jill/txt

Matthew Kirschenbaum on how reading is changing, in response to the US National Endowment for the Humanities’ rather retro report on “reading”, To Read or Not to Read:

To Read or Not to Read deploys its own self-consistent iconography to tell us what reading is. In the pages of the report we find images of an adolescent male bent over a book, a female student sitting alone reading against a row of school lockers, and a white-collar worker studying a form. These still lives of the literate represent reading as self-evident — we know it when we see it. Yet they fail to acknowledge that such images have coexisted for centuries with other kinds of reading that have their own iconography and accouterments: Medieval and early modern portraits of scholars and scribes at work at their desks show them adorned with many books (not just one), some of them bound and splayed on exotic devices for keeping them open and in view; Thomas Jefferson famously designed a lazy susan to rotate books in and out of his visual field. That kind of reading values comparison and cross-checking as much as focus and immersion — lateral reading as much as reading for depth.

if:book also has an interesting critique of the NEA report, responding to Kirschenbaum’s comments.

Tonight’s going to be busy. First I’m giving a talk on Blogging and Freedom of Speech for the Bergen Linux Users’ Group at 7 pm. The meeting’s open and free, as befits a Linux-lovers’ meeting, so if you’re interested, come to Auditorium PI i Autogården, Johannes Bruns gate 12. The blurb for the talk is included after the “read more” link.

Then at 9 pm, I’m going to the Machinima evening that Linn Sovig’s organised at Landmark.

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Martin Grüner Larsen completed his thesis, “Text, Thought, Time: The Weblog As Essayistic Process”, a literary analysis of blogs, several months ago, and is currently posting a compressed, translated-into-English version on his blog, chapter by chapter in a series he has named “A Bluffer’s Guide to My MA Thesis“. Lots of interesting ideas and insights in chapter 1 - I’m looking forward to the rest!

Here, for instance, is sort of the outline of much of the point of the thesis:

One night, having browsed an online collection of Montaigne’s Essais and a selection of blogs, it dawned on me that these texts actually had a lot in common: the focus on process; the intellectual restlessness; the love of quotation, of other texts, of the randomness of things read coming together and the verbal and intellectual playfulness - these were all superficial qualities shared by blogs and the essay. I found that these superficial qualities actually signalled a deeper relationship of methodology, composition and structure which I wanted to explore and use to develop a theoretical vocabulary to describe blogs as literary entities and then use in practice to analyse and criticise some blogs.

It’s also a lot more fun reading this compressed version than it is to read ordinary an ordinary MA thesis - and my job requires me to read a few. Subsections 1.4 and 1.5 are compressed as “meaningless formal drivel” and hence we are spared them. Landow’s book is approved of despite it’s “rather tacky So 90’s! covers”. And potential naysayers to arguments made are brushed aside as “probably crabby old men who couldn’t make a hyperlink if their life depended on it.” I wonder whether Martin met any such in his oral defense?

Tonight is the Republicans’ YouTube/CNN debate, where, instead of journalists asking all the questions, the rest of us were asked to record questions and upload them to YouTube. CNN then chooses the questions they want to use, and the would-be-presidents answer and discuss.

There almost wasn’t a Republican version of these debates, after Mick Romney and others saw the Democrats’ version back in July. One of the questions chosen had a melting snowman asking questions about global warming, you see. Clearly frivolous. And so Romney planned to cancel. Several other Republicans also claimed to have schedule conflicts. Anyway, CNN rescheduled the debates and has apparently succeeded in talking them all into participating.

TechPresident points out that CNN chooses which videos to show based on criteria they haven’t actually disclosed - but it certainly seems reasonable to assume that at least one criteria is that it make “good television”. The public haven’t been given the opportunity to cast their votes - but Techpresident’s attempted to find something close to the public’s choice by showing us the 40 most viewed questions currently on YouTube, starting with number 40.

I haven’t actually viewed each of these videos, so I’m going to have to trust Techpresident when they say there are no snowmen.

As an aside: for the Norwegian elections in September, one of the newspapers, VG, set up something similar. They actually went to public places and aimed cameras at people, asking them to ask politicians a question, so the video aesthetics is rather different - here are the submissions, I can’t find an archive of the actual broadcast. This way of collecting questions may have been necessary in order to get enough submissions in a small country like Norway, though you really do miss out on the YouTube aesthetics. Also, the debate was not televised on traditional television, but simply broadcast on the newspaper’s own “net TV” channel. Presumably the attention this got would have been far greater if one of the major traditional television channels had run it.

Hooray! Labor won the Australian elections! In a landslide! Or, for more background for the non-Australians, see the piece about it in the New York Times.

A couple of years ago I wrote about a family-aware clock much like the Weasley’s clock, developed by Microsoft - they’ve continued working on it and are ready to have a few families try out the prototype: The Whereabouts Clock. It’s kind of cool - but would depend on family members actually having their mobiles with them, on and charged. Which is probably the case most of the time in many families.

Steven Poole’s book Trigger Happy was one of the first books giving a history and aesthetics of videogames - and it’s very accessibly written too. We’ve used it successfully in teaching a couple of times at humanistic informatics. Now he’s offering a free (as in free beer) PDF of the British, 2000-edition of the book, under a Creative Commons license - for a limited, though unspecified, period.

I’ve asked our library to see whether the library can legally archive a copy so that readers can access the book digitally even after Poole removes the file from his server. The paper edition of the book’s currently on loan at about half the Norwegian libraries that own a copy, so it’s clearly popular.

This is a “death map”, showing where players are most likely to die on a particular level of Half-Life 2, found on a page of player statistics for Half-Life provided by Valve, the company that makes Half-Life. Apparently players’ copies of the games are automatically reporting back to the mothership on details such as where they die, the average session time (26 minutes), average completion time (6 hours, 14 minutes) and so forth. While there are potential privacy issues about software automatically sending messages “home” to its creator, I love that they’re releasing the statistics freely - what a great tool for researchers. And seeing this kind of information openly available also makes me feel calmer about the sorts of things being reported and why they’d be useful to the software creator. I wish Microsoft and Apple and the others would do the same. (Found via Kottke.org)

I’ve disabled SnapShots on this blog - it was that cool gimmick thing that let you see a preview of a page by hovering over a link. They added ads. And there doesn’t seem to be any way of opting out of the ads, although the blogger can opt in so she gets money off the ads. While I appreciate that many bloggers like ways to earn extra cash off their readers, I don’t want ads on this blog, so unfortunately, SnapShots has to go.

Pity. I rather liked it. Not enough to put up with its ads, though.

Albertine Aaberge teaches high school students digital media, and noted in a blog post yesterday that she’s had much the same experience with them as I described in my presentation in Oslo last Thursday: teens have a fair bit of experience with digital and social media, but they tend not to make the connection between that and their learning environments. They may have a form of “digital literacy” but it’s not the kind that is expected by teachers, universities, or, I would argue, their future employees.

Thinking of this made me think of my eleven-year-old daughter’s homework yesterday. She’s in sixth grade and had finished the chapter on geometry in her maths book, so her maths homework was to spend fifteen minutes working online on maths using links her teacher had provided in her school’s LMS. Forty minutes later she called out “Look at this, Mum!” She’d been playing with a symmetry game at Mathemania.no and was thrilled at the groovy patterns she could make.

Now this symmetry game is actually very close to the Flash-based games she loves to play anyway. She enjoys drawing games, and solving “missions” and decorating her igloo in Club Penguin, and various rather insipid decorating your bedroom sort of games at Games2Girls. She’s bookmarked sites like ninja kiwi, Miniclip and Scribble, a game where you draw lines to help your “blots” get through hindrances. She’d now far rather play Flash games of a Saturday morning than watch cartoons on TV, which used to be the thing to do on weekends when mothers don’t want to get up early. Going to her computer now to check out her bookmarks, I see her browser is open to “storytime” at the BBC, which is also a link provided by her teacher in the LMS.

A site like Mathemania.no gives kids maths in a medium they already know - fun little Flash games that you can play with and explore as you play with plasticine or drawing equipment or lego blocks or dolls. So kids can use the digital literacy they have - basic browser and gaming skills - to learn maths.

A site like Mathemania transfers maths skills into the kids’ area of digital literacy or competancy. That’s great.

But we also need to be helping kids to learn to transfer their species of digital literacy into the kinds of demands the adult world will require. We can’t just translate all knowledge into Flash games and the Wikipedia and Facebook and expect young people to intuitively “get” how to, for instance, conduct productive web searches, evaluate information critically, present it to others using appropriate digital means - or even, for 95% of them, to learn to PROGRAM those Flash games or make those critical remixes of popular culture that we’re so thrilled to see when we discover them.

I really think that schools and educators are increasingly aware of these issues - and I think that we need to keep that focus.

I might have to try to find Aurora a summer camp or something that teaches her how to make Flash games :)

So have you seen that Amazon’s going to be selling an ebook of its own called the Kindle? It looks pretty ugly, doesn’t it, and yes, we’ve seen ebooks before, but apparently this one will be different because it’s got wireless connectivity and will hook up directly to amazon.com, allowing you to buy books and do anything else you do on Amazon from the book itself. Which might just work. Despite the device’s rather extreme ugliness (how much un-cooler could you make an ebook?) it does have a keyboard, something that the previous generation of dedicated ebooks pretty much all lacked.

It was announced on Engadget back in September, but Robert Scoble’s all excited about it today, linking to a feature on the Kindle in Newsweek and hinting that he’ll say more himself once he’s no longer bound by an NDA that expires tomorrow. Which I suppose is today given he’s in California and I’m in Norway.

I’ve seen some collaborative story-writing apps for Facebook before, but this is the first narrative I’ve seen that’s written to be read in Facebook: Why Some Dolls are Bad, by Kate Armstrong and Henry Khachatryan. I found it in the same way one finds most things in Facebook: two of my friends added it.

I only just added the app so don’t have much to say about it yet, but here’s the blurb:

Why Some Dolls Are Bad is a dynamically generated graphic novel built on the Facebook platform. The work assembles a stream of images from Flickr that match certain tags and dynamically mixes them with original text in order to produce a perpetually changing narrative.

Users who subscribe to the application in Facebook can capture pages from the graphic novel and save, reorder, and distribute them.

The novel engages themes of ethics, fashion, artifice and the self, and presents a re-examination of systems and materials including mohair, contagion, environmental decay, Perspex cabinetry, and false-seeming things in nature such as Venus Flytraps.

And here’s Kate Armstrong’s outside-of-Facebook presentation of the piece.

You might have guessed from my fascination with babies, my sudden uptake of knitting and the slight bulge of my tummy: Scott and I are having a baby! We had the “big” ultrasound today, at the hospital, where they look to see whether the baby has four chambers in its heart and five toes on each foot and so on, and she does, she looks just absolutely perfect - and she’s (almost certainly) a girl!

She’s due on April 14. I’ve already started saying no to invitations to speak next semester, and I’m obviously not going to the Electronic Literature Organization’s excellent-looking conference next May (CFP deadline Nov 30). I’ll be on maternity leave from three weeks before April 14 and for the rest of 2008. After that, Scott will probably take paternity leave for a while - we get 54 weeks (at 80% pay) to share between us, which is great.

There, uh, might be a bit more blogging about baby and pregnancy websites and social networking and blogging for mums than usual. You guys’ll understand, right?

I’m speaking in Oslo today, at the Fleksibel læring (flexible learning) conference at the University of Oslo. Here’s the slideshow I’ll be using. It’s in Norwegian, sorry to all you non-weegies - you might be able to follow it anyway, though.

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My main point is that despite today’s students having grown up with technology, and despite their using the net extensively, they still lack very basic skills for using the net in learning at a university level - and the ways teens use the internet differently from older users (e.g. games, IM, social networking) can almost hide the fact that many of them lack skills seen as basic in what we oldies call digital literacy - such as being able to find relevant information, evaluate it, synthesize it and present it. Of course it’s also possible that they’ll simply redefine “digital literacy” so it means something else once they’re adults, but I somehow doubt it. I think actually the idea of “digital natives” is dangerous - it lets us as teachers and parents off the hook.

I absolutely love the babies on the first slide. I found them at a stock photo site, and they only cost me a dollar to download and use as much as I like with only a few reservations (I can’t make a company logo using them, or sell them to you, for instance). Actually I didn’t even pay the dollar because when you sign up you get five free credits. It’s the first time I’ve bought stock photos for presentations - usually I use creative common licenced photos (there are a few of them in the presentation too) or my own photos or I ask the photographer for permission. I love finding photos I can use as a sort of framework for building my slideshow around - my mind works well that way. And those babies are so cute.

The other improvement I’ve made to my slidemaking is using cross-platform fonts. I’ve been so fond of mac-only fonts that my slideshows look bad on Windows - or on slideshare.net. This time I found the list of fonts that both macs and Windows know about and stuck to it - and lo and behold, the result looks far better.

Annelogue wrote recently about watching FLYING: Confessions of a Free Woman, a six hour movie by Jennifer Fox that explores how women live, think and feel today across the globe. Intrigued by Annalogue’s post I followed the link to the director’s blog, and was immediately hooked. In eloquently written posts, she wonders about why men and women communicate differently (she wants to talk, he doesn’t so much), weaving different possibilities into her narrative in such a thought-provoking way. She writes about a recurring argument with her boyfriend - now that sounds awful, doesn’t it, but it’s not, she manages to write about it with distance and love and intensity, which sounds impossible but I certainly recognise not only much of what she’s describing, this is the sort of thing my girlfriends and I talk about often.

I might have to see her movie too. I was rather happy to find that it’s available for international sale in just a few weeks, whereas the US and Canada have to wait another half year. Just the opposite of the usual :)