jill/txt

I finished the manuscript! Hooray! Now just a few loose ends to tie up and we’re off for Christmas!

Scott and I are spending all of January 2008 in Chicago, as visiting researchers to the English Department of the University of Illinois at Chicago (with, among others, Joe Tabbi, editor of the Electronic Book Review and director of the Electronic Literature Organization). We’ve rented a brilliant-looking little place in Bucktown and I’m looking forward to being all urban. If you know of any interesting events in Chicago in January, please let me know! We’ll being giving talks with Joe on Jan 11; either of us would be happy to come and do a talk elsewhere if times suit.

I’ve got two more days to finish up the final version of the manuscript for my book Blogging, and it’s going pretty well. And look, the cover is ready! The book is part of a series called Digital Media and Society (the first book in the series is Mark Deuze’s Media Work), and so the books have a uniform sort of look, with the grey, black and white and the rain of zeroes and ones. Andrea, my wonderful editor at Polity, asked whether I had any particular ideas for the cover image, and when I asked Scott he suggested a megaphone, which is what the designer has chosen to use. I think it looks great - I like the semi-see-throughness a lot. And it looks a bit like a steering wheel, which you know, I’m the navigator of my blog, that sort of fits, though I’ve no idea if the designer intended that.

Also it’s my book! Look, there’s my name, right there in the bottom corner! Hooray!

Update: Here’s the Table of Contents.

MIT Press requested a photo of Hilde and me to use in promoting our World of Warcraft anthology (which you can already preorder on Amazon!). Makes sense. Sure. But both Hilde and I enjoy having our photos taken about as much as we enjoy going to the dentist.

Fortunately the university has a photographer especially for these sorts of occasions. And fortunately, digital photography allowed us to weed out the horrible photos and pick this really fairly nice one. That’s Hilde on the left and me on the right, in case you’re wondering.

I don’t think I’ll show you the one of me on my own though. Oh dear.

By the way, if you want to use this photo to promote our beloved book in some way go ahead, steal use it, we want you to.

Here’s a good Christmas gift idea: A gift certificate to Kiva, a website that coordinates microloans to individuals running small businesses in the developing world. I’ve given goats as gifts to family members before, but this seems more satisfying: the recipient gets to choose for him- or herself who to lend the money to, and when the money is repaid, can choose whether to lend it again to a new person or to withdraw the money. If the gift certificate isn’t used within a year, it becomes a donation to Kiva, which is fine, too.

I like that. I mean, goats are great, but you can’t really play with a goat if it’s in Africa and you’re in Europe or Australia or the US. A microloan, now that’s something you can play with - leafing through the profiles of people in need of loans, and perhaps thus being inspired to lend someone another $25.

Oh, and Hilde sent along confirmation that my instincts are right: Goats are So Two Years Ago, writes the Telegraph. Let’s hope kiva.org gift certificates make the cut.

I got the final reader reports for my Blogging book back last week, and have till next Wednesday to completely finish up the manuscript. With the manuscript completed by Christmas, my lovely editor Andrea Drugan figures we can get all the bits of the copy-editing and proofing that I need to be involved in finished before the baby’s here in April, which would certainly be a Very Good Thing. The idea of having two or three weeks to go through a copy-edited manuscript with a tiny baby needing constant attention is not at all appealing. Also, this means the book’s highly likely to come out on schedule, in the autumn of 2008.

There are of course lots of suggestions for changes in the manuscript (did you ever read a manuscript or book that you wouldn’t have written differently yourself?), but the reader reports are mostly very positive, which is great! And there are some tweaks that’ll be good improvements, too, which is great.

Flight Paths is a new network novel being written by Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph. Its first iteration is being developed on their blog, where they’ll also be discussing research aspects of the project and including reader-generated content. Here’s an excerpt from their description:

“I have finished my weekly supermarket shop, stocking up on provisions for my three kids, my husband, our dog and our cat. I push the loaded trolley across the car park, battling to keep its wonky wheels on track. I pop open the boot of my car and then for some reason, I have no idea why, I look up, into the clear blue autumnal sky. And I see him. It takes me a long moment to figure out what I am looking at. He is falling from the sky. A dark mass, growing larger quickly. I let go of the trolley and am dimly aware that it is getting away from me but I can’t move, I am stuck there in the middle of the supermarket car park, watching, as he hurtles toward the earth. I have no idea how long it takes – a few seconds, an entire lifetime – but I stand there holding my breath as the city goes about its business around me until…

He crashes into the roof of my car.”

The car park of Sainsbury’s supermarket in Richmond, southwest London, lies directly beneath one of the main flight paths into Heathrow Airport. Over the last decade, on at least five separate occasions, the bodies of young men have fallen from the sky and landed on or near this car park. All these men were stowaways on flights from the Indian subcontinent who had believed that they could find a way into the cargo hold of an airplane by climbing up into the airplane wheel shaft. It is thought that none could have survived the journey, killed by either the tremendous heat generated by the airplane wheels on the runway, crushed when the landing gear retracts into the plane after take off, or frozen to death once the airplane reaches altitude.

‘Flight Paths’ seeks to explore what happens when lives collide – an airplane stowaway and the fictional suburban London housewife, quoted above. This project will tell their stories.

Henry Jenkins has a very useful blog post exploring the origins of the term “digital natives” and showing how its a term that’s increasingly problematic today. This ties in beautifully with the talk I gave in Oslo a couple of weeks ago, where I argued that “the idea of “digital natives” is dangerous - it lets us as teachers and parents off the hook.” As a physical immigrant myself (my family moved to Norway from Australia when I was eight) I particularly appreciated Jenkins’ note on the jingoism implied in the term “digital immigrants”, where an immigrant is seen as always inferior, always going to be struggling with the language, the accent and the culture. In Norway the rhetoric is still largely about immigrants “integrating” successfully, but in the US and Australia, the “melting pot” metaphor has largely been supplanted (thankfully) by the “jambalaya” of multiculturalism, where diversity can be celebrated and seen to be to everyone’s advantage. Jenkins writes:

Surely, we should recognize what digital immigrants bring with them from the old world which is still valuable in the new, rather than simply focus on their lacks and inadequacies.

(..)

At one time, the digital immigrant metaphor might have been helpful if it forced at least some adults to acknowledge their uncertainties, step out of their comfort zone, and adjust their thinking to respond to a generation growing up in a very different context than the realm of their own childhood. As Prensky concludes, “if Digital Immigrant educators really want to reach Digital Natives - i.e. all their students - they will have to change.” Yet, I worry that the metaphor may be having the opposite effect now — implying that young people are better off without us and thus justifying decisions not to adjust educational practices to create a space where young and old might be able to learn from each other.

As I argued in Oslo, the skills “digital natives” bring to universities are immensely valuable, but also very different to the ones that we as educators define as “digital literacy”. Teens use the internet differently to adults, and the ways they use it do not completely transfer to the skills needed in a world based on knowledge and information.

Bergens Tidende has a good article about Linn’s machinima evening last Thursday, and Linn herself has blogged very useful rundowns of the program (part 1 and 2) and even two pieces that there wasn’t time for. The evening (and these blog posts) serve as excellent introductions to machinima, giving examples of typical genres and tendencies, neatly and entertainingly organised. A great resource for someone interested in learning about the genre or maybe in discussing machinima in class.

My daughter got a little distracted doing her maths homework this evening, which involved making charts in Excel. She drifted off into the apparently infinitely unfolding edges of the spreadsheet, calling out, “Look mum! I got to 25,000!” and so on as the numbers of the cells grew and grew. Finally, to my surprise, she actually found an edge to Excel’s spreadsheet.

Did you realise that “the ultimate square” of an Excel spreadsheet (as my eleven-year-old has named it) is IV65536?

That’s right. IV is how far across you can get, and 65536 is how far down you can get.

That’s a long way. But it’s not infinite.

Cory Doctorow on on why social networking sites like Facebook don’t grow forever:

For every long-lost chum who reaches out to me on Facebook, there’s a guy who beat me up on a weekly basis through the whole seventh grade but now wants to be my buddy; or the crazy person who was fun in college but is now kind of sad; or the creepy ex-co-worker who I’d cross the street to avoid but who now wants to know, “Am I your friend?” yes or no, this instant, please.

(..) The least-awkward way to get back to a friends list with nothing but friends on it is to reboot: create a new identity on a new system and send out some invites (of course, chances are at least one of those invites will go to someone who’ll groan and wonder why we’re dumb enough to think that we’re pals).

So we probably don’t have to worry too much about Facebook taking over the Internet….