jill/txt

So I want some blogs to recommend to my students but man, all the blogs I read are by 35 year old women who are often academics and who like gadgets and new media and books and who really probably don’t have that much in common with my mostly 19-26 year old students.

Any ideas?

Hm. I had an email from Flickr today telling me I have to merge my “old skool” Flickr account with a Yahoo account. And to switch to Blogger.com’s new cool system, I have to switch to logging into that using a Google account.

I like staying logged in to Flickr and Blogger. Makes life easier.

But with these merges, that means I’ll always be logged in to Yahoo and Google, too. That means Yahoo and Google will recognise me every single time I visit another Yahoo or Google affiliated site. The amounts of data they’ll collect on me - on all of us - are gigantuan.

I’m not sure I like that.

Today’s class will begin with a discussion of the worksheets I made up for this week. I’m interested in what the students think of them. We’ll also be looking at their blogs and we’ll talk about the assignments.

The main topic for today, however, is to introduce blogs as a cultural phenomenon, and to begin talking about what they are. I’ll use the following summary to spin off into the web and show the students examples on the projector. (more…)

I’ve been exploring Facebook recently, after Ina invited me to join, and it really does have some intriguing aspects - it seems to merge many things from many other social sites. Of course I’m the ONLY “faculty member” on it from my university, but what do you expect. Today I noticed this sorting of “stories”, which I found oddly fascinating. It makes me want to click and read about this person’s “network stories” and “relationship stories” - the first includes such dull statements as “X joined the Uni. Bergen network”, the second, well, most of my friends seem not to have “relationship stories” in Facebook, but I have a single relationship story: “Jill is listed as engaged.” It would be much more interesting reading the relationship stories of somone a little more flighty. “Status stories” are pretty dull, I have to say. “Jill is at work.” “Jill is at home.” “Jill is at work.”

While each of these events is not really a narrative in itself, their presentation in consecutive order, with dates, certainly sets up an implied causality or at least sequence - if “The king died, then the queen died of grief” is a minimal narrative (events, sequence, causality), then Facebook stories put together certainly might be. Although they require a different sort of interpretation than a conventional narrative does.

I assume somebody’s written a Facebook fiction, yeah? Or is there hardly any point in fictionalising something already this intriguing?

Rune Klevjer’s PhD thesis has been approved, and he’ll be defending it on February 9th! The afternoon before the defence, Rune will hold his “trial lecture”, and the topic is very, well, topical: “Aesthetics and Ideology in Computer Games: An Analysis of Super Columbine Massacre!”

Super Columbine Massacre! is a game about, you guessed it, the Columbine school massacre. It recently caused a controversy when it was pulled from the Slamdance Guerrilla Gamemaker Competition by the festival organisers due to sponsor pressure. And this after the game had made it to the finals. I haven’t played the game, which is available as a free download, but I’m thinking I will. I also plan to read Clive Thompson’s analysis of the game, “I, Columbine”, in last week’s Wired, which Linn Sovig calls “the best artistic critical analysis of a game I have ever read!”

Linn also points out how this controversy actually has people discussing games as art, which is really quite a switch from the usual games as mass entertainment. Should be a really interesting topic for Rune to work on for his trial lecture - and for us to listen to.

Rune’s lecture on the game will be held on February 8th, at 15:15 - in the auditorium at U Pihl, which is over at the Social Sciences faculty at the University of Bergen. His opponents for the defence (and the people who wrote the assignment for his trial lecture!) are Espen Aarseth and William Uricchio.

I found this quote in Trevor Scholz’s blog (and may I say that post is a lovely example of how you can blog a classroom discussion using links and narration - students, please try to emulate that!):

A recent survey conducted by Kelton Research discovered that a majority of Americans (52-percent) said their “most recent experience with a computer problem provoked emotions such as anger, sadness or alienation,” yet a whopping 65-percent of these same folks spend more time with their beloved computer than their own spouse (Engadget)

The logic of the comparison isn’t quite compelling. I mean, I could say that wow, for 99% of women, their bras touch their breasts for more time than their boyfriends do, without that proving anything very useful about women, bras, breasts or boyfriends other than that bras and boyfriends are good for entirely different things. But there’s a certain frisson to it that made me blog it anyway.

I’ve been so impressed by the utvidet arbeidsplan (”expanded work plans”) my daughter’s been bringing home from school after the latest reform of schools in Norway that I’ve tried to make one for my students. The idea is to give them a very clear overview of what they’re supposed to be learning and how to go about learning it. But it may well be ridiculous - will you please have a look and see what you think?

One advantage for me is that having estimated times for the various tasks I can actually see that what I expect them to do outside of class is entirely consistent with the amount of time they’re supposed to be spending on studying. My daughter’s fifth grade worksheet doesn’t show time estimates, I got that from the European Tuning project, which I heard about when I (as head of department) was asked to report on how our department calculates student workload and would the Tuning system be useful. The idea of this part of the Tuning project is to standardise student workloads per credit so it’s easier to transfer credits from one country to another and know that they’re equivalent. This PDF has detailed examples of how to do this when planning a specific course. I’m not sure whether students are ever supposed to see those planning documents, though.

Anyway, according to Tuning, a 15 credit course (in the ECTS - European Credit Transfer System, which we now use) should involve 375 hours of work for each student. That’s actually 19.5 hours a week for the 18 weeks between the first class and the portfolio being due. I’ve only reached 17 hours, but there’s plenty of opportunity for spending more time on things.

Now I really need some feedback though: If I give my students this work sheet will they laugh at me for giving them something based on what a fifth-grader is given? I mean, it’s way too detailed. But my impression is that students don’t do work outside of the classroom because they don’t really know what they’re expected to do. (Is that true?)

I think I’ll try it out next week, and we’ll see whether I keep doing it. And I’m not sure yet whether this is extra work for me or whether it will help make teaching easier for me. And am I sewing cushions under arms? Quite probably adults should be organising their own studies? Although you know, I’m not going to have their parents sign it as my daughter has me do, and I’m not going to check up on them - and I’ll encourage them to change the tasks if they feel others would be more useful to them in reaching their learning goals. Sorry, learning outcomes. For some reason, the EU standard is learning outcomes, not learning goals. I have no idea why.

I found an unusual blog by chance: Någons mamma - någons dotter (that’s Swedish for “Someone’s mother - someone’s daughter”), written by a woman in jail. She writes her blog posts in letters to her daughter, who posts them to the blog for her. Each post is titled “Mamma bloggar frå fengslet” (Mum blogs from jail) followed by the name of the jail she’s in and the number of the post. It’s very thoroughly done - the dates are “Mammas senaste blogg är daterad den 20 Januari 2007;” (”Mum’s latest blog is dated January 20 2007″) and comments are left by, for instance, “din brors tjei” (”your brother’s girl”).

This is, I think, not simply an interesting blog to read but another example of the new stories we hear through blogs. Yes, a newspaper might have printed letters from a jail, and books have been published by people who have spent time in jail, but this directness is different: not only do we readers experience the distance to this woman as far less than if we read her words in a newspaper or a book, but this communication is important for her, and it seems, for her family.

And perhaps the implications are greater too. She writes how her letters to her daughter have been opened and read by the wardens. She’s upset by this - she agrees that it’s reasonable that letters to an inmate be opened, though she doesn’t agree that they should be read. But what is the reason for reading letters from an inmate? Shouldn’t inmates in jail have freedom of speech, as others do? Are her letters being read because the wardens know that parts of them are being posted to a blog?

Interesting questions, I think.

In today’s class we’re going to look at the transition to print and we’ll discuss how technology and culture interact - and we’ll do some more blogging, too. Easy reading this week: just chapter two of Bolter’s Writing Space, which is about writing and technology.

I think we’ll start with the good old “Helpdesk i middelalderen” sketch - which is conveniently available on google video, youtube and various other places as well as on the NRK website.

I’ll show a brief powerpoint so we can look at pictures of incunabulas, which is always satisfying, and we’ll discuss the chapter from Writing Space as well as looking at the changes Elizabeth Eisenstein writes were engendered by print. We’ll draw on the concepts of technological determinism and alternate approaches to understanding the relationship between technology and culture in discussing this.

Finally, students will re-read page 19 of the section from Writing Space, where Bolter argues that technology and culture are so entwined that you can’t really talk about technology changing culture - they both change - and then we’ll discuss how that can be understood in relation to the different approaches to the relationship between technology and society/culture that Chandler outlined (hard and soft technological determinism, socio-cultural determinism, voluntarism, and our addition, co-construction), and that we discussed last week. Then, after a plenary discussion, they’ll blog their conclusions.

Hm. My iMac is being fixed, and the repair person rang and asked for my password so he could fix it. Should he actually need that? Can’t they boot off a CD or something and not need access to my personal files? Oh well.

Searching I can’t find a thing either way, so who knows. I don’t think I’ve given my password to anyone before, though. Hm.

Students blogging in our Critical Approaches to Technology and Society course:

• Robin
• Hamdi
• Alex
• Cristina
• Olav
• Catello
• Morten
• Bradley
• Lene
• Øistein
• Sindre
• John
• Marius
• Iselin
• Derek
• Ole Johan
• Alessandro
• Maja

I dreamt that only one student showed up for the first class of Critical Approaches to Technology and Society this morning. I did the lets get to know each other thing just for him, I showed him how to use a blog - and then, after the break, forty more students showed up. They’d all slept in. And the stuff I want to do after the break today is all completely founded on their knowing each other a little and their having blogs set up.

I hate teaching nightmares. At least I’ve never dreamt I was naked in front of my class or anything. And I didn’t dream I was unprepared. And it wasn’t as bad as that lecture from hell when none of the technology worked!

This semester I actually get to teach my blogging book! Isn’t that clever!? I get to teach something that I’m researching and writing anyway, so both teaching and writing should propel each other forward in a very productive fashion (instead of hindering each other as often happens) - and the students will get a super-engaged teacher and a real “research-based education” experience. Look, here’s the syllabus for the course.

That’s if they actually show up. I sure hope my dream doesn’t come true.

Hey, Kristine Jørgensen, Bergen girl who studied at my university (though at Infomedia not our department) and is now finishing her PhD in game studies in Copenhagen, is Microsoft Norway’s new xbox gaming lifestyle specialist! Congratulations, Kristine!

Oh dear. I just posted a photo of the cherry blossoms on the tree I walk past on my way to work, and on a whim, did a search for “cherry blossoms in january“. They’re everywhere - Bergen, Paris, New York, Massachusetts. This is not good.

A journalist rang me last night with questions about YouTube - Marika suggested he call me, he said, which was cool (thanks Marika!), because unlike last summer, by now I do know stuff about YouTube, more than enough for the two brief quotes needed for the article. And the great thing about journalists calling you is they fill you in on bits you didn’t know - I hadn’t thought to search YouTube for the Norwegian stars, for instance, and this article nicely presents some who’ve got way more fame than they’d expected. Fun :)