#infsum

This week I have decided to participate in a sort-of-new social media experiment.

Depending on which way you look at it, Infinite Summer was set up either as a challenge to or a support base for those who have had David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest on their shelves for too long and hadn't until now mustered the strength to lug it off. The "challenge" (for those that see it that way) is to read the book in three months... Well 91 days to be exact; most people began on June 21st and are set to end on September same, thus encompassing all of the summer-official, and hence the name of the experiment.

The reason this is a challenge, and the reason one might also see it as a support base or network or group, is because the book contains over 1,000 pages, a not insignificant chunk of which are endnotes. The length (or heft) of the book is often commented upon but, just in case it's not clear, it is a novel. This is a fictional book to be read for pleasure.

DFW has for a few years now been one of my favourite writers and Infinite Jest has been taking up a wedge of space on my bookshelf for about the same amount of time. I avoided reading it by absorbing everything else he'd written that I could get my hands on, thinking I'd never have the time to commit to his magnum opus. I was shocked by his suicide last year and was going to post something on this blog but didn't think what I had written was appropriate at the time.

Many others were upset too. Some like the founders of Infinite Summer were obviously more productive in their response to his passing.

The official website (http://infinitesummer.org/) is set to feature regular blog postings from writers who are reading the book alongside everyone else, commenting on their experiences with the books and making people feel perhaps a little less alone in the challenge. (As well as being long and containing endnotes, the general preconception of the book is that it's difficult.)

Meanwhile, a Twitter hashtag (#infsum) has been set up so that twitterers can comment on the book and then see each others' comments by doing a quick search.

For those who have ever participated in a book club, this may not seem that original or experimental. The first obvious difference from a 'real' book club that meets in a physical location, is that, as with most online groups, distance is no issue; people from all over the globe can alert and update each other as to their progress and interpretations. Twitter also seems to eradicate time issues; it's not exactly asynchronous as it's possible to simulate live chat via Twitter but it's also possible to (dis)engage at any moment. This has its advantages and inevitable its disadvantages.

One criticism, that could also be levelled at Twitter as a whole, is that people don't necessarily communicate but just key others into their own updates via the hashtag. This means the tool sometimes seems to facilitate something more like a support group for addicts ("It's been 7 days. I've read 63 pages. Every day is struggle" &c.) than an actual discussion, but then perhaps that's appropriate given the alleged subject matter of the book. There might also be a parallel to the upcoming "bookaholic" publicity campaign, which Jean Hannah Edelstein reported on earlier this month.

Another disadvantage might be that it encourages instantaneous judgement of the section just read every time the book is put down. Obviously people continuously form and change opinions as they read something but I wonder if Twitter will encourage people to cement those opinions without giving them more than 140 characters to reflect on them.

Having said that, Twitter is only one outlet for those taking part and many are keeping blogs on their progress. You can follow all this yourself by checking out the website (link above) or the hashtag.

I have decided to back-post my tribute for DFW written at the time of his death - you can find it here. I'll let you know if anything interesting in the way of social media experimentation comes up.

Status Updates and Digital Identity

I have often blogged about language here and its uses on the Web and in e-Learning. While I have always been to some extent self-conscious about the kind of language I use on this blog (ie. what voice I project, what kind of identity this entails) my uses of Twitter, Facebook and Ping.fm have forced me to re-think what appears here.

Since using Ping.fm (which I blogged about previously) to update my status on Facebook, Twitter and this blog simultaneously, I have had to think a lot more about what status actually means.

Traditionally of course, status referred to something like class or one's ranking in society and I'm sure that definition still holds. In the new Web 2.0 sense of the word though, status refers to one's present state of activity, either in-the-world or on-the-web, and as such tends to give a microscropic view of the person's condition:

Rob is looking forward to a glass of Montepulciano

as opposed to traditional status which would be macroscopic:

Rob works at a bank and earns over £100,000 a year

The first example given above isn't necessarily typical however. That might have been typed in Facebook once but since the advent of Twitter, I've noticed status updates getting much messier. Now, we're more likely to see:

Rob That new AFX tune = tuuuuuuuune :-o

It's not about bad spelling, which has always been a pre-requisite of text-size updates due to the 140 character limit, but bad grammar.

I've become aware of this using Ping.fm because the same status update I send to Facebook also comes to this blog. It's not a professionalism thing; it's a case of my status updates making sense, whether or not they are prefixed by my name or not.

Whereas on Facebook, an update might read:

Guy is hungry.

the same update coming to this blog would read:

is hungry

Which just wouldn't make sense (to me, anyway) in the context of a blog. I suppose "am hungry" would make sense as this implies a truncated first person but then my status update on Facebook would read "Guy am hungry"...

So I've worked out that using an application like Ping.fm, I'm limited to using verbs in the simple past tense or with modal auxiliary verbs tacked on the front. I can get away with a Ping.fm status like:

got hooked on The Wire over the last four days.

because it still makes sense over on social networking sites where my name is shoved in front of it. Likewise, I could update with:

would watch more of The Wire tonight but might go to see Che: Part One instead.

and get away with it for exactly the same reasons. I say "get away with" but of course no-one's going to punish me or even frown on me for not sticking to these rules. The only explanation I can give is that I prefer to construct my digitial identity in this way. It might seem trivial but status updates are the most prevalent indicators of digital identity, especially as they appear both on social networking sites and on blogs.

With a few tweaks to the stylesheet of my blog I've arranged for my status updates to be capitalised (that is the first letter to be in uppercase) just to make those decapitated sentences look that little bit neater, rather than have my Facebook and Twitter statuses look messier as a trade-off. It took a few seconds to write the following bit of code, which takes care of this tidy-up job for me:

div:first-letter { text-transform: uppercase; }

The only "problem" I might have left is the kind of restriction this approach places on my status. What all the above means is my status updates are always about what I have already done or about what I might do under certain conditions and never about what I am actually doing at this very moment. Right now though, I intend to go home.

BbWorld Europe (Day One, PM) - The Google Generation, Podcasting and Peer Review

At 4pm, I went to a fascinating talk by Dr. Chris Stokes who works in the School of Clinical Dentistry at the University of Sheffield. Apparently his talk was a continuation from one he gave last year though I must have missed him at last year's conference in Manchester. However, he gave a clear outline of what it was he was following on from...

Last academic year, instead of asking his students to give presentations, Dr Stokes decided to ask his students for podcasts as a form of assessment. They were asked to produce 5 minute mp3 files that would critically evaluate two pieces of scientific literature and then be peer-reviewed on paper.

Dr Stokes played some examples of these in the presentation and you could really hear how students used the creative freedom they'd been given while still meeting the academic criteria. Some podcasts began with a group introduction, some revolved around use of music (there were some copyright issues with this) while others took on more diverse forms, ie. a news broadcast or radio show being transmitted from a zoo. We were told that audio was chosen because there was a feeling that video would tend to make students as nervous as a presentation might - in both cases, body language is on show.

I would've add that audio is far easier to create and edit, and where mistakes and time restrictions are involved good editing is crucial. According to the presentation, students dealt with technical aspects easily but found it difficult to condense the subjects they'd been assigned for podcasting purposes.

But Dr Stokes then went on to discuss what he has been doing this year. The peer-review aspect of the project has been moved online and focus is primarily on getting students to use Web 2.0 tools they are familiar with to develop relevant academic skills. Whereas, before last year's podcast trials students were asked to give a traditional lecture or presentation as part of their assessment, Dr Stokes wanted to move away from the "lecturers' domain" and into the "students' domain", seeing as lecturing is not a necessarily a key skill for the field of dentistry. To move further into this domain, Dr Stokes allowed students to choose what format they decided to submit their work in.

Given the previous assumptions about video and presentations, the results were surprising. At the end of the project, Dr. Stokes got:

• 5 videos,
  
• 14 Powerpoint presentations,
  
• 2 wikis, and 
  
• 9 web documents.
  

There were also over twenty "described weblinks" (presumably reviews of the sources students used but also included YouTube videos) and more importantly no purely audio podcasts!

The peer-review aspect of the project also required students to write blog entries on their contribution to the group in Sheffield's Blackboard system and also, potentially, reviewing the blog entries of others. This reviewing involved giving the blog entries a star rating and leaving a comment. Dr Stokes said giving the star-rating option however had been a mistake as students would rate the presentation but then use the comment to justify the numbers of stars they had given, leaving those being reviewed with little to no constructive criticism. Consequently the star-rating is something he intends to leave out in future peer-review projects.

Students were also given the option to work in Connect, which is Sheffield's branded version of the social networking software ELGG but this was merely a provision for those who would prefer not to use Facebook or some other site they might already be using. Apparently, some students used this but others didn't even sign up.

He talked a little about taking into account the demographic of his students, all of which (I think he said this) were part of Generation Z - alternatively known as Millennials, Generation @, and the Internet Generation. Typically this demographic consists of people living in Western or "First World" cultures, born between the years of 1995 and 2010. I've also seen this called Generation C (where C is close to the U.S. pronunciation of Z and stands for "connect", "click", "computer" or any other web-related word you might think of). Dr Stokes admitted to his preference for the term Millennials, which he said was "growing on" him.

It seemed to me that he'd made a real effort to understand where his students were coming from and, in doing so, had hit upon some surprising conclusions. For one, some students want to write essays, as evidenced by the Word documents in the pot at the end of the project. Nevertheless, he recognised that online spaces for learning "seem important". And finally, students don't seem all that interested in audio podcasts - except, perhaps as part of enhanced podcasts (that is, with simple visuals like still images of Powerpoint slides).

This last point is an interesting one. I personally think this could be for two reasons. Perhaps students are trying to meet what they perceive as traditional expectations by producing something like the presentation they would've been previously tasked with, with the exception that it's digital and online.

Or perhaps students don't feel the same constraints that we ourselves feel and expect. As I mentioned, audio is easier to create and edit and therefore time-saving but perhaps, for students who have been given the creative freedom to make their project really unique, convenience isn't as much of a priority as it is for people in full-time work. Perhaps it's about students being given the opportunity to take pride in their work, to fulfil the set criteria while making the project something of their own.

TDA Project Climax

On Tuesday morning, my colleague Robyn and I went over to Bulmershe campus to run a focus group with a PGCE course convenor, Judith Davies. This was the climax to a project Robyn and I have been working on with Judith since before September.

Robyn and I had been asked to look at the wealth of Web 2.0 tools out there, select a bunch of them and match them up against criteria which we had drawn up previously. The idea being to find at least one Web 2.0 tool that would fulfil a newly qualified teacher's portfolio needs.

Throughout the project, we kept a wiki within Blackboard (using the Learning Objects tool) to analyse tools and compare them with one another. When the New Year began we looked at all the information we collected and we picked two tools (and a spare) that we were going to focus on. We also prepared a slideshow (embedded below) and several handouts to make the day run more smoothly.

TDA Focus Group

View more presentations from readingcdotl. (tags: wikis e-learning)

The idea of the presentation was to present these findings to a group of teachers who Judith had paid with funding to take a day's leave and give them a lunch while we were at it.

We took what I thought was a fairly "radical" approach to the slideshow - that is, there's hardly any text and the focus is more in images and making an impact with these to mark different parts of the morning. This was inspired by talks I've seen given at conferences recently and was an attempt to remedy the Powerpoint fatigue I've been afflicted by recently. When it came to the tools themselves, we simply logged in and did a live demo, showing some examples that we'd prepared earlier to inform them further. You can see the examples we created below:

http://tdaportfolioexample.pbwiki.com
http://tdaportfolio.edublogs.org

And while we were eating lunch we recorded the discussion that we had around the table - about e-portfolios, their shortcomings, or rather the current lack of an adequate tool, and what they thought of the tools we'd picked out.

Robyn and I have yet to go through the feedback but as we do, I will try and post some of our findings here and perhaps some of the wiki notes we made in early on in the project too. All in all, it was a successful morning - so much so, that I'm now trying to take the same "radical" slideshow approach with the workshops that we run here and with future presentations.

Blog of the Week: The White House

Given yesterday's historic occasion, it seems only appropriate to make mention of The White House blog where you can read all about the inauguration, Obama's economic agenda, his plans regarding energy and the environment and the ways in which he intends to address other issues of the day. It's also a very nicely designed site.

When the time allowed, I had been following the blog at Change, the Obama Team's previous site. Obama may not only have been the first Presidential candidate to embrace the web but also the first to embrace Web 2.0. At Change, Visitors were able to submit ideas via the Citizen's Briefing Book - these ideas were published on pages where others could vote to move them up or down a scale and leave comments.

They also use plenty of discussion and video to liven up the site. Can you imagine such a thing happening if McCain had gotten in? Even if it had, can you imagine people engaging with it? It will be interesting to see how much of a difference it'll make. The Change site has officially closed now but you still see the previous postings by going to this site.

In the meantime, I've been thinking about a change as well - albeit of a smaller kind. Some people have been saying they can't see my blog so I'm thinking of moving from Blogger over to Edublogs where all the other learning technologists seem to be. Still, if I decide to move, I'll post a notice here. So, for now, keep watching this space.

Durham 2009, Day Two

Click here for Durham 2009: Day One

No doubt some sore heads in the first presentation this morning after a three-course meal in Durham Castle, with lots of wine, followed by a trip to the nearby Undercroft bar... Still as this presentation was the usual Roadmap spiel from Blackboard it barely mattered. We still don't have a definite date for the release of Version 9 and while I'm sure the information they gave about Project NG was useful for some, I'm also sure I wasn't the only one who'd heard all this before.

They did mention that Blackboard was being re-branded and that three themes would be evident in upcoming versions: Blackboard Learn, Blackboard Transact and Blackboard Connect.

Following that, a forward-thinking talk from Sophie Paluch (College of Law), Kate Reader (Bristol) and Zak Mensah (TASI - soon changing it's name to JISC Digital Media) about mobile technologies in Higher Education. One thing I took away from this presentation was how much mobile technology has moved since it first came about - and how quicky. Sophie showed an advert on YouTube, and while I haven't been able to find the same one, this clip should give you an idea of the kind of progress that's been made.



Later I saw a presentation from Ralph Holland (Tyneside) and Merv Stapleton (City of Sunderland) on their comparison of e-portfolio tools and their usage in different (and sometimes novel) situations. One example Ralph gave of marines trying to maintain e-portfolios out at sea but being unable to due to lack of proper Internet access was particularly vivid. I would have liked to have seen more examples here but I spoke to Merv after the presentation and we're going to keep in touch and share experiences.

Lastly, we were treated to an inspiring final keynote from Paul Lowe; a very energetic speaker who runs an MA Photojournalism and Documentary course at the London College of Communication and has his own blog here. He talked about the course he runs, which recruits mid-career professionals and requires them to keep their own blogs for purposes of reflection. The talk itself was very inspiring and, as you'll probably notice from the slideshow I've embedded here, very visual - but the main thing I took away from it was that it didn't matter so much which tool his students practitioners were using but that how they used the tools to interact with one another that counted more.

Blogs and educating the eflective practitioner

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: elearning professional)

Paul uses Blackboard but he barely mentioned it in his talk. And people on the course were allowed to use whatever blogging application they preferred. It seemed more important that they were paired up or put in groups so as to support each other during the reflective process (especially given that they were subject to a lot of criticism). Feedback was the crucial element here, I think.

Together with Andy's presentation the previous day, I came away determined to make more of an effort with my blog!

Blog of the Week: Five Thirty Eight

Anyone been following the US elections? As a serial drama, it's been fascinating and I wouldn't be surprised if a few weeks after the inauguration, someone options a film of the whole thing.

So, if you're interested, here's Five Thirty Eight - a blog which compiles multiple poll findings from the States and tracks each of the candidate's popularity. The site gets it's name from the number of electors in the electoral college. It's frequently updated and should make interesting reading over the next couple of weeks.

At the time of writing, Democrats should have a lot to be happy about but of course there's only one poll that really counts - and that one's taking place on November 4th.

(I should prob'ly stop calling this feature "blog of the week" if I can't actually keep the blog up-to-date. Perhaps, I'll just refer to it as Recommended Blog in future...)

Blog of the Week: Orwell's Diaries

I'm technically in the States as this is being published but am writing it before I go for scheduled release. So it seems appropriate that I should mention this blog, which is similarly delayed (albeit by much longer)...

‘When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page’, wrote George Orwell, in his 1939 essay on Charles Dickens.

From 9^th August 2008, you will be able to gather your own impression of Orwell’s face from reading his most strongly individual piece of writing: his diaries. The Orwell Prize is delighted to announce that, to mark the 70^th anniversary of the diaries, each diary entry will be published on this blog exactly seventy years after it was written, allowing you to follow Orwell’s recuperation in Morocco, his return to the UK, and his opinions on the descent of Europe into war in real time. The diaries end in 1942, three years into the conflict.

So: one of our greatest political writers is "blogging" seventy years after he first wrote his the content. Enough said, I think.

Blog of the Week: Greta Christina's Blog

Does 'blog of the week' sound patronising? I hope not. All I mean by it is that I've been looking at a particular blog this week and think it worthy of mention here. I don't mean to suggest that I've looked at all the blogs on the web and that this is the best out there, this week. It might not even be the best of what I have read in any given week.

But the blog I've been revisiting this week must surely be up there. Here's a nod in the direction of Greta Christina. As she herself says, she uses her blog to riff on "sex, atheism, politics, dreams, and whatever". She's been blogging, or better yet "thinking out loud", since 2005.

I found her site some months back after I'd read Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. Despite being an atheist myself (albeit with an interest in religion), I wasn't very impressed with some of its arguments (especially with regards to moral philosophy). So I was on the look-out for other arguments from different viewpoints. And my search for the term "atheism" brought up this surely now-famous posting about anger at religious views in America and the world today. I recommend reading it, no matter what your views are concerning religion as I think it makes some very good points and passionately too.

More generally, I like the presentation of her site. She breaks up the text with little pictures, some of them purely decorative, some illustrative of some point and others poignant or disturbing. Check out the simple image of a coathanger in the "Atheists and Anger" post, for example.

Of what I've read, I think I can safely say that Greta Christina is always opinionated but never patronising, always well-informed but never digressive, and always engaging but always on equal terms with her readers.

Reading On/Off The Screen

A quick glance at the Guardian website today reveals a few separate but related articles, here, here and here. The common theme: reading from a screen.

It interests me because my last two posts have been fairly long and opinionated; perhaps not ideal for the computer screen. I wonder if I've really got the hang of writing for the Web.

I read and write a lot in my spare time; so far that's been the strongest influence on my blogging here. I've included pictures and blocktext in recent posts but a more radical approach might be in order...

The idea of the blog of the week I suppose is that I can look at what kinds of blogs are out there and what makes them successful in my (so far long-winded and prose-y) opinion. To date, we've only had three but two of them have been webcomics.

There's something about the comic strip form seems to lend itself really easily to the screen. It's visual, it usually gets to the point quickly and that point is normally funny. It'd be interesting to see if something like a longer narrative could be pulled off in this medium though.

Currently, I can't imagine trying to read a novel on one of the new e-readers coming onto the market - I'm too fond of paperbacks. What about you?

Blog of the Week: Very Small Array

Okay, I missed one last week. I was busy tidying my room, washing my hair, going on dates... (Yeah right; it was work as usual).

Here's Very Small Array. Brought to us by Dorothy Gambrell of Cat and Girl fame (which'll one day be a blog of the week here too, probably), this one is updated pretty irregularly.

As with the previous blog of the week (yes, two weeks ago now...) only the newest post ever shows on the front page, normally featuring an interesting visualisation of some obscure data. Somehow, most entries manage to be both quirkly funny and bizarrely poignant at the same time...

Check out this one, for example (as ever click to enlarge/expand):




And for the confused or bored, let me elaborate.

Craigslist is a site featuring free classified ads and discussion forums. The most well-known (or notorious) section of Craigslist is the "Missed Connections" area which features posts from people who thought they had some kind of brief but unarticulated spark with someone, usually a stranger, usually in a public place. For example:

You were on the Central line and I got on and we made eye contact a few times. You seemed very tired, but you still looked cute. You had on a brown knit sweater on top of a plaid undershirt, and some cute loafers.

The ads are written in the hope that that stranger (or whoever) will read it and recognise themselves described in the post and reply and then that something will happen...

The site is used all over the world, though it was started in America, and the locations where "connections" are missed are, as you'd expect, very varied.

So the above image shows the names of places where connections were most frequently missed by State, displayed in the actual States themselves. While I have no idea what the black patches mean, there's something poignant about the data being presented in this way with the stark white-on-black. Instead of being given their proper names, States are labelled with the names of corporate coffee houses (like Starbucks) or popular shopping destinations (Wal Mart) and I can't help but picture lonely people wandering around with shopping trolleys or sitting quietly desperate with coffees, surrounded by so much stuff but still hoping for something as simple as a "connection"...

I'm not sure if this counts as webcomic or not but it's pretty powerful stuff and I can't imagine it existing in any form quite so potent and far-reaching as a blog.

Blog of the Week: xkcd

Well, why not one a week? Assuming I read enough blogs that I consider worthy of attention, it shouldn't be any trouble. I suppose, if I run out of ideas, I can just go all self-referentially postmodern and link to this one.

But this week I want to mention a different kind. Normally, when I'm explaining what a blog is, either to an individual or during a talk, I use the analogy of a diary where the newest entry is at the top. I don't know that that's a good explanation really but it gets people started - they understand that the blogging tool does the dating and sorting for you and I think that's the crucial difference from ye olde "Web 1.0 "websites.

Only blogs don't have to be in journal or diary form at all. They can be webcomics like xkcd:


One I thought might appeal to academics - click to expand/enlarge. Although my recent favourite, which contains some swears and is therefore mildly NSFW, is here.

Which is why I think it's worth a mention here. When you visit the website, the newest strips always appear on the front page and then there's a "Prev" and "Next" button for you to navigate your way through other comics. It's updated every Monday, Wednesday and Friday and you subscribe to a feed as with other blogs.

Also, it's funny. Which should've been reason enough really.

Tip: Hover your mouseover each strip for a follow-up punchline. It means misinformed screenreaders but they were never very good with webcomics anyway.

Blog of the Week: Language Log

Not that I'll be picking a blog every week or anything... But thought I'd point to Language Log here, a site I visit fairly regularly, which always has something interesting to say about the state or nuances of our (or, for that matter, any other) language...

Three highlights from the past week:

• Beware of "Nerdview"! This is particularly aimed at e-Learning people I suppose (or perhaps just me?) and is especially timely as it's e-Learning Week here at Reading, where we run a number of workshops over five days in which staff can receive training, help and advice on using our VLE (Blackboard) and other tools out on the web (for the purposes of teaching and learning). This post (and this one too) should emphasise the need for those who spend a lot of time with the technical to take a step back when talking to those who don't.
• A lot of students use Facebook and anyone who has an account and checks in regularly will already be aware that it's constantly being updated. This posting at Language Log details a subtle change for the better, which, though small, I'm quite pleased about. And the end of the post is reassuring; it's good to know Facebook are taking the complexities of identity, both real-world and digital, into consideration...
• And, finally, a cartoon... The original post is about "talkativeness" and mentions gender but I don't think I need to explain how it might also illustrate generational differences concerning communication and technology... Shame it won't fit into my squashed blog; click to expand/enlarge...
  

About this blog

I finally got around to sorting this blog out! Well, sort of... It still needs work.

Basically, I've been stockpiling stuff to go up for a while but rather put it all up with today's date, I've decided to back-date it. So for notes on meetings/conferences/etc I attended before today , I'll date it around the actual date of the event itself. Every post dated before this one will have a footnote formatted a bit like this:

[This post is back-dated. dd-mm-yyyy]

That date at the end being the date of the actual posting. Whenever I back-date posts, I'll create a new post to explain there's something new to the blog up with links. A bit like this one:

• 18-04-2008: PPPSIG Meeting at University of Hertfordshire
• 19-06-2008: "Enchancing the Student Experience"
• 26-06-2008: Preview of Previews...

I can't really think of any other way of doing this at the moment. What do you think? Feel free to use the comments link below to leave me some advice! It's open to all...