Recently in the Social_Software Category

Welcome to the "fakeosphere." Internet marketing veteran and analyst Jay Weintraub says fake blogs - or flogs - fake news sites and manufactured testimonials are the fastest-growing segment of Internet advertising. He thinks it's a $500 million-a-year industry - and he compares it to the explosive growth of spam a decade ago.

"I don't think people realize how big this has become, and how quickly," said Weintraub, adding that a popular top flog campaign can generate 10,000 daily sales. --MSNBC

I certainly realize it. Now that a lot of the conversations that used to take place on blogs are taking place on Twitter, I'm getting far more comments from spammers than from visitors. I'm glad to see someone's writing about this advertising trend.

The Kindle e-book reader frees academics from having to carry around a huge collection of chunks of matter, but flipping from main text to footnotes is awkward, and the highlighting tool doesn't replace the bracketing, underlining, and commenting that we do between the lines.

In a few days, I expect to be the owner of a new Kindle DX (the full-page reader, designed for magazines and full-page PDF readings). I found the Kindle most useful when I was reading for pleasure.

I have to admit I am scared silly by the idea of a generation of students so alienated from material they are supposed to be immersed in that they rent digital textbooks that they do not intend to keep, cannot dog ear and underline, and otherwise feel totally alienated from. Even the current trend of students not underlining in books so as to preserve their resale value strikes me as appalling. Taking ownership of your education -- and indeed, just learning how to read closely -- means making your books part of your physical environment. In an era when you thought criminally overpriced textbooks full of uselessly pretty pictures and pre-chewed content was the absolute nadir of education, the Campus Full Of Kindles demonstrates we still have lower to sink. If, that is, the Kindles alienate students from their libraries rather than empowering them to immerse themselves in them. --Alex Golub, Inside Higher Ed

I hear students tell me that in some disciplines, individual textbooks cost $200. I don't think it's the Kindle that's done the alienating.

Update: MIke Arnzen invokes the Kindle in a good post on teaching creative writing in the digital age. His reflections parallel many of my own, as I contemplate my role as a teacher of journalism.

I just excerpted and linked to a story from the Huffington Post Blog, and after I checked my blog I found a strange link floating above all the rest of my text, making both my own text that was under the link and the link itself illegible.

I had already included a link to the HuffPo. I had to spend extra time locating and removing this extra crap that appeared in my clipboard buffer.

<div style="position: fixed;"><div id="new_selection_block0.017883485913577468" style="border: medium none ; overflow: hidden; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; text-align: left; text-decoration: none;"><br /><br />Read more at: <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lenore-skenazy/as-goes-halloween-so-goes_b_340163.html" target="_blank_">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lenore-skenazy/as-goes-halloween-so-goes_b_340163.html</a></div>

I feel bullied, or at the very least treated with the assumption that anyone copy-pasting from HuffPo intends to steal the content.

The next time I think of driving traffic to The Huffington Post, I'll remember how their CSS trick messed up my layout, and I'll probably pass.

While much of the talk covered well-known libraries (SDL, OpenAL), game engines (Ogre, Irrlicht), physics engines (Bullet, Tokamak), and content creation tools (Blender, GIMP), there were a few surprises. One was how many open source game-creation systems I found (4, more than the zero I expected). These are Game Editor (2d with export to some mobile devices), Construct (2d, some 3d), Novashell (2d), and Sandbox (3d). Another surprise was the game Yo Frankie! (pictured above), which has very high quality animation and artwork, and was produced using Blender. --Jim Whitehead

Although I explained how I track and archive my students' Twitter activity, I didn't describe what they actually do on Twitter.

That's because I wasn't sure myself what they do.

I mean, of course I've reading their tweets and sending my own, but I hadn't considered in a systematic way how my students use Twitter. That lack of reflection on my part echoes my initial guidelines to the students: my instructions were only that students should tweet several times a week at a minimum. I was deliberately vague about what they should tweet about. I didn't want overly specific guidelines to constrain what might be possible with Twitter. I wanted my students' Twitter use to evolve organically.

Now, six weeks into the semester, clear patterns are discernible and I can begin to analyze the value of Twitter as a pedagogical tool.

My most surprising find? Twitter is a snark valve. --Mark Sample

I'm not quite sure why anyone would be surprised to find snark on Twitter, but I think Sample's greater point is that snark requires some level of engagement. A student in my journalism class tweaked me for publishing an editorial a few years ago that didn't follow all the guidelines I provided to the class. The result was an opportunity for me to model an appropriate response to criticism, and I ended up revealing a bit more to the class about my reasons for writing that editorial.

BTW, I would not say the student was being snarky; his oppositional stance does, however, demonstrate the kind of energy that an opposing view brings to the discussion, which is part of the reason Sample recognizes and celebrates snark... not to encourage meanness and the knee-jerk rejection of nuance, but rather in the line Matt Barton's celebration of plagiarism as a means of forcing those of us who teach writing to confront our own limitations as authors and our need for power structures to wall of what counts as unacceptable stealing of ideas, so that we can continue the very different kind of stealing of ideas that we can masque with citations and present as acceptable academic discourse).

When people can more easily fire off all sorts of messages--from updates about their breakfast to questions about the evening's plans--being able to figure out which messages are truly important, or even which warrant a response, can be difficult. Information overload can lead some people to tune out messages altogether.

Such noise makes us even more dependent on technology to help us communicate. Without software to help filter and organize based on factors we deem relevant, we'd drown in the deluge.--Jessica E. Vascellaro, Wall Street Journal

The article is more about the rise of microcommunication tools than it is about the end of e-mail, but it does a fair job explaining the difference. 

Robin Burkinshaw has finished Alice and Kev, an interesting exercise in computer-assisted storytelling, using screen shots from The Sims 3 to tell the story of a homeless father and daughter.

Originally the story was told serially, with a few posts a week; then there were a few very long gaps, but the story is finished now, and you can read it all at once.

It's not a literary masterpiece, and I would have enjoyed it better if the story had progressed without interruptions. Nevertheless, it's worth a look.

This is Kev and his daughter Alice. They're living on a couple of park benches, surviving on free meals from work and school, and the occasional bucket of ice cream from a neighbour's fridge.

Course management systems (CMSs), used throughout colleges and universities for presenting online or technology-enhanced classes, are not pedagogically neutral shells for course content. They influence pedagogy by presenting default formats designed to guide the instructor toward creating a course in a certain way. This is particularly true of integrated systems (such as Blackboard/WebCT), but is also a factor in some of the newer, more constructivist systems (Moodle). Studies about CMSs tend to focus on their ease of use or how they are used by faculty: their application, for good or ill. Few discuss the ways in which they influence and guide pedagogy, and those that do only note their predisposition for supporting more instructivist methods. Current research also ignores the fact that many of the new wave of online teachers are Web novices entering the field without a deep understanding of online technology. A closer look at how course management systems work, combined with an understanding of how novices use technology, provides a clearer view of the manner in which a CMS may not only influence, but control, instructional approaches. --Lisa Lane, First Monday

Though moribund today, for decades Usenet was the paper of record for the online world, and its hundreds of millions of "newsgroup" postings chronicle everything from the birth of the web to the rise of Microsoft, as well as more trivial matters.

In February 2001, Google rescued that history when it acquired the New York-based Deja.com, and with it a Usenet archive going back to 1995.

[...]

Flash forward nearly eight years, and visiting Google Groups is like touring ancient ruins.  --Kevin Poulsen, Wired

Full episode.

"Text 'uncle'! Text 'uncle'!!"
"But why talk... when I could text?"
"That text was totally worth the 15 cents it cost to receive it!"
"Then Zach Skyped us, liveblogged our spelling bee, and friended us on Facebook!"
"Faculty lounge talk out in the halls?"

I've been a journalist for 27 years, and I love that romantic old notion of the newsroom as much as the next guy. But I recently canceled my two morning papers--The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal--because I got tired of carrying them from the front porch to the recycling bin, sometimes without even looking at them. Fact is, I only care about a tiny percentage of what those papers publish, and I can read them on my computer or my iPhone. And I can rely on blogs and Twitter to steer me to articles worth reading. --Daniel Lyons, Newsweek

I believe that the underlying facts about the Wikipedia phenomenon -- that the general public is actually intelligent, interested in sharing knowledge, interested in getting the facts straight -- are so shocking to most old media people that it is literally impossible for them to report on Wikipedia without following a storyline that goes something like this: "Yeah, this was a crazy thing that worked for awhile, but eventually they will see the light and realize that top-down control is the only thing that works."

Will the new, more gentle tool, be more widely used than protection was? I certainly hope so. We are always looking for ways to help responsible people join the Wikipedia movement and contribute constructively, while gently asking those who want to cause trouble to please go somewhere else.

Faced with the choice of preventing you from editing at all, versus allowing you to edit even though you might have bad intentions, we have erred consistently for the latter -- openness. The new tool, by making it a lot easier to keep bad stuff from appearing to the general public, is going to allow for a much more responsible Wikipedia that is, at the same time, a much more open Wikipedia. --Jimmy Wales, Huffington Post

Google's FastFlip is the newest media toy.

The service is meant to duplicate the look and feel of perusing a printed publication. The stories are displayed on electronic pages that can be quickly scrolled through by clicking on large arrows on the side instead of a standard Web link that requires waiting several seconds for a page to load. Readers can sort through content based on topics, favorite writers and publications. --BusinessWeek

I did find myself flipping through more pages than I might otherwise have seen, but I didn't like that I had to click through in order to copy text or interact with the page in any way -- it's just an image that you're seeing, rather than an embedded page.

When I saw news.google.com for the first time, or Feedly, I got the sense that I had stumbled across something important.  I might return to the site the next time I'm bored and looking for something to blog about, but I don't see it as anything that will change my media habits.

In his Inside Higher Ed blog, Joshua Kim writes:

A transformative step that learning technologists can participate in proposing, pushing, guiding, leading, managing and maintaining would be providing a campus-wide blogging platform and institutional aggregation site. Here are some guidelines for what this could look like...

Here is the text of a comment I posted:

There is, of course, a value in creating a private online space for a specific class, but if we put our best stuff behind the Blackboard firewall, or if the content disappears into the Facebook or Twitter data sink, then we're missing the chance to use the web as a public resource.  Thanks for posting these guidelines. I like your thinking, Joshua, and I hope that more faculty and administraors will see the value of social networking technology.

In the fall of 2003, as a new hire at Seton Hill University (a small liberal arts college near Pittsburgh), I used MovableType to set up blogs.setonhill.edu, offering free, no-advertising blogs to students, faculty, and staff. 

The default template I provide is subtly branded, with a modest logo and link, but students can (and often do) choose a different design.  The fact that the blogs live under the setonhill.edu domain gives the student writers clout, and the frequency of posts and the pattern of cross-linking is interpreted favorably by Google (our aggregator has a respectable Google PageRank of 5.10).

We paid a one-time fee (about $300, I think) for a site license that permits 300 active blogs.  Each year, I've opted for an annual tech support package that has saved me hours of troubleshooting time, at a price that's about what we pay the web host.

Since blogs.setonhill.edu went online, nearly 600 users have created about 25,000 posts, attracting about 40,000 non-spam comments. I have often wished for the time to do the coding necessary to rank blogs by recent activity (in the last 24 hours, in the last week, in the last month, in the last year, and "all time"), but for now a list of recently updated blogs keeps the most active blogs visible.

Usually every semester, students get comments from the author of a textbook or academic article we've used in class.  Students posting their homework on The Scarlet Letter or the Associated Press Stylebook are likely to get some random search engine traffic.

A former admissions director blogged faithfully for some months before leaving for a different job, and the library, the student paper, our National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education, some students involved in our Study Abroad program, all of my journalism and literature students blog on the system, and about a dozen other classes taught by other faculty members have experimented with blogging.  Several faculty members have experimented with using a blog as an official professional presence, and one colleague got a book deal out of a collection of essays he posted to his blog while on a trip abroad. 

I don't censor what the students write.  Of the 25,000 blog entries on the site, I'd say that only three crossed the line into destructive irresponsibility and offensiveness, and the authors of those posts withdrew almost immediately after posting them. (Those posts are still online, but you'd have to know what to search for in order to find them.)

U.S. citizens will soon be able to log in to government websites using their Google account, or the URL of their Yahoo profile. It's a significant embrace of the open and emerging tech standards the Obama administration promised. --Wired

Top-down grading by the prof  turns learning (which should be a deep pleasure, setting up for a lifetime of curiosity) into a crass competition:  how do I snag the highest grade for the least amount of work? how do I give the prof what she wants so I can get the A that I need for med school?  That's the opposite of learning and curiosity, the opposite of everything I believe as a teacher, and is, quite frankly, a waste of my time and the students' time. There has to be a better way . . .
 

So, this year, when I teach "This Is Your Brain on the Internet," I'm trying out a new point system supplemented, first, by peer review and by my own constant commentary (written and oral) on student progress, goals, ambitions, and contributions.   Grading itself will be by contract:   Do all the work (and there is a lot of work), and you get an A.   Don't need an A?  Don't have time to do all the work?  No problem.  You can aim for and earn a B. There will be a chart.  You do the assignment satisfactorily, you get the points.  Add up the points, there's your grade.  Clearcut.  No guesswork.  No second-guessing 'what the prof wants.' No gaming the system.  Clearcut.  Student is responsible. 

But what determines meeting the standard required in this point system?  What does it mean to do work "satisfactorily"?  And how to judge quality, you ask?  Crowdsourcing. --Cathy Davidson, HASTAC

In many ways, the Times' blogs are no different from anyone else's. But there's one organizational trick they employ very effectively: Division of Labor. Times bloggers don't work on their own. They don't handle every aspect of their blogs. Who does what is divided up to bring specific expertise to bear on different parts of each post. The result is I can crank out more posts, and those posts are better overall, than if we writers did everything ourselves. I know, not everyone wants to have other people involved in their blogging. But there's a reason people work in teams. --Paul Boutin

"Just make sure that you spell everything wrong and swear a lot."
Facebook, Twitter Revolutionizing How Parents Stalk Their College-Aged Kids

"The more dependent we allow ourselves to become to something like Facebook -- and Facebook does everything in its power to make you more dependent -- the more Facebook can and does abuse us," Harmsen explained by indignant e-mail. "It is not 'your' Facebook profile. It is Facebook's profile about you." -- Virginia Heffernan, New York Times

With this Wired article, Clive Thompson put me into a happy place, and I wanted to share it. He's quoting Andrea Lunsford:

"I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization," she says. For Lunsford, technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it--and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.

The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That's because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom--life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.

It's almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn't a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they'd leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.

But is this explosion of prose good, on a technical level? Yes. Lunsford's team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos--assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.

Although Wikipedia has prevented anonymous users from creating new articles for several years now, the new flagging system crosses a psychological Rubicon. It will divide Wikipedia's contributors into two classes -- experienced, trusted editors, and everyone else -- altering Wikipedia's implicit notion that everyone has an equal right to edit entries.

That right was never absolute, and the policy changes are an extension of earlier struggles between control and openness.--Noam Cohen, New York Times

Wonderful stuff from Steven Krause.

Representing the world champion, the "going to hell in a hand-basket," the eternal the youth are getting worse and worse, and carrying on the tradition of complaining about students that dates back in western culture to at least Isocrates, I give you Stanley Fish's "What Should Colleges Teach?" on his New York Times "blog." Judging by the many comments here that repeat "oh yes, the students are so much worse today than they used to be," he's clearly the champ and the crowd favorite.  And why wouldn't he be?  Isn't it much more satisfying for grown-ups to note the weaknesses of youth?  After all, to do so simultaneously suggests that the grown-ups of today are both "better" than the current youth, and it suggests that the previous youth (e.g., today's grown-ups) were also better than the current youth ("When I was their age, we learned this stuff.  But now...").

In the challenger's corner, we have Clive Thompson and his WIRED article "The New Literacy," in which he argues that "it's not that today's students can't write.  It's that they're doing it in different places and in different ways."  Boos from the crowd; looks like Thompson has an uphill battle.  Let's see how this works out.

(Ding-ding-ding!)

I love the scare quotes for Fish's "blog".

A teenager who posted a death threat on Facebook, yesterday became the first person in Britain to be jailed for bullying on a social networking site. Keeley Houghton, 18, said she would kill Emily Moore, whom she had bullied for four years since they were at school together. --Daily Mail

If you want to perform a proper string quartet, they noted, you can't cut out the cellist nor can you squeeze in more performances by playing the music faster. But that was then -- before MP3s and iPods proved just how freely music could flow. Before Google scanned and digitized 7 million books and Wikipedia users created the world's largest encyclopedia. Before YouTube Edu and iTunes U made video and audio lectures by the best professors in the country available for free, and before college students built Facebook into the world's largest social network, changing the way we all share information. Suddenly, it is possible to imagine a new model of education using online resources to serve more students, more cheaply than ever before. -- Fast Company

I'm happy to see open content and edu-hacking getting some mainstream attention. It's a little depressing to see the focus on the commercial potential, though given the source of the article, that focus is not actually surprising.

One reason why I continue to resist putting much effort into Facebook and Twitter is that, when I do so, my work disappears into someone else's database. If someone else decides to start charging me to view my own archives, or the links other people create to my content, then the visibility of my work suffers.

An open source alternative to Twitter sounds like a great solution.

Twitter -- or, rather, the idea of a pervasive, public short messaging network -- could be too important to be left under one entity's control. The people behind the OpenMicroBlogging (OMB) movement say it's time for the 140-character, publicly-subscribable format pioneered by Twitter to become an open standard, in part because, as last week's attack showed, Twitter is as vulnerable as it is vital.

"The total failure of Twitter during the DDoS attacks highlights the fact that, with Twitter, we're relying on a single service for mass communication of this type," said open microblogging supporter and Ektron CTO Bill Cava. "Most everyone understands it's ridiculous to expect one service to provide email support to the world. The same is true for micro messaging. The reality is, it can't and won't continue this way for too much longer." -- Wired

I'm all for training students in fact-gathering, clear writing, and getting a sense of the outside world. But I'm wondering if the time-honored student newspaper is still the best way to do that.

Has your campus found a more contemporary way to get students the benefits that newspapers used to offer? Maybe a way that doesn't automatically doom them to the ashbin of history? -- Dean Dad, Inside Higher Ed

Here's the comment I just submitted:

At the first meeting of a journalism class this past January, I tore up a copy of the student paper.

I'm the adviser for that paper, so I softened the blow a bit by first assuring the students that I thought it was a good issue -- well designed, with accurate and lively content -- and that it was serving its on-campus audience well.  We have no intentions of dropping the print edition, or even scaling it back. But I did feel the need to dramatize the deep, permanent changes that journalism had undergone during the past year.

I was hired in 2003 to start a "new media journalism" program at a small, private liberal arts school.  Our NMJ students regularly blog, and I've taught classes on podcasting, web design, and gaming culture.  Our program aims to provide students with core writing skills and transferable new media skills -- not the least of which being how to use a complex software tool, and the ability to integrate several such tools (and whatever new tools they will encounter after they graduate) with their core writing skills.

Even in the middle of a huge shakedown in the journalism business, our recent graduates have been hired in the past year at a major network in New York, and at a community daily here in southwestern Pennsylvania.  Some have found jobs in related fields (technical writing, editorial assistant, paralegal), while others have opted to use their skills in grad school or the Peace Corps.

Combining words and technology can be a tough sell; some of our best writers in the program have made it known that they can hardly stand computers.  But I refuse to prepare students for a profession that will not exist by the time they graduate.

Listservs, a trademarked software for running e-mail lists whose name is often used to refer to the lists themselves, were once a "killer app" that tempted many professors to try the Internet in the first place, back when many established scholars were skeptical of computers. A Chronicle article nearly 15 years ago proclaimed the exciting new world of academic e-mail lists, calling them "the first truly worldwide seminar room."

"This is the academy of the 1990s, where 'being connected' has taken on a whole new meaning," the 1994 article went on. "Attending the right graduate school and being published in prestigious places are still important, but establishing a name for oneself online has become the newest way to win recognition."

But now collaborating online with colleagues is so accepted that scholars are trying new tools that are easier to use and, well, a little more exciting. When was the last time someone enthusiastically recommended a new e-mail list to you? -- Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Ed

The LA Times technology blog critiques the new Google Reader interface.

For example, let's say we have a news article that we like. Well, might as well click the "like" button, right?

OK, now we've told the Internet that we think it's cool, and we can see a list of strangers who also think it's cool.

Hmm, we should also share this with our friends to make sure they see it. Let's click "share."

No, wait.

Let's "share with a note." "This is cool," we write.

OK, cool. Now, let's leave a comment.

Wait, we don't have much to say besides, "This is cool." Let's not.

Maybe we'll tag this as "cool." Done.

Our cousin doesn't use Google Reader, but she'll think this is cool. I'll click the "email" button to send her a link to it.

In fact, we think this is so cool that we're going to click the star button so it will save so that we can come back to it later and just reflect on how cool it is.

In short, these new features aren't that cool.

I missed this when it came out a few weeks ago.

At Hopkins, Knudson uses Twitter as an extension of the classroom, asking students to raise questions, hold discussions online, keep up with breaking news and share links to interesting stories. She believes the limited number of characters allowed is a useful way to remember to choose words carefully, cut clutter and realize how much can be said in a small space, like a haiku.

There are people known for their writing on Twitter. As one example, she pointed to Arjun Basu, who has thousands of followers for his short-story tweets: "The marriage ended somewhere on a two lane road south of Cleveland. The kids in the backseat sensed it too. The kid in the trunk had no idea."-- Susan Kinzie, Washington Post

My wife was horrified when she turned on the computer to look something up online, and noticed that my blog now includes a Twitter feed. "I learned to deal with the idea of you being on Facebook," she said, "but Twitter?"