Digital Literacy & Me

Reflection on creating my (video) podcast:

My video podcast was created on my Blackberry, on a Kodak flip-cam, on Windows Movie Maker and ultimately YouTube. It also encompasses a number of online social media apps that I use. This assignment challenged me to work across hardware and software – since the video from the BlackBerry in the first scene, had to be uploaded from a proprietary network. The flip cam video had to uploaded as well, then edited and produced on Movie Maker. I needed literacy in all these technologies to pull it off.

I once heard Windows Movie Maker described as a “killer app” since it suddenly enabled video making by the average person and I agree with that assessment. The video wouldn’t have been possible without it.

Creating this podcast, and the new media it profiles demonstrates that I must take on several roles/wear several hats to do it all including creating the content and producing it.

The podcast was not scripted/written except in a very general sense (something I do all day at work). However, it was developed with a goal to tell narratives about each of the media, primarily to make it a bit more interesting.  However, some stories were cut to reduce the size to under five minutes. In fact, five minutes is long for a video without a strong narrative line or other interesting content.

Question that comes to my mind (completing a university course assignment in this manner) – is there an APA style for video or other online media?! J Should there be?

Digital Literacy and Me

This was a challenging project for me. I've dabbled in imovie before, but haven't really counted audio or video in my skill set, so there was a big learning curve involved. After getting off to a slow start, though, I began to see the possibilities - and also to see where I had gone wrong (and didn't leave enough time to start over!)

Digital literacy is a big topic, and it was difficult for me to find an angle to focus on. It was also difficult for me to find my voice in a new medium. I listen to a lot of CBC, and I have a bad feeling that I've sort of unintentionally modelled my podcast on something I'd hear on Definitely Not the Opera (but with low production values).

Nonetheless, having to think critically about my relationship to new media was a valuable exercise. Please excuse the technical glitches. You might want to have your finger on the volume control before you start. There are a few unfortunate fluctuations along the way!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umVsqFO-7jU

Digital Literacy & Me

I have just finished the Assignment 1 podcast for Comm 597. This is significant in a couple of respects: today is not the deadline day, so that is a novel feeling; and this was the first podcast I have made. I remember hearing about the podcast requirement for this course while sitting in on an elective presentation last spring. A student who had done the course recalled how bewildered she had been by the prospect of making a podcast, but also how she persevered and figured it out. That scene, along my finding the friendly voiced Annie in a Youtube tutorial, combined to give me the confidence to give it a try. Using memory and a Youtube link, I managed to fit myself into a little community of podcast-making supporters across time. I should also mention that I enlisted the help of my younger son, Michael, in the task. In his fingertips, the laptop seems to be an extention of his hands, whereas mine feels, at times, more like a bulky prosthetic attached to my hands.

It was certainly slow going at first. I had a number of false starts as I tried to figure out how I could best and most smoothly record my voice tracks. I tried to memorize, and then ad lib, and then reading a written script, but nothing worked. My time in television studios suggested some form or teleprompter, so that’s what we fashioned by tailoring the size of the screens so that a panel of an editable Google document was visubke just beneath the record button. With that infrastructure apprehension alleviated, I worked inside the mind of GarageBand.

I don’t use that term “inside the mind” lightly, because I did feel more than once as I dragged pics in from iPhoto or a tune from iTunes that, somehow, my project was being thought out by the software and those who had designed it. It was a fleeting thought, but I did tell my wife that I felt like I was wandering around inside Steve Jobs’s head. What was going to be a predominately audio podcast took a decided turn toward photos, as a panel of all of my iPhone pics going back two years appeared as a reservoir on the side of the screen. I take a lot of photos, and they became a renewable resource for this project. I took screen captures for other images. What was disappointing is that I could not figure out how to download Youtube video so that I could work with it. That certainly would have made my project more entertaining in the good sense of that word. I’ll try to figure this out -- without Michael’s help!

It is not a new concept for me, but it was reinforced how important pacing and rhythm and changes of mood are. I am not saying I succeeded, but I do know how important to the story these devices are, and that’s why I decided to pay the 99 cents and cut in a portion of the Cookie Monster’s singing, “C is for Cookie!”I also re-learned how important it is to the story when the technology takes a back seat and becomes infrastructure, (Partial Kubish Hyperlink [PKH] in my own memory to lecture by John Durham Peters at last year’s spring institute where he talked about “infra” meaning “below.” I wonder why that particular memory link fired when I wrote the word “infrastructure”?) that brings no attention to itself, allowing the illusion of a greater connection to through audio and video to the story. I’m not a pro, but I did make some tweaks in soundtrack editing to draw less attention to the tools.

What I would like to do in future podcasts is to simulate hypertext links, in a way. But that is another project.

Guest Lecture Response: Neil Baldwin

Hi Everyone,
Here is something Neil has written in response to your comments regarding his initial post. Neil encourages you to share your thoughts here in the comments.

"it will be two years in april since the creative research center www.montclair.edu/creativeresearch went live, and you, as one of our earliest adapters, can see how much we have grown -- just look at our Web-bibliography and Links and Blog pages.
the Long Form is alive and well at the creative research center.
and i, as a writer and author, have commensurately migrated more and more to the Web in everything i do.
or, i should more pertinently say, everything i produce (in the content sense).
to be sure, as many in your class pointed out, and as milosz says in his wonderful poem at the end of my post -- i still turn to The Books when i want a particular kind of respite or solace.
as a matter of fact, right now i am halfway through the cairo trilogy by the nobel prize winner nahguib mahfouz.
it's a thousand pages, and i hope it goes on forever....
the preponderant part of my day - as an author and, in the past five years, as a university professor - is spent either in class or at my desk - and when i am at my desk i am on the computer.
sometimes i might get up and walk around and take a break, but the pull to come back is strong.
occasionally, i feel guilty (if that is the right term) for spending so much time in cyberspace.
but then another side of my mind issues the corrective that i need to go where the actionis, in the fullest sense.
along with the desire to put a narrative out there comes the reciprocal desire for response.
i was going to say "feedback" but that is too distorted.
as a writer, i have always had a hunger to communicate, and that is a given in my life and work. but in the past fifteen-plus years since the Web entered my life, there is no question that my urge for a reply - in the widest cultural sense down to the most immediate "did you get my email?" sense - has increased.
i have ambivalent feelings about this mirror-effect, i.e., the more going out, the more i want to see and experience coming in.
one could adapt the metaphor and say it is as natural as breathing...but i would be remiss if i did not tell you and your students that it has a darker tinge.
i can't quite define this new synaptic mode. i think it is primal, archetypal.
i'll stop now with this final thought: i do not see the e-book 'explosion' in a darwinian way anymore.
i do not see an electronic tsunami crashing down upon us and carrying away the flotsam and jetsam of print.
i agree with the general sentiment of your class that the media will coexist.
the gradual atomization of TV, the music business, movies in multiplexes, interactive displays in museums, smartphones, and so on - - there is no way this surge could not effect and disturb the dynamics of the act of reading.
however, as long as human beings seek out manifestations of creative self-expression, books will remain."

Digital Literacy and Me

I had a good deal of fun creating this podcast of my digital autobiography. First, there was a need to step back and reflect on the moments in my life that defined my growth as a cyber-citizen. Then, I had to go around and collect images to help tell the tale. I can't begin to describe how cool it was to dig up my old websites on the Wayback Machine at archive.org. I then relied on sites and tricks that I picked up along the way to finish off the research - like visiting ccmixter to download an appropriate song. I really enjoy making videos and playing around with iMovie to help familiarize myself with it. I'm getting pretty impressed with how quickly I can put things together now. The messy detail work and fine tuning can be tedious, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. In the end, I think I've come up with a strong creative presentation that I am quite proud of. I look forward to sharing it with my online community and getting the feedback.

Ultimately, this is another step in building and enhancing one's transliteracy skills. The confidence gained here helps encourage me to take on more similar projects.

Week 3: History of the Book

It’s not just about the printing press! The history of the book presents us with a complete, observable communications revolution. The historical record allows us to examine the whole of a vast socio-cultural, political, and economic change over a period of some three to five hundred years (depending on whose perspective you prefer). By following the developments in manuscript and print book production, tied to the changes in the technologies used to produce those texts, we can also chart the various changes in social organization, politics and economics. 

“Can books only exist in the paper-printed media? Can the text be separated from paper to be reused as a book through digital media? Is such a discussion relevant to the subject of books?”

Some key ideas to consider:

• the history of the book
• the end of books (!?)
• the net_reading/writing_condition
• What are some current views about the emergence and diffusion of media?

Was There a Reading Revolution in the New American Republic?

Professor Robert Gross explores the history and historiography of book history and reading in pre Civil War America. This lecture was originally given at the University of Toronto in the fall of 2008.

Inner Space Explorers

This course is providing a clarity of insight about new media. It’s making the everyday known - there is so much that we do without being aware of what is actually occurring…the text we click on, the connections within a website, the social experience  we are coming to rely on to provide us with a blanket of familiarity.  It allows us to experience ourselves as ‘inner space explorers’, a particularly significant descriptor that Rheingold provides.

We are stumbling through this incredible period that reading Bush tells me began well before the time that I thought it had actually began. It wasn’t the 70s, it wasn’t the 40’s; it truly builds on all of the media and thinkers that came before it – the alphabet, the printing press, the work of Charles Babbage and Ada, Boole with his “algebra of logic.

I’m comforted by the fact that it took Boole twenty years after his “flash of inspiration “ to teach himself enough mathematics to write The Laws of Thought. (Rheingold, 2000). It does take time to truly understand what is occurring. We can learn how to surf the web, build a blog and (in a very few days that are left to me) post a podcast. It take time to truly understand what it is that we are experiencing in warp speed compared to Boole. That is what we need to come to terms with. 

Bush says that “truly significant attainment becomes lost in the mass of the inconsequential” and he looks to technology to address this gap. Yet as we harness more and more technology, we are still finding that we are left with the conundrum of having access to more information and yet feeling no closer the attainment of knowledge.

What if links worked both ways?

While we are discussing linking and hypertext, I wanted to bring up a concept that I first learned about during the Digital Tribes course at MACT. In the book, Critical Cyberculture Studies, Greg Elmer's  article The Vertical (Layered) Net describes the differences between two schools of thought about the future of the web.

On one side, developers believed the web should be open, shared and used for more than passive browsing, and on the other side were developers who felt that it should be controlled and needed to protect proprietorial interests. On page 162, Elmer explains the debate that hyperlinks should be multi-directional. If I link to your site, your site would now link to mine. He points out that this is a logical concept, especially since the term link connotes two ends.

Elmer says that, "If [links] are bidirectional, a link always exists in the reverse direction. A disadvantage of this being enforced is that it might constrain the author of a hypertext - we might want to constrain the reader" (emphasis added by Elmer). Three years after this discussion at Berners-Lee's World Wide Web Consortium, Elmer says that a compromise was made so that the "'collaborative possibilities of hypertext' on the Web are reduced to simple annotative possibilities of hypertext links".

When I read this, I was struck by how drastically this would change the web as we know it. If multi-directional links were in place, people would need to pay more attention to where they link and why. I regularly see links added on the end of a page as afterthought and accompanied by the words, "for more information" or tacked on as a lazy reference.

But imagine if links worked both ways. If I linked to a CNN story on my blog, the link would also allow CNN visitors to see my blog. This could be helpful if I expanded on the story, but it could also waste their time if all I did was post a link without adding new content. This small change to hyperlinks could have changed the way the web was built, how people browsed and the content provided. I can't help but think that it would be a more democratic web if links worked both ways.

I was really impressed with Vannevar Bush's article "As We May Think." In particular, his ability in 1945 to predict the potential for future technologies. In my mind, he described many technologies in theoretical terms that we now have in practice: digital photography, fax machines, QR codes, calculators, databases and even early concepts of data sharing and collaboration that conceivably are in use as Wikis. I will comment on his envisioning of hypertext momentarily.

As a high school mathematics teacher, I was particularly compelled by his commentary about the role of the mathematician in the age of calculators. I think he provides a compelling argument for what the purpose of modern public education should be. His discussion on the role of early mathematics technology like the abacus and the concept of zero reminded me of the book Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife. Moreover, his 1945 arguments were repeated in discussions by educators on the role of graphing calculators in the 21st century. Bush says, "the creative aspect of thinking is concerned only with the the selection of data and the process to be employed and the manipulation thereafter is repetitive in nature and hence a fit matter to be relegated to the machine." This definitely resonated with my philosophy on mathematics education. I felt that it was more important that my students understood what technology to use, how to use it, when to use it and how to understand what the technology was telling you than it was to be able to perform rote calculations. I didn't mind my students using the calculator as much as possible, so long as they understood what it was doing for them (a basic level of numeracy was required for this however). In my mind, the purpose of education is to develop the sort of creativity, ingenuity, critical thinking and problem solving skills that allows students to master technology, rather than the simple memorization of facts, figures and algorithms.

Having said that, the real reason I wanted to respond to Bush's article was to discuss his insight as it relates to hypertext. Bush's envisioning of the technology that he dubs Memex laid the groundwork for what would become hypertext. Hypertext is text that includes references to other related material. In modern web terms we see it as a hyperlinked word that can be clicked, redirecting the reader to another webpage with related material. For the Memex, Bush describes a series of codes that are used to search and retrieve images of files. The memex could be programmed in a way to bring up related material as further pieces of the code are entered. The code would be programmed by the user based on "associative indexing."

This concept of clicking on data to bring up related data is fundamental to the web. In fact, as McLuhan would have predicted, the hypertext media has influenced the user significantly. Many web developers are aware of the eye patterns that users exhibit when scanning a web page and the data on the relatively small amount of time users will spend on one webpage. Ultimately, this element of the web experience is different than the experience envisioned by the Memex. Bush discussed how a user would create their own paths of material in order to be able to revisit the thought paths created as they explored content. The clickability of the web is more about exploring new content than revisiting old content. I would venture to guess that many users could have difficulty following the same path twice in a world wide web tour as they would be likely to be compelled by different bits of material and different hyperlinks as they experience material for a second time.