Archive for the 'Blogging' Category
April 29th, 2008 by cutter
The Ning site for the Institute is up and running. It’s just getting out of the gate. People have signed up, some additions have been made, but we haven’t begun to spend significant time there. I feel confident that if people start to see it as a place where they can do a lot of their work, that more activity will occur there, but there are a few who are relatively active. Of the 20 or so faculty in the institute, 17 have signed up. Some of these, however, are grad students and non-faculty. I’d like to see more people get involved.
Everyone’s bizzy now with the end of the semester grading, portfolios, meetings, conferences, etc, and given the amount of work going on around the institute, it’s comforting to know that there’s been this much involvement. From my call that I put out last week for folks who wanted to be test pilots with me in the Fall using Ning and the blog function, I got a handful of replies, just about what I wanted.
Next semester, I move from Queens to Staten Island, and David and Chiara (who I’ll be joining) are very open to networked environments, so we’ll be working closely together and I’m pretty sure getting a lot of crap done and enjoying ourselves in the process. I’m really looking forward to the Fall.
In any case, here’s my IWS widget (since wordpress doesn’t allow tampering with CSS.) (One day soon, I’m gonna start blogging from my personal domain and move the colony.)
April 12th, 2008 by cutter
Spoiler: If you are one of the three people in the country who has not seen There Will Be Blood, then you won’t want to read this post.
Very busy around Brooklyn this week. I could start many places, but Mayor Bloomberg’s congestion pricing, you may have heard, never was brought to the floor for a vote. I read some interesting articles about urban renewal, and I hear that in Long Island City (It’s one of those more urban Queens nabes) the city is planning on building lattices around the elevated subway (I guess that’s the 7 train?–must be) with a water collection system. The idea is to grow plants and flowers all around the circumference of the train and to bring in the birds and the bees. The idea will be that when you look up to the train rather than seeing the nasty old grimy city scape, you’ll catch a bit of a garden hovering in the air. Very cool idea, and it got me thinking about doing related work in my classes. There’s a movement at St. John’s to push for service learning, and since urban renewal is a growing interest of mine, if I were to incorporate service in my classes, it would be on the level of urban development and renewal. What role could my students and I help play in making this city a better place? Better start crackin’ on this.
I showed There Will Be Blood in classes this week as students will be next writing critical reviews. I’m leaning towards having them put together film reviews but I’m open to other genres as well. We’re reading Christopher Orr’s essay at The New Republic as one of our models, and Orr takes M.T. Anderson to task, especially for the ending. I remember when I first saw the film (I’ve now seen it four times) that I was so blown away about how darn good the film was, how sound and measured and careful the story line is, how perfect the acting is, and how believable each gesture, glance and look . . . I wanted to love the film, I wanted to love the ending, and I do love the ending, very much. It works for me, but the problem isn’t with the end, it’s with the hop to the end. We move from Little Boston and next thing you know H.W. and Mary are getting married. Twenty years flashes by in an instance, and maybe we were supposed to already know that Daniel Plainview’s character formation completed itself while he was in Little Boston and that the next two decades would only be a matter of his following the same greedy, hateful path. But we also know that D.P. is capable of love–he’s hardly stereotypical–and we also know that he was engaged in other major projects over the next twenty years, and since we do, isn’t it fair to assume that he would have had many other relationships with others, others as important as Eli? In any case, the film is incredible to me. Is it flawed? Of course it is. But it would be flawed if it were perfect–if you catch my rhetorical drift.
Some of my students have become rather strong bloggers. I look forward to reading their posts on a daily basis. I try to comment as much as I can. There are a few who come to mind right away who write with the best of them. Some really good stuff, and seeing this fresh work causes that old image that anyone can be a writer to present itself. But today I’m no fool.
I joined Facebook last weekend. I like it. I have installed a zombie application and have been biting people. I attacked a couple of friends, but they didn’t seem to mind. Donna’s zombie slapped me upside the head when I attacked, and I wound up losing. I went and bit some chumps, got my power up and returned to Donna’s zombie and treated her to some chomping madness. I danced and pounded my zombie chest.
I presented to faculty on the website Ning that I wrote about before, and once I get my screencast up on google video, I’ll post it. We had a good talk about integrating blogs and other media into the classes, and I’m slated to give some workshops/tutorials at the end of the semester. I got meetings this week, faculty observations, and the like. A few of us are going to pilot teaching with Ning and we’re going to start using the space for faculty virtual discussions. I’ll include future posts.
One last thing. I just found out today that Adam Koehler accepted a position at Manhattan College. Adam and I met at RSA a few years ago and hit it off. I’m excited that he’s moving out here, and I hope that he sends me an email so we can set up a meeting when he comes out here to look around.
April 6th, 2008 by cutter
I’ve got to say bravo the Wordpress folks for the upgrade they did on the Dashboard, but I know it’s going to take a little while to get used to it.
I know that Wordpress 2.5 was just released. I don’t know if this new design is consistent with the new version of Wordpress or something else all together (I haven’t installed two five on my other blog yet). Looking over the comments under Matt’s post on the new design, people were pretty shocked that the change happened. I think it’s fair to say that the community should be given fair warning ahead of time. Maybe in the form of a note that appears in the dashboard when one logs in?
One of the major changes was de-cluttering the dashboard, and I’m glad they did, though I could imagine it being slimmer still. Overall, the look and feel of the design is quite pleasing. It feels web 2.0, flatter and thinner. One thing I noticed right away is that the link for the Dashboard is gone all together. I poked around for a while thinking, now how the hell do I get back to the home page? Finally, I tried just clicking on the tab at the top, and it brought me home. That makes sense, and it probably should have been that way all along.
Another thing I noticed right away is that the link to upload files that was located under the posting box, something my students rely on heavily, is gone in the effort to reduce dashboard congestion. Now, one uploads files by using this Add media interface that lies above the text editor.
What is a little confusing here is the change in language. Before, you would be able to “upload a file.” Now, you upload “media.” There are icons for uploading images, video, and sound files, but no icons to upload a text file. At first, I was wondering, well, how do I upload a Word document for sharing if I’m not being given an option to upload text media? I went ahead a tried using the image uploader, and that worked just fine. But I can imagine a lot of people NOT thinking to try uploading a text file using an image uploader. I mean, why would they?
That’s all for now.
March 15th, 2008 by cutter
Before Spring Break two weeks ago, I mentioned my frustration with having to use the Blackboard CMS systems in my comp classes. As I said back then, I was pretty fed up with the clunkiness of the system and the lack of intuitive movement it allowed. I spent a good portion of Spring Break migrating my courses from that system to using Blogs in the classroom, and I knew then as I know now that it was going to be a challenging pedagogical maneuver.
Many of my students had started getting accustomed to the Blackboard system, and while they didn’t like it, they had begun to adapt. At right about that moment, I told them that they were going to love this new way of doing work, that it would make their writing more relevant, and, overall, the electronic mode would be easier to use. The majority of the students welcomed the change and they have told me in conferences that they like using their blogs better than they did the earlier system, so all-in-all, the move has gone well, but, still, the hardest part was getting them weaned off of something they had grown accustomed to and onto something new.
Overall, I’ve been rather pleased with their blogging and am turning to their posts as a matter of interest and hobby and learning a lot from what some of them have to say. They’ve been given the freedom to write about whatever they want, just like any blogger, and they’re responding in turn. I often find myself laughing and engaging their posts. Some of them are starting to get noticed in the larger blogosphere, and just about all of them are seeking to bring traffic to their sites. So far, things are looking up with the use of blogging in the class, and while I’ll need to make some tweaks for future courses, particularly in the areas of design and other media, I feel like this is shaping up to be a productive pedagogical approach.
Still, a CMS like BB, while clunky, is designed for classroom space, and blogs are not, and while it’s fairly easy to use blogs as a management platform, I can imagine other ways. There’s a company called 21Classrooms that lets you create an account for a class with students in it that incorporates a home page where announcements can be posted and allows you to navigate to individual student blogs. But this site has its limits. The largest being that the site is teacher controlled, and so while this is a good idea for middle school bloggers, I’m not so interested in being the blog police at the university level. The second limitation is cost. You can create an account and get access for free, but the space you’re given is paltry, and to make the system work, you’d almost certainly need to purchase the upgrade. Hardly worth the trouble.
On a similar note, I happened to catch Chris Anderson (editor for Wired, author of The Long Tail, etc.) on Charlie Rose not long ago, and Chris had mentioned how he saw that social networking, in its Facebook and Myspace iterations, was currently still in its infancy.
When pressed, Chris recommended Ning for a more localized platform of social networking. I have just begun to explore Ning, but it appears to do two particular things quite well. First, it allows someone (anyone) to create their own social network and invite members to join that network. The creator can include options such as forums, multimedia pages (photos and video), upload documents, and create blogs. So if you think about running a drupal CMS (which I’ve toyed with and decided against, particularly because it doesn’t allow the member to design their own blogs), Ning offers the same ability. Individual members can run their own websites, blogs, post their own videos, forums and so on. They have a genuine sense of autonomy but they happen to be connected to a social network. So the second advantage is that the heirarchical order of CMS’s seems to fade into the background and each member enjoys the same freedoms of the network’s creator.
March 6th, 2008 by cutter
I can’t deny it. It could be cleaner, a little sharper, less clunky. It’s those arrows I think. I wanted to use Jing for this tutorial that I put together for my students, but I was having issues with my account (or, more likely, I was having issues pulling up my username and password from the depths of identity protection), so I figured it would take less time to photoshop my screen shots (command+shift+4) then it would be to resolve the issue. In any case, here’s a tutorial for importing an xml file into google reader that could be useful for students. Feel free to beg, borrow, or steal (well, keep the begging–just have at it.)
The original post:
Over the past couple of days, I have been collecting your various blog addresses. I’ve been getting a lot of notes from you concerning the places to find your fellow bloggers for the floating workshop.
I’ve been able to compile a list of all the blog addresses for my classes. I added them to my reader and I’ve exported them in a special kind of format that will allow you to import them into your google reader account.
I’ve done all the work for you, and since I have, there’s no reason in having you add everyone to your reader accounts. Instead, I can just share my work with you, and you can automatically have what took me two hours to compile and organize.
The file that you should import is a collation of my classes. This way, you can see the blogs that my other classes are doing, and you can read and comment across classes. By blogging, I’ve just networked our three classes together, and if you guys want to work across classes later on the semester, I’d be open to that suggestion.
Please note that once you import the file, you won’t have every single class member. I have not received emails from all my students giving me their URLs, so there are a few missing. We’ll all be able to add them later on, however, when we find out what their addresses are.
Ok, Here’s what you need to do to import the file.
- Click on the file and save it to your desktop.
- Open google reader.
- In the upper right hand area, you’ll see a menu. Click Settings
.
4. In the new window, click import/export
5. Find the file on your desktop and upload it.
6. After it uploads, it will take you to the subscriptions page. Just select Back to Google Reader and you’ll see your imported subscriptions. Vala!
February 28th, 2008 by cutter
I’m not the only one who has lost their posts in the past. I have a strong feeling that they’ll be gone forever. These comments are from August 2007.
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sincitykitty Member August 9th, 2007 at 11:48 pm
me too! only my home page shows up, none of the others. Glad to know it not just me, but I’d love to know what’s going on.
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barry Key Master August 9th, 2007 at 11:48 pm
Yes, we know. Your pages are safe, they are just not displaying properly. Working on a fix now. Should be fixed soon.
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honjangnim Member August 9th, 2007 at 11:50 pm
me too… when i click on the article, it just keeps redirecting all of it to a url… and its blank!hope this gets fix soon…
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mrsedubose Member August 9th, 2007 at 11:50 pm
thank god!! I just got home and found my website gone!! almost started to cry!!
And so on . . . So in these old comments, Barry figured out what the problem was. Today there was an Amazon AWS outage, but it doesn’t look like it affected anybody on Wordpress . . . except me. :-[ Hopefully, things will get resolved for me. This Barry seems like a nice guy, and he’s a fellow Gotham dweller.
February 27th, 2008 by cutter
Logged on to the computer and all my blog posts were somehow deleted. It looks like I got hacked or something. I have no idea what happened. I didn’t change themes. I didn’t do anything. I have a note out to admin. Hopefully, I’ll be able to recover the posts. Sorry for the inconvenience. At least it happened just out of the starting gate, and at the moment only a few posts are gone.
February 24th, 2008 by cutter
After my discussion of an article idea yesterday, I received three pieces of helpful information to continue thinking about emergence and CMS’s. One came from a colleague over email and another shows up on Donna’s Blog where Scot adds a riff. I’ll start with the blog and then move to the email, which adds an interesting way to build the article more.
Reading Donald Watts’ Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, Donna pulls the following quotes:
How does individual behavior aggregate to collective behavior?
Although genes, like people, exist as identifiably individual units, they function by interacting, and the corresponding patterns of interaction can display almost unlimited complexity.
the particular manner in which they interact can have profound consequences for the sorts of new phenomena–from population genetics to global synchrony to political revolutions–that can emerge at the level of groups, systems, and populations. (27)
The post mentions that people who are interested in social action should be “studying networks.” I couldn’t agree more. Speaking about old school forms of protests driven by ideologies, Johnson in Emergence writes: “What they fail to recognize is that their can be power and intelligence in a swarm, and if you’re trying to do battle in a distributed network like global capitalism, you’re better off becoming a distibuted network youself” (226).
Scot makes a really good point about disconnections and friendships, reminding me of why I was reading Jean Luc Nancy’s The Inoperative Community in grad school. Of course, Scot is talking about, in my mind, a whole ‘no.ther theoretical territory, The Great Excluded Middle. What he says is very provocative, so let me quote him here.
Put somewhat differently, is there a productive place for disjunction or dis/connection within network models and if so what might this look like? I don’t have the best answer yet for this, but the abstract I wrote suggests that friendship (or at least Blanchot and Derrida’s version of friendship) might suggest a possibility for imagining networks less as near-limitless possibilities for connection and more as “communities without community,” to borrow Blanchot’s phrase. Such a network, if it’s right to call it that now, would highlight interruptive contacts over associative linkages, contacts extended, though not necessarily with commensurability, to an other who may or may not ever answer the call for aggregation.
One way to reinscribe the issue of disconnections into emergence theory is to consider them, as in cybernetics, as noise, i.e., as part of a larger field that cannot be inscribed into a system. If you approach this difficulty from the position of ethics and politics, then the reinscription that I am suggesting is a violence and a reduction to the important thought of the refusal to be connected.
In our field, we often hear arguments about the digital divide, between those who have access and those who don’t. But while those arguments are made, we hear little to nothing about the choice not to connect. This choice, as I see frequently, is not limited to students, but it is very strong in the humanities among everyday professors. We could speculate as to why, but I think we’d be close to offer the explanation that some people just don’t want to change, or to do more, or whatever. But what is at work in a situation like this, is a subject taking a position of resistance, a subject who does not write (or connect) because that subject is attached to an identity. This is different from, say, the Bartleby who “prefers not to.” The difference between those who resist and Bartleby is that Bartleby has no attachments to subjectivity or identity, he is what Agamben would call a “whatever being.” If you read through Agamben in the Coming Community, what you see is “The perfect act of writing comes not from a power to write, but from an impotence that turns back on itself and in this way comes to itself as a pure act (which Aristotle calls agent intellect). This is why in the Arab tradition agent intellect has the form of an angel whose name is Qalam, “Pen,” and its place is an unfathomable potentiality. Bartleby, a scribe who does not simply cease writing but ‘prefers not to,’ is the extreme image of this angel that writes nothing but its potentiality to not-write” (37).
To return to Scot’s thoughts, the difficulty involves this transition of moving from subject positions to whatever beings, and it is here where the inoperative community, the coming community, and the community without community is perpetually arriving.
In any case, there is a part 2 to this post. I have to think about how these ideas work with the email I received concerning anxiety in networked environments.
February 23rd, 2008 by cutter
Someone I work with hit me and a few others up with an article idea that had come to him after his students bombarded a discussion list inside of Blackboard. (As I’ve said before, BB has been the standard sameness around SJU.) He hit us up wondering about the phenomenon and about how the traditional role of teaching intersects with these out of control writing phenomena.
I was glad to hear it and explained that what happened and happens is that the activitiy is a phenomenon, and it is an emergent phenomenon at that. If you have ever dabbled in complexity theories or read stuff like the famous 1979 Douglas Hofstadter’s Godel, Escher, Bach: The Eternal Braid then you might notice relationships between that discussion board explosion and these studies.
People like Steven Johnson, Mark Taylor & many others have talked for a long time about how communities and cities work. There is no person in control, but stuff happens, and it happens productively, intelligently, without agency, and without teacher interaction. Part of the trick is getting in tune with that emergent phenomenon, respecting it, and letting it develop. It requires stepping out of the driver’s seat, taking risk, and having faith. As our fetishism for a romantic expressivism and need for originality has shown, these are hard things for academics to relinquish.
Johnson, who happens to a neighbor of mine, wrote Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. This book would be particularly helpful. It is a popular book, very smart, and very accessible. The section that he has on ants explains how complex and intelligent their communities are but each individual ant, although unintelligent, acts as part of the community in response to other ants’ pheremones.
I had students read this book on emergence last year at Texas Christian University. They were absolutely enthralled by the book, and learned a lot about community.
But the issue that my colleague was pointing to (for me, at least) is the issue between how agency breaks down with the rise of new technologies, how it is hard to relinquish our (modernist) authority in the classroom, and how an understanding of collective intelligences can be a productive way to think about writing in the classroom. We’ll see where this goes, but, for me, this would be a pretty easy article to produce on my own.
February 22nd, 2008 by cutter
Back when I was at the University of Texas, Arlington working on my PhD in rhetoric, I started a coupla blogs. The first was “Neo-Baroque”, the second was “Workin’ On it.” I used them as think places for my research on my dissertation, but, for some reason, I never quite felt comfortable putting my research out into the public, so I took ‘em down, and I still believe that they helped me focus on the diss at hand.
The writing of the diss is done, I graduated, and am teaching writing at St. John’s University in Queens, NY. We made the long haul from Fort Worth, TX to Brooklyn and settled in. I think I’m ready to get back to blogging. The way I see it, keeping the blog is not just a place to continue practicing your daily writing, but it helps immensely with teaching, and keeps you in touch with new and exciting research that other bloggers in the field are doing. It plugs you in more directly to the online community, and that’s what it’s about.
I can’t make any promises about what will show up in this blog, but I know the kind of blogs I like best, and my current desire is to keep the focus on writing and technology and related disciplines/professions. I’m interested in the future of English Studies, how digital information is impacting the field in general, and what I and other like-minded folks are doing and thinking about it.
Writing for Ants is starting out quiet with no big plans, no big ambitions. It’s just another baby, but don’t tickle me or pat me on the head. Some babies bite. When they get their teeth anyway . . . .
In the meantime, have a cigar.
