digital rhetoric

2007-12-13T11:51:00.000-07:00

Dear Tom,

I thought it would only be appropriate to do this "cover letter" as a blog, as

this is a class on digital literacy
the first thing I learned to do in your class was a blog
it is more fun than writing a plain old boring letter!

I feel like I have come a long way since that first blog on Pandora. Right now, I am listening to Deezer.com instead of Pandora (even though I still love Pandora, Deezer is nice in that you can listen to an entire album for free!) Right now I am listening to Josh Ritter.

I am using Google Docs to write this letter, which I learned in your class as well. I haven't done it yet, but I remember you showing us that I can post this directly to my blog by hitting "publish." I am adding links, bulleted lists, bold text, etc. here, so I hope it works!

This is a cover letter to introduce my final project. Instead of doing a service project for the English Language Center, I decided to set up a service learning project for my 102 class next semester. I figured that was a bit more "bang for my buck." For this project, I have arranged for my students to do a service learning project in either the English Language Center or Fairmont Junior High. My students will prepare and teach an English writing lesson to the ESL students at either institution. This will be part into our semester-long inquiry into the causes and effects of migration. Specifically, I want my students to explore the issue of immigration through writing, research and reading. This service learning project will provide my students with an opportunity to observe and interview refugees and immigrants as a means of gathering information for their ethnographies on immigrant groups in Boise.

Of course, I had to include technology in all of this! Please feel free to peruse my newest and best wiki yet: www.researchwriting.pbwiki.com ! I have used a wiki as an organizational tool for this class, and I will have students use a wiki to publish their writing, have online reading discussion groups, and to create a classroom textbook on this subject of immigration. One idea that I got from Heidi is to assign two class "ethnographers" every class period- their job will be to write their observations on the class on their wiki- that way my students will have a resource to go back to in order to review what we did in previous classes. It will also be a great resource for students who were absent. Pairing this with the wonderful online calendar gives students absolutely no excuse for not turning in all work on time!

I have learned a lot about organizing such a tool from this semester's experiment with wikis. First of all, name them well! My first wiki, www.unit3multigenreproject.pbwiki.com was probably the worst name for a website ever, seconded only by one of the class wikis: www.yourunitthreeclassworkwiki.pbwiki.com. Ok I take it back. The second one is worse. Yes, I know, awful. My poor students, having to remember that! This time I stuck to the simple www.researchwriting.pbwiki.com and for my students, www.researchwritingclass.pbwiki.com. That should be easier to write and remember!...

I went from doing individual units as their own wiki (unit3multigenreproject.pbwiki.com and unit4project.pbwiki.com ) to doing one wiki for the entire class (researchwriting.pbwiki.com). That is better for obvious reasons. Since I started using wikis mid-semester, I didn't think to use the same wiki for both units three and four. That would have been a much smarter move. Oh well, you live and learn, right? :)

OK I am going to practice with publication. I am going to publish this to my blog to see if all the links and formatting worked... here goes...

It worked! Wow, digital writing is fun. I feel so distinguished! I do think that writing for the web gives one a sense of audience and makes writing more exciting. I do agree with Mary Sellen in "Information Literacy in the General Education that we are doing our students a mis-service if we aren't weaving digital literacy into our work as writing teachers. Evaluating websites for validity is crucial for democratic participation in today's web-savy world:

One of the goals of general education is to give students the
skills and knowledge to be citizens who live useful lives in a democratic
world. The new technologies of electronic publication and
the dissemination of information add another dimension to this
citizenship. The social mechanisms that will define what is the
responsible use and creation of information are still being defined
and will be written by the students in our classrooms now. Minimally,
information literacy gives students the skills to understand
the structure, use, and evaluation of information. Through this
understanding students gain a framework to evaluate the impact
of these technologies on the decisions and choices they make. It
also gives students foundational information so they may participate
in the social mechanisms that will control and regulate the
future of the creation and dissemination of information (125).

As Sellen eloquently notes, information literacy helps our students understand the texts they are reading on the Internet. Being literate means to constantly evaluate the information you interact with- this is crucial on the Web. I hope that by using a wiki in my classroom, my students will not only be creators of content, they will learn to to be critique-ers of content as well. That is, if the democratic Internet survives the encroaching corporate take-over...

As I peruse our syllabus, I am struck by how much virtual ground we covered. I don't even know where or how to begin talking about everything we learned in class this semester! Obviously I can, and am, making visual the practical digital literacy skills I have learned this semester. On that note, this seems like a great spot to insert a video I made as an example for my 101 class:

But how to represent the complex understanding of digital rhetoric I have gained? I could mention a few that really stood out: Daniel Anderson's Prosumer Approaches to New Media Composition: Consumption and Production in Continuum is one that comes to mind immediately. To me, that was an amazing article in that it showed so many possible applications for digital rhetorics: Kairos, the journal it was published on, is an example of digital literacy in and of itself. Anderson's (article? Video? Digital essay? Do we even have a word for what he did yet?) work of art can be used to teach digital literacy to teachers, to students, it is an impressive example of what we can do with the written word in a digital atmosphere. I am excited about the possibilities! Far from being the death of the book, I think that the Internet will change the way we tell stories.

What else comes to mind? The crimes of virtual rape, or of imaginary economies that surpass those of developing nations? The new forms of literacy emerging on the web? The rhetorical strategies behind those literacies? How to write for the web, or how publish on the web? Are we becoming cyborgs, is the Internet taking over? Is every move we make on the Internet being monitored? Is there such a thing as privacy on the Web? Is digital culture jamming a crime? What is the future of the Internet- strictly controlled marketplace or revolutionary democratic forum? We have explored these topics and more in this class- my head is still spinning... hopefully I will remember everything we've done, read, discussed! I do know, though, that I will be perusing your syllabus for a long time after class ends- revisiting articles, looking for readings for my class, doing some inspired web-surfing...

I've really enjoyed the ride! Thanks for teaching this class- I have learned a ton!

Samantha

2007-12-06T13:21:00.001-07:00

Read the #1 news story from Project Censor's Top 25 Censored News Stories of 2007:
"Future of Internet Debate Ignored by Media"

2007-12-01T09:32:00.000-07:00

Check out the website I made. I did it to show my students how to do some stuff, and also to get something off my chest that was making me mad. I made the video using videos from Youtube captured with Snagit, then played with in Windows Moviemaker. Enjoy! Leave a comment on my website if you want.

2007-11-29T22:30:00.000-07:00

Fairytale Generator

2007-11-29T11:32:00.000-07:00

Get Your Cyborg Name

2007-11-29T07:35:00.000-07:00

Interesting newspaper article: "World Faces 'Cyber Cold War' Threat"

2007-11-27T13:54:00.001-07:00

Get Your Cyborg Name

2007-11-27T12:37:00.000-07:00

Check out this video entitled Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us

2007-11-15T12:09:00.000-07:00

Here is a link to my final project- it is not yet complete, but I would love your input/feedback... www.researchwriting.pbwiki.com

2007-11-13T13:23:00.000-07:00

Some interesting links:
Despair
Man in the Dark
No One Belongs Here More Than You

2007-11-01T14:17:00.000-06:00

Here are some lyrics that have come to my mind this semester as we've explored online identities. It's a country song by Brad Paisley (I am not a country music fan, but my husband is, so it's now part of my world). This song is funny, though. I tried to paste it, but the formatting gets all funky when I do... so follow the link.

2007-11-01T11:21:00.001-06:00

The picture in the article wasn't very good, and I just had to see what a Whitecross portable vibrator looked like. Here it is. Just put a ribbon on it and it's the perfect Valentine's gift!

2007-10-30T21:18:00.000-06:00

Superfollow PatternGame

2007-10-27T23:40:00.001-06:00

2007-10-25T22:15:00.000-06:00

Here is a link to my unit 4 project wiki...

2007-10-22T13:19:00.000-06:00

Here's an interesting post on Writer's House at Rutgers. Embedding has been disabled (I wonder why) so you actually have to go to YouTube.

2007-10-18T13:28:00.001-06:00

Here's something to consider in light of our discussions about censorship and control.

2007-10-17T15:53:00.000-06:00

Here's the blog I created for last week's presentation.

2007-10-11T15:12:00.000-06:00

Here is my wiki for the digital writing resource project!

2007-10-03T21:14:00.001-06:00

Jeffrey Grabill’s “Utopic Visions, The Technopoor, and Public Access: Writing Technologies in a Community Literacy Program”

In this article, Grabill addresses the issue of technology access—and, more specifically, the issues of access in Adult Basic Education courses. Grabill draws attention to the fact that in the discussion of literacy and technology access, most (if not all) of the conversations have been focused on activities based in the context of traditional schools. By focusing all of the attention on the writing and the access of technology in schools, we are missing an opportunity to investigate these same issues in the work place. To summarize the point of this article, Grabill states “My argument is that writing with computers in nonschool contexts is a significant area of inquiry that needs the experience and expertise of computers and composition professionals. But, work in this area demands that we confront complex issues of public access and participate in the design of writing technologies” (299).

Grabill acknowledges that the issue of access has already been addressed. There are three main categories of access: infrastructural, literacy, and acceptance. Infrastructural access revolves around how technology is distributed. This involves questions like “Who is making these decisions about technology? And “How will these access—both physical and virtual—be designed?” (300) Literacy as an access issue revolves around who has the knowledge to use these technologies. Finally, the third issue of access is about acceptance. The groups that are typically silenced in traditional classrooms (women and minorities basically) have the opportunity of an equal playing ground in technological environment. Grabill includes data that shows how these groups in particular have limited access to technology, and he states, “In a sense it seems irrelevant to talk about how electronic discourse in a medium like e-mail can hide markers of race, class, or gender or that network use may allow a group or individual to cross lines of social stratification more easily. Given this data, it is increasingly unlikely that individuals of lower income, education, and people of color are online. Groups and individuals without access, who fit the Rand profile, form a fluid, multiple, and complex class position of the technopoor” (303).

Having touched on all of the issues of access that have already been explored, Grabill then addresses something that has not: the adult population outside of the context of traditional school. Grabill uses an example of the Western District Adult Basic Education program. He writes, “The purpose of the case was to understand how literacies were defined at that site, who participated in those decision-making processes, and in whose interests those decisions were made” (305). One particular class of the program was a writing class (though the teacher claimed it was not a writing class) that dealt specifically with teaching students how to communicate through technology. Some students were frustrated with the technology to the point that they dropped out: “In some respects, the technology impeded the students’ ability to learn to write with technology” (308). Grabill concludes that some of these problems that students come across when learning technology can and should be dealt with through the design of the curriculum.

COMMENTS:

I was uncertain about reading another article about the issue of access because I thought we had pretty well covered the topic, but when I read this piece I was taken aback by the fact that Grabill addresses many issues I had never considered: adults’ access to technology and access in work place situations. I, like many other people apparently, have always thought about this issue in a traditional educational setting.

2007-10-03T16:44:00.000-06:00

I saw this on Conan last week--it seems somewhat relevant to this class. Enjoy.

2007-10-01T17:04:00.000-06:00

“Game Theories”
By Clive Thompson

This article all begins with the fascinating story of economist, Edward Castronova. Welfare researched was his main focus, and it proved unfruitful in reaping him attention, prestige and the success that he desired.
Castronova finally hit an interesting niche when he began to pay attention to the economic situations of EverQuest, a video game. Noticing the currency within the game, and the currency that the game generated in the real world, Castronova began to conduct more research, and wrote about the revenue the digital world produced in the “real world.”

“The Gross National Product of Everquest, measured by how much wealth all the players together created in a single year inside the game. It turned out to be $2,266 U.S. per capita. By World Band rankings, that made EverQuest richer than India, Bulgaria, or China, and nearly as wealthy as Russia… It was the seventy-seventh richest country in the world. And it didn’t even exist.” Thompson goes on to make the point that “Many economists define their careers by studying a country. [Castronova] had discovered one.”

Thompson goes on to examine how real world currency is generated by means of digital entertainment. In EverQuest, for example, players all start out on the same bottom level. They work themselves up the virtual socio-economic ladder by killing things like dragons, and obtaining gold and other valuable pieces, and also gain property. Once they gain considerable assets and position in the game world, they can sell their character to the real world. Such auctions can take place in online auctions like e-Bay, but people have also set up businesses where they buy characters and then turn around and sell them at a marked-up price.

There are ethics that play into this. Oftentimes a “guild” forms online – a group of players who have worked together to accumulate riches, which they split among each other. They help each other slay dragons, and thus help each other get wealthier. Thus the winnings tend to be everyone’s in a sense, and when one player sells his character, [s]he is selling what they jointly earned…

Utopian as well as free-market concepts, varying economic situations are, in certain instances, played out on EverQuest. Most everyone starts on the same level, with nothing, and works themselves up, some forming guilds that seem communal – and then there are the more privileged players who buy themselves position… also, “when game companies offer socialist alternatives, players reject them” because they get bored without some sort of defined competition. So it seems like the free-market, in some form, is predominantly mirrored in the game.

Robert Shapiro, who was in the Clinton administration as the undersecretary of commerce, feels that “Castronova’s research proves that the only way to create a truly free market is to support programs that give everyone a fair chance at success, such as good education and healthcare.”

So the once unnoticed economist is now noticed, and now he is hired as a fully-tenured professor at Indiana University. Though he likes gaming, and his research has been successful, when taking into account other online communities that are being contrived in order to replicate and even replace real-life training and scenarios (like what’s occurring in There.com), Castronova states that “he is dismayed by how the real world has bled into the virtual one. ‘I liked it better when they were, you know, just games.’”

2007-09-27T11:06:00.001-06:00

I know you're all anxiously awaiting my abstract for the Barton piece, but I just couldn't get it together. I won't bore you with excuses, but between 4 kids, 2 jobs, school, and a junker car, each day is a new adventure - and today's adventure ends with a bent steering-rod and no abstract. My apologies. - Mike

2007-09-26T17:51:00.000-06:00

“Profiles as Conversation: Networked Identity Performance on Friendster”
By danah boyd and John Heer

Using performance theory as a springboard, boyd and Heer jump from the premise that “communication is inherently embodied and contextually dependant” into the world of “Friendster.” In this fascinating study, the authors examine what, in the digital world of “Friendster,” constitutes identity, conversation, and social groups.

Frienster started in 2002 as a network of “gay men, bloggers, and attendees of the Burning Man festival.” This network went worldwide and broadened, and by the time this article was written “most early adopters have eschewed the service, calling it ‘so 2003.’”

Much like facebook and MySpace, Friendster has a place for a picture and profile on each member’s page. It also has a meeage board. Unlike facebook and MySpace (or like them, depending on the motives of the user) Friendster is primarily a sort of network for dating. It also has a space for testimonials, where members recommend each other to other members.

To study the dymanics of Friendster, Heer and boyd employed two methodologies: ethnography and visualization. They participated on the site, observed it, interviewed members, and gave surveys for nine months in 2003 (thus, the ethnography). The visualization portion of the study included surfing profiles, pictures, and “searching for common interests.”

Some questions boyd and Heer posed were:

- How is context transferred, created, and interpreted in digital environments?
- How are conversations initiated online?
- What are the goals of digital conversations and how are they maintained?
- What are the possibilities and consequences of replicability, searchability, and persistence?

A recurring topic in this study was the fact that in digital environments, social walls could be easily demolished. “For example, work and the pub are … geographically disjoint...” in networks like Friendster, “the office and the pub become one.” It was brought up again and again that one’s boss may happen upon one’s page, which may prove awkward. Even more, the boss may ask to be one’s friend, letting the boss another step further into one’s personal life. If this weren’t sticky enough, who one’s friends are say a lot about that person, and may arouse speculation. In one instance, a professor a (former?) student of hers started conversing over the site, and other students started asking the professor on dates, etc, and friends of the prof started wondering about the relationship between the prof and the one student she started talking to in this Friendster setting. In another situation, students of a high school teacher happened upon her site, and though her profile didn’t have anything particularly incriminating, her friend’s sites did. And the students questioned her about it. “The content provides both context for the service as well as information about an individual’s identity.”
So – that the barrier that shelters the private from the public/professional can be cracked causes the question of audience to arise. Who is the audience for these sites? For Friendster, users the ideal audience seems to be, ideally, lovers, friends, and friendly online acquaintances --but only ideally is this the case. In actuality, it can be, and likely is, much broader. There was even a case of a woman’s page being published in the Chronicle.

With the exception of instances where Friendsters meet outside of their Friendster site, the social set-up is largely superficial in the sense that identity as portrayed can obviously be skewed. This fact surfaced quite pronouncedly with the “Fakesters.” These were people who made fictitious profiles and posted them with corresponding pictures. This caused some sort of glitch in the system because of the degrees of separation factor (four degrees of separation – I didn’t get that part about the networking…?). These imposters also overloaded the network at times. The network providers started seeking out Fakesters, and deleted their accounts. This caused an uprising Fakesters deemed the “Fakester Revolution,” as these members went forth to avenge the “Fakester Genocide.” In this conflict, these “fictitious” members pointed out that “none of this is real.” (So, perhaps the Fakester profiles weren’t all that different in nature from the profiles some of those who considered themselves the “serious” users.) This was the most amusing part of the article for me.

But, it was all interesting to me, because I never though of online communities in such depth, though I did realize that some of these things (personal life being invaded by professional life, etc.) were happening in various online contexts (blogging, too).

2007-09-26T02:24:00.000-06:00

I found a website that lists the most popular open-source software websites. They even have an open-source web builder called Amaya--I read a review, however, that said it was a bit bulky and not as user friendly as Dreamweaver or Frontpage.

2007-09-25T14:50:00.001-06:00

I'll abstract Heer's "Profiles as Conversation" for Thursday.

2007-09-23T10:40:00.000-06:00

David Huffaker’s “The Educated Blogger: Using Weblogs to Promote Literacy in the Classroom”

This article basically sets out to describe why and how blogs should be used in educational settings. Huffaker defines the features of blogs: offer instant publishing, people can comment/give feedback to different posts, are archival, and other bloggers can hyperlink to them.

Huffaker suggests that we should not ignore blogs in educational setting because a majority of blog users (40.4%) are adolescents—people under the age of 20. He writes, “This article hypothesizes that blogs can be an important addition to educational technology initiatives because they promote literacy though storytelling, allow collaborative learning, provide anytime-anywhere access, and remain fungible across academic disciplines” (92).

Huffaker begins his argument by writing about the importance of literacy. Education is based on reading and writing, and educators need to take every opportunity to get students to read and write. Huffaker writes about an emerging literacy—digital fluency. Digital fluency is basically about people becoming comfortable using technology. He writes, “The uses of educational technology have a two-fold advantage: they can promote the types of literacy traditionally encouraged in learning, as well as the digital fluency needed to prosper in the digital age” (93). He continues that blogs are a great way to get students to increase their literacy (especially digital fluency) because blogs are easy to use and allow students the opportunity to get more comfortable with computers.

Storytelling is often used as one way of introducing kids to literacy. This is an effective way of getting children used to expressing themselves while being entertaining at the same time. Blogs open up the possibility of incorporating storytelling into educational settings. And again, using technology in this way would help students with their digital fluency.

Blogs can easily be utilized in classrooms and offer many benefits. Students have an opportunity to express themselves in the same way that they can in a diary or journal while at the same time being hooked into a digital community. Blogs have a simple design making them accessible to most people. Because blogs are so simple, they are easy for teachers to teach. One of the biggest draws to blogs is that they are based on the internet, making them accessible anytime from anywhere there is internet.

Blogs allow personal expression while at the same create a sense of community. Blogs open up opportunities for feedback and comments, and bloggers can also link to each other’s blogs. This is essentially a space where the private and public mingle.

Another positive feature of blogs is that they can be used in any discipline. Huffaker gives examples how blogs have been used in science and math classes—it does not have to be used solely be English instructors. He writes, “any discipline can use blogs to approach a style of meta-learning, where concepts of contexts are discussed and articulated in both a personalized and group exchange, and ideas are built on previous educational content” (95).

Huffaker continues by listing more reasons why blogs should be used in classrooms. First and foremost, blogs bring the idea of audience to life for students. Blogs also are easy enough for students of all ages to use (including an example that he gives of third graders using blogs). Blogs are not confined by a certain group, specifically that one school using blogs is not stuck only with each other’s blogs—blogs transcend individual schools. Blogs are also good for teachers to use because they can work as an archive of the work they’ve done. Ultimately, the biggest draw that blogs offer is that they create sense of community.

COMMENTS:

I think the most important thing that Huffaker wanted people to learn about blogs is that they are easy to use, which up until a few weeks ago I would have disagreed with—not because it isn’t true, but because I didn’t know how easy it was until I was forced to learn. My question becomes, how can we convince educators to give them a try? I think Huffaker does a nice job of listing reasons—sense of community, ease of use, the importance of digital fluency—all good reasons why blogs are a reasonable place to start or add to using technology in the classroom. I also think that Huffaker made sense by relating blogs to journals—an already pedagogically accepted learning tool. Perhaps it would be beneficial to push this idea when trying to convince educators of why they should give blogs a chance.

2007-09-22T12:43:00.001-06:00

Here is my blog.

Also, I'll take Huffaker.

Have a good weekend!

2007-09-21T11:55:00.001-06:00

Here is my blog!

2007-09-20T12:40:00.000-06:00

New Media and the Slow Death of the Written Word
by Mark Zeltner, Ph.D.
abstract by Samantha Reinhart
Written by a lover of the newspaper, this article responds to the question "Will the Internet drive the newspaper into extinction?" Mark Zeltner decided to ask one of his News Writing classes what they thought about the future of newspapers or, more specifically, what the future of news on paper would be. The students' response was that it was not a question of if the newspaper would disappear, but when.

Zeltner realized that he would have to embrace this new technology, and soon became excited about the possibilities of the new-media. One aspect of the new-media that particularly strikes Zeltner is the ability to use hypertext links to break down the traditional narrative styles. For example, a journalist can tell a story using hyperlinks to provide background information, use audio for impact, and use pictures that have amazing resolution and color to tell a story that words can't. An author can even use video to supplement his written text.

However, Zeltner notes that many critics are appalled at what computer-mediated texts will do to our ability to appreciate traditional narrative strategies and books in general. Critics ague that this technology could not only lead to the death of print media, but to the death of our ability to comprehend this type of narrative.

Zeltner isn't worried about death of print. He argues that the Internet provides a new form of media that will supplement, not kill, the previous technology. He notes that the TV did not put an end to the radio or the movie, as many critics feared. Zeltner says that the medium and how we consume it is not going to change- reading an article on the web is not the same as reading it in a print newspaper or a traditional magazine. Novels still make no sense on the web, and there is no risk of the novel dying out any time soon!

The gist of the article is this: that "there is still a place for the printed newspaper in our society. There will always be an audience for a well-written novel delivered the traditional way--on paper. But the new-media opens an untold number of new methods of reaching and communicating with an audience."

According to Zeltner, there is only one "wonderful and terrible" problem. There are no rules for writing for the new-media and the ones that exist for traditional print media simply don't work. Thus Zeltner steps in and provides the solution to his "terrible" problem. Here they are, folks, pay attention- the top ten rules for writers on the web.
The Ten Rules
1. Just the facts ma'am or keep your writing tight, tight, tight
On the Internet, less is more. Words are precious. Use them sparingly and effectively.

2. Anything over a screenful is wasted or click vs. scroll
How you decide to cut up your information to fit on the screen is imperative. How can you do this in a way that will entice your writers to keep reading?

3. No page is and island or think in modules not chapters
"Digestible chunks." Make sure that each page can stand on its own and teach something to the reader.

4. A picture is worth a couple thousand words or when to embed images and when to just write
Use a picture if it says it better than words can. Don't use pictures that will distract or detract from your main point.

5. Did you hear that? or when a sound is more is more important than words
Use audio when it portrays something better than you can in words.

6. Did you see that? or when a video clip is more important than words
Video clips are small on the screen. Pick wisely and make sure that the small size will not impact the power of the message.

7. Huh, what's this? or when to use descriptions and definitions
Use hyperlinks to define or describe confusing words or concepts.

8. Ever take a trip without a roadmap? or why hypertext links are wonderful, dangerous things
Don't send people away from your page! If you do, make it easy for them to come back!...

9. Want some fries with that or sidebars are an important part of every document
Sidebars are a great way to provide supplemental information. They basically take the place of the footnote.

10. Sometimes you can tell a book by its cover or why content and form are both important
The medium is the message! Good writing simply doesn't do it anymore. You have to make it look pretty and exciting!!!

This does not mean that we don't have to worry about what we write anymore. The written word is as important as ever. "The difference is that we can no longer depend on words alone to carry our messages to the new technically sophisticated audiences of the twenty-first century."

2007-09-17T15:07:00.000-06:00

Editorial Style

This helpful guide gave tips on how not to overload surfers with information, and how to format information effectively within the context of a website.

Along with text, this piece incorporated a few images with captions, which, though a little blurry, was helpful to get a visual of the concepts being explained.

The key to successful online prose is to write in a way that "is concise and structured for scanning" -- basically making the page skim-friendly. An interesting technique for conveying information in an expedient way is by writing with the model of the inverted pyramid, but with the conclusion at the beginning of the text (144).

Thinning out what, in print documents, might be thick paragraphs of information helps readers read quickly, but the author also notes that one does not want to necessarily "dumb down" the information while making it more skeletal. What I basically envisioned when this was described was Losh's "Digital Rhetoric:Genres, Disciplines, and Trends" (do I use quotes or underlines with that title? :-{ ). What Losh does not seem to do is add the TARGET = "main" to her tags so that a separate window opens, rather that having another window take over the initial window that the site inhabited (149). I always hate when that happens, especially when people send me an e-mail with a link that takes me away from the e-mail I hadn't completed reading yet. Anyway. Instead of taking the audience away from the website, frames should "allow you to supply commentary on material in another site and also maintain navigation links back to your site" (150).

A plethora of links within a certain amount of prose might prove to be a distraction (I'm visualizing now Wikipedia). As the author states, "it's pointless to write a paragraph and then fill it with links to go elsewhere" (150). So frugality of links within prose is encouraged, and a tactic that might encourage this frugality is to "group all minor, illustrative, parenthetic, or footnote links at the bottom of the page" (151).

There are many other points about making an effective site have to do with (of course) design and audience. Web authors are encouraged to be cognizant of tasteful link colors, and eye-catching approaches to headlines and subheadings. They also talk about "thinking globally" when typing in dates, so that you use a format recognizable to all.

Much of the guide was essentially about how to pragmatically apply "flow" to web composition.

2007-09-17T10:29:00.000-06:00

Ilana Snyder’s “Page to Screen”

This selection is the preface to Snyder’s book Page to Screen: Taking Literacy into the Electronic Era. This book is a collection of essays from a variety of authors that offer different perspectives on the “newness” of digital literacies. The authors in this book begin to consider that the concept newness is a little misleading because most of these technologies aren’t really new—they’re simply an extension of a prior technology. Snyder compiles a list of questions that act as starting points for the conversations taking place in the book:
How new are computer-mediated literacy practices?
Do they signal the dawn of new literacies of do they only re-incarnate old ones?
What is ‘new’ about them?
How do we asses them?
Does their use enhance literacy practices or diminish them?

She continues, “These questions are raised within the broader context of a culture that valorizes, even fetishes, ‘newness’ at the same time as it extols the traditional and the old” (xxx).

Another key issue that this book addresses has to deal with educators and the “newness” of technology—teachers, unlike their students, tend to not be too interested in new technologies. Snyder describes this as a “widening gulf” (xxii). She concludes, “Just because we have remained largely impervious to technological change does not mean that this is how we should continue to respond. Even more important, if we are to begin to bridge the growing gulf between ourselves and our students, we cannot afford to remain ignorant of the characteristics of these new technologies and their complex cultural influences” (xxiii).

Snyder gives brief summaries of what the book discusses, including particular theories of the other contributors. (I won’t run through all of them—I’ll just mention the few that stand out most to me.) In the section of the book that deals with the “spaces of electronic literacies” Gail Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe talk about the social struggles that come with commercialization of technology, including the idea of intellectual territory.

According to Knobel, Lankshear, Honan and Crawford discuss how new technologies can be used for the benefit of second-language learning (similarly how in other decades had different kinds of audio-visual technologies).

Charles Moran and Gail Hawisher examine the difference between postal mail and the new forms of communication that appeared with the new technologies (particularly email). The language used in email tends to fall somewhere between the language used in speech and that of print. They also talk about the issue of access, stating that the email is part of a “gated community” because only 2% of the world’s population are connected to the internet. (It should be kept in mind that this book was published in 1997.)
Snyder includes Burbules discussion of hypertext and hyperreading (which I think is probably the same information from the article of his that we read last week). In the same conversation about hypertext, Snyder includes Michael Joyce’s distinction between hypertext and multimedia—hypertext perhaps acting as an education tool, while multimedia acts more like television (“the vast wasteland”).

Another theme of this book deals with educators’ lack of acceptance of the new technologies. Smith and Curtain “suggest that teachers will encounter professional dilemmas when dealing with their young students and this new era will generate feelings of intellectual incompetence and powerlessness among educators” (xxxii).

Snyder concludes this preface by talking about whether or not these technologies are truly new. In Burbules discussion of hyperreading he suggests that people are actually just using their reading skills in a new way, making hyperreading an extension of reading rather than a whole new skill. In the same regard, email is really just an addition to letter writing—people are adjusting the skills they already have into digital environments. Snyder concludes by describing an Annie Leibovitz picture of Bill Gates where Gates was standing on a seemingly endless highway surrounded by desert (hinting at the information superhighway). Snyder writes, “It seems to me that our responsibility and challenge as educators and researchers it to explore this terrain, whatever its features, to devise the theoretical and practical understandings that will allow ourselves and our students to reconnoiter it wisely” (xxxiv).

COMMENTS:
It feels a bit odd to look back at work this that was done in 1997 because so much has changed since then when it comes to technology. For example, Snyder writes, “history suggests that we should remain somewhat skeptical about how the wiring of our schools might affect pedagogical practices” (xxii-xxiii). It seems to me that we are coming closer and closer to having most classrooms wired, and I would say that I think technology will (or perhaps already does) affect pedagogy. But Snyder also seems to be implying that educators need to jump on the technological band wagon before they get left further behind. Without reading the rest of the book it is hard to say what exactly Snyder believes by putting out these contradicting ideas.

I found this piece difficult to abstract because it briefly discusses the opinions of so many people. I hope I was able to make some sense of it for you guys!

2007-09-16T20:07:00.000-06:00

I'll take Zeltner

2007-09-15T09:24:00.000-06:00

I'll take Synder.

Have a good weekend!

2007-09-11T16:03:00.000-06:00

Poetry.

2007-09-11T16:00:00.000-06:00

This is a link to find more information about Trunk Monkeys.

2007-09-11T08:22:00.000-06:00

In her article, Christina Haas explores the complex relationship between old and new technologies, hence the title of her discourse, “On the Relationship Between Old and New Technologies.” This intriguing examination applies the theories of Lev Vygotsky (who was “profoundly influenced” by Engel’s work Dialectics of Nature, which postulates “that through labor, humans interact with nature via material tools”) to describe the complex situation of literacy technologies found together in everyday work environments (212). Haas then uses the work of a “Dutch philosopher of technology” named Bijker to interpret her “case studies [to suggest] some other, more complex and more empirically valid ways of viewing the relationship between old and new technologies” (221).

The two presuppositions/views about technological literacies that seemed to most compel Haas to write this article were:
- The replacement model. “…assumes that the old and the new technologies are clearly differential from one another, both theoretically, and in practice” (210). And that new technologies make “obsolete’ the old.
- The straightforward model. “…a new is better view in which new technologies are more advanced and therefore more efficient, more powerful, or both” (210).

The two Vygotskyian tools that she uses to create her framework for examining the use of old and new technologies are the “mediational means” and the historical genetic method. The term “genetic” basically entails a look at the history, the origins of technology, and of the cultural embrace/use of the technology. “Mediational means” refers to looking at literacy “as a distinct phenomenon, but as always imbedded in larger human practices” (211). In other words, it is looking at literacy as a sub-practice inherent and integral to larger goals of humanity.

In addition to these concepts, the Vygoskian approach suggests that a) “multiple technologies for literacy exist, b) their history-of-use is complex and overlapping and c) that technology’s uses are tied intrinsically to other human activities” (213).

Making the abstract concrete, Haas visits three work sites to evaluate how the different modes literacy technologies are being put into practice. The first site observed is the workplace of a city engineer who works for a small town in Ohio. He contract with a particular agency to map and maintain the water plans of the city. This case study basically notes that graphics programs, as well as phone, faxes, and scribbled notes are used in this work. Haas highlights the fact that new and old technologies work effectively together towards a goal. Each technology is important in supporting the other. (Thus the mediational means is at work, the replacement model is disproved, and a) and c) of the Vygoskian hypotheses are demonstrated.

There are two more truly interesting case studies, but honestly, I’m looking at the clock and I need to start wrapping this up. I’ll do an overview. One case study is in another city office of the same town mentioned above, and this office, overall is reluctant to implement e-mail – here the historic-genetic concept is highlighted, as this reluctance is based on the notion that the old methods are just as useful as the new, and the “old villagers” might be unhappy about the whole email thing.

The third is a look at an abortion clinic’s literacy technologies, and how the old paper-and-pen method is imperative to their processes and record-keeping there. Meanwhile an up to date, computer-designed pamphlet about the development of the baby in the womb, and processes that need to happen if an abortion is not carried out, is found to be secondary to the rest of the paper work that needs to be done. I think the “mediational means” is again brought up.

After setting up this framework, Haas uses Bijker’s theories to dig a little deeper, and bring to surface the other complexities of intermingling old and new technologies. These concepts, amalgamated with Haas’s observations are as follows: Non-linearity in Technological Development and Change, The Role of Contingency and Constraint in the Use of Literacy Technologies, and Interpretive Flexibility of Technologies – as well as Power as a Rhetorical Concept in Technological Development and Use.

To conclude, I think Haas’s rational for combining the Vygoskian and Bijkerian approaches is interesting, and important to touch on. Haas states that Bijker’s work Of Bicycles, Bakelite, and Bulbs, “can be seen as an extended application of Vygotsky’s historical genetic method,” so, she thought it logical to combine the two in this study as they tend to go hand in hand, and as they successfully eradicate the simplistic notions that she described at the beginning of her article (226).

Phew. This was a great article. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to say that in an abstract. Probably not, as it’s not a review, but, really, dig deep into this one, it is fascinating.

2007-09-10T22:37:00.000-06:00

Madeleine Sorapure, Pamela Inglesby, and George Yatchisin
“Web Literacy: Challenges and Opportunities for Research in a New Medium”

Abstract by Samantha Reinhart Mora

This article discusses an important and interesting question– how do we go about teaching our students to do research on the complicated medium that is the Internet? Teachers today cannot ignore the web as a powerful resource for student researchers. However, students must be taught how to assess the complex variety of digital rhetorical situations and how to navigate the medium they are presented in. This helps students determine the reliability of the website as well as to extend important literacy skills, such as associative logic, and understanding visual rhetoric and interactivity. We need to guide students to become discerning readers of the internet who are able to discern the dangers while reaping the benefits of the web. The two major challenges posed by the Web as an information resource– diverse and unfiltered content and its hypermedia format- offer opportunities for students to develop their critical thinking and research skills.

There are some guides that are useful to some extent when evaluating Web sites. Based on librarian and teacher suggestions, these guides direct the student to assess the author and the publisher of the material. These criteria can be useful when, say, deciding which movie reviews are academic enough to include as sources. However, sometimes this method can cause students to reject potentially valuable material because the source seems unreliable when judged by traditional research methods.

Some research librarians, recognizing this, say that new techniques need to be developed because of (among other things) the difficulty of in identifying authors, the lack of peer review, and the unclear use of dates. There are also new genres of research to be considered: among them, personal home pages and infommerical Web sites.

Personal home pages offer fascinating first-person views that are potentially rich research sources, though students need to understand the difference between primary and secondary sources and how to evaluate the author for validity.

Infomercial sites pose an interesting problem, because although they are often commercial sites, their purpose is sometimes also to educate. Students must learn to evaluate the site on its own merits, conduct further research into the credentials of the author (sometimes as easy as Googling the author’s name) and to seek sources that make an opposing argument to balance informations sources. This creates some new kinds of work for the researcher, but also teaches solid critical and intellectual skills necessary for good research writing.

Students must learn another skill to determine validity of a site- how to read visual elements. These elements can complement, complicate, or contradict the message conveyed by the text.
“Websites teach us how they want to be read, in large part through visual, graphic, and layout elements, and we must be aware of that teaching process as we read.” Images can convey possible bias, while presenting a false objectivity on websites. Students need to be made aware how visual information can be manipulated.

Links can also provide valuable clues about the value of information on a site. An important aspect of evaluation is assessing the sources to which an author refers. Students must evaluate the number of links or the lack thereof, also understanding that often times academics are light on the links but heavy on references. Another issue with links deals with a source’s borders. We can look to George Landow’s rules for how a site must properly treat its visitors, which basically states that a site should always let a reader know where they are on the web… (If a link leads away from the site, the reader should know, and feel at home in the new document after using a link.) Links can be a means for stimulating and engaging readers, and can compel students to attend to structure and organizations.

Another facet to reflect upon is the interactivity of a Web site, as this can help indicate the quality, accuracy, bias, and the overall value of the information it presents. What kind of material is the website asking from the student, and how what does this show us about the reliability of the Web site? Students must learn to read interactive elements as clues in determining a Web site’s rhetorical mode and purpose.

In conclusion, although we should not forget that the Internet is not an ideologically neutral territory, it is important for students to be able to be critical users of the Internet– this can enhance student’ research and writing skills, and someday can even improve the
Web itself, as today’s researchers become tomorrow’s publishers.

Comments

I agree with the authors who pose that learning how to assess a website’s validity teaches the student valuable critical thinking skills. I would go even further and say that it is our duty as writing and reading teachers to teach students how to assess a website on many levels. As digital literacies continue to proliferate, we owe it to our students to teach them this new, intricate literacy. As the article concludes, the students today are the publishers of tomorrow, so by teaching our students these crucial literacies, we are working to make the Internet a better place!

2007-09-10T18:50:00.000-06:00

Abstract of Nicholas Burbules’s “Rhetoric of the Web: Hypertexting and Critical Literacy.”
by Mike Peterson

Description of Article
Burbules starts his article by posing what he calls the perennial question: is reading hypertext something new, or is it the same as reading traditional texts? Throughout his article, he answers this by saying they are the same, yet different—while certain skills apply to both functions, hypertext comes with its own set of challenges and idiosyncrasies. One such unique trait of hypertext is the link.

The hyperlink can be compared loosely to citations within traditional texts: they point us to someplace else where additional information might be found. The difference, of course, is that hyperlinks are quick and easy: a couple of clicks and you’re there—no time and money-consuming ventures of finding or buying or photocopying books and articles.

But these links shouldn’t be uncritically viewed as mere shortcuts. Readers need to remember that links don’t all have the same semic relationships, links are a man-made construction, and links are not simple associations of two givens.

Another trait of hypertext is that it doesn’t have to follow the Outline and Syllogism formula of traditional texts—through hyperlinks, it can take advantage of other rhetorical possibilities such as Bricolage and Juxtaposition.

But hypertext also comes with disadvantages and therefore ushers a greater need for readers to develop a more reflective and critical approach to the way they read. First, there is the problem of a surfeit of information, which increases a reader’s need to make rapid judgments. This leads to the writer’s assumption that a reader’s attention must be seized and held quickly. The second problem that there is a “blur of distinctions of relative credibility.” And the third problem is a lack of distinction between computer use as an intellectual tool and that of a mere plaything (which results in a diminished capacity to concentrate on less-stimulating projects).

Burbules goes on to list a few tropes, which he equates with the different types of hyperlinks: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, hyperbole, antistatis, identity, sequence and cause-and-effect, and catachresis. He does this because he wants “links to be seen as rhetorical moves that can be evaluated and questions for their relevance.”
Burbules wants readers to move away from the “simple consumer orientation” of the web. If we understand the limits and possibilities of the web, its rhetorical conventions, and learn to be critical readers of hyperlinks, the web can go from being a “frightening medium of manipulation and distortion” to an “opportunity for discovery and synthesis.”

Comments and Questions
I’m not a hundred-percent convinced that such a thorough understanding of hyperlinks is needed to be a critical reader of hypertext. It would take a master rhetorician to determine the different tropes that each link reflects. What I think is important, though, is to understand that links are man-made creations, and that not every link is created equally. There are a lot of things vying for our attention on the Internet, and I agree with Burbules that we shouldn’t be uncritical consumers of everything put before us. Do you think Burbules is splitting hairs over the tropes?

I drew a lot of good points from this article that I will use in teaching my E102 class. Burbules discusses the importance of recognizing the difference between credibility and glitter—while flashy and catchy sites are appealing, they are often nothing more than fluff void of content. That isn’t to say credibility lacks flashiness—a reputable site can still have ad banners, video and audio links, but those links will more likely be for content rather than spectacle—no linking for linking’s sake.

This article was written ten years ago. Burbules predicts that “the aura of credibility of any particular hypertext on the Web sill be diminished, since there will almost certainly be more garbage than work of quality in this Brave New Self-Publishing World.” I say, “Welcome to 2007!”

I watched a news program recently about the dangers of multi-tasking. The program concluded that multitasking isn’t always a good thing: it results in a lot of surface-level action with little retention or deep understanding. In other words, you can carry on four conversations at once via e-mail, telephone, text-messaging, and face-to-face interaction, but only so much of that information can be processed. I thought of that as I read this article. As we are plagued with an increasing plethora of information on the Internet, how are we allocating our attention? Do we read just bits and pieces of articles, gloss over summaries and abstracts, and watch/listen to decontextualized media clips? Is this causing a reduction in our deeper comprehension of the world? Is wisdom being replaced with a cluttered-head of random tidbits? In other words, if I have a half hour to read the news, am I better off skimming a couple dozen articles and watching small clips hear and there, or would I be better off reading one or two “complete” articles?

2007-09-09T21:50:00.001-06:00

Abstract: Lester Faigley’s “Literacy After the Revolution”

This article was an address that Faigley made as the Chair of CCCC. He starts the address by reminiscing about the addresses of the prior years, and talks about the circumstances that allowed him, as well as everyone else in the profession, to become a member of the rhet/comp field. He explains how he, by chance, became a writing teacher—a member of the ugly stepchild of the English field.

Past addresses of the conferences had been given by people who had been heavily influenced by teaching basic writing. As teachers of basic writing, these people were aware of the power that institutions (like universities) hold that maintain, or even contribute to, social divisions. These teachers, along with teachers like Faigley, used anti-authoritarian ways of teaching writing to students: literacy as a means to participate in social and political avenues.

Faigley notes that the growth of the rhet/comp field is not without problems; the working conditions for many writing teachers still had not improved. This leads Faigley to the main point of his address—there are two forces that are changing what the people of rhet/comp do in their field: the digital revolution and the revolution of the rich. He states, “These revolutions have been described as having very different impacts—the digital revolution as expanding access and the revolution of the rich as contracting it—but we may eventually come to see them as different aspects of an even larger scale” (32).

The revolution of the rich largely has to do with the ability of the rich to control the middle/low class work force and the decline of publicly supported education. Essentially, to increase profits the powers that be found that they needed to find ways to be more flexible with their workers. (I read this to mean that they needed to find a better way to pay more people less money for more work.) This equaled many people losing their jobs. This ultimately affects universities as well:

More and more, colleges and universities are being ordered to make sweeping changes by politicians who are unfamiliar with higher education. They see colleges and universities as bloated and want to “re-engineer” higher education on the market-driven principles of “downsizing” by imposing heavier workloads, getting rid of tenure, and converting full-time jobs into “permanent temp” positions. (34)
Part-time faculty in 1991 became 35% from 22% in 1970. The majority of these positions are held by women.

The digital revolution also has had a great effect on the composition field. Faigley runs through the history of the internet, much like we read last week—as a Cold War project, the ARPANET, and eventual transition of use from military to personal. Faigley states that it is important to understand the internet’s history “before we pronounce it good or bad for our discipline” (36). (It’s important to keep in mind here that this was written in 1997.) Many students were already using the internet in the social and political ways that Faigley described early in the essay. However, Faigley also hits on one topic we already covered last week—issues of access. He states, “Even within the United States, Internet users are far from being equally distributed across the population” (39). This, of course, links back to what Faigley was describing at the revolution of the rich. The rich have access, others do not.

Faigley concludes his address by coming back to talking about the rhet/comp field. He writes, “In a culture that is increasingly cynical about the belief that schools should offer equal opportunity to education, we have remained steadfast to the goal of literacy for equality,” and “we can be confident that the need for what we teach will only increase” (41). Quoting from Berlin, Faigley reminds us that all writing teachers need to be aware of the political and economic contexts in which we teach.

2007-09-06T22:23:00.000-06:00

These are the links to the music I'm part of. If any of you want any music for any of your projects I'm very open to doing some. Points End is my personal music. I do all the scoring, I play all the parts, do the recording mastering all that stuff.
A Rotterdam November is the band I'm part of that I play lead guitar and keyboard for.

http://www.myspace.com/pointsend
http://www.myspace.com/arotterdamnovember

2007-09-06T16:33:00.000-06:00

Mike - Burbles
Melissa - Faigley
Alan - Sidler
Samantha - Sorapure
Christy - Haas

2007-09-06T16:27:00.002-06:00

The music video below features my friend Jen Reynoso. I guess the video is a huge success in Mexico.

2007-09-06T16:27:00.001-06:00

Trunk monkeys are awesome.

2007-09-06T16:24:00.000-06:00

2007-09-06T16:21:00.000-06:00

2007-09-06T16:19:00.000-06:00

2007-09-06T16:18:00.001-06:00

2007-09-06T16:16:00.001-06:00

2007-09-06T16:15:00.000-06:00

2007-09-06T16:12:00.000-06:00

A technology that not everybody knows about is the effect processors people us in todays modern music. There are two routes when going on the quest for perfect tone. I chose the Tonelab SE by VOX to get alot of the tones and sounds that I wanted. Though expensive it takes the place of an entire pedal board-
Though at times the analog sound can be better from a pedal board like this. The cost is outrageous. The link posted has a price probably equivalent to around 3500 dollars.

2007-09-06T16:09:00.000-06:00

This guy "Buckethead" Brian Carroll is a bit strange... But a phenominal guitarist. Derranged 20th century theory combined with modern rock and style. His personality and dressing style isn't exactly my inspiration, but his music is.

2007-09-06T16:06:00.002-06:00

2007-09-06T16:06:00.001-06:00

2007-05-01T01:37:00.000-06:00

The 10 Coolest Technologies You've Never Heard Of

This is a great article. I just watched "Irobot" today, (which was interesting, but certainly not as good as the book) and I couldn't help but think about it as I read through this list. The two most striking comparisons to the movie that I can make come with the Silicon Brains project and the Chaos Computing project.

The Silicon Brains portion of the article basically discusses the invention of artificial brains, for a many different purposes. One reason for the development is to help scientists to truely understand the inner workings of the human brain. I saw more on this exact study in a documentry on The Learning Channel. God help us if there were no learning channel. The idea is phenominal, while it would help us to understand the inner workings of the human brain, it could aslo revolutionize the medical world, aiding those with neurological handicaps in ways that we would have never thought to be possible. The extent of what we could learn from this may be limitless. This is what brings me back to the rediculously hokey but not altogether impossible movie I watched today. While it is not possible for any man to survive as many car crashes or building explosions as Will Smith did, the basic premise of the movie is not so far fetched. It begs the question. If we were to create the equivalant of our own human brain, is this where it would end? Would there be a point of no return? A point where we as creators no longer have control over what we have created?

The Chaos Computing portion was also interesting. The idea of creating a piece of hardware that can morph, and can perform an incredible number of funcions seems impossible, and yet here we are, reading that it is not. It seems to me that as we go along, we are less involved in the things which we create. We are now creating things that we no longer need to manipulate, but simply operate themselves, and in this case, morph themselves. Even the cars we used to see in futuristic movies, the ones that drive themselves, are not becoming so farfetched. A few months back I saw a commercial for a car that can parallel park itself. How wonderful.

At any rate, I have to say, that I will always hold a special place in my heart for the Science Fiction writer. Although I respect any writer who can produce inciteful and publishable material, it seems to me that it is the SciFi writer who is the most inventive of all writers. We are now seeing novels such as "Irobot," which thirty years ago seemed proposterous in content, coming to the forefront with ideas that are not entirely legitimate. The recreation of a human brain, for medical puposes as well as commercial purposes seems wonderful indeed, but certainly will not come without debate. It will be a debate over the consequences of such a step forward in technology. The same consequences that were carried out in a Science FICTION novel written decades ago.

2007-05-01T00:22:00.000-06:00

This is a really interesting article on how you can anger Google and end up condemned to the be at the bottom of the pile when someone searches for you.

Google Hell

2007-04-25T11:31:00.000-06:00

Really, Really Dead

The death of internet radio.
I want to give the eulogy.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2120916,00.asp

http://savenetradio.org

2007-04-23T22:25:00.000-06:00

I don't want to dig too deeply into these three articles on Flash here in the blog because the timing is perfect for me to discuss them in relation to my presentation and my own experience with Flash. But I did want to say that Nielsen's article especially struck me because I still think of the internet in general as a new thing, and just like people are afraid of e-books as a new and substandard replacement for paper books, Nielsen seemed to be talking about Flash as a new and substandard replacement for good old tried-and-true HTML pages. The way he spoke of traditional HTML pages surprised me. He acted as though HTML had been around for centuries and if it ain't broke, why fix it? It's interesting to me to see this resistance and wish to adhere to something which may seem traditional and safe, but is itself a new invention. And it is also interesting to see that the "world" seems to have disagreed with Nielsen. In just seven short years, Flash has gone from "fluff" to indistry standard for the majority of people wishing to create serious websites. If it isn't itself a Flash site, guaranteed over 50% of the decent sites we all go to contain Flash elements. Apple.com uses Flash and quicktime. So does Microsoft.com. Adobe purchased Flash. Almost all commercial and corporate websites are flash. (Glance at Louisvuitton.com). It is the way of the future. --Big Brother

2007-04-19T14:12:00.000-06:00

DIGITAL DIVIDE in the last twenty-four hours.

Check out this article on closing the Digital Divide. Microsoft is sunning its benevolent side.

TG Daily Article

2007-04-15T21:26:00.000-06:00

Don't Click It.

I realize this one was already blogged on... but I don't care because I want to do it too.

I thought this site was pretty interesting. I must admit that I was very confused when I first entered the site and was caught clicking. But, I did get the hang of it eventually and it was pretty fun. I don't know if it is something I would want to do on a regular basis, but it is something to think about. What would I do if suddenly my mouse was wrapped up with one of those pokey things? Probably cry after getting poked quite a few times, but after that it would be something that I would get used to... just like every other piece of technology that has come my way. But that leads me to the question: are we creating technology, or is technology creating us? Kind of scary to think about.

I really liked the fact that the site had just about everything you would need to know... the history of clicking, how to not click, why to not click, and all that jazz. It even had tons of fun examples, I'm sure I could have been entertained for hours if I didn't have homework to do. But I especially liked the mouse tutor. the first test (catching the little white balls while avoiding the scary hands) took me forever to pass. It made me mad. The second one (the maze) was eassssssy! the third (the spiders) was simple enough, I'm just too tired to be quick ebough to keep those icky spiders off those por people. But I got a professional score any way (after trying 5 times).

Hooray!!! I am done with all 10 of mine now!!!

2007-04-14T16:37:00.000-06:00

Don't Click it. Institute for interactive research.

I really enjoyed the premise behind this site, rather than using the mouse to click and change from section to section you need only rest the cursor over a specific point and the dynamic interface does the rest.

There was a certain freedom that I found in not being required to use the mouse in the traditional sense. One solution to prevent clicking provided by the institute is the Mouse Wrap, which is a spiked cover which you place over the right and left clickers, effective.

The inclusion of historical usage of the click was also pretty interesting; dating back to 300 BCE with the Greek Countingboard to the SAGE radio control center to modern computing. Alternative methods to clicking buttons are swiping the cursor over the button in a linear or circular motion or holding the cursor over the button for a determined amount of time. I am curious if this sort of interface would provide less irritation or agitation to those with Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. The whole idea of not having to click, though, is really interesting, I see this is as some part of what the future holds.

Here is another interface that is definitely going to be seen in future implementation.

2007-04-12T11:46:00.000-06:00

no no no no no no no no(etc.)

Does anyone else have this running through their heads? I had to put on some music after watching this vlog, because I could not get the cacophony out of my head!

Did anyone else find the epileptic screen seizures distracting? There were some screens where I couldn't read the text before the image came to eat itself, and then I would try to find where I was.

One thing I did gain from that experience was the reason why I hate poetry. I have the hardest time figuring out what in the world poets are trying to tell me. Kearns said that poetry focuses more on form than correlation. I don't get the correlation.

For example, I would have never gotten any/all of what Robert Kearns was trying to say with the first poem. I had no idea where to begin, because I did not see any correlation between the text and g(G)od. I understand from the text that Kearns wants people to figure things out on their own, and that he is busy answering his own questions, but I am not one who is pre-disposed to seeking the meaning of poems. I learn through a different medium.

John

2007-04-11T21:16:00.000-06:00

Visual Blogs. (I'll just mouth off about something small and highly specific because it caught my eye).

Badger writes:
"Weblogs, it could be argued, help to re-establish the connection between image and place. When we look at a blog image we also look at what appears around it – the design of the blog itself, the text, the other images, the voice of the blogger."

I don't buy into the argument that a visual blog closes the schism between original locus and original artwork. Benjamin wasn't talking about digital technology, and frankly I find it hard to believe that he would define digital work as original art to begin with. I would suggest that Benjamin would say digital art has no "aura" to be removed in the first place. Furthermore, if it is true that simply including captions and the html background of a blog ties visual work to its original locus, then the answer to returning original artwork to its natural environment (thereby negating Benjamin's concerns) is that all one has to do is post some pictures and details about the original location of creation and bam! we're back where we belong. Of course, this isn't true. Benjamin was saying that no matter what, a reproduction can never possess the original quality of the hand-made piece in the original locus and context of its creation. But digital art doesn't ever really exist, does it? It's little ones and zeroes. There is no film, no negatives, no paint involved. What is a digital photograph of a meal? Is it art in Benjamin's sense if there is no original copy? Is the original copy the first downloaded file one places on a hard drive? That sounds completely different to me than an original painting. Is the original gone forever once I download my pics and erase the memory card on the camera? Is it removed from its original context if I move the file from My Photos to My Documents? Is the aura gone if I buy a new computer and transfer all my files over? I think the argument is foolish.

2007-04-10T01:14:00.000-06:00

Well I have to say I am really intrigued by this set of online articles, for a multitude of reasons. Starting with the most irreverant, I happen to know the town of Pinedale pretty well. I am familiar with the Bar Cross Ranch and if I sat and thoguht about it long enough I could probably even put a face to the writer's name. The only thing I am not sure of is what he does/did to earn the title cyberspace cadet. Is that a job title? A name for people who are ambivalent about the internet? A reference to great works of goodness he has performed for Deadheads and other online communities? Wish I knew.

Still this article struck a chord with me, particularly when he brought up prana. I get what he is saying about small communities, having grown up in one in Wyoming myself. I liked the idea that we all start in someplace or time we call home. We don't realise how much it means until we no longer have it. Then we spend the rest of our lives sorting through fascimilies, fighting for the dreams of memories of what we called home, and watching as each new place, however intriguing, falls short of the expectations of that first home, even later incarnations of the same space. I'd say that is an archtypal experience for people. That particular journey can be found in quabbalistic theories, Christian spirituality, and is somewhere near the crux of the Bhuddist religion.

Then there is the fact that reading this article gives me a better understanding of what I am wanting to learn and understand within the confines of my final project. Yes, I am interested in collaborative writing but in the sense that my blog space and my game in chat space create community and whether or not that community effectively communicates anything beyond its own self interests. Is there prana? Is there meaningful connection or are we all just a bunch of floating cyberidentities that live incomplete lives in the computer generated world out of a need for connection that real life no longer offers in ideal quantity?

I also share the understanding that I'd rather have real friends, people I can see and touch and smell and trust by their appearance in my life that they are honest in that identity, than friends I only know through cyberspace. Words on a screen don't do it for me. Or perhaps they do too much. When I think about the second article we read and the issues it brought up in regards to identity with the web, I realise that yes, Hayley, whom I've never met in real life, is one of the few females I know that I trust, becuase she poses no threat. Yet I've only known her through IM. Who knows she could be male in this real world. Does it matter? Does it matter who anyone is here because I know her there and that is the person I trust. A personality defined in lines of text. When all of us are readin each other's profiles and interpreting ourselves throguh the words of others, what does that mean? What does it do to the idea of self and the idea of shared experience? I am tired of asking question. I'd be interested in your thoughts.

2007-04-09T18:35:00.000-06:00

By the way, I figured out how to edit blogs if you all need to. Go to you Dashboard and click on manage posts. It will show all of the past posts and next to all of yours there is an edit button.

2007-04-09T18:22:00.000-06:00

Is There a There in Cyberspace?

I thought this article and the other one, which covered something similar, were very interesting. Both seemed to come up with the fact that perhaps real life is better than cyber life. I have to agree. Real life is, well, real. You can touch things, see things, feel things, smell things, hear things, and experience REAL things. Online you're not REALLY doing any of that (ok, maybe seeing and hearing). The experiences that you have in online worlds are not real experiences. They have nothing to do with the real world. BUT, I have to say they are fun and aren't all that bad.

From my personal experience I enjoy real life much more than online life. I was one of those people that spent hours online in chat rooms and RPG games and websites. I was convinced, at first, that it was so much better than real life. But after a couple years of this I came to realize that it was a lonely life. I wasn't actually experiencing anything, I was just interacting in one big story.

But, like I said before, they aren't all bad as long as people understand that it isn't real. The problem is the people who get way too involved like in the "A Raper in Cyberspace" article. The man who did this was far too involved in the game (and a bit messed up in his head if you ask me). I think it is about time everyone finds something in real life to occupy their time and leave the internet for fun, information, and communication.

2007-04-05T20:03:00.000-06:00

Gender gap alive and well online.

I didn't know that the number of users was now so gender similar. I knew that before there was a gap existing with female users, gladly that has changed. It is interesting in the reasons of usage, male users try to find something new and more interesting to them while female users try to keep up with relationships and connections. More women are using the net now, as they outnumber men in the US. It seems that men and women are both utilitarian in their usage of the net, while men tend to be checking out new technologies, sports information, and joining fantasy sports teams--women tend to use the net for medical research, email, map directions, and religious information.

From personal experience I can say that I do tend to use the net from the male standpoint pretty regularly, but also include much general research into topics of varying degree, medicine, religion, and maps do fall in there undoubtedly, perhaps less in terms of directions. All in all, a good article.

2007-04-04T23:43:00.000-06:00

I thought we were all supposed to pick an article that we liked and write on it in here... but I seem to be the only onw (so far). I guess I'll get started any way.

Writing 4 Cyberformance

I thought this was interesting, yet so boring all at the same time. The way this is set up is different from everything else we have read and I like that. Different formats are always interesting to me.
It was very boring though. It seems to me that most online conversations that are worth reading have some funny, interesting, or entertaining subject matter, but this one just seemed to drag on and talk about nothing.
It had a few good points, like the mis-communication on the internet that takes place when we can't hear voices or see body language. I also liked the part about how lol has so many meanings, because it does.
Other than that though, I'm not sure if I got anything else out of it. I think they could have easily made this more interesting than it was.
I was also confused from time to time when names were cut off and I didn't know who was talking, or the various squares in the middle or words (hopefully that isn't just my computer)
But, like I said, I think the most important part of this article is the mis-communication. It is something to think about since it is such a set back.

Jessica

2007-04-04T23:35:00.000-06:00

Women's Advocate...

Jumping right in...what is the answer to the question: what's stopping women from playing games like Warcraft? It was a provocative question, but as soon as it was asked, the article moved on. Is it unanswerable right now?

I also found it interesting that Ray said the video game industry was "growing up." That seems like a notable term for it, since video games are literally young. At only forty years old, give or take, video games (especially compared to other forms of entertainment like books, dance, music, even card games or board games, which have been around for centuries) really are young, and really are growing up. Are video games teenagers or adults yet? We left the infant stage once we moved past Snake and Space Invaders, past the toddler years once we left behind Duckhunt and Super Mario Bros., past Kindergarten when we left Starfox and Sonic and DK2 in the dust...but where are we now?

2007-03-15T03:00:00.000-06:00

File-Sharing to Bypass Censorship. I won't do the whole spiel, but I did feel like saying this article sounds a lot like Google News. Sure, so Google News is still only linking to established "traditional" news sources, but I'm amazed by where I find myself sent and the views I come across. It's not just NBC and BBC and New York Times anymore. I've read newspaper articles from out-of-the way corners of Asia and Australia. It may not be P2P, but it offers substantially broader access to news information than I had five years ago.

2007-03-14T15:26:00.000-06:00

Hacktivism is the fusion of computer hacking and political activism. It is aimed at free information, removing censorship, etc. The focus of this article was mostly on the difference between hacking and hacktivism, and the number of activities wrongly defined as Hacktivism such as Denial of Service hacking.

It seemed to me that the most interesting aspect of this article was the idea that governments are trying to impose restrictions on the internet, which in and of itself, is supposed to be a free and ungoverned resource. That raises issues in my mind of the possibilities of a one-world government not based upon the unification of the nations of the world, but on the internet as a global environment. Is the internet its own nation, so to speak, and will we eventually see the internet come under the rule of a government? The Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace is flamboyant and idealistic, and I can't help but thinking that the America we live in today is not so much the true democracy the Founding Fathers intended when they made their own Declaration 240 years ago. We may believe the internet can and should be free and ungoverned now in its infancy, but the internet may become a global cybernation with its own non-terrestrial government in the future.

I find the concept of true Hacktivism to be fundamentally profound, although I did notice that a great deal of the article and the quotes from Hacktivists and experts seemed sensational and extremist. The question is, are Hacktivists really freeing information which should be universally accessible, or are they taking a non-discriminatory approach and endangering individual and group security? I think there is a great deal of grey area here. What is positive, constructive hacking that sends political messages, and what is extremist hacking that produces damaging results (and who decides)?

2007-03-14T11:22:00.000-06:00

David Scheck, Andrew L. Shapiro, and Steven Johnson, “Technorealism. Get Real! A Manifesto from a New Generation of Cultural Critics”

This article serves as a sobering wake-up call to all technophiles, as well as a reassurance to technophobes. In opposition to some of the other “digital manifestos” read this week (particularly John Perry Barlow’s “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”) “Technorealism…” seeks to dispel digital idealist thoughts. The article professes that there is inequity built into all aspects of technology, and by no means is the Internet a signifier of utopian progress. Equally divisive is the piece’s open stance on government intervention, declaring that online jurisdiction of some sort is necessary and natural.

Regardless of slant, the articles read this week share a common thread in recognizing technology—principally the Internet—as not only an extension of society, but a highly influential, sovereign body. The lines regarding regulation, conduct, and control are highly blurred (as one article mentions, “moving with the technology”).

In regard to the copyright issues discussed this week, “Technorealism…” makes a very clear distinction between information and knowledge. To me this signifies a difference between the knowledge it requires to create a mash-up such as the .mp3 example I brought to class (which you can listen to here.) and the actual information the pieces of said mash-up came from (technically songs, which require a different type of knowledge to create). As technology proliferates and information moves faster throughout the globe in a number of different mediums, this new art movement seems only natural; especially to the United States, a nation that has struggled for a cultural identity for some time. Perhaps this mash-up culture is our culture, a sort of digital melting pot if you will.

The article on guerilla advertising reminded me of the recent “bomb” scare in Boston. Watch it here:

2007-03-14T01:55:00.000-06:00

"Changing Copyright," Essay by NEGATIVLAND

This is a fairly long article for the amount of information it covers. I think that if the author had not used three adjectives to describe every noun, we would all be in bed by now. That being said, here is an overview of the article.

The thesis, or main point rather, is posed in the form of a question, located near the end of the entire article. The question is this, "Should those who might be borrowed from have an absolute right to prevent any such future reuses of their properties, even when the reuse is obviously part of a new and unique work? Do we want to actually put all forms of free reuse under the heading of "theft" and criminalize a valuable art form such as collage?"

The article does not neccessarily contain much statistical analysis or research pertaining to the question, but rather a basic opinion which I am sure is the opinion of most of us when presented with these questions. Your average reader would answer "no." The article gives some basic arguments for this. The main one seems to be that copyright laws are killing creativity in America.

What the article suggests in this argument, is that not eveything that is created, something completely original. I would agree with this in a sense. Many writers, film makers, or artists of any kind are heavily influenced by books which they have read, movies they've seen, paintings, songs, etc. Therefore, the article suggests that by not allowing for at least some degree of "borrowing," creativity in America is doomed. Unless someone were to come up with something that is completely original, they would generally be paying a high price, or worse, opting not to create anything at all.

Much of the the first half of the article consists of an intense amount of wordiness. The second half is the meatiest, and most easily interpretable. The basic premise is that copyright laws are too tight, which most would agree upon. The article just takes it a step further in saying that this rigidity of the legal system is destroying the creative spirit of artists in America. The article even makes comparisons to Communism, in that it disregards the human nature of its own people (artists), and instead, adhears only to the rights of publishers and manufactures.

2007-03-13T21:46:00.000-06:00

John Whalen, “The Mayhem is the Message”

This article basically sums up the idea of "Cultural Jamming," which is in essence a returning attack on advertising (be it on the internet through spam, or on billboards seen while driving down the highway) which involves altering content of the original advertisement. Joe Matheny, is one such "troublemaker" with the rain of frogs on Bill Clinton's website, who was rewarded with multiple automated thank-yous. Ham radio jammers are another example of these culture jammers, including examples of "foul-mouthed Mickey Mouse impersonations and other audio filth."
Digital-age jamming examples include the following: pirating radio and TV, computer hacking, media hoaxing, and counterfeit desktop publishing to name just a few. There are many names applied to this form of communication including: media vandalism, "clueless asshole-ism", and as they term themselves dissidents of mainstream media. One of the more interesting aspects of the article is the BLF, or Billboard Liberation Front, that makes massive printouts to edit billboard text or simply to add a blemish or many. Jack Napier, of the BLF, mentions that they "don't damage the property. I don't want to cut billboards down. It's just that I'm kind of tired of being communicated to constantly by advertisers who wane me to buy their product." I can't agree more with what they are doing, this advertising is very annoying, especially flash-based ads on the internet (which aren't too difficult to defeat).

2007-03-13T19:49:00.000-06:00

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.
A motto, no a manifesto, for the digital community, the digital generation. The declaration, by John Perry Barlow, is the statement of the freedom of thought exchange, ungovernable by law or institution. It is a proclamation of self government; the freedoms allowed by a society truly governed by its people. It's an admonishment to those who fear what cyberspace is, and could be. It is an articulation of the power we now share in this digital medium.
It is a declaration.
The hope is that Barlow's assertions are true, that the cyber-realm is truly independent. If government and institution can somehow restrain the flow of thought, we will have lost our last community forum, the last of our power, the last of our independence.

2007-03-13T08:21:00.000-06:00

Viacom sues Youtube over copyright infringement.

Protecting fair use.

2007-03-11T22:51:00.000-06:00

Gods Little Toys by William Gibson

Pretty much this article covers "cut-up," "collage," "reconstruction," "remix" stuff from way back in the 40's all the way to now. The jist of this collage like method is taking writing, or songs, or sound snip-its, or something and cutting it up and putting it together with other things of that sort and creating something entirely new. This is also covered in more detail in Scutze's article.

I thought it was interesting to read these articles the week after we read articles on copy right laws, because these remixes are violating them. I personall thought the laws are getting quite rediculous and I was very happy to know people out there are still "sticking it to the man," if you will.

One thing I thought was a bit questionable in this article was what he said about the record industry. Basically he said they are pretty much out of the picture, or at least heading that way. Does he think these remixes on the internet are going to take over? That is what is comic. I don't even like music remixes so I doubt I would like other kinds either. Not to mention, if the record industry became obsolete there wouldn't be anything new to mix with. But he seems quite sure that that is the way things are heading.

I did like the last but about who owns culture and especially the music in it. I do agree that we as a people own our culture no matter what big companies say or think. That is what makes us who we are.

2007-03-08T13:44:00.000-07:00

Abstracts for Week 9

Merin – Governments of the Industrial World
Jess – God’s Little Toys
James – Who Owns Culture
Sean – Hactivism
Dylan – Changing Copyright
Bill – Mayhem is the Message
John – File Sharing
Dale – Technorealism

2007-03-07T10:51:00.000-07:00

Although this article was incredibly spread out and seemed a lot larger than is tackle-able, I did find a tutorial on this site that was very helpful to give some
direction. You can view the tutorial href="http://www.lib.utsystem.edu/copyright/index.html">here
if you didn't find it.

The most useful aspect of this website was the four factors test. These are nebulous rules surrounding the copyright laws. The questions were:

1. What is the character of the use?
2. What is the nature of the work to be used?
3. How much of the work will you use?
4. What effect would this use have on the market for the original or for permissions if the use were widespread?

Since this article was written for university instructors, it talked about fair use. One's work can be included in a university setting for critique, and also for
distribution to students (one copy to each student) without any financial obligations to the author. The author, by the way, is anyone who contributes to the original publication with new information or artwork, as long as other contributors are not hired on a work-for-hire basis. If the work becomes proprietary at any time, then the usage of the materials could be in question again. The example this text gave was that the instructor wanted to publish her work into a book, and since the instructor would benefit financially, the publisher asked if she had permission from each and all of the authors she was citing in the book. That would be a time consuming process. You can ask the author for permission to use their work, and then it wouldn't be a problem. If the author says no, you still might be able to use it,
however.

In short, there are no hard and fast rules as to when something is used in a publication. I thought the comic book would help me get a better hold on things, but it added legal issues that were not discussed in this article. Lawyers can be a good thing in the right setting.

Publication companies will set limits on how long a citation can be if the author is not responding to inquiries regarding usage, or if the author cannot be reached. There is still a liability issue, but by them putting limits on the length of the quotation, there is lesslikelihood that the author/publishing company/university will be sued (Yes, all of these organizations can be sued).

I think after writing this abstract, I understand why the information on this page was so disjointed. There are too many tangents to go off on before you can make it to your point. I guess that is what hyperlinks are for.

John

2007-03-07T00:25:00.000-07:00

"Bound by Law? Tales from the Public Domain" Keith Aoki, James Boyle, and Jennifer Jenkins.

This online comic book helps to outline the general concept of fair use in copyright law including elements that are inherently in danger of stifling artistic achievement.
The comic strip begins with consideration of the "clearing rights" concepts which involve the "process of finding the rights holder, and getting permission or paying to use material." This is supposed to be an effective measure that helps to protect previous creative work, however the crux issue of this work, is that Documentarians deal with more than just other people's rights. What it really comes down to is what is listed under copyright law as public domain, page 10 has a general outline. Broken down, the table shown contains the generality that any work created after 1/1/1978 will be protected "when the work is fixed in a tangible medium of expression." The eight types of works that are protectable are listed on page 29. A good portion of the comic book pertains to a little line on page 14, "Fair use Should mean you don't need permission for incidentally captured fragments. But the practice is often different." It seems a little outrageous to charge $10,000 to include a 4.5 second Simpson's clip accidentally included in filming. To prevent further problems and stifling creativity the comic strip author's suggest that filmmakers research fair use and make "collective decisions about what's fair"; though I'm not completely certain that it would protect them if they broke copyright law similarly as a group. Another powerful question was posed, "Do we want to give copyright holders a veto over history?", after inclusion of the Dr. King's estate claiming copyright over his speeches, photos, and interviews. Another important issue considered is the extension of term limits from 1978 to 1998 and on extending copyright terms from 28 years to 50 years to 70 years past the death of the author (95 for corporate authors). The end seemed appropriate with the inclusion the ecological, naming there are some entities or parcels that need to be private, however when it comes to creativity, fair use needs to be extended somewhat. This is definitely a complicated issue, whether copyright laws should be able to limit artistic creativity in order to maintain the source's originality. How should this be limited, and how should regulation occur, who decides.

2007-03-05T01:41:00.000-07:00

Yes, I noticed as well that two of the articles are the same, and one of them, the most important of all I think, is one that we read a few weeks back in "Game Theories." I found myself making incredible article connections in my head before even reading the others and I didn't know why until I noticed that I'd already read them. My article for abstract, however, is new.

"From Sweatshops to Stateside Coorporations" By James Lee

This article seemed to pack a lot of information in just two average length pages. Hopefully I can explain it without tangling it all up. We have all heard of sweatshops in Asia, most notably sweatshops that produce for clothing companies and shoe companies. Lawrence prepped us with "Game Theories," for what we now read in this article, and that is sweat shops meant specifically to farm gold, IE the virtual money we learned could be farmed and sold as see in "Game Theories" as well.

The article mentions, buyer seller, supply and demand type aspect, but touches very lightly on the buyer. Lee writes the buyer as being the gamer with money to burn. The sellers are the newfound coorporations which implement sweat shops as a means of farming the gold, so that they might turn around and launder to this group of gamers with money to burn.

The article discusses the conditions of the sweat shops. Work days run around 12 hours. And according to some sources from the sweat shops who do not give their real names, there are not Holidays. The managers of these places are said to work even longer days of around 14 hours. They also live there. Lee writes "...if you lose your job, you also lose your home." when writing about the managerial conditions at the "farming centers." Work conditions then, could be considered vigorous. However, the article does go on to imply that the conditions are not at all comparable to a sweat shop that produces clothing or shoes. I would agree, that there is a major difference between sitting in front of a computer playing a game all day, and performing manual labor producing clothing all day. If I were forced to chose one, I would take the former.

To me the information this article reveals to us enforces the idea that this virtual economy, is just that, a virtual economy. You have larger coorporations buying out smaller ones, monopolizing the trade so to speak. IGE can be comparable to stores like Walmart or Target. Also, the biggest profiters in this economy, true to form, are inherently dirty. The article mentions that CEOs of these cooporations will use the same excuses that CEOs of so many other coorporations use when confronted with the sweat shop question, saying that these people "...earn a fair salery in relation to the profession in that country."

2007-03-04T22:41:00.000-07:00

Ok first I would like to point out that two of the articles this week are repeats, just incase no one noticed. Game Theories we read two weeks ago. It was the article from the Walrus. Also, Boring Game? Hire a Player and Ogre to Slay? Outsource it to Chinese are exactly the same as well. So I suppose Merin and I are going to be posting about the same thing. I also think these aticles would have been more beneficial if they had been in the same week or the week right after the first week we started talking about video games. Just a thought

"Boring Game? Hire a Player" by David Barboza

Pretty much this article talks about "farming" sweat shops in China. These are places that hire people, for rediculous pay, to run around in games and get the most gold, the best weapons and such, and to level the characters. In turn the company turns around and sells these things for actual money. This is what all of the articles talked about this week.

The first thought that comes to my mind is how wrong this is. That could just be me. I'm sure some of you in the class think this is perfectly fine. But let me go into why I think this is so wrong.

Let's start with the selling of virtual goods for real money, shall we? The gaming companies are very against this. In Clive Thompson's article he quotes Richard Bartle (who pioneered the first virtual world in the 1980s) as saying, "It's a game and what we are doing is inviting you in to play with the toys. But you don't own the toys. We do." That is it exactly. This is supposed to be a game... that you play... for fun. Wow, what a shocker!! For people to buy their way into a better part of the game defeats the purpose entirely and ruins the fun of getting there.

The next thing I had a problem with was how little these people get paid in China for doing this job. I can't imagine they could live off of that. The highest someone made in this article was $250 a month and the lowest was $75 a month. I would be out on the street with the bums drinking booze if that was me. I guess they chose to do that job and all they have to do is play video games all day, but it still seems rediculous. It makes it so much worse when you find out how much the company makes off what these people are doing. In the James Lee article, for example, one of these companies was making $1.5 million a year. And they can't afford to give their employees more? As said by Edward Castronova, mentioned in a couple of the articles this week, "They're exploiting the wage difference between the US and China for unskilled labor."

Apparently not much is being done to shut down these companies. I think something should be done. This isn't what playing games should be about.

Jessica

2007-03-04T22:38:00.000-07:00

Ogre to Slay? Outsource It to Chinese
The readings this week are an expansion of what we began in week six. The class was first introduced to the online MMORPG economies in Clive Thompson article "Game Theories." David Barboza's article follows the online economy through an examination of "Goldfarming" a phenomina that is happening internationally in digital sweatshops.
Gold farming is the term used when an individual, a small business, or a corperation pays gamers to simply accrue game currency, as well as build characters and earn rare items, which can be sold on the digital black market for real world profit. The ease with which this is done is prime for sweatshop labour, which Barboza tries to focus on in his article, but does so unsuccessfully. Instead the article has to do with the ability to make profit off of digital currnecy, which was already examined in Thompson's article.
Barboza's discriptions of the work environment become seemingly minor atrocities which occur in digital sweatshops. "Another operation here has about 40 computers lined up in the basement of an old dilapidated building, all playing the same game. Upstairs were unkempt, closet-size dormitory rooms where several gamers slept on bunk beds; the floors were strewn with hot pots, " Barboza observes. However, the comparison these sweatshops to the "thousands of textile mills and toy factories that have moved here from Taiwan, Hong Kong and other parts of the world to take advantage of China's vast pool of cheap labor," seems streched in the article, as if an afterthought.
The socio-economic impact of these goldfarms are worth studying, not just on the digital market, but with what it has done to the work ethic of our generation in not only International sweatshops but in the warm glow of computer screens in the United states as well.
Due to limitations in my internet access ability I was not able to view the multi media portion of this article. When I have the ability to view it, I may ammend my assertions.

2007-03-01T13:47:00.000-07:00

Abstracts for Week 8:

Jess: Boring Game
Merin: Ogre
James: Everquest
Dylan: Sweatshops
John: Crash Course

2007-02-28T12:57:00.000-07:00

The Museum of E-Failure

Since its inception in 2000, this website has logged 900 + websites that have "gone dark" from the years 1998-2004. Some of the sites just disappeared off the face of the planet without any reason why, whereas others showed an "epitaph" or some sort of farewell, webmaster written. Within this site are screen-shot recordings of the demised sites, much to the point of remembering what has passed through the ages unnoticed. The site mentions that this is to help find "insight" to see if the web has a "central role" in later history of dead media.

Beyond the seemingly endless pile of web refuse listed in center-screen, there is an explanation at the right pane of the page that discusses this page of Ghost Sites. This seems to be some sort of mock narrative, which implies an astronautical experience which led to the beginning of a 1996 project. This continues to creatively discuss the dot.com bubble. That is pretty much what is considered in the page, many examples of dead sites without any possible explanation for the occurrence, unfortunately bleem.com, which I believe is the same bleem software playstation emulator is among the list of casualties. Perhaps the cause of their demise was a lack of advertisement at cited in "The Great Web Wipeout", and insight before its due time.

It seems that with the passing of these sites, we learned how to make up from others mistakes and helped to create the booming internet-economy that exists today. I thought this site was quite interesting, somewhat morbid in a sense, but thought provoking to see how many need to fail for the few winners to pick up the pieces and achieve great success.

2007-02-28T01:17:00.000-07:00

The Great Web Wipeout

I see that I am the first to take advantage of the new two in the morning time extension. Here is a comb over of this article.

This article might seem irrelevant, because it is now around a decade old. However I don't believe that this article stepped too far out of its boundries. It didn't make any rash predictions, or suggest and ideas that never really came to be. It more so remained focused on its main theme, and that is the death of so man of the so called dotcoms during what was supposed to be the great media revolution.

The article highlights two main reasons as to why this complete collapse of profitable websites occured. The two are closely related to each other, as we can see that one reason would be the eventual cause for the other. The first reason sited in the article is what the article refers to as the provider's "general inability to add bandwidth." For those of us who are not entirely computer savey, what this basically means is that sites were getting more hits than they were capable of handling, forcing them to become "off the net" at some point on a daily basis because of overload. The reaction to this then, was that people were simply going to smaller sites that had less hits. This by itself is a problem, yes, but what it would eventually lead to would prove to be the nail in the coffin, so to speak, for many providers on the web.

As we all know, free websites depend entirely on advertisement dollars to turn a profit. Once advertisers got wind of the over load on their respective sites, investigations were carried out in order to find out how many users were actually getting to see their articles, and also for how long. The article states that advertisement expenses were at some point around 15 dollars a hit for some websites. After investigations however, it was found that users that did access the sites, were generally only there for a matter of minutes. On top of this, it was also found that 90 percent of the hits were not even real users, but rather produced by "spiders" and "crawlers." At this discovery, prices for advertising dipped all the way down to a dollar for every thousand hits.

My favorite idea touched upon by this article, was the comparison of heavily used sites such as Yahoo.com, among many others (especially in the present day, ten years later), with big time corporations such like Wal Mart, calling the sites the Wal Marts of web advertising, which "drove the price points into the basement."

I would now ask, after reading this article, in todays world, has the "media revolution," which was thought to be occuring back in 1996 six, occured yet? Was the great web wipe out simply a case of entreprenuers getting too far ahead of themselves and attempting to accomplish goals that they did not yet have the means to accomplish? Do we have the means now, in the present day?

2007-02-27T22:23:00.000-07:00

Another comment on the videos- We all have fairly disturbing taste...

"Dot Bomb"
Joseph D'Hippolito's article focuses on the rise and fall of the dotcom economy wave, why it happened, and what can be learned from the early internet failures of the mid-nineties. As D'Hippolito concisely puts it, "The supersonic growth of dotcom businesses—and their equally supersonic collapse—is one of the most spectacular developments in technological and commercial history."
Pets.com, the feature of two other articles this weeks, is the symbol of the dotcom disaster. The monitary loss quoted by D'hippolito is substantial, as I understood it somewhere near 62 million dollars. How did this happen? According to the article, it was the ability for entrepeuners to start business without any assets. Ideas had investors, money thrown at them, and were off the ground trying to run all without a business plan or competent management. Ralph Oliva, executive director of the Institute for the Study of Business Markets and a marketing professor at Penn State University said, "“An entrepreneur should not get money until that idea is translated into a great business design. If all venture capitalists are doing is funding ideas and the business infrastructure hasn’t been put in place, then a very important part of the capitalist system has broken down.”
Dotcom economy failed for the very reason that Internet succeeds, an extension of net neutrality. Anybody with computer experience could feasibly open their own online business, without economic training, and with the correct greedy corporate connections without even their own assets to risk in the venture.
What can be learned from this failure? A digital Market is still a market, business theory works the same in the digital world as in the real world. Though the internet economy failed in the nineties, it will revive as all economies eventually revive, "Once the current market anomalies are over, I feel there will be an incredible demand for people who really know how to coach in this converging economy,” Oliva says.
Before the readings for this week, I hadn't understand the true disaster of the dotcom economy. Most of all, why did these big businesses not see the holes and why did they keep throwing money at a non-returning venture? I'm not sure if it was greed, or hope.

2007-02-27T21:37:00.000-07:00

First I would like to say I enjoyed everyone's videos very much. Good times.

"Pets.com latest high-profile dot-com disaster" by Troy Wolverton

This article is about Pets.com, an internet pet food company, that had to close down during the "Great We Wipeout" or "Dot Bomb." Basically, like many other web based companies at this time, they spent more than they made. According the the Dot Bomb article in 1999 the company spent $21 million in advertising (the awesome sock puppet dog) and only earned $5.4 million. Doesn't quite even out. Eventually the company shut down and sold everything, the article didn't say to who but if you go to the website now, it is no surprise.

All of these articles talk about the same thing, web based companies shutting down or going bankrupt. Before and during the time these articles were written a lot of companies were starting online businesses thinking it would make them quick money. Unfortunately, a lot of the people didn't know how to run a business and most of them shut down. I'm sure a lot of those sites are now shown on the Museum of E-failure.

My first thought on this was, "Wow, I didn't know this happened." Maybe I was too young to care about news. To me the internet has always seemed like a great place for business. I hope I'm not the only one in the class to hear about this for the first time, although I'm sure I am. My next thought was, "Is this still happening?" I'm sure it isn't as bad as it was then or I would be hearing about it. But, what I wonder is if the numbers are still relitively high or if we have managed to fix the problem? Obviously, a lot of businesses, online and else where, will shut down due to lack of interest and business skills, but this seems like an outrageous amount of failed businesses to me.

I guess the internet isn't as great as I once imagined huh?

2007-02-27T12:46:00.000-07:00

2007-02-27T12:39:00.000-07:00

2007-02-27T12:35:00.001-07:00

2007-02-27T12:35:00.000-07:00

Be sure to turn your sound on

2007-02-27T12:33:00.000-07:00

how to get fired and find a new career

2007-02-27T12:31:00.000-07:00

2007-02-27T12:26:00.000-07:00

Arcade Fireis totallywickedsweet!

2007-02-27T12:20:00.000-07:00

iPhone Hysteria

haHA!

2007-02-27T00:49:00.000-07:00

One more rant! This is hearkening back to a previous discussion of making websites that are useful and actually work.

So my fiancee and I were looking at reviews of the (awful) movie The Number 23 with Jim Carrey, which took us to a wiki article on the 23 enigma. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23_%28numerology%29 (if any of you have extra time and are a tad bored). The article stated that it takes 23 seconds for blood to circulate through the human body and my lady, being the scientist, said she thought that was incorrect. So I quickly tried to search it. I came across several websites which had no useful information, and this was one of them. Notice how the site poses the question, but gives no distinctive link to the answer. And furthermore, when you click on the only seemingly pertinent link, it takes you....tada!....nowhere. This is a how-to for the worst of the web. And, by the way, I never was able to find out how long it takes for blood to circulate. And, because there are people making useless websites such as this, I was all the more annoyed when we left for the movie which in and of itself, was somewhat useless and annoying. So much for trying to take a quick break from the semester! Here it is:

http://www.writer-tech.com/sre/body/circulatory.htm

2007-02-26T23:47:00.000-07:00

Hey folks - Thought we could all use a little relief being as how it's midterm season. This is a clip from the movie Sneakers with Robert Redford, but it pertains to class. The story follows a group of hackers/pseudo-techno-criminals who have created a business that allows companies to hire them and test their security vulnerabilities by breaking or hacking into their buildings and/or networks. But everything goes awry when Robert Redford's former buddy resurfaces after his alleged death decades before to become the Sneakers' nemesis....

In this scene, David Straithairn, who plays a blind man and the team's lead tech guy, uses a refreshable braille display to read computer information displayed on the screen. It takes a minute to load, but it's kind of fun, and it shows some of the accessibility technology we're talking about.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=360vFPX-T_g

2007-02-26T21:20:00.000-07:00

Interesting presentation on the Net Neutrality argument.

2007-02-26T00:30:00.000-07:00

Web Accessibility Initiative

Making the web accessible to all people, regardless of disability, age, etc., is the goal of this initiative, with emphasis not only on websites but web software. The groups making up the WAI want to create a web where not only can people with disabilities access the web, but also contribute. They argue that the technological advantages of the web allow for new "unprecidented" possibilities for access to and interaction with information in a way never previously possible using standard tools like print or video media. The introduction has very little applicable information, so....

I dug a little deeper and began looking at actual evaluations and guidelines.

Essential Components of Web Accessibility employs a relatively simple-enough concept of interdependency between users and authors as the heart of web access. If the authoring tools and evaluative tools developers use produce content which are directly accessed by users employing assistive technology, browsers, and media players, and everything works the same way on each side of the coin, the system runs smoothly and users are not denied access because of some disability. Furthermore, if implemented and maintained correctly, the system is self-perpetuating in a sort of economic concept of proportionate supply-and-demand. If users can access the web universally using certain tools, those tools come into demand, as does the demand for developers to continue to create web media which universally interacts with these tools and users, and like a cycle, the system flourishes. This is essentially the goal of the initiative. The W3C and WAI have a trifecta of guidelines for creating and maintaining user accessibility aimed at the three levels of the web: developer, content, user. The ATA (Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines) looks at developing tools, the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) at the content in static terms, separate from user and developer, and the UAAG (User Agent Accessibility Guidelines) looks at how end-users receive and interact with web content.

There are mountains of information contained here and I couldn't begin to sort through it all in a few hours' time. The fact that these guidelines go so far as to evaluate content evemts triggered by mouse interaction is testimony to the extensive nature of considerations. I'm unable to comment with much authority without taking the time to look further into the policies and concerns, which would ultimately be an entire semesters' worth of work. I find it a daunting task to place all disabilities under one umbrella and try to shotgun web content in one fail swoop. It certainly seems to be a valiant goal and a worthwhile endeavour.