Archive for June, 2010
the pathway to the bottom of the BFH, after descending to the river.
2010/06/18: Your viewer’s eye will tend to follow a line. Make a photo that uses leading lines to direct the viewer to your subject. #ds215
A set of potentially incredible and useful resources. Wrapped in a clumsy, ugly, difficult, annoying and frustrating Flash-based LMS. Unbelievable.
It’s got such gems as this:
I honestly don’t know what to do on that screen. Turns out, you click the checkboxes to reveal text. Look! It’s inter-active™! Unbelievable.
My team recommended putting the video on YouTube and building a simple website as a framework to organize them, or to use Moodle if more LMS-like functionality was needed. They hired a consultant (whom I actually worked with for a couple of years) and he produced this monstrosity. I’m guessing it’ll be listed on his consultancy website as another successful project, with some institution names listed as happy clients. What a fucking waste. This could have easily been viewable on any device, with little or no friction involved. Instead, a huge amount of time and money was wasted to build obstacles to getting to the content. Now, I’m pretty sure nobody will actually get to use that content.
The internet is not just a CD-ROM that you don’t have to burn copies of. It is fundamentally different. If you don’t understand that, in the year 2010, you have no right to be consulting on anything. And you certainly don’t have a right to waste taxpayer dollars in reinventing CD-ROMs over TCP/IP.
James Duncan Davidson, Kris Krug and Pinar Ozger are on a photo expedition covering the oil leak in the Gulf. The photos they’re managing to get are surreal. Water isn’t supposed to look like that.
[1]
[2]
[3]
[1]
[2]
[2]
The team is putting together a photo pool on Flickr, with some more amazing, disturbing, surreal shots of the disaster.
Footnotes:
the pathways were covered with majillions of these little guys today, making it interesting weaving a path with my bike that wouldn’t smoosh them.
2010/06/17: Shoot wide open today. Make a creative photo that uses a shallow depth of field to good effect. #ds214
I read a whole bunch of posts today on the topic of comments on blogs, triggered by some critiques of Gruber’s Daringfireball which hasn’t ever had comments. Gruber wrote a post about the Google/Admob/Apple drama, and was called out for not having comments on his blog, and how that’s bad form. Gruber responded with this:
You write on your site; I write on mine. That’s a response.
and
Comments, at least on popular websites, aren’t conversations. They’re cacophonous shouting matches. DF is a curated conversation, to be sure, but that’s the whole premise.
He’s right. Comments aren’t really conversation or discussion, at least in the way we (meaning the general edublogger community) talk about them. They are often just asynchronous tangents, or even rambling snark fests. Comments are clumsy bits of text, misunderstood or misinterpreted very often.
Now, I have no interest in having a “curated conversation” – whatever the hell that is – but, along the lines of the commonplace book concept, this is my outboard brain. Comments distract from that. With comments, I think – even for a fraction of a second – about potential responses to a post before posting. I’ve deleted dozens of posts, because I figured the comment threads would go astray.
Marco Arment describes blog comments as many-to-one feedback:
A blog post is a one-to-many broadcast. Comments are the opposite: many-to-one feedback. A true discussion medium would encourage more communication between the commenters, forming larger quantities of many-to-many interactions and de-emphasizing the role of the blog post’s author. In practice, that rarely happens.
If comments are behaving as many-to-one feedback, there’s minimal value to showing them to the world, because the world largely doesn’t read them. But the act of showing them to the world — your world, not the commenters’ — creates a setting in which commenters are encouraged to behave negatively.1
We already have a widespread many-to-one feedback medium that avoids this: email. So that’s the feedback system that I allow on my site. Anyone can email me, and I will read it.
Those who truly want to start a discussion usually have their own blogs, so they can write their commentary to their audience.
More, from BoingBoing’s perspective as an absofrackinghuge blog community with comments:
(unrestricted blog comments result in a) a milieux here whereby the comments should be an unfettered, energetic free-for-all. But it’s not just about entitlement … more practically, that results in a noisy, infested mess that drowns out anything of quality.
This, from Derek Powazek, perfectly describes the weight of comments on writing:
I turned off comments in the last redesign of powazek.com because I needed a place online that was just for me. With comments on, when I sat down to write, I’d preemptively hear the comments I’d inevitably get. It made writing a chore, and eventually I stopped writing altogether. Turning comments off was like taking a weight off my shoulders. It freed me to write again.
A weight off my shoulders. Interesting.
And this, from Ian Battleridge, on how comment “discussions” break the “link economy”
Comments also massage your ego. “Look,” you can say, “500 comments! I’m popular! And successful!” Comments also break the link economy, because they encourage others to comment directly on your site rather than writing on their own site, linking to you, and potentially getting linked to in return.
So, I thought about these posts. And about how I’ve been thinking and feeling about my blog and how I want to continue using it. And I’ve decided that comments are not helpful for that. If this blog is my Commonplace Book, if it’s my Outboard Brain, I need to be able to write whatever the hell I want, without thinking, even for a second, about what might happen in the comments. I’m not writing stuff here for comments, or for the ego stroke that goes along with them. I’m doing this to think out loud and to document stuff.
I’m really easy to get in touch with. I’m not dropping out or disappearing. If you have something to say, say it. If it’s worth saying in a comment post here, it’s worth anteing up and posting it on your own blog rather than burying it in a comment thread here.
So, for now at least, comments are turned off. I don’t know if that will last, but it’s worth trying.
just past MacEwan Student Centre, on the way off campus on a rainy afternoon
The Big Dog passed away yesterday. Her health was kind of shitty for the last year or so, but she seemed to be getting stronger. Yesterday afternoon, she didn’t seem herself. She seemed weak, lethargic. She refused food. In her 11 years with us, I had never seen her say no to food. She knew something was up.
She went quietly, just after going to bed. Apparently, without pain, probably as a result of internal bleeding due to massive organ failure. She was a good dog. She was a pain in the ass sometimes, sure. But a good dog, in every sense of the word. She craved human contact, and would adjust her 75-pound frame to lean against a hand that wasn’t petting her, or wasn’t petting her just right.
Now, the Little Dog can eat her supper without having to worry about Big Dog finishing it off for her. But she misses her, too.
I hadn’t heard the term “commonplace book” before, but it sounds like a perfect description of the “outboard brain” – the main reason I started blogging. It wasn’t about publishing anything, or discussing or commenting or connecting. It was documenting a flow of ideas and contexts.
Steven Berlin Johnson gave a talk back in April, describing the history of the commonplace book. He was using it as an introduction and context for the need to be able to remix content – as an argument against locked down electronic books that implement DRM to prevent copy and paste – and it nicely describes both the need to remix, and the need to document.
Scholars, amateur scientists, aspiring men of letters—just about anyone with intellectual ambition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was likely to keep a commonplace book. In its most customary form, “commonplacing,” as it was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one’s reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations. It was a kind of solitary version of the original web logs: an archive of interesting tidbits that one encountered during one’s textual browsing.
Interestingly, he mentions a historical precedent to multitasking and attention deficit reading, citing Robert Darnton:
Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end, early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your personality.
Johnson’s full post is well worth a read (go read it now, if you haven’t already – he goes into the implications of DRM for eBooks (both implicit and explicit forms of DRM).
But the idea of a commonplace book resounded with me. I see my blog, primarily, as serving that role for me. That’s why I started the blog back in the olden days. That’s why I keep posting stuff to it. And why I posted copies of coursework and notes from the grad program. It’s all part of a narrative, documenting various contexts.
When I started at the Teaching & Learning Centre, I knew a bit about what Randy Garrison was doing – he was the new Director of the TLC, and he’d been working on something called “community of inquiry” – but I didn’t know too much more than that. I didn’t pay it much attention, since it didn’t overlap what I was doing very much.
Years passed, and I’m now planning the research proposal for my MSc thesis. And it turns out that the Community of Inquiry model is probably the best fit for what I want to do to investigate differences in discourse between two cohorts. More info on my research proposal at a later date…
Basically, what Community of Inquiry does is to take a look at the discourse of a community, from three overlapping perspectives:
- cognitive presence
- ability of participants to construct meaning through sustained communication
- social presence
- ability of participants to project their personal characteristics into the community
- teaching presence
- design, facilitation, and direction of the community processes
You take the discourse of a community, crunch it through some latent content analyses, and get an idea for how the participants fit together along the three perspectives.
The really appealing thing about the COI model is that it has been used by several researchers to investigate various communities, so it’s got some validity and rigour behind it. That’ll make my job much easier, as I won’t have to spend as much time designing and defending the analysis framework…
I found it pretty interesting that my poking around with research proposal planning lead me right to Randy’s work. What are the chances that you’d happen to be working for one of the key researchers in a field?