obvious. It's easy to understand that although it pays the selfish herdsman to add one more sheep to common grazing land, the result may be overgrazing, and less for everyone. But what is the limited resource, the commons, in the case of driving? It's attention. Attending to a sign competes with attending to the road. The more you look for signs, for police, and at your speedometer, the less attentive you will be to traffic conditions. The limits on attention are much more severe than most people imagine. And it takes only a momentary lapse, at the wrong time, to cause a serious accident.

Mike Arnzen writes about the thinking behind his decision to revise his syllabus to include a statement on the use of electronic devices in class.

In some ways, there's no difference between a student texting and a student flipping through a magazine in the back row of a class, but there are times when we use technology to multitask and this is where the issue gets thorny and complex. What if we're discussing Foucault's "Panopticism" in the classroom and a student wants to quickly do some web research on a referenced person in the article, like Jeremy Bentham? I wouldn't want to ban such ambitious impulses to learn more, so long as it pertained to the subject at hand or contributed to the collaborative learning of the class.

What I'm really concerned about is multitasking that puts personal interest above the class interest, and the fetishism of technology that reinforces gizmo play for its own sake. My hope is that I can help students consciously rethink their gizmos as tools for learning and research and communication, and to respect the social space and dynamic of the classroom.

Mike does a great job putting forth the thinking behind his new policy, which carefully instructs the students with examples of what counts as an actionable offense. My own syllabus, rather than listing sample infractions, refers more generally to common sense and common courtesy.

I've considered having students in each class come up with their own policy on the use of electronic devices, since, for instance, students in "New Media Projects" will be sitting at machines programming in Flash or working on 3D animations, and I hope the in-class activity will be challenging enough that they'll want to spend class time on the course material. But in that class I'll be asking them to follow online tutorials, and to use the online user forums and tutorials (as well as my personal feedback) to find answers to their technical problems, so I would expect them to be online.

Our dependence on electronic gadgets -- hand-held yesterday, ear-mounted today, cranially implanted tomorrow -- makes classroom manners a moving target.  Manners depend on perception and context.  Several years ago, when I was experimenting with using a PDA to do all my in-class housekeeping (such as taking notes on class participation and oral presentations), a student was offended because, as he saw it, I was playing with my gadget instead of paying attention.  And once during an inspiring faculty workshop, I was pouring out my brainstorming into a word processor file, when the leader interrupted her presentation to ask, "Could the typing please stop?"  Whenever my preferred method of staying on task is perceived as rude, it stings a little.  But manners are socially constructed tools, and manners differ as contexts differ.  At academic conferences, I regularly see more than half the audience tapping or thumbing away; yet when a rising freshman asks, during a summer orientation, "Should I bring my laptop to class?", I reply that each professor's preference will vary. The student using technology during class may, of course, simply be wasting time. But as long as the technology does not disrupt anyone else, I tend to give the student the benefit of the doubt.

It's downright rude when students entertain themselves instead of listening to their peers reciting their work, and really it's no different if they choose to ignore me when I introduce a new concept or the next assignment. I try to work around this by promising that I'll give students some in-class writing time in the last 15 or so minutes, but that for now they need to pay attention to this next topic. (Is that bargaining? Conceding too much power over how to spend our limited time together? Are my expectations too low?) 

Somewhere I heard of a professor whose policy is that if a phone goes off in class, he will answer it. I can't imagine myself doing that. Not only am I concerned about appearing to be heavy-handed, and I'm also not sure that I need a separate policy for technological distractions.  Do we have or need to articulate a policy to deal with the student who sits, with arms folded, refusing to take notes (ever!) ?

Many years ago (not at SHU) in a technical writing class, a student who sat in about the second row often fell asleep leaning her head against the wall.  I had the fleeting thought that I should pretend to fall asleep during her final report, but rejected the idea. (Yes, she would have remembered the event, but for all I know she had narcolepsy, was up all night working a night-shift job to pay for her education, etc. etc.)  Instead I just spent more time right in front of her row, more time making eye contact with her.  She was actually a very good writer who made substantial, lasting contributions to the class. I'm not sure that shaming her in class would have helped. (Had she started to snore soporifically, so that other students also dropped off one by one, that would have been different.)

Another time, at the same school, I taught a class with a student who kept her chair aligned so that she was directly behind another student, no matter where I was in the room. She frequently talked with that student during class at inappropriate times, and when I looked up, I'd see the student in front whispering a reply, so I always assumed that the visible student was the troublemaker.  One day the fall guy was absent, so the ventriloquist sat in another chair so that she could pull the same routine on someone else.  At the end of the year, when I didn't give the ventriloquist her full marks for class participation, she argued with me on the grounds that she never missed a class. 

Such cases of deliberate, immature, low-tech rudeness are rare, but the common technological infractions are often the result of simple carelessness. It's happened more than once that a student who was in the front of the room had to interrupt her own presentation, walk back to her desk, get her bleeping phone out of her purse, and shut it off.  If I taught lectures with 100 students, where phones rang several times during each class period and the offenders were always anonymous, I might get more upset about the use of electronic gadgets. But so far, I find that the self-moderating social system functions fairly well, and what goes around comes around.

Facebook's advertisers in ur feed, annoying ur friends. (Wired)

Undeterred by the setbacks with its Beacon platform last year, Facebook is rolling out more advertising that uses your friends to sell you stuff.

The latest Pew report:

Since 2006, the proportion of Americans who say they get news online at least three days a week has increased from 31% to 37%. About as many people now say they go online for news regularly (at least three days a week) as say they regularly watch cable news (39%); substantially more people regularly get news online than regularly watch one of the nightly network news broadcasts (37% vs. 29%).

Since 2006, daily online news use has increased by about a third, from 18% to 25%. However, as the online news audience grows, the educational divide in online news use - evident since the internet's early days in the mid-1990s - also is increasing. Currently, 44% of college graduates say they get news online every day, compared with just 11% of those with a high school education or less.

Net-Newsers and Integrators take advantage of a range of web features to get the news. Roughly four-in-ten (39%) Net-Newsers - and about a third of Integrators (32%) - have gotten a news story emailed to them in the past week. And while 30% of Net-Newsers regularly watch news online, 19% regularly listen to news on the web.

Net-Newsers and Integrators also rely on news and political blogs as a part of their news diet. Roughly a quarter of Net-Newsers (26%) and somewhat fewer Integrators (19%) say they regularly read blogs on politics or current events. Overall, only 10% of the public regularly reads political and news blogs.

Other tidbits...

• " Integrators, who get the news from both traditional sources and the internet, are a more engaged, sophisticated and demographically sought-after audience segment than those who mostly rely on traditional news sources. Integrators share some characteristics with a smaller, younger, more internet savvy audience segment - Net-Newsers - who principally turn to the web for news, and largely eschew traditional sources. "
• "Most of the loss in [newspaper] readership since 2006 has come among those who read the print newspaper; just 27% say they read only the print version of a daily newspaper yesterday, down from 34% in 2006."
• "About a third of those younger than 25 (34%) say they get no news on a typical day, up from 25% in 1998."

Josh suggest this story. Experimental software now under development can automatically swap eyes and facial expressions from one face to another, and the software is being tested as a way to anonymize faces that appear in Google Maps.  This story is about more personal, more targeted, use of image-processing software. (NYT)

Ellen Robinson, a volunteer college trustee in Denver, commissioned Sara Frances, a local photographer, to shoot a formal family portrait to hang prominently in their new house. Working for $150 an hour, Ms. Frances changed expressions of family members and swapped the dog's head between images. She slenderized bodies, adjusted skin tones and changed the color of several outfits to make for a more unified palette. She even straightened the collar on one son's shirt.

"You're spending a lot of money on these portraits," Ms. Robinson said. "They're supposed to last a lifetime -- generations, really. So why not get a helping hand to do it right?"

Photography has always represented, to some degree, a distortion of reality, said Per Gylfe, the manager of the digital media lab at the International Center of Photography in New York. A photographer can create different impressions of the same scene by including some elements in the frame and omitting others, by changing lenses, or by tweaking the color and tone of the image in the darkroom.

"We've always taken photographs as proofs of events, and we probably never should have," Mr. Gylfe said.

It's hard to believe that the word "hello" entered common discourse so recently, and that an inventor suggested it in a conscious attempt to develop a protocol for using the telephone. (Wired, apparently borrowing heavily from Wikipedia.)

Bell's famous first words spoken over what we now call the telephone -- "Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you." -- were delivered without any greeting at all.

When he did weigh in on the subject, Bell proposed using "ahoy, ahoy," the age-old seafarer's hail. And, in fact, ahoy was the first greeting used, until Edison suggested hello.

An iPhone is too expensive for my budget, but I'm still happy to see this, from Wired:

Open iPhone. Go to App Store. Download Frotz. The classic text adventures from Infocom made us all learn the shortest possible way to write responses, and this brevity of input seems perfectly suited for iPhone use.

Chris Brogan just posted a horror story that made me make backups of everything I've ever uploaded to Google Docs. Note to self: use Google Apps as a redundant backup only.

Monday afternoon, after lunch, Nick came back from lunch to find out that he couldn't get into his Gmail account. Further, he couldn't get into anything that Google made (beside search) where his account credentials once worked. When attempting to log in, Nick got a single line message:

Sorry, your account has been disabled. [?]

That's it.

Nick sent a message or three to Google for support. He got back this:

Thank you for your report. We've completed our investigation. Because our
investigation was inconclusive, we are unable to return your account at
this time. At Google we take the privacy and security of our users very
seriously. For this reason, we're unable to reveal any further information
about this account.

And that's it.

That's not quite it... apparently Nick had paid for the corporate version of Google Apps, and therefore had access to technical support with a human being, who was able to resolve the problem. But the rest of us don't have that option.