Kevin Kelly on a “dead media”

Kevin Kelly has posted a fascinating article on the history of edge-notched cards. Before computers, I would have loved these things.

Computers and education

Slate’s Ray Fisman has an article outlining some of the fallacies associated with the equation computers + kids = learning. The impetus for the article is a study of a Romanian program to supplement the purchase of personal computers for families with children. I haven’t had a chance to read the article, but I think Fisman makes some points that stand up independently of it.

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

Warning: MacWorld IR chaos

Scott McNulty at The Unofficial Apple Weblog has posted a warning for MacWorld attendees: disable your IR port. Apparently, some CES attendees used a TV-B-Gone-type device to turn off displays during presentations.

As you may or may not know there has been something of a dust up across the tech blogosphere regarding a prank that a certain tech blog performed during CES. The prank involved a little gizmo that turned off a number of televisions at once, which one could use to turn off displays during presentations (which is just what the people in question did).

This is probably a good idea, although I think users are also likely to face inadvertent problems. We recently installed the new iMacs in some our labs at the CWRL, and, with the computers arranged along the walls, it is almost impossible to use the Apple remote without activating every machine on one side of the room. If this is the case, imagine what a carelessly directed remote would do on the conference floor at MacWorld.

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?

Michael Wesch’s “Information R/evolution”

Michael Wesch of “The Machine is Us/ing Us” has posted a new video “Information R/evolution.”

I think the thing to take away from the video is that information is now free of the desktop metaphor. Early in the video, he slams Yahoo for making a “shelf” online, and he celebrates that now information can be in multiple “places.” This is hardly a new thought, but the presentation is accessible and a good conversation starter.

However, like with “The Machine is Us,” I have to take issue with the assumptions of Wesch’s new work. He asserts that the web makes it possible to have information without materiality, going so far as to claim that “we organize information without material constraints.” I get his point—the next bit of text points out that he has put the same bit of “information” in “three ‘places’ at once”—but that doesn’t make the data immaterial. As Katherine Hayles points out, no information is immaterial; it exists as magnetic states on hard drives and has to be accessed with computers via cables.

Anyway, Wesch does interesting stuff. And the soundtrack is awesome.

via Searchblog

J. G. Ballard hates computers

According to The Guardian, J. G. Ballard claims that “I don't think a great book has yet been written on computer.” The comment comes as part of the paper’s series of photos of writers’ workspaces. Here’s Ballard’s:


This comment strikes me as extremely bizarre, particularly the assumption that underpins it: that it’s possible to tell what technology has was used in the composition of a text. (Ballard claims that he writes his books out in longhand.) This sort of thing is typical of technology extremists, and, as is often the case, they are based on unverifiable assumptions. The only out for him that I can think of is that, as an author, he actually knows other authors and may have inside knowledge about their composing processes.

Via Boing Boing

Using Facebook for course management, pt. 2

Introduction

In my last post, I discussed some reasons why instructors would want to use Facebook to manage their course communication, as well as the potential drawbacks of this move. In this post, I will cover how to set up Facebook for this purpose, giving an overview of relevant apps that are necessary for making Facebook a courseware package.

Courseware basics

A good courseware system should provide at minimum 1) a central location for course communication such as announcements and 2) file sharing. A basic courseware system of this type can be had on Facebook by adding just a few apps.

Course apps
When Facebook introduced the Facebook Platform, they eliminated their own course application, allowing users to take over this feature. I have had a good experience with two course apps: Michael Staton et al.’s Courses and Colin Schmidt and Jonathan Chapman’s Courses

• Staton et al.’s Courses allows users to find a course at their school by the department and course number or create a course themselves. Users can then invite their classmates on Facebook to join the course. When logging into the app, users view a list of courses they have joined and can access tabs that let them browse for other courses, find their friends’ and classmates’ courses, rank their courses, and adjust the app’s settings. Individual course pages have links to study groups and display a course discussion board. Individual courses can also set up course chats using Vawkr (a third-party, Flash-based program which ominously announces that if you allow it to access your computer’s camera and microphone, you may be recorded).

• Schmidt and Chapman’s Courses app offers a similar set of features. Users can add new courses, but it doesn’t seem that the system has a very efficient way of browsing for courses that have already been created. It is possible to invite friends to your courses, as well as view your schedule. Individual course pages are designed like a Facebook user page, with panes for adding course notes, a course discussion board, and a course wall. While this app has more spaces for course communication collected on the course page, they all seem to be implementations of the same, discussion-board-type messaging system. Interestingly, there is also a pane entitled “Advice from Former Students”; however, it is not clear to me how helpful this feature would be. The app seems to be set up so that individual sections of the course have their own pages, and it is not clear if advice posted to one section would be aggregated on all sections.

Update: After futher use, it seems that while this app has useful tools for managing course information, it is very difficult to connect courses with other users. For that reason, it might be wise to use the Staton et al. app for now until the collaboration features of this app become better developed.

Currently the Staton et al. app has over 32,000 users while the Schmidt and Chapman app has only 7,000. While there would normally be an incentive to go with the app with the most users in order to take advantage of the greater network effects available to that app, in the case of course communication, instructors will not necessarily be interested in those effects and can just pick the app that has the features they want and invite students to join.

Document sharing apps
• Scribd allows users to post and share documents through their Facebook accounts. Presumably the files can be in almost any format: the app’s homepage says it supports the .pdf, .doc, .ppt, .xls, and .txt formats as well “etc.” Users don’t have to create accounts with the system, and permissions can be set so that documents can be seen by everyone, friends, or only the user.

• ThinkFree Docs is an app created by the online MS Office alternative, ThinkFree Office. The app requires users to create an account at ThinkFree.com. Users can then upload documents (in the .pdf, .rtf, .dot, .pot, .pps, .xlt, .csv, .txt, .hwp formats) through Facebook, share documents, and view documents shared by other users.

There are some difficulties with this app. When I added a document, my name was not listed as the user name. Instead, the user was listed as “twha”; it seemed that this might be the default user name for documents added on Facebook. For this reason, it doesn’t seem that users can manage privacy settings: documents are either published or not. Despite these drawbacks, if instructors decide to require their students to use an online office suite and settle on ThinkFree, this app could prove useful.

• Finally, instructors can also use the Share Files app by FilesAnywhere. This app is the most robust of the three, and it requires users to create an account with the website. This account comes with 1GB of free storage and allows users to upload, download, and receive files through their Facebook profile. Users can then set up password-protected folders that they can use to transfer files with others in their class. If instructors want to do any complicated file sharing as part of a Facebook-based class, Share Files is probably the best option, for both volume and security reasons.

Additional apps
Depending on the emphasis of the course, instructors can also choose applications for blogging, videos, or practically any other new media format that is currently available.

Notify course participants
The final step in setting up a Facebook course is for instructors to notify their users of the apps they need to install to their Facebook accounts. Typically, instructors will want to add a common course app, a file-sharing app, and then any other apps that are necessary for the particular course.

Conclusion

Facebook is not yet as robust a courseware medium as Blackboard or Google Groups. It does, however, offer a simple solution that should be enough for most classroom applications. Since the Facebook Platform will continue to improve and add more apps, it is likely that Facebook courseware will become a much more robust, and widely adopted, solution in the future.

Using Facebook for course management, pt. 1

Introduction

Course management systems
The use of course management systems, or courseware, like Blackboard has become widespread in U.S. colleges and universities. With the merger of Blackboard and WebCT, however, the courseware available to most instructors and students has become monolithic, a situation which is not relieved by Blackboard’s patents. While there are a number of free courseware solutions, it may not have occurred to most people that with the introduction of the Facebook Platform, the social networking site can be used for course management.

Why use Facebook for course management?
One obvious reason for using Facebook as an alternative to Blackboard is that most students already use Facebook or are at least familiar with it to some degree. If an instructor chose to use a free system like Moodle, all of his or her students would have to create accounts at the site and learn how to navigate it and its features. With Facebook, most students will already have accounts and know how to navigate the site already, so there will be fewer barriers to their adoption and use of a Facebook-based courseware system.

Another reason that Facebook makes an attractive alternative both to proprietary sites like Blackboard and open source sites like Moodle is the popularity of the site. This popularity, combined with the functionality of the Facebook Platform, encourages developers to add more features to the site—which would happen much more slowly in the form of version releases with a proprietary system like Blackboard or less frequently with less popular sites like Moodle. The Platform was introduced in the summer of 2007, and before fall it has already introduced course tracking, document sharing, blogging, and podcasting applications. It seems likely that at this pace of development, Facebook users will keep adding applications to take advantage of new technologies, a fact which will likely keep those applications on pace with educational developments as well.

Issues to consider before adopting Facebook

Secure communication
Before deciding to use Facebook to manage course communication, instructors should carefully consider how they will use the system. One chief drawback to using Facebook for course communication is that it currently does not have many controls for securely communicating with individual students. For that reason, it should not be used to send students graded work or other sensitive information.

Instructor-student relationships
Instructors should also consider how using Facebook for official class communication will affect his or her relationship with students. Traditional courseware like Blackboard automatically grant an instructor a different status in the system, giving her or him a different level of permissions when interacting with it. This is not the case with Facebook. If you decide to use Facebook as courseware, be aware that you will have no special privileges in the system, unless individual apps allow you set those privileges. Additionally, since most students will use Facebook for purposes outside of class, instructors may find that students try to contact them through the system in ways that might be unprofessional. These issues should be thought through before instructors make a decision to move to Facebook-based courseware.

Conclusion

To sum up, Facebook has a lot of promise as courseware, allowing instructors to interact with students in an environment that they feel comfortable in. There are some risks and drawbacks to using Facebook for course applications, but if instructors weigh these risks and set appropriate boundaries with students, there should be significant benefits to using the system to enhance course communication.

In my next post, I’ll suggest some Facebook Apps that can be used in a courseware system and show how they can be assembled together to make Facebook-based courseware.

Update: Using Facebook for course management, pt. 2