Metaphoric Space, Cyberspace, and Work Space — Computers and Writing 2009

Chair Mikhail Gershovich, Barch College, CUNY Hacking Spaces: Place as Interface Danielle Nicole DeVoss, Michigan State University Douglass Walls, Michigan State University Scott Schopieray, Michigan State University Writing-a-go-go: Ubiquitous Computing and the Thirdspace of Workplace Writing Tina Bacci, University of Rhode Island The Examined Life–Cyberspace Style: The Construction of Space in the #philosophy IRC Undernet…

The Impact of Ubiquitous (or not so ubiquitous) Computing on Faculty and Students — Computers and Writing 2009

These are my notes, lightly edited, from a panel at Computers & Writing 2009. I only found a single plug in the meeting room, in the very back row. This is a small conference, so I probably appear fairly antisocial typing way in the back here. (I’ll move up when the panel actually starts in…

Why the Newspaper Still Beats the Amazon Kindle

A Kindle DX is on my lust-list, in part because I read a lot of PDFs. In Slate, Farhad Manjoo offers a thoughtful critique of Kindle’s self-proclaimed destiny to be a news medium: The Kindle presents news as a list–you’re given a list of sections (international, national, etc.) and, in each section, a list of…

Designing the digital tale

Many of the canonical works of hypertext fiction were written before the World Wide Web, so the author/designers were creating an experience for users who were not already familiar with the conventions of HTML documents. (When we surf the web, we expect links to change color after we visit them, we expect a home button…

Security Fix – Microsoft Update Quietly Installs Firefox Extension

This sort of thing makes me very unhappy… without my permission, Microsoft pushes out an add-on for a competitor’s product. The service pack for the .NET Framework, like other updates, was pushed out to users through the Windows Update Web site. A number of readers had never heard of this platform before Windows Update started…

F-Secure says stop using Adobe Acrobat Reader

I am not a fan of Adobe Acrobat Reader, though I do read a lot of PDFs. With all the Internet attacks that exploit Adobe Acrobat Reader people should switch to using an alternative PDF reader, a security expert said at the RSA security conference on Tuesday. Of the targeted attacks so far this year,…

Aviary – Terms

“We love you, but signing this agreement doesn’t make us legal partners.” — Aviary EULA That’s from the “summary” column, on the right side of a page that has the equivalent legalese on the other side. It’s an example of a human way to present an end user license agreement (EULA), one of those legal…

Adobe Shockwave interfereres with my system, blocks my attempts to remove it, and replaces the "No" button with "I grant permission for you to nag me later"

Does Adobe Shockwave fit your definition of malware? I train my kids not to click on random boxes that pop up, and I don’t want any boxes popping up on computers my kids use. So I was very annoyed the other day when I first saw this box — intrusive auto-update window that shows only…

Amazon Modifies Kindle Text-to-speech Feature – PC World

The new Kindle is still way out of my price range, though of course I’m still craving one. This news took a bit of the edge off of that craving, since I regularly load my MP3 player with the sounds of a computerized voice reading common-domain texts. Amazon.com will let copyright holders opt out of…

Picasa 3 Screen Capture Bug

I’ve been using Google’s Picasa for years. It’s a very efficient tool for sorting, cropping, and otherwise tweaking images, and it’s integrated with Google’s online photo album and Google’s YouTube service, so it’s very convenient. It’s also behaving very strangely. After I updated recently to Picass 3, I notice that, every second the program is…

At M.I.T., Large Lectures Are Going the Way of the Blackboard

At M.I.T., two introductory courses are still required — classical mechanics and electromagnetism — but today they meet in high-tech classrooms, where about 80 students sit at 13 round tables equipped with networked computers. Instead of blackboards, the walls are covered with white boards and huge display screens. Circulating with a team of teaching assistants,…

E-mail Fail

It seems that a recent ‘reply-all storm’ at the State Department caused the entire e-mail infrastructure to crash. A notice sent to all State Department employees warned of disciplinary actions which will be taken if users “reply-all” to lists with a large amount of users. Apparently, the problem was compounded by not only angry replies…

Proving the Benefits of Peer Instruction

Another article that’s on my mind as I consider how to integrate group work into an unusually large literature class. In an undergraduate genetics course, students were, on 16 occasions during the course of a semester, asked a pair of “isomorphic” questions, which have different facts but require students to apply the same principles or…

Learning about Web 2.0 and Web Design

A former student writes: I need to find a simple book that sort of explains the trends of Web 2.0. Nothing too techy, but something that would talk about what makes it special, what people are doing with 2.0, and the best ways to utilize its philosophies. Basically, my company is moving towards plenty of…

PDF Readers: No to Adobe and Foxit; Maybe to Sumatra

I’ve never been a fan of PDF documents, but now that I have a tablet PC, I thought I would try reading a few PDF documents and see how my tablet functions as an e-book reader, mostly for magazines, dissertations, or the occasional advance proof copy that someone wants to share with me. My first…

"Report a Concern" at Google Maps

Philipp Lenssen at “Google Blogoscoped” spotted a change in Google’s panorama map interface, and asked me to weigh in. Since a recent Google Maps Street View update, Google shows the wording “Report a concern” at the footer of their panorama photos (in older versions, a text for this elsewhere was reading “Report inappropriate image” –…

Google's SearchWiki

How long has this been around? I just noticed it. Google’s user interface is so streamlined that any change at all is noteworthy. I haven’t had the chance to play with it. I’m not sure how much I want my own biases to affect Google’s search results, so I’m going to have to read up…

Google's "Lively" Virtual World is Dead

Lively.com will be discontinued at the end of December, and everyone who has worked on the project will then move on to other teams. We’d encourage all Lively users to capture your hard work by taking videos and screenshots of your rooms. I never did get around to sampling Lively, since the initial reviews I…

Going Digital

Blogging this to assign for my students to read when the current unit is over. Not surprisingly, the Web serves the first function of a local paper exceptionally well. They deliver information instantly, and articles can be updated and corrected in real time. What is surprising, though, is the unfortunate and neglected condition of most…

Yahoo's Blistering Buzzword Barrage

I logged onto Yahoo and found that my profile had been changed. The first of Yahoo’s “Top Questions” is “What happened to my profile?” but the link just goes to the aggressively cheerful “Welcome to the Profiles Tutorials!” page, which does not actually answer the question. Another question is “What happened to my alias profile?“,…

Jerz's Literacy Weblog (est. 1999)

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