Tattoo Dreaming

If I were ever to get a tattoo, it would be something like this.

This tattoo, by the way, is one possessed by a customer of Aunt Clara's over at pinkbunnypajamas.com, which is where I recommend you go for all of your Pink Nightmare needs.

Uncharted, Undaunted

Uncharted, undaunted, keeps rolling on.

I won't go into the details of what happened in bringing this update to the public. Suffice it to say that, as with many small companies like ours spread out over several time zones, the following held true:

1) Thing break.
2) When they break, it's at the worst possible time.
3) When things break at the worst possible time, communication is key.
4) Sometimes, for whatever reason, people forget to communicate.

And so on. But that's beside the point. What matters is that Oregon's Multnomah Falls is quite the place, made even better by quite the hike from the serene little spot you see here to the towering heights above the falls, when the folks below on the bridge look like ants but you're too busy insufflating the bark off of trees because you're breathing so hard after climbing that steep little 1.2-mile switchback trail to the top.

As we walked, folks kept telling us, "You're almost there. Only seven more turns." We counted turns. And turns. And turns. It reminded me of that scene in Ghostbusters where they're walking up the stairs at Dana Barrett's apartment and Venkman says to Spangler, "So, where do you think we are?" Spangler responds: "Teens." Venkman then says "OK. When we get to twenty, tell me, because I'm going to throw up."

We made it, though. And this was only one stop on our ten-day spin through Oregon. Lots more to come.

Tune it to Walter

I have to confess that any reminisces I might have of Walter Cronkite anchoring the news would be manufactured. I mean I've seen him anchoring the news, reporting the news, in the context of videos presented in other forms from what we see in Apollo 13 to newsreels of his World War II reportage to his reporting of the JFK assassination. I may very well have witnessed some of his reports on the television as a kid, but as a kid -- or at least as this kid -- the only relevant things you remember from the news the adults in your life consumed were the Sunday funnies and that one glorious day when it was revealed to you that there were black-and-white funnies in the paper on the weekdays.

But still, I get that feeling that with Cronkite's passing today that we've seen the last light turn off in an era when television news was, for the lack of a better word, better.

Did they still opine on the news then? Yes. But back then, news was an event, a distillation of a day's news into a scant half-hour, an hour if there was something really big. If there were something extremely big, we got that delicious moment when your shows were suddenly interrupted with a cheesy cardboard graphic warning us of a special news bulletin.

Today, news is not an event. It's a given. It's not trickled out to us. It's on twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, on several channels where they opine and opine and opine and report and report and report until we're so numb to the news that it takes the overspectacular -- the Michael Jacksons, the OJ Simpsons, the airplane crashes, even to get us to realize that news isn't background noise, it's news. To me, Walter Cronkite is one of the last symbols of the era when news was news, not a 24-hour expectation or bloviation fest.

Time's headline declares that Cronkite owned the word 'trust.' I have to agree with that. Who in the news owns that word today? I don't know. But there are certainly a legion of newsies attempting to own the word 'jackass' today.

The little screen was bigger back then. If we wanted news, we had to tune in at those specific times, and when we did we knew the likes of Cronkite would be there, goofy windblown white-man hair and all, not the polished mannequins we have these days. Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather may be the last of the breed, but even they saw the advent of the 24-hour news cycle and were swept into the maw.

Is too much news a bad thing? Absolutely.

I'd rather give up 24-hour news. I'd rather just tune it to Walter.

Glutton for Punishment

Because I'm a glutton for punishment, and because Blackboard scares the living hell out of me, I'd like to introduce my Blogger-based public speaking course, everydayspeech.

Bear in mind if you visit the site now, you'll be assaulted by some hard-to-read text, a few dead ends when it comes to blog add-ons, and, underneath it all, a highly amateur instructor who, before hes tarted taking an online course on building online courses from Utah State University back in June, thought pedagogy was somehow related to the teaching of feet. I don't know my cognitive scaffolding from my constructivist approach, but I'm sure going to figure it all out before I have to make everything work by August first.

So if you're keen on watching people torture themselves, keep checking in at everydayspeech over the next few weeks, just to see how things are going. Or not going. Or whatever. Witness either the triumph of a novice teacher or the naive dreams of an amateur go down in flames.

Frankenstein

"It wasn't supposed to be this way! This was supposed to be a thing of beauty, not this monstrosity you see before you!"

--Dr. Frankenstein, from Mary Shelley's novel.

Jury Duty

I'm not going to work tomorrow. Instead, for $10 for the day plus mileage, I'll likely be sitting in a jury box, doing some kind of note-taking, deliberating or, if the trial is boring, a little sleeping. Maybe not that last one, sure.

I have mixed feelings about the experience. It'll be interesting to see things from the inside of a courtroom, but I have no illusions that it'll be anything like what they show on television. It'll be plodding, deliberative, and very likely boring.

Part of me wonders if I shouldn't try to get out. I understand if you're the sole income-earner, sometimes they let you off. But as I'm a quasi federal employee, there's likely not much sympathy there. I'm hoping, however, that this will be some kind of selection process tomorrow rather than a trial and that I'm rejected for some kind of technicality. I've been brushing up on my Federalist Papers and, if that doesn't work, I'll try the ploy a former Hispanic boss said he'd use -- he said he'd tell everyone there that he hated white people. That might not be as effective a ploy for me, however.

So tonight I plan to beef up on my jury persona by watching "Ernest Goes to Jail." It should be most enlightening. Anybody got a leaky pen?

They Moved My Cheese and Turned it into Limburger

Reading our various assignments this week made me recall a rather famous quotation from former French President Charles de Gaulle: “How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?” The readings, particularly “The Horizon Report” are forcing me to re-shape de Gaulle’s famous quotation from the perspective as a teacher seeking to integrate technology into the online classroom and the student trying to assimilate the whims and quirks of each online class:

How can anyone possibly test out software/websites/ thingamajigs that come in two hundred and forty-six different varieties?

And there’s an even better question:

How do we know what we don’t know?

And then there’s this killer:

When we find out what we don’t know, where do we find the time to test-run these possibilities out?

That, if you’ll bear with me through one more quote, reminds me of something said by Scott Adams in his Dilbert comic strip: “[It’s] like sandblasting a soup cracker.”

I’m the soup cracker. All this information is the sand coming at me, stripping the paint right off.

First off, one of the most pertinent things said in The Horizon Report – and this applies for teachers, students, and, frankly, anyone repurposing text, images, et cetera – comes on page six of the executive summary: “The challenge is to develop curricula and assessment rubrics that address not only traditional capabilities like developing an argument over the course of a long paper, but also how to apply those competencies to other forms of communication such as short digital videos, blogs, or photo essays.”

I have a practical example here, which comes from the 10 ½ years I spent in journalism. I got my degree in journalism and mass communication in 1997, so not too long ago. Looking back on my education now, I’m shocked and appalled as to how little computer technology – aside from word processing – played in that education. I was going into the communication business, and by golly just about anything I learned about how to use technology in communication came from other disciplines. I used my student e-mail a lot more for English and French classes – E-mail was a requirement in the French classes I took – than I ever did in journalism. Because of one of my English classes I discovered that the university had space set aside for students on their uhhhh, word is eluding me for the moment . . . servers for students to create their own web pages, so I did, and had a lot of fun with it. In journalism, and while on staff for the school newspaper, our only connection with technology was through word processing. We had a web edition, but that was done by a little sequestered group that was brought in at the last minute after everything else was done. (To be fair, the paper was also designed and paginated on computers, but that, again, was handled by a little sequestered group that gave the rest of us odd and furtive glances as we came in and out of the newspaper office.

Then I went into professional journalism and retrogressed. The first paper I worked at had DOS-based computers that were modern in the lat 1960s, and pagination was accomplished with waxed paper cut with X-acto blades and stuck on other bits of paper, with plastic tape covering everything to keep it all in place until the proofs got to the printer. We did eventually graduate to PCs, but for months went without e-mail – I acted as a courier, bringing computer disks of our stories from a branch office to the main office, 15 miles away.

The next paper was better, but only just. We had e-mail and a web presence, but again, we were all sequestered away from each other. We had more access to technological tools at home than I did at work.

Now, thanks to the work I’ve done at http://www.uncharted.net/, through blogging and pure and simple experimentation with the wizardry of computers beyond word processors, I’ve started my real education. And it’s frustrating to see how far behind I am. But I’m not alone – as The Horizon Report authors point out on page seven of the executive summary: “even old technology hands often tire at the thought of learning yet another way of working.” And it’s even more tiresome to work hard at learning a new technological feat only to have it superseded by something else even more amazing.

Part of the difficulty, as the report authors point out (page seven) is that “we have seen many of the technologies and practices highlighted in this series converge, morph, and shift over the years, evolving in ways that continue to keep them in our sights as they move to nearer and nearer adoption horizons.” As we learn to blog, for example, suddenly we see blogs evolving from portals of self-expression to teaching portals, commerce portals, what have you – and that’s only a superficial look at what’s going on. Imagining how social operating systems (page eight), the mind bogglingly-complex mogulus.com and stickam.com (page ten) might work in any environment, let alone an online classroom environment is staggering to keep up with.

So as I read, I had a lot more questions than answers popping up:

First of all, to make these technologies work, we have to experiment with them. We have to find out what we don’t know. Then, we have to find the value in them. Then we have to figure out how to sell that value to administrators, bosses, co-workers, and students, in order to make the experimentation plus value equal useful participation. I’m doing this kind of equation with Twitter right now, and I’m still in the experimentation phase. As far as I can tell, Twitter has got me connected with a string of multi-level marketers, Apple snobs, users putting on the personae of Ernest P. Worrell and Charles Nelson Riley and, on occasion, ladies who want to share naked pictures with me. (Those get condemned to Twitter’s version of hell, “Blocked Users,” fairly quickly.) Finding the value can be a difficult thing to accomplish.

Technology is making the world speed up, and do so quickly. I was actually frightened a bit by the authors’ description of a possible use of social operating systems (page 27):

Students working on a research paper often do not fully realize what it means to be a scholar. Of the network of activities that scholars are involved in – writing, researching, interacting with peers and colleagues, presenting at conferences and symposia, and so on – only a small part is apparent to a student doing research. Every idea, paper, experiment, and artifact is, in reality, attached to a person or group of people who helped bring it about. Imagine the impact of tools that place those people and relationships at the center of any research inquiry: concepts clearly linked to people; connections between those people and other clearly indicated; a much more complete picture of the topic would emerge, more quickly than is possible with current tools. Simply changing the organizing principle – from products or concepts to people and their connections – will change the kinds of results that are revealed.

I imagined some poor scientist or scholar, already frenzied in keeping up with his or her discipline, technology and other pressing matters, suddenly being inundated with questions from students all over the globe, wanting insights, information, handouts, et cetera. Where does one find the time to respond to everyone?

But of course it is coming to be like that. Last semester, I used Twitter as a research springboard for a paper I wrote for Dave Hailey’s Publications Management class. Because Twitter allowed me to connect with people as well as ideas, the paper I wrote was richer because of it. I can see the use. But the widespread application of it all staggers the imagination and opens the true possibility of the Internet becoming even more of a time sink than it already is. Of course there will be countermeasures: Those being inundated can use the same social operating systems to separate the wheat from the chaff, the deep thinkers from the cursory thinkers, cutting down on the number of responses that must be given. But hellllllllp the idea of all that coming at you at once still beggars the imagination and brings new force to the exhortation: Sometimes there just aren’t enough hours in the day.

Then comes the second question: Can I keep up with all of this? Yeah. When I find the time.

Captain Obvious Calling In

ABC news and -- if ABC news is to be believed -- financial institutions worldwide are aflame (not with passione, but with flame) over a report written by a 15-year-old Morgan Stanley Europe intern in England about how teenagers consume technology.

The report, if you care to read it, is here, but frankly, I'm confused as to why anyone thinks this is so revealing. Morgan Stanley Europe, in its introduction to this three-page report (bulked up with five pages of cover, index, financial gobbledlygook at the end, et cetera) certainly is all hopped up about it:

At the vanguard of this digital revolution are teenagers. While their habits will obviously change (especially when they start employment), understanding their mindset seems an excellent way of assessing how the media landscape will evolve. To this end, we asked a 15 year old summer work intern, Matthew Robson, to describe how he and his friends consume media. Without claiming representation or statistical accuracy, his piece provides one of the clearest and most thought provoking insights we have seen. So we published it.

Yes, published it, typos (in his report and the introduction) and all.

But why? The report doesn't reveal anything we don't already know about teen technology habits: They like their mobile devices and games, the cheaper the better, though they're willing to pay more for more features; they don't want to pay for music and see nothing wrong with piracy, though they will pay to see concerts and films; they don't read newspapers.; they don't like advertising, be it outdoors or on the Internet. They are also capable, it seems, of writing up a three-page statement of obvious generalities and getting a major financial institution all spun up about it.

Morgan stanley knows this. they say in their introduction that "these trends will not necessarily surprise." So why all the hype?

Or is this a viral marketing ploy, which Robson says teens enjoy so well. Does Morgan Stanley want to be seen as the Hip, Now stockbroker? If so, they'd better do better than a poorly proofread PDF.

Yes, as MS points out, the implications for profit models are shifting as we move into the technological era. But frankly, we don't need Robson's report to point that out to us. That profit (and delivery) models for newspapers, music and other bits of entertainment and informative gewgaws have to change is, to put it simply, blindingly obvious. And we can't all decide that viral marketing is the way to go -- because as soon as they become ubiquitous, the new, ripe crop of teenagers will tire of the tactics and demand to be entertained/sold to in some other manner. We might quite possibly see viral marketing become cliche and passe as are billboards and newspapers, so there's no salvation there.

Confusion, not Anthropomorphism

I am, perhaps, a little confused.

The rage these days among those pushing for gay marriage is to point to the animal kingdom and say, well, there are gay animals, such as these two penguins at the San Francisco Zoo, so same-sex attraction is completely natural.

Um.

So, they say, they seem to know what's going on inside the heads of two penguins. They seem to think that because two male penguins hung out together and were allowed to incubate an egg and successfully raise a chick together that, ergo, they must have a seme-sex attraction. Really? Talk about grasping at straws.

This kind of thinking is highly illogical. If two men hang out together and successfully raise a child, does that make them gay? Or does that make them two humans who have successfully raised a child in spite of sexual orientation, hetero or homo? The desire to see a child raised successfully by two ladies or by two males or two females is hardly evidence of gay animals -- it's evidence of the drive to survive. It's sophomoric to assume that two male penguins -- a species known for cooperation between partners in incubating eggs and raising young -- are gay because they succeed.

Find a new argument, folks. One that makes sense.

Populism and Mass Social Networks

We all know social networks on the Internet are the big thing these days. From Twitter to Facebook, from Flickr to even the oddballs like digg and fark.com, mass audiences are finding places to explore, have fun, comment, criticize, vent, rant, praise, rave and otherwise hobnob with their fellow wizards.

But at what point do the wizards have to hobnob with the commoners, pull back that curtain and, perhaps, reveal that they might just possibly be a humbug?

I've spent a lot of time over the past year thinking about social networks and social networking. I'm on facebook. I'm nearing my thousandth tweet on Twitter. I've got two blogs, and am a contributor to a third. I've got ideas for at least a half a dozen other blogs which, for the most part, appeal to tiny little niches on the Web and elsewhere, because that's the kind of thing I have the time and energy to focus on as an individual.

For the broader market, the mass social networks, the Facebooks and Twitters, you need company. But I come back to that same question: When do the wizards hobnob with the simple folk?

To be sure, there is room on the Internet for social networks that appeal to niche markets, the professionals, the fetishists, the hobbyists. I'm sure, somewhere out there, thanks to services like Ning.com, there are Twilight-based social networks. There are Harry Potter-based social networks. I'm part of a social network set up for 1990 graduates of Bonneville High School, of all things. I get regular updates. I visit occasionally. They're gearing up for our 20th reunion, and it all looks to be wonderfully social and organized.

But the Facebooks, the Twitters, can't do that, at least on the surface. Subgroups might develop -- and sertainly have -- inthose networks, but the networks themselves, on the whole, are established for mass appeal, not limited to a single, or even a small collection, of audiences.

Enter the populist view. Populism, in the paradigm of social networking, means opening the ubiquity and inexpensiveness of the Internet to anybody with a computer and a reasonably fast Internet connection. This is no startling revelation, I know. The likes of Clay Shirky and others have long opined that the advent of the Internet is akin to the invention of the printing press in freeing expression from the gatekeepers who beforehand kept things under control or at least among the hobnobbing class.

What is the appeal of social networks? To me, it's the ability that such networks afford anyone to upload a photo, write a story or a post, and have it read and perhaps enjoyed by someone else. The photographer and poster may indeed recognize that there are others out there much more capable of producing better photograpsh and batter-written posts, but that is of no consequence. What matters is that the poster is able to share what he or she has created with those who might be interested. And for friends and family, there is interest. Maybe outside that circle, there is interest. There is competiton, of course. It's fairly easy to get onto the Internet and say, "Eew. I can do better than that." And the beauty is they can go ahead and do better than that, post their own, share it with their friends, and the one who has an inferior product need not be bothered. Or even jealous. Or even aware.

Maybe Anne Elk can explain this better than I can:



Yes, it's a stupid, poorly developed theory. But it is hers. She is proud of it. And she doesn't really care if someone out there has a better theory. It is her right to share her theory with the world, and social networking can help her do that.

This is the populist theory of social networking. Maybe it's not what the niche markets want. Maybe it doesn't have professional appeal. But it allows everyone out there to participate, contribute, share and explore.

Does this mean I don't find professionalism appealing? No. But it does mean that I object to the thought that professionalism is the only lens through which one may observe the world. Let me illustrate by example:

How many times have you asked an English teacher “Can I go to the bathroom,” only to have the teacher respond, “I don’t know. Can you? I think you mean ‘May I go to the bathroom.’” The implication here is that the word “can” implies ability – Am I able to go to the bathroom – and the “may” implies asking permission – “I need to go to the bathroom. I am asking your permission to leave the room to do so.” Technically, maybe there is a difference between can and may. But isn’t the overarching message from the teacher to the student that he or she needs to use the bathroom and is asking permission to leave?

Here’s the point: Do we let the English language drive us, or do we drive the English language? Those who can get past the fiddle-faddle of an overreliance on precise language agree that we shape the language, it does not shape us.

It's the same with professionalism being the sole driver of a social network -- or anything else for that matter. The Internet allows us to remove the gatekeepers, to pull back the curtain on that wizard.