Knowledging across life’s curriculum

Blogging tool quarks

I mentionned earlier that I was testing rss readers. But I am also testing remote blogging tools like the one incorporated in Diigo but also stand alone desktop ones like Blogjet ($39US)–review here (with Ecto), BlogDesk (free)–extensive review here, Elicit ($29US) lots of features, WBEditor 2 ($19US) –no service to iron out the kinks, but positive review here; and wBloggar. WBloggar (free) has just released a firefox version; I must try it to see if I like it better. A review is found here.

I’ve also tried Performancing for Firefox that integrates within FF (right click and blog/ review found here)and have just recently downloaded the Flock browser with integrated blogging options right in it. I need to fiddle a bit more with this one. It’s an impressive browser, with many options but at first try it is somewhat slow to load pages. It is only a beginning I suppose. A review of Flock beta is found here scroll down to blog editor for specific information.
The previous post was blogged with the trial version of Blogjet. For some odd reason the full text was blogged but only the intro shows up on the home page. I tried to republish to no avail. It is not that serious. The full posting can be viewed by clicking the title. When first publishing a post with an uploaded picture, the settings here at edublogs would not allow the image to go through.

Meanwhile, the stand alone blogs are much more full featured than the browser integrated ones (Firefox and Flock); but the latter are quite useful for short blog snippets. I’m hoping for my cake and the possibility of eating it too in the near future, when we can combine feed readers with full featured editing and publishing tools ! It will sure beat trying to format text in the edublog/wordpress editor which never seems to be able to remember how to stay formated.

A tool and a talk

I’m trying to accomplish two different things in this particular posting.

1. Test the new remote blogging service offfered by the very interesting social bookmarking service Diigo (beta)
2. and point you in the direction of a web presentation called Beyond the Blog (see below)

——

Diigois first and foremost a bookmarking service but one with more than one twists. Not only can you bookmark pages, sections but you can add private or public annotations (on top of the highlighted copied content) and add sticky notes too. You can export your bookmarks, import from your browser or deli.icio.us (I wish there were more options here) but Diigo has yet to offer an opml import option. You can also subscribe to other members feeds or specific tags. Recently they’ve added this blogging feature.

I appreciate remote blogging. It saves times and you can update more frequently. I’ve been able to add wordpress blogs easily, the examples are directly related. But I will need to go search for my other blog configurations.

Notes: right away there are a few frustrating bugs. When you highlight a part of the text you want to blog, it copies it automatically to the editing screen. That`s good. But when you begin to type an introduction, or a comment at the top of the copied info, the entire note gets hyperlinked. There is no ‘unlink’ button, nor is there an undo option. And an html editing option would also be nice when the WYSIWYG screen won`t cooperate. Next version I suppose.
——————————-

So here goes for the first posting.

——————————

• UBCWiki: Beyond the Blog

Blogjects…hmm!!!

Lately I’ve been testing new (to me) feed readers … (BlogBridge, Awasu, and the newest version of FeedReader(3)); an activity that sent me back to my neglected collection of feeds. I miss having the time to read and comment, read and blog, blog and talk with my virtual colleagues and critics. Obviously I read and found this:

On Anne Gallaway’s blog (Purse Lip and Square Jaw), there is an entry on the subject of “blogjects”. Not really on `blogjects’ but she takes the word/concept to task. What are blogjects? A videocast and a picture can help make sense of what these are.

Essentially, the term is meant to represent objects with certain built in capabilities to interact with the environment; designed to collect information and feed it back to the user. Here they speak of GPS mapping and googling attached to : i.e. a camera.
In what they call the Internet of things (seen as post web 2.0), objects are anthropomorphised, they literally ‘talk back’.

The Internet of Things is the underpinnings for a new kind of digital, networked ecology in which objects become collaborators in helping us shape our individual social practices towards the goal of creating a more livable, habitable and sustainable world. “Blogjects” — or objects that blog — captures the potential of networked Things to inform us, create visualizations, represent to us aspects of our world that were previously illegible or only accessible by specialist.

As Anne Galloway remarks, Bruno Latour’s Actor Network theory (ANT) is certainly the theory that seems to best represent such actants; the term Latour used to signify people and/or object agency. Actant as a term collapses both into one: no more hierarchy, instead both have equal powers of shaping but they remain separate yet interconnected.

ANT is not focused on the objects says Anne Gallaway, but instead Latour foregrounds the links or relationships these make possible (the network they map out). I agree with Anne’s reading, in that it’s the interdependant connectivity made possible by the translations of actants, that lead to versions of the social. Latour in his latest book mentions there is no social a priori, it is constructed through translations, mapped out from the center out, according to the actants that create the signifying network organised around a controversy/issue/event. (Reviews here).

Instead the notion of blogject seems to collapse person-machine into one, in more of a cyborg type of entity, than a Latourian actant which retains more of its separate yet interconnected reality. The blogject is anthropomorphised, it “thinks” and “communicates”; while the cybord is a human that is machine like. Blogjects seem to fit nicely in Donna Haraway’s cyborg world: “Haraway’s ideal “cyborg world” consists of people living together, unafraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines.” The kinship is forgotten for a fetishised object as Anne remarked.
I too object to the Internet of things being seen as “a renaissance of objects”. Objects have always informed and participated in significant ways in our world. The digital object is just another “species”. (Knorr Cetina also has much to say on this). How I read blogjects (and surface reading it is at this point) and the explanation provided is as follows: they carry their own DNA (to carry through with the anthropomorphism), reveal traces of human/object activity, while feeding back contextual information that is otherwise hidden, accessible only to experts in the past or invisible because of our human limitations.

The tools/objects can help us see more of the context, the history, and even the background and as such extend our information source and perhaps enhance cognitive potential. But what I or You do with what you now have access to and are able to see can be something completely other than connecting to humans in any significant way or creating “sustainable and habitable worlds”. That’s a big technological leap of faith.

What blogjects seem to represent well are various traces of our human/object activities, what they call ‘cataloguing the weak signals” (see slides of presentation).This newer ‘legibility” of traces of what use to be opaque or invisible also implies new types of literacies; a literacy of diverse codes, genres and symbols. It also implies more demands on our already stretched to max attention. Without some purpose, some type of practical use, this is just one other type of information, in an already saturated information world.

As an ordinary user, a citizen doing my thing, I can choose to tune out, or never tune in in any significant way, watching a trend go by without taking part in it. In business certainly. In research, and specialized uses, the many types of mapping made possible by technology is quite useful. (See DontClick.it and see the mouse traces of past users). In education? perhaps, once schools ramp up to systematically teach information-media literacies across the board.
And furthermore, if blogjects don’t partake in actual blogging, that is publishing person generated text we can read, instead of bouncing snippets of all kinds of data, than a more apt term could be “datajects” (sounds too much like reject) or “infojects” or even “mediajects”. What do you think?

Blogs as graphs

Discovered via Remote Access this online tool that takes a url from a web site, and turns it into a graph. This is what knowledging across life’s curriculum looks like.

What do the colors mean?

Here is what they say:
blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

Basically it says a lot about code but very little about anything else. Oh well nice graphics!

Smartfox, firefox scholar coming soon

In the development stages, Scolarly firefox tools 

SmartFox is being developed by the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).

Firefox Scholar (aka SmartFox) From ToolCenter

The Educated Browser: SmartFox, the Scholar’s Web Browser

While many libraries and museums have put materials online, often at great expense, scholars and researchers using these institutions’ online catalogs, collections, and documents currently have no easy or powerful way to use these resources, often resorting to a cobbled-together set of stand-alone applications (such as EndNote and Word) to make citations, take notes, and create personal collections and bibliographies. Few libraries and museums have had the resources to improve the user experience of their valuable resources. The Center for History and New Media is building an open-source package of tools for libraries and museums that will work right in the web browser, where most research is now done.

We are calling the project SmartFox: The Scholar’s Web Browser, and it will enable the rich use of library and museum web collections with no cost—either in dollars, or probably more importantly, in secondary technical costs related to their web servers–to institutions.

This set of tools will be downloadable and installable on any of the major open-source browsers related to the increasingly popular Firefox web browser: Firefox itself, Mozilla, and the latest versions of Netscape and the AOL browser (all based on the Firefox code base). SmartFox will enable users, with a single click, to grab a citation to a book, journal article, archival document, or museum object and store it in their browser.

Researchers will then be able to take notes on the reference, link that reference to others, and organize both the metadata and annotations in ways that will greatly enhance the usefulness of, and the great investment of time and money in, the electronic collections of museums and libraries. All of the information SmartFox gathers and the researcher creates will be stored on the client’s computer, not the institution’s server (unlike commercial products like Amazon’s toolbar), and will be fully searchable. The Web browser, the premier platform for research now and in the future, will achieve the kind of functionality that the users of libraries and museums would expect in an age of exponentially increasing digitization of their holdings.

I’m thinking Yé!!! I can grab (umm!), mix and match, collect, collage, collate and remix in a more fluid way. Where do copyrights come into play? How are they managed? Or are we talking only public domain materials? Will the stored copies collect reference materials. I suppose the tools will take care of these details. Lets see, sounds great on first reading.

spam activity–kills interactivity

FED UP

Yes I am. I tried all the tricks and spam blasting widgets (or at least I think I did) offered by James and his crew (?). But no can do anymore. I’ve had it with the bushels of unsollicited comments I have to deal with.
Battling spam: pornography, gambling, pharmaceuticals, technology sollicitation has simply gotten the best of me. NO MORE comments, and hopefully trackbacks too. …. I need to read up on this a bit more.

I tried to install this new service from Webride which adds discussion to any web page. But I can’t (don’t know) how to install it here. Perhaps this could be a solution to these pesky spammers. Perhaps I simply don’t know how to manage comments (subscribe only I guess could do the same).

Here is what they have to say. Note they seem to be developing something for wordpress.

From their webpage:

Comment everywhere

Webride automatically attaches discussion forums to each and every web page on the Internet.
Use the input field on the homepage or our browser tool (bookmarklet) to start discussions on web pages you are interested in. With Webride, you are not restricted to only blogs!

From the developer page ummm! hint hint!!!

Blog integration

We, the Webride team, have already started integration with Wordpress. API::Blog is half the way through and we would support everyone, who likes to take only the last steps but get all the honors

Currently, our Wordpress plugin already chats with the Webride API to post messages, but the other way back - pulling messages from the Webride API, waits for implementation. It isn’t too complicated, but our priorities have changed somewhere in between.

Podcasting legal guide

Creative commons has published a new legal guide for podcasters. You can view the contents online or download a 42 page pdf file from their site.

Finds-smartboards

If I am going to blog anything these days it should be some of the finds I`ve been coming across.

via Vic Divecha’s Tech Blog

further linked by Renée Marie Fountain from Laval University Quebec

The World of Smartboards, Sympodiums is about to change

The technology is multi-touch screens, developed at NYU (as per post on the Cult of Mac blog). And the interesting part is that Apple has patented these interactions, which means… a TabletMac?

Enough to make any edtecher dream in living color!

reviewing peer-review

“This blog entry examines why it is so hard for us round pegs of new media to fit in the square holes of academic tenure. The talk closes with an invitation to contribute to the “Text Pool,” a peer reviewed online environment for stimulating collaborative writing that aims to furnish an alternative metric for academic success.” (text from the Conference Media Blog, mp3 talk by Jon Ippolito.)

This is a review of the ‘ways of academia’ when it comes to the inseparable process of peer review/publishing and tenure. Listen to the talk on the mp3 file .

It proposes alternative ways that take into account new forms of knowledge creation–particularly relevant to those in new media, and those who use multi-media and networked technologies. It reminds us (as I previously noted) that technology is redesigning disciplinary maps and academic ways.
I’ve also collected a number of articles that critique and offer proposals to update the peer-review process. An update on the ‘genre’ is what is proposed. The links to these papers and blog entries can be accessed here.

Tracing Identity

My interest in identity is long standing. My foray into the world of psychotherapy and fine arts was in fact a way to delve into identities. What makes someone who he is, is a fascinating puzzle that drives a lot of my intellectual curiosity. Identity is made up of so many different pieces that overlap, shift and change according to context, circumstances, needs, geographical situatedness, academic conversation, new interest, new role, work, culture, values, beliefs, etc. Most of what we do that is of any significance has identity marking potential built into it. How much or how litte we let these etchings transpire through our public and private selves is a complex human and social mystery.

This curiosity about identity has of course taking me on a cultural journey across anthropology. The journey I seem to be returning to more and more, the landscape of which has so much to reveal. That says something about me these days. A topic for another time.
But I am confused. I came across an upcoming conference I knew nothing about yet it is hosted at my own university. I had to find it online, querying some search engine about anthropology. That tells you how much the local is completely disconnected and further how disciplines don’t talk to each other. This is a department in the same building ! Yet nothing. I guess for most Education, and Anthropology are unrelated.
The conference will be held on May 9-14 2006 at Concordia University in Montreal. CASCA 2006:

HUMAN NATURE/HUMAN IDENTITY: ANTHROPOLOGICAL REVISIONINGS is a conference on identity and rethinking what we mean by identity.

some of the topics covered are as follow:

The theme we propose would seem to connect directly, for instance, with the following areas of current anthropological concern (amongst others):
1) …the embodied nature of identity, whereby mind is part of body, and individual body part of social body, such that any conceptualization is partial, partisan and provisional. What does ‘human nature’ mean when to be human and natural (healthy, sentient or sick) are discursive notions owned by collective systems of signification?
2) …the political nature of identity, whereby positioning in and by social discourses determine the conditions of being. What weight (freight) does ‘human nature’ carry in a milieu where identity politics would deploy subaltern notions of ethnicity, religiosity, gender and indigeneity so as to classify a sovereign space beyond the purview of others?
3) …the relational nature of identity –recursive, cybernetic– whereby things are epiphenomenal upon the relations between them. On this view, human nature is that which is elicited in particular moments and places by the contingent and relative qualities of what ‘the human’ is seen to engage with.
4) …the existential nature of identity, whereby each of us individually manifests the potential of the species, and constructs world-views, life-projects and life-courses which embody the capacities for conscious creativity intrinsic in the nature of the human as such.
5) …biogenetics, nature and identity: new reproductive technologies, the genome project, genetically modified foods. What does genetic engineering tell us, as anthropologists, about current public understandings of human nature and of our own?
6) …environmentalism, nature and identity: Gaia, new-age travelling, tribalism, religiosity and dissidence. What does the global phenomenon of environmental awareness tell us about a political reconceptualisation of the relationship between humanity and nature?
7) …’neo-materialism’ or ‘neo-ecologism’ variously argue for anthropology to consider how humanity’s identity is to ‘dwell’ in nature. Methodologically one overcomes distinctions between culture and biology, human and animal, ideal and material, by a holistic appreciation of the way human nature is at once a matter of evolution, adaptation and enculturation.

Yet nothing about technological identities, virtual identities, disembodied identities in media, trace identities in technology and the like. They are missing the newer research in Media Anthropology and CyberAnthropology and identities of globalization (many links in spanish). Some interesting authors on the subject are Anne Beaulieu, Christine Hine, and a number of others. I wrote a paper (up for publication in Anthropologie et Société) on these trace identities and what we are looking for when we track behavior on the Internet.
On the other hand you have conference presentations on Identity 2.0 (by Dick Hardt), that talk about data constructed identities with much hype around managing the implications. This is linked to Attention Economics trends and ownership of ‘click logs’ that are traces of browsing behavior on various sites. I’ve written about this previously here and here the subject is only beginning to be unpacked and showing the many sides of its emerging personality. Such as Google and Yahoo logs which are now under political scrutiny and efforts to control information.
The conversation about Identity 2.0 is one of commerce, not people; of management across platforms (avoiding silos) for ease of access… for whom do you think? Jon Udell’s recent posting on “Controlling our data” concludes with this:

Controlling our data is an idea whose time has come. In different ways, Root and Sxip are exploring how to build businesses around that idea. Whatever the outcomes, we are bound to learn important lessons.

I hope our lessons won’t be regrettable ones. In the meantime there are wider social implications here. Centralized identity data….??? Serious discussions about the repercussions and ramifications this may have must first be had. And sooner than later.
I’ll say more at some other time. I need to go sit my family for some embodied tête à tête and my mother’s Sunday lamb roast! I’m licking my chops

Will fair use survive?

I found a 2005 policy paper via Academic Commons, that discussed fair use (US) at length shedding light on the increasing difficulties faced by those who want (could) take advantage (news, education, parody, critique) of the built in exceptions to copyright and trademark laws.

Educational issues:

“I know the university is concerned about copyright issues. We can’t make course packs without sending for permission for every article,
and so many professors I know run to the copy
machine and make copies themselves, or to the
few little shops that don’t require copyright. I
have sought permission from Art in America and
different magazines, and they charge and arm
and a leg, even for articles that I wrote!”(p.32).

On artistic creation:

Tony White has also been educating himself about copyright law, “but what I find discouraging is, the more you learn about copyright and fair use, the more of a chilling effect it has on your creative expression. Greater education about this topic, for artists, seems to have a chilling effect” (p.31).

On plagiarism:

How do they feel when somebody else copies their work? Clay Shirky uses Creative Commons licenses, but he tries to stop outright plagiarism. “One time, some guy from Singapore stole a bunch of my articles. It wasn’t fair use, because it was the whole article. I went directly to the guy. And that was enough – it disappeared, because it was embarrassing to him. He was doing it to increase his credibility, not to derive money from it. And so if his credibility was damaged by being discovered, that was enough of a remedy.” (p.34)

The authors speak of the The Chilling Effects Clearinghouse that

[B]egan in 2002 when Wendy Seltzer, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, realized that the Internet’s vast potential for people “to express their views, parody politicians, celebrate their favorite movie stars, or criticize businesses” was being threatened by the widespread practice of sending cease and desist letters, or take-down notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (the DMCA) (p.35).

They speak of strong, medium and weak claims and cease and desist letters that often led to compliance. Even weaker cases who had genuine fair use claims, but no money to fight in court were compelled to pull the material from public view or cease the uses they were making of it.

On fear of law suits:

Katz, an art historian and expert in lesbian and gay studies, wrote: “I wasn’t involved in controversy, because I knuckled under, but in two cases, I’ve wanted to publish images of artists’ work in the context of an article on the relationship between their work and their sexuality, and both times permission was denied. I felt confident that I was covered under fair use, but the publishers felt otherwise” (p.54).

Often related to parody:

“This kind of issue needs exposure,” he concludes. Corporations are “trying to pressure people, trying to use scare tactics and legal tricks.” (p.48).

On being too small to matter:

A videographer who is hired to document family histories wrote: “Many times I will lose work to others for not being willing to break copyright law and use a song that is protected. ASCAP and BMI won’t even answer requests for small uses. [...] I can’t give that to them because large companies won’t even acknowledge my existence to give me permission.” He feels that copyright law should not require clearance in these situations. “ (p.56)

On the extreme prices attached to coursepacks:

So professors are faced with the following options: (1) we cannot use supplementary materials; (2) we can create a combination of paper and e-reserves, which can be really hard on large classes where lots of students have to share the information; (3) we can charge the student an outrageous amount for a packet of xeroxed essays that they won’t be able to sell back; (4) we can break the law” (p.58).

An art scholar adds this:

I am a strong advocate of fair use for scholarship and believe that it is being endangered by profit motives. Many university presses are dropping art publications due to rising costs and fear of litigation. In the long run, this will adversely affect copyright holders, as their work will not be made known through the critical act of scholarship, and students will not be made familiar with their work in the classroom” (p.59).

Conclusions and recommendations point to alternative routes where the intermediaries are eliminated:

A major force contributing to the erosion of fair use is the culture of gatekeeper-intermediaries –publishers, broadcasters, distributors, and many ISPs – who care less about legal niceties or the rights of users than about avoiding expensive lawsuits. This structural problem means that proponents of fair use must not only educate, advocate, and litigate; they must promote alternative technologies that eliminate media bottlenecks. Open access academic journals, open source distribution for creative products, and independent ISPs that are willing to resist DMCA take-down letters are some of the innovations that can help liberate fair use from clearance-culture gatekeepers (p.61).

Amen! Do see some of my older entries under the categories of (c) & (cc) or copyright/copyleft alternatives.

• Notes on the history of copyright ;Open Access and creative commons licencing ;Open access journals; Open content alliance;Copyright or copyleft of blogs

Collaborative diagramming tool

The tool is called Gliffy

I forgot I had signed up to participate in the beta trial. I received my invitation this evening. So far I find the features are easy to navigate and use; Gliffy provides a number of aesthetic features too. You can invite others to collaborate and when you are finished you can publish to the web in 3 sizes (it generates a link to a jpg file).
I will give it more of a spin in the days to come.

FROM THE FAQ SECTION

What is Gliffy?

Youniverses, Generation C, Twinsumers

Stopping by Jyri Zengestrom’s blog, I ended up on a Top Model’s blog and finally on Trendwatching.com… Oh my god!!!

This is a wake up call and probably what the hoopla is all about when we read about various takes on information mirroring and personalization. Andrew Keen (echoed by Nicolas Carr and others) comments:

Another word for narcissism is “personalization.” Web 2.0 technology personalizes culture so that it reflects ourselves rather than the world around us. Blogs personalize media content so that all we read are our own thoughts. Online stores personalize our preferences, thus feeding back to us our own taste. Google personalizes searches so that all we see are advertisements for products and services we already use.

Trendwatching talks about twinsumerism and collaborative filtering. A twinsumer is someone’s likes matched to a ‘twin’ product or service.  They add:

Collaborative filtering (Wikipedia’s definition: the method of making automatic predictions about the interests of a user by collecting taste information from many users) has been around for a long time (in internet years, that is). Pioneering this space was Amazon.com’s recommendation software, which could tell a customer that others who had also bought Rushdie’s Midnight Children, appreciated The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, too. [...] Others have followed.

They add that Collaborative filtering is fueling what they call Nouveau Niche, and what I briefly referenced in a prior post, that is the The Long Tail :

BusinessWeek called it ‘The Vanishing Mass Market’, Wired Magazine spoke of the Lost Boys and the Long Tail. Others talk about Niche Mania, Stuck in the Middle, or Commoditization Chaos. We at TRENDWATCHING.COM dubbed it NOUVEAU NICHE: the new riches will come from servicing the new niches!

These are niches created by these micro content markets of each and everyone’s Youniverse!  I completely understand the Narcissism metaphor being used by vocal critics, but…. Trendwatcher tags yet another trend they’ve called Generation C (C stands for Content):

The GENERATION C phenomenon captures the an avalanche of consumer generated ‘content’ that is building on the Web, adding tera-peta bytes of new text, images, audio and video on an ongoing basis.

The two main drivers fuelling this trend? (1) The creative urges each consumer undeniably possesses. We’re all artists, but until now we neither had the guts nor the means to go all out. (2) The manufacturers of content-creating tools, who relentlessly push us to unleash that creativity, using — of course — their ever cheaper, ever more powerful gadgets and gizmos. Instead of asking consumers to watch, to listen, to play, to passively consume, the race is on to get them to create, to produce, and to participate.

They mention the inevitability of much ‘crap’ being created–”superior tools and no talent still equals useless content” but acknowledge that there are exciting new niche markets created exclusively by ‘non-professionals’ with talent and new tools.

Now contrary to the verdict of culture flattening by Keen and Carr (destruction for Keen) I can’t come to the same dire conclusions. Projecting from Friedman’s ‘narrowcast’ view of culture and connectivity trends, there is simply too much of the rest of the world being edited out of the picture (see various critiques of Friedman’s flat world view). Even if the above trends can’t be denied, they are fueled by consumate consumerism, more than productive content generation. Popular culture is certainly of interest to a certain extend, however there are other less flashy ‘happenings’ that need a more fine tuned focus to see them. There are also more consumers of content than producers (good and bad); more readers than reviewers and active filters; more French bloggers than American ones (writing practices that pre-date the electronic media). My point, trends are not independant of the cultural roots of their embodied and geographically situated participants and take on their color.

I believe to a certain degree in collaborative filtering as an Information management tool; as distributed sense-making; and as an informal kind of peer reviewing. Will I find these filtering others around the google corner? Perhaps yes, if my super-encounterer luck is up! Perhaps not (and probably not). In most cases I will need to rely on trusted information producers and other sources of productive filtering and creations which take time to locate. Furthermore, if the creativity of tools and bandwith are fueling more ‘production’ of content, we’ve all seen how utterly demanding in time, energy and mental bandwith maintaining online presences can be. Enough to discourage more than one after a few months of enthousiam.

To make a cultural point, the book I’ve been reading by Scollon & Scollon’s Nexus of practice provides a number of stories about vocality and technology related to indigenous people of Alaska. It seems their style of discursivity is strongly skewed towards silence and observation over public participation and ‘all out’ vocal displays on or offline. In Alaska their connectivity is very much up to date due to the military structural needs of the past. The authors quote one Alaska native saying: “I can only speak to you to the extent I know you” (p.133). Online identities complicate the matter even further when faced with virtual ’strangers’ . Direct questions, the authors tell us are understood as scolding and are responded to by reflection in silence–not writing nor response.

I suppose many other cultural characteristics could be studied to disconfirm the blanket statement of similar techno appropriation leading to a cultural flattening and the end of High Art (Keen’s elitist art) as we know it. These are Western shoes, western values, western discourses. Perhaps another form of colonialism is setting in: techno-colonialism! If not in the access to tools or pre-defined contents (though mostly English) than in the discourse that assumes this reality is a shared view and lived experience affecting all in the same way.

info encountering

How we go about locating and piecing information together is something I’ve been interested in for a long time. I did not know that fairly new research in Library and Information sciences looked into what is called “information encountering”. (thank you Johannes Strobel). In the same family of behaviors incidental learning (different discipline) is when an activity without planned learning goals leads to some type of new knowledge. Information encountering takes place in unplanned situations while doing something else or seeking some other form of information.

Coined by Sanda Erdelez (I don’t know if she was the first but she is the most referenced when “googled”) she speaks of four different types of ‘encounterers’

1. the non-encounterers
2. the occasional encounterers
3. ‘encounterers’
4. and ’super-encounterers’

The 3rd and 4th categories are those who often bump into information and who enjoy the serendipidous encounters. The ‘encounterers’ she says do not see connections between other aspects of their information behavior, in contrast to the ’super-encounterers’ who see these types of finds as important elements in their information acquisition.

‘Super-encouterers’ are those who find information in multiple locations and distill information from multiple sources while often linking people and finds on an ongoing basis. Erdelez says:

It is as if information super-encounterers have channels for information perception that are more sensitive than the channels of other information users. This in turn may make them more sensitive to noticing information in their environment.

I guess I am one of those who characterizes herself as an information junkie, hooked on following those obscure links into the labyrinth of the Internet; reading reference lists from A to W labelling chosen entries with ‘find’ or ’see’ and sitting at my computer googling, or searching the journals of my library through the intranet connection.
I admit I started early (not just a side effect of pursuing a PhD). As early as I could read, I was reading the adds on bubble gum wrappers (no joke) and ordering the free items, then writing to get mail from numerous magazine offers; I then graduated to home schooling freebees and magazine samples; to reading the career section diligently and linking friends, teens and colleagues to jobs and various resources; to finally creating web sites to ’store’ and organize my finds.

Now with tagging the frenzy is limitless. I even bought software to manage bookmarks many years back, but needed a better tool to manage more detailed information (clippings or articles). I recommend MyInfo. Since I started using it the price went up but it is still inexpensive for the features and ease of use it offers. You can make folders, drag and drop links and highlighted text and search the databases you create, mail these to friends and colleagues or publish them on the web. A great tool with impeccable service.

PBWiki

I was never completely taken by wikis but this one stands out . You can take the well made visual tour that gives you a good idea of all the features it offers (text formating, rss feeds, side bar, file uploading, pictures, etc). A bunch of new features have been added too.

Right now they are offering 2 for 1 storage. Last but (for me) not least it is aesthetic too (rare for wikis).

My first efforts are found here.