"Social Media & Education" panel at THATCamp Austin

Last week I had the chance to attend THATCamp Austin, a regional spinoff of THATCamp at George Mason University.

I was able to attend two thought-provoking panel sessions, and I got to hear about a lot of interesting projects through the dork shorts presentations. You can read a lot about what happened by scanning through the archive of Twitter posts at TwapperKeeper.

I really enjoyed the unconference format. Instead of having the conference schedule determined by the conference organizers, the attendees voted on the proposals they wanted to see. One of these proposals suggested a discussion about the role of social media in educational practice. Below, I've posted some video from this session for those who weren't able to make it.

Colonizing Web 2.0 apps

A while back, I posted a response to a panel I attended at the 2008 Computers and Writing Conference. The panel reported the work of a research group that was designing what amounts to a social network site based on writing. It is very rare to find someone in the field of rhetoric and writing who can program, and I thought it was a shame that this dedicated group of R&C programmers were trying to reinvent the social networking wheel. Generally, I think this situaiton is like the one Tim O’Reilly describes in this piece on the Yahoo-Microsoft merger.

I believe that we’re collectively working on an Internet Operating System, and that it will ultimately look more like Unix than it looks like Windows. That is, it will be an aggregate of best of breed tools produced by an army of independent actors, all playing by the same rules so that those tools work together to produce a whole greater than the sum of the parts.

Fighting over search is a bit like the Free Software Foundation re-implementing cat, ls, sort, and all the other Unix utilities that were already available in the Berkeley distributions of Unix. The real problem was solved by someone outside the FSF, when Linux Torvalds wrote a kernel, a missing piece that became the gravitational center of Linux, the center around which all of the other projects could coalesce, which made them more valuable not by competing with them but by completing them.

I don’t think writing researchers should be spending time rebuilding features that already exist elsewhere for free.

I should reiterate here that I think it is fantastic that writing researchers are coding websites and building web services. This is a crucial writing skill that I think we as a field have neglected in favor of sexier forms of writing like audio and video. However, what we should be programming are innovative new services that fit into the already existing Web 2.0 space, not building our own versions of existing (or new but more popular, better-supported) services.

So here’s a thought: if rhetoric and composition instructors want to use social networking apps, and they want to avoid sites like Facebook (when I voiced my objections after the panel discussion, one response was that sites like Facebook don’t offer the security necessary for protecting students’ work and grades), why don’t they find an unpopular social networking site and populate it? Here’s a list of social networking sites and their membership on Wikipedia. Instructors could find a largely defunct site, colonize it, and use their collective power to get the site to add features and functionality that fit the interests of the field? Of course, this would only work if many instructors and students from many different schools started using the site. However, it could be a great way to get free programming from a dedicated source while also taking advantage of features geared towards the needs of writing instructors.

Rhetoric and society

Lately I’ve been thinking about the problems that rhetoricians have sharing our knowledge with others outside the field. Ever since Ramus limited the scope of rhetoric to style and delivery, rhetoricians have been losing the public battle over the relevance of what we do. This situation was not much improved when rhetoric attached itself to freshman composition, the indentured servitude of academic disciplines. Like freshman comp, rhetoric is seen as somewhat remedial, unnecessary for people who are already good communicators.

As a student of rhetoric, I find this view of rhetorical studies to be somewhat limiting, in that it ignores the substantial contributions that rhetoricians have made to our understanding of reading and writing practices, as well as of argument and other forms of communication.

Which brings me to this Lifehacker post which I saw over the weekend.

Job interview master Vj Vijai describes how make the best impression at a technical interview using people skills (versus technical skills). His talk, which happened at O'Reilly's awesome Ignite event, is informative, funny, and short. Vijai also has a web site outlining the principles.

I thought that description sounded catchy, so I clicked on the link and here’s what I saw:

NLP or Neuro-Linguistic Programming is a rogue branch of pschylogy that is based on the premise that language and communication can be used to influence people.

What he is teaching isn’t hacking or psychology but rhetoric! This conclusion is reinforced by reading the comments on the Lifehacker post. They read like a greatest hits of criticism of rhetoric: if this is so great, why doesn’t it work all the time? Isn’t this manipulation?

I am continually shocked that rhetoricians have allowed our subject matter to be hijacked in this way, but I‘m not sure how we can reenter the conversation without seeming out of touch—quick, which term is more appealing, ‘pathos’ or ‘Jedi mind tricks’?—or worse, whiny.

Anyway, here’s the video of Vijai’s talk:

Stephen King on Writing

Some helpful writing advice from Stephen King:

Via Freelance Writing Jobs

Sketchpaper iPhone

I don’t know if this is useful, but it is neat. I really enjoy seeing how people integrate paper into their digital activities.

the folks at Labs.Boulevart were kind enough to put together sketchpaper versions of the iPhone. It's a free download (in PDF or Photoshop flavors) of just a bunch of images of the iPhone, left completely blank (sometimes with the MobileSafari and/or carrier bar on there) for designers of all kinds to sketch on and imagine with as they will.

Very cool idea, and the number of different setups and implementations they've thought of is impressive—just the kind of thing to get the iPhone creative development juices flowing.

Blogging Computers and Writing 2008: Building Social Networking from the Inside Out

Collin thinks that someone should live blog Computers & Writing, so here goes. Maybe I can send the conference promoters an invoice retroactively if they decide to adopt his reimbursement plan. :)

Panel chair Mike Palmquist of Colorado State started things off by introducing Writing Studio, a writing-based web portal hosted by CSU. According to Palmquist’s history, Writing Studio began as a hypercard-like program with multimedia features, but it migrated to the web in the late 1990s.

Recently, the site switched from supporting classes to supporting student writers. Jill Salahub, also of CSU, explained how the site had been modified to provide this support. After presenting some results from an internal study of the online Writing Studio—according to Salahub, an instructor’s teaching experience and prior use of CMS was related to adoption of the site, and students tended to copy the responses of their teachers towards the technology; if the instructor was enthusiastic of the technology, students tended to be enthusiastic as well—she described how students eventually became interested in using Writing Studio as a networking tool. To that end, the site’s managers have added user profile pages and places where students can find other people in their classes.

Lynda Haas of UC-Irvine, Carolyn Handa of the University of Alabama, and Will Hochman of Southern Connecticut State each discussed their use of Writing Studio at their home institutions. Haas repeated Salahub’s finding that prior experience with writing technology tended to lead to more positive adoption experiences by instructors, while Handa detailed her grad students’ use of Writing Studio as a shared knowledge depository. Finally, Hochman showed how he used his students’ responses to the classroom communication tools provided by Writing Studio as learning experiences

Haas also pointed out this hilarious Facebook group, which encourages students to write “THIS IS SPARTA!” somewhere on their AP Exam. The meme has caught on: it appears that people have been repeatedly vandalizing the Wikipedia AP Exam page with the phrase. I am usually involved in grading AP exams, but I had to skip this year; now I’m a little disappointed that I’m going to miss out on seeing how often this meme actually showed up on the tests.

I found Writing Studio to be a really interesting project because the researchers are coding the site themselves. It reminds me of some of the early work in the CWRL, when Fred Kemp and his colleagues were creating Daedalus. Now that the lab primarily uses open-source, off-the-shelf tools, it’s good to see that writing researchers are still creating software. However, I wonder about the worth of these programming projects. Like Daedalus, Writing Studio seems to be innovative, providing some interesting tools for networking and connectivity. However, its innovative features seem to have been eclipsed by sites like Facebook. This, I think, introduces the primary response to Writing Studio: why build a writing-specific social network when social networks that can support (or be tweaked to support) writing activities already exist?

Palmquist responded to this question by saying it was a metaphor issue: Facebook was created for socializing, while Blackboard and WebCT are created to support lecture classes. He argues that Writing Studio is specifically designed to support writing classes. Another attendee supported this claim, arguing that the Writing Studio created a protected space for students to share their writing.

I think these are fine arguments, but I remain unconvinced. To give an example from one social networking site, even though Facebook was created for socializing, there are emerging movements to adapt the site for business and productivity ends. I don’t see why this can’t be done for writing as well. Further, Facebook can be as protected as anyone wants it to be; one just has to learn how to change the privacy settings.

In short, while I think that Writing Studio is a great project—particularly because I believe writing researchers should be involved in programming—I doubt that the future of writing studies will be in creating writing-based versions of free tools like Facebook. Why can’t our innovation go in a new direction?

Telling stories with maps

This looks interesting.

Penguin books is working with 6 authors to tell 6 stories in 6 weeks. The first one, The 21 Steps [by Charles Cumming], is told via embedded Google Maps. Wow. What a great method of delivering stories, especially this one that follows a man around town (inspired by the classic thriller The 39 Steps).

The life of a blog-post

This animated graphic from Wired shows how a blog post goes from its author’s computer to the web.



via Boing Boing

Tweetmeme tracks the tweetosphere

Tweetmeme is a new service for tracking the movement of memes through the tweetosphere.

Tweetmeme looks for new content and tracks who else is talking about it. It ranks the content based upon who and how much a particular item is being discussed. As anyone knows, the number of URLs which spread virally through Twitter each day must run into the millions, so tracking where that viral trail starts and gains momentum is going to be fascinating. It also categorizes the content into blogs / videos / images and audio. Sure there are other Twitter aggregators like Politweets (politics), TweeterBoard (conversation analytics) and many others. But Tweetmeme has a few other features including a ‘river’ of new content and RSS feeds for the river (or categorized feeds for blogs / videos / images / audio).

I’m excited about this service; I’ve become interested in the kind of writing that occurs on microblogging platforms like Twitter, but I haven’t been able to do much research on the subject because I haven’t been able to find a way to archive tweets for research. It seems like Tweetmeme will make that possible.

via TechCrunch

Humanities: In the future!

Here’s a pretty slick presentation by Richard E. Miller, the head of the English Department at Rutgers, on the future of the humanities.

I like what he has to say about new media and the humanities (I want a colaboratory), but he somewhat distressingly seems to ignore the role of rhetoric, writing studies, and technical writing in the same. The only scholars mentioned in the presentation are literature scholars, and the type of writing which Miller spotlights is creative writing. According to Miller, what the university has to offer the Wikipedia generation is

sustained study and deep understanding. when you add that to the picture you get human creativity put at the center of the humanities[. . . . The] real function of the humanities is to engage in the act of creativity moment by moment to improve the quality of the world we live in.

The talk sort of reminded me of the ridiculous hand-wringing over the death of reading, where “reading” means “reading literature,” whatever that might be—no one ever seems to get worked up over the death of email at hands of text-messaging or the sad demise of the online message board. Definitions are similarly limited in the presentation, where it appears that the goal of the English Department is to study “literature,” whatever that might be, and the only type of writing worth mentioning is creative writing.

NY Times on cellphone novels

Norimitsu Onishi of the New York Times has written an article on the popularity of cellphone novels in Japan. While the phenomenon has been around for almost a decade (Onishi dates it back to 2000), it was reported at the end of 2007 that half of Japan’s top ten novels of the year were written on cellphones. The article provides some interesting background to the phenomenon.

The cellphone novel was born in 2000 after a home-page-making Web site, Maho no i-rando, realized that many users were writing novels on their blogs; it tinkered with its software to allow users to upload works in progress and readers to comment, creating the serialized cellphone novel. But the number of users uploading novels began booming only two to three years ago, and the number of novels listed on the site reached one million last month, according to Maho no i-rando.

The boom appeared to have been fueled by a development having nothing to do with culture or novels but by cellphone companies’ decision to offer unlimited transmission of packet data, like text-messaging, as part of flat monthly rates. The largest provider, Docomo, began offering this service in mid-2004.

This kind of trend makes literary-types upset. One worry is that few of the current crop of cellphone novelists have ever written before. According to the article, cellphone authors aren’t being compelled to write for traditional literary reasons.

“It’s not that they had a desire to write and that the cellphone happened to be there,” said Chiaki Ishihara, an expert in Japanese literature at Waseda University who has studied cellphone novels. “Instead, in the course of exchanging e-mail, this tool called the cellphone instilled in them a desire to write.”

Interestingly, one author of a cellphone novel, Rin, acknowledges the literacy divide between the writers/readers of cellphone novels and other kinds of novel reading. Here she explains why the readers of her novel aren’t interested in traditional novels.

“They don’t read works by professional writers because their sentences are too difficult to understand, their expressions are intentionally wordy, and the stories are not familiar to them,” she said. “On other hand, I understand how older Japanese don’t want to recognize these as novels. The paragraphs and the sentences are too simple, the stories are too predictable. But I’d like cellphone novels to be recognized as a genre.”

Related: Personal publishing and micro-fiction

Teens privacy savvy

CNET News is reporting on a Pew Internet & American Life Project study called “Teens and Social Media,” which found that teenage girls tend to blog more than teenage boys (35% and 20%, respectively) and that teenage boys post more videos online than girls (19% of boys have posted a video online compared to 10% for girls).

However, for me the most interesting news is that teens take greater measures to protect their privacy online than adults do.

But how safe are teens being in protecting their personal information and images? More safe than adults, apparently. About 66 percent of teens with a social network profile restrict access in some way and 77 percent of teens who upload photos restrict access some of the time, while only 58 percent of adults who post photos restrict access.

For video, a smaller percentage (54 percent) of teens restrict access, about the same as adults.

Writing technologies: Circumventing the keyboard

Yesterday I came across these two examples of writers working around half of the ubiquitous computer interface: the keyboard.

First, Martin A. Rice, Jr., an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, likes to compose his emails on a typewriter:

Mr. Rice will often write a letter on his typewriter, scan it into his computer, and then send the image as an e-mail “Some people are tickled by it,” he “Some people are absolutely annoyed.”

Apparently, Rice prefers the tactile feedback of typewriter keys to the “mushy” response of a computer keyboard.

Second, novelist Richard Powers, who won the National Book Award for The Echo Maker, also dislikes typing, and in an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air explains why he likes to compose his novels using speech-recognition software instead.

The Powers interview was particularly interesting to me because I spent a summer working as an intern at Speech Technology magazine in the summer of 2000. At that time, I think it would have been extremely cumbersome to dictate a long text using speech-recognition, given the limitations of the technology back then—it demanded a lot of computing power, required users to speak using unnatural cadences so the software could distinguish between words, and users had to spend a lot of time training the software to recognize their accents and speech patterns before it was very accurate. Apparently the technology has improved quite a bit, or, at least, Powers has found a way around its limitations.

One question I had about Powers’s process that wasn’t answered in the interview was: how does he revise? Does he use the software, or does he revert to a keyboard for this part of the writing process?

Personal publishing and micro-fiction

Cameron Reilly of The Podcast Network has created a new site, Twittories, for crowdsourced stories composed in Twitter (via TechCrunch).

My wife and I were putting our kids to bed and we were doing something we have done with them since they were about two years of age. One of us starts a new story by telling a few lines and then the next person picks up where they left off and so on. I thought “gee, this is like a Twitter conversation” and started to wonder what it would be like to have a bunch of folks on twitter collaborate on a short story—140 characters at a time.

Apparently, a similar phenomenon has already demonstrated that it has legs: in Japan, novels are currently written and consumed on cellphones.



In a related post on Read/Write Web, Alex Iskold responds to a post by Fred Wilson on microblogging (Wilson drew the graph above), expanding on Wilson’s claim that microblogging fits a niche in personal publishing not met by chat, social networking, or blogging. Iskold concludes his piece this way:

The personal publishing market evolved from cumbersome web sites to online diaries called blogs to social networks and more recently to microblogs. Each form of personal publishing is different and each has its niche and audience. While social networks have been the most wide spread, the content creation there feels different from publishing. Because traditional blogging platforms are powerful and still require technical know-how, microblogging has evolved as an intermediate form of self-publishing. Microblogging has a shot of spreading blogging further into the mainstream as well as swaying some professional bloggers to start personal blogs.

Although Iskold doesn’t mention micro-fiction like Twittories in his post, it will be interesting to see how this kind of writing fits into the microblogging niche.

Confections (s)ugare

Update: This post is a partial review of Edward Tufte’s Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative.

Edward R. Tufte describes a confection as a group of visual elements assembled to describe or enhance a written argument in his 1997 bookVisual Explanations. A confection, he argues, is distinct from both collages, which are intended to convey messages not associated with written arguments, and diagrams, which convey messages but whose elements lack the disparate nature of a confection. A straightforward photograph is, according to Tufte, not a confection; but two photographic images superimposed upon one another to create a fantastical mélange that cannot be photographed would be a confection. In this sense, a confection is an arrangement of disparate elements so as to make an argument. (One example is the title page of Hobbes’s Leviathan, pictured below.) It is this arrangement, the confection’s fantastical placement—either in space or in time—of otherwise unrelated visual elements, that makes them theoretically interesting.


Let me explain why. Accepting the above definition, I ask: what does it mean to say that a confection makes—either implicitly or explicitly—an argument? That is, is the argument made by the confection independent of its fantastical arrangement, or is the argument dependent on this arrangement?

I’m thinking two things: 1) since the characteristic of confections that makes them so—the arrangement of disparate elements to make an argument—is true of all graphical arguments, be they diagrams, graphs, straight photographs, and drawings, does it not also follow that all graphical output is confectionary in some degree? And doesn’t this realization of the fantastical in all graphics lead to certain conclusions about their trustworthiness and veracity? More on this after: 2) Isn’t the very construction of a causal argument confectionary in its selection and arrangement of elements that are not adjacent in space and time?

This, I think is a key point, for what makes a graphic a confection makes it an argument. Realizing this fact—that what argues is confectionary—provides a graphical explanation that undermines claims of objectivity or absolutism on the parts of even the most clever conclusions.