Recently in the Technology Category

At the 2009 Educause Conference, Inside HIgher Ed reports on The Cloud.

Woo, who took the anti-cloud position, said that just because higher education is moving en masse toward outsourcing services such as e-mail and data management to external providers does not necessarily mean it is moving in the right direction.

"I'm not sure why every conversation about cloud computing always has to do with 'When?' " Woo said. "Why aren't we asking, 'Why?' "

She cited recent Gmail outages and an anecdote from an organization she had advised who had said a cloud storage provider lost its data. "There are security risks, there are privacy risks -- where is that student data being stored? Where is that research data being stored? .... How is the private sector going to feel when when we can't guarantee that our research data our faculty are generating for them is safe?"

Dieckmann laid out the pro side first from an economic perspective, noting that economy has become a watchword as many IT departments seek to maintain a high level of service even as their budgets are pared down.

Here at Sunlight we want the government to STOP publishing bills, and data in PDFs and Flash and start publish them in open, machine readable formats like XML and XSLT. What's most frustrating is, Government seems to transform documents that are in XML into PDF to release them to the public, thinking that that's a good thing for citizens. Government: We can turn XML into PDFs. We can't turn PDFs into XML.

Flash isn't off the hook either. Government has spent lots of time and money developing flash tools to allow citizens to view charts and graphs online, and while we're happy the government is interested in allowing citizens to do this, Government's primary method of disclosure should not be these visualizations, but rather publishing the APIs and datasets that allow citizens to make their own. Only after those things are completed to the fullest extent possible should government be working on its own visualizations. While Adobe may say in their open government whitepaper:

"Since the advent of the web, an entire infrastructure has evolved to enable public access to information. Such technologies include HTML, Adobe PDF, and Adobe® Flash® technology."

This is nonsense. --Sunlight Labs (via)

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.

Looking forward to this promising resource.

I've wrapped the blogs up,  tidied them up, corrected & updated them and put them into 1 handy ebook for you to download and take home. It means you have have an all-in-one desktop reference to giving your multimedia journalism more spark, and getting in the entrepreneurial mindset.

Chapters include: video, audio, storytelling and branding.

It'll be available from Monday, it's 100% free and there's no registration or anything. Just click on the button and you'll be able to download it outright. --Adam Westbrook

Great stuff from Mark Marino... not only is the content fascinating, but the blog-sized presentation, for discusison, of a fundamental theoretical concept is a great example of what the blogging medium can do for (and to) scholarship.

Item for today: =

In Donald Knuth and Luis Trabb Pardo's article on the history of computers, the note the moment at which = moves from equivalency to assignment. Here is a moment where mathematical notation and code separate on the basis of assignment, where it moves from a real that represents abstractions to a realm that controls memory locations.

For all intents and purposes
Algebra: x = 0; and computer code: x=0;
seem to mean the same thing.

However, on the most fundamental levels, they are not. The one establishes equivalence of signs. The other tells the computer to store the value 0 in the location represented by x.

In CCS, we have not just a mathematical system, for surely much of algorithms is mathematical. However, when critics talk about the materiality of these performative declarations in programming languages, they are talking about this latter notion of x=2.

Again, I don't want to rule out the possibility of critically analyzing mathematics. I just want to talk about this moment of the separation, where the computational instructions gain additional semantic meaning because there signs are not just representations, but commands with material ramifications. --Mark Marino, Critical Code Studies

Clearly, the computer re-energized Bukowski and gave him new life as a writer. Yet much of Bukowski's late writing was about old age and death. The computer fit into this. In poems, letters, and in The Captain, Bukowski chronicled his struggles with the computer. The shutdowns, the lost poems, the time at the shop for repairs. This mirrored Bukowski's own health problems and trips to the hospital. The computer represented the writer in old age. The computer and the digital revolution also suggest the end of the book and of print. As a result, the computer spelled the death of the traditional author, a fact that must have struck Bukowski as he faced death himself. Yet all was not doom and gloom as the computer (old age and death) also provides the material and means for new poems. So the computer also represents the old writer's creative impulse. Jed Birmingham, Reality Studio

In a bid to save money, the station is planning to reassign the technicians who operate the electronic prompters that feed scripted news copy to the anchors while they're on the air. Instead, the station wants its anchors to do the job themselves.

[...]

"Instead of orchestrating coverage, fact-checking, handling breaking news, paying attention to the [newscast], engaging reporters, questioning authorities, covering bad writing and technical mistakes, anchors will now spend most of their time" running the prompter, said one newsroom employee, who asked not to be identified because he's not authorized to discuss the change. "It's kind of like a literal one-man band -- singing, banging a drum, crashing cymbals, playing a trumpet and strumming a guitar . . . except we're not playing show tunes here." Washington Post

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. 

The AP recently raised eyebrows last year when it announced its intent to charge bloggers who quote from an AP story, and again more recently when it announced vague plans to track the spread of AP stories through secret embedded codes.

The AP's position is that if search engines are making money delivering customers to AP content, then the AP should get a piece of the action.  Here's a suggestion that might actually work, without trampling the fair use doctrine in the dust, and without relying on magic digital pixie dust tracking technology.

Financial wires have long charged higher rates for the timeliest delivery of such information as stock quotes, so the approach is not without precedent. As more and more news organizations wrestle with the need to create premium products, the AP's experiments will emerge as valuable case studies in high-stakes bets.

Time-based pricing could take any number of forms, including early access to an index of stories that would enable participating search engines to begin crawling the news sooner than the other guys.

Another option under discussion is the earlier release of actual stories, in effect setting up some AP customers as places that users would come to rely on for the earliest look at AP content.

What's interesting about these ideas is that they could generate much-needed revenue without jeopardizing journalism's civic purpose of wide distribution of news. --Bill Mitchell (Poynter)

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

When the University announced its Kindle e-reader pilot program last May, administrators seemed cautiously optimistic that the e-readers would both be sustainable and serve as a valuable academic tool. But less than two weeks after 50 students received the free Kindle DX e-readers, many of them said they were dissatisfied and uncomfortable with the devices. --Fox News

Yes, I interact with students via e-mail and the Web. And computers can be great for teaching when it's difficult or impossible for students to get to a brick-and-mortar classroom. But for me, teaching involves f2f (there, you see, I've gone and used a computer term in a sentence). I want to listen to students talking to me, to one another, having a spontaneous conversation about the subject. It's fun. It's energizing. Online, I just don't feel that kind of electricity. It's probably just a personal preference.

But I do see some significant downsides to distance education. It's touted for all the wrong reasons. It's cheap: yes, perhaps, if you discount the price of the technology (it turns out that computers cost more than people, that computer techs cost more than entry-level instructors, and that software costs more, not less, than textbooks, and it must be constantly upgraded). --Dennis Barron

Silly headline, from a University of Washington press release.

Second, fourth and sixth grade children with and without handwriting disabilities were able to write more and faster when using a pen than a keyboard to compose essays, according to new research.

The study, headed by Virginia Berninger, a University of Washington professor of educational psychology who studies normal writing development and writing disabilities, looked at children's ability to write the alphabet, sentences and essays using a pen and a keyboard.

"Children consistently did better writing with a pen when they wrote essays. They wrote more and they wrote faster." said Berninger.

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

From the president's prepared remarks to school children, scheduled for tomorrow.

Every single one of you has something you're good at. Every single one of you has something to offer. And you have a responsibility to yourself to discover what that is. That's the opportunity an education can provide. 

Maybe you could be a good writer - maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper - but you might not know it until you write a paper for your English class. Maybe you could be an innovator or an inventor - maybe even good enough to come up with the next iPhone or a new medicine or vaccine - but you might not know it until you do a project for your science class. Maybe you could be a mayor or a Senator or a Supreme Court Justice, but you might not know that until you join student government or the debate team.

And no matter what you want to do with your life - I guarantee that you'll need an education to do it. --Barack Obama, whitehouse.gov

Interesting that Obama mentions "articles in a newspaper," rather than "articles for a news website" or "articles for a RSS feed" or "articles for cranially-implanted holographic simulation networks."  But he does end with a reference to social networking.

Do you think the hand-washing reference is just a little bit... I don't know... pandering?  Is the President going out of his way to make Republicans look silly for opposing some Oval Office happytalk? 

I remember some years ago reading an article that used a similar strategy to describe exactly what it would feel like to stand on Mars.

One of things Ford wasn't ready for is the weird smell.

"From the [spacewalks] there really is a distinct smell of space when they come back in," Ford said from the station in a Friday night news conference. "It's like...something I haven't ever smelled before, but I'll never forget it. You know how those things stick with you."

In the past, astronauts have described the smell of space as something akin to gunpowder or ozone.

The sounds of spaceflight have also been surprising, especially when Discovery fires up its large maneuvering thrusters, Ford said. -- Fox News

Some of these wacky rookies forgot to strap themselves down while sleeping, and just as the gruff, no-nonsense mission commander is in the conference room asking for a more experienced crew, the snoring rookies float past the camera.  The next morning, they try to make popcorn in the kitchen, and watch with wide eyes as various items ping-pong throughout the cabin, causing a low-gravity chain-reaction that sends a communications satellite to fiery doom.  When a capsule of Soviet cosmonauts starts running out of air, the motley crew of unlikely recruits is the only rescue team available. Will they show NASA they have the right stuff, or will NASA tell them to stuff it?  Starring Don Knotts, Tim Conway, and Leslie Nielsen. Introducing Mischa the Chimp as Dr. Bananas.

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

A technology win from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

Rather and Potter emptied the victim's pockets of his cell phone and wallet and told the victim to "get out of here," police said.

The victim ran off while Rather and Potter headed toward Fifth Avenue, police said.

When officers showed up at the victim's home, he was simultaneously canceling his bank and credit cards, and using a computer to track the location of his cell phone through its GPS, police said.

Okay, so it's after midnight on a Friday night... but surely someone's awake in a call center, somewhere in the world.

After following the maze of links for getting contacting Verizon by telephone, I get this screen, which dead ends.

I presume there's supposed to be a phone number or a chat applet or a dancing teddy bear in that box, but it's empty -- both on Firefox and Safari. So my quest to get Verizon to undo its URL hijacking is not over. On the upside, I learned how to do a screen capture on my new MacBook Pro.

I'm blogging the Verizon tech support number so I can find it again -- it's very hard to find it on the website..

1-800-837-4966

 

 

OMG! The prez is in ur internet, killin ur freedomz!

The new version would allow the president to "declare a cybersecurity emergency" relating to "non-governmental" computer networks and do what's necessary to respond to the threat. Other sections of the proposal include a federal certification program for "cybersecurity professionals," and a requirement that certain computer systems and networks in the private sector be managed by people who have been awarded that license.

"I think the redraft, while improved, remains troubling due to its vagueness," said Larry Clinton, president of the Internet Security Alliance, which counts representatives of Verizon, Verisign, Nortel, and Carnegie Mellon University on its board. "It is unclear what authority Sen. Rockefeller thinks is necessary over the private sector. Unless this is clarified, we cannot properly analyze, let alone support the bill."--Declan McCullagh, C|Net

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.

I've been sitting on a particular interactive fiction work-in-progress for ten years. Ten years! Every so often I dust it off and add a little more, but I still haven't finished the chore of converting it from Inform 6 to Inform 7.  And while hiding from this project, I went and released a different project that hinted at a sequel that I haven't even started on, seven years later. Seven years!

Clearly I need a bit of help finishing some of the creative projects that I start. Even during the summer, when I kicked my Blender3D skills up a few notches, I never got the 8- or 4-hour blocks of uninterrupted time that I used to depend on in order to develop a complex project.

Anyway, IF designer and gaming maven Emily Short explains how her own creative efforts have developed. Here's where her essay winds up:

Write the through-line first: come up with your setting and any prototype coding you need to do, and maybe make a list of puzzles/elements that you'd like to see in the finished game. Then create a simple outline design of the game and implement it so that you have something you can play (even if very quickly) from a beginning to the end, and which contains the most critical turning points of the plot. With that skeleton in place, consider what you like and dislike about the structure; you complicate the game incrementally, fleshing pieces out with new puzzles or improving on the simple puzzles/conversations that you used to start with. You may be drawing on the list of puzzles or situations you'd had in mind to start with, but you don't have to commit to a whole structure at the outset.

What's great about this: by the end of the first week or so you have a complete playable game. It is always in some sense "finished" -- oh, not in a state you'd want to release, certainly, but it has a clear enough shape that there's not a horrible anxiety-producing mystery about what will go in any part of it. The ending gets as much attention as the introduction, and isn't likely to be fundamentally different in style, theme, or implementation quality.

At the same time, you've got a process with a lot of flexibility, because you can add new elements to address design flaws you see. Too steep a learning curve? Fine; add a few more intermediate puzzles to the opening of the game. Not enough motivation for a major NPC? Add another conversation scene that sheds some unexpected light on her background. (A weird thing about IF: it's generally easier to add stuff than to take it out. If you've implemented a major feature or a complex puzzle it may have implications here and there throughout the whole code. Editing it back out is like kudzu eradication and may leave you with bugs.)

Finally, this process offers the best odds for return on investment. At any given phase of development you'll have something that you could stop, beta-test, polish, and release. Doing that early might produce a bite-sized mini-game with little story complexity; doing it late might produce a 15-hour masterwork; but the process of getting from what you have to a game you can release is always clear.

I bought my Olympia Monica S in Croydon, south London, from an office supply shop when I was 20. It was a decisive moment. I wanted to write and a typewriter was the essential tool of the trade, an instrument every bit as vital as a paintbrush is to a painter or a guitar to a guitarist. Longhand was never an option. Acquiring a typewriter, particularly if you had no plans to become a secretary, was a sign of identity, a declaration of commitment and intent. .. [T]he computer has never been a dedicated writing tool -- writing is the least of it -- and everyone uses them. They are somehow both more marvellous and more ordinary. That's why there isn't a shred of romance in the idea of a writer and his or her personal computer.--Rick Poynor

A few years ago, I bought a wireless mouse, used it for a few days, then put it away in favor of my old mouse.  Every so often, like when I'm not feeling the course-prep love and I'm desperately looking for an excuse to procrastinate, I remember that wireless mouse, but can't remember why I stopped using it. So I dig it out, reinstall it, use it for a while, and then put it away again.  The last time that happened, I decided I would put it away so far that I wouldn't be able to find it the next time I wanted to try it again.

I want to try it again, but I can't remember where I put it. And no, I don't remember why I must have decided the corded mouse was better.