"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.

“Is Aristotle on Twitter?”: The interview

Last week, Adam Lee of SXTXState interviewed me and my fellow SXSW panelists about “Is Aristotle on Twitter?” Here’s the video:

The panel will be Tuesday, March 17 at 10:00 a.m. in room B. You can find more info here.

Olympic dreams

This breaks my heart.

You may think basketball superstars have it all. Think again. We bring you the touching story of Kobe Bryant's Olympic-sized heartbreak: never having won a gold medal!

Let the Swiftboating begin!

From The New York Times:

Mr. McCain’s campaign is now under the leadership of members of President Bush’s re-election campaign, including Steve Schmidt, the czar of the Bush war room that relentlessly painted his opponent, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, as effete, elite, and equivocal through a daily blitz of sound bites and Web videos that were carefully coordinated with Mr. Bush’s television advertisements.

Here’s the video in question (via the Huffington Post):

"What we decided to do is find the top three international celebrities in the world, and I would say from our indications, Britney and Paris came in second and third," said campaign manager Rick Davis. "Will people think of this as negative advertising? Look, it is the most entertaining thing I have seen on TV in a while." He went on: "It is not our campaign that is trying to make him into an international celebrity. It's his campaign... I don't know Paris Hilton and Britney Spears but they are international celebrities, so, you know, apples to apples."

I would like to think this is going to backfire on the McCain campaign. (Just for the ineptness alone: could the inset shots of Hilton and Spears be any more ham-handed?) Perhaps this time the press won’t let the Republicans control them quite so blatantly.

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

“The ambusher became the ambushed”

Congressman John Culberson of Twitter fame ambushes a TMZ paparazzi. Scroll to the 2:07 mark of this video to see the encounter.



via Robert Scoble

Political appropriation: “Barack Hussein Napoleon Pol Pot Obama”

I’m in the middle of reading Jeff Rice’s The Rhetoric of Cool, and the section on appropriation made me think of this bit from last Wednesday’s Daily Show:

Writing about appropriation, Rice notes that while it often associated with advertising and commerce—such as the appropriation of youth culture by corporations to sell products—it can also be used

to learn the methods of persuasion conducive to new media (61).

I think Stewart and Co.’s riff on Obama’s “Hussein problem” is an example of this persuasive appropriation. The method is typical of The Daily Show: by taking the right-wing smear campaign aimed at Obama’s middle name to a ridiculous extreme, they show that it is merely ridiculous.

In other news, I’m excited that Stewart and Colbert are on Hulu now. It retrospect, it is easy to see why Hulu beat Jotspot. The service that makes linking and embedding easy is much more likely to catch on online.

Twitter items of interest

I’ve been swamped for the last week getting my students’ grades in and working on a few writing projects, so I haven’t had a chance to blog here in a few days. However, I did want to post these interesting Twitter-related items.

First, Twitterverse is a free screensaver that ships with the new version of the Mac OS which will show your friends’ Tweets while your computer is idle. I just installed it, so I’m not too sure how fast it updates, but it looks pretty cool. For those of you (like me) who aren’t as Mac-savvy as the link above assumes, you have to install the DevExamples package on the Mac OS disc 2 to find the file. After that, you can follow the rest instructions.

Second, one of the most common questions that non-Twitter users ask about Twitter is “Why would you want to do that?” This question can be surprisingly difficult to answer, but this video provides one nice, simple answer you can point them to: communication. I think Twitter has more (and more interesting) uses than this, but the video is engaging and worth the watch.

Uncanny valley chart on 30 Rock

The uncanny valley graph made an appearance on 30 Rock last week where the show’s writers upped the chart’s silliness by explaining it “in Star Wars.”

More Wikipeida jokes: Now with substance!

A few days ago I posted a quick Wikipedia joke from 30 Rock with no particular purpose other than I thought it was funny. Over the weekend, I saw another Wikipedia reference, this time on The Simpsons:

I figure that if I keep posting everything I see on TV, I need to add some commentary to make it worthwhile for readers, so here goes.

What is interesting about these two jokes is that they are both reacting to the major criticism of Wikipedia: because anyone can change anything, the information on the site is inherently untrustworthy. In this case, a misinformed person like Homer can change whatever they want to fit their reality, and, in the case of the 30 Rock clip, individuals who don’t like how they are portrayed there can alter the facts to make themselves appear in a more favorable light.

Studies of Wikipedia have shown, however, that the site is fairly robust in that it recovers quickly from malicious edits. So, at least in this regard, the parody of the site on both shows is a little stale.

What I think the writers of The Simpsons joke get right, though, is the attitude of some Wikipedia vandals. In the clip above, when Homer mentions his desire to “change a lot of things” on the site, I believe the malice and sense of offense in his tone might be similar to what would prompt a person to do this.

Wikipedia joke on 30 Rock

30 Rock had a pretty good Wikipedia joke in its last episode, Subway Hero. Here’s the setup: Tracy sticks a screwdriver in his CD player and has a near-death experience. While in the netherworld, Tracy meets Richard Nixon, and the spirit of our 37th president convinces him that a black man can, in fact, support the GOP. The scene below comes after Tracy and Jack preview a PSA that Tracy has recorded for Jack’s PAC, the Committee to Re-invade Vietnam.

The great thing about the joke is that Nixon seems like the kind of person who would have been really, really worried about what was on his Wikipedia page. And, of course, Tracy is the kind of guy who would try to update Wikipedia with a screwdriver.

Internet ads on TV

This sounds like a horrible idea.

What would it take to run ads like this on regular TV? Even if the ads are not clickable, simple banners or graphical buttons that appear in sync with what you are watching would grab your attention. Imagine a Nike logo popping up when you are watching basketball, or cruise ship when someone in a movie mentions the Bahamas. It could be annoying, but not if used judiciously. And it would certainly solve the problem of people fast-forwarding through ads with DVRs.

I already can’t watch anything on TNT because they have so many pop-up promos for their shows.

Lessig ‘08

Lawrence Lessig has launched a website, Lessig08.org, featuring a video where he explains

the launch of two exploratory projects—first, a Change Congress movement, and second, my own decision whether to run for Congress in the California 12th.

via O’Reilly Radar

Google’s Marks on the social graph

Google’s Kevin Marks made this presentation at the LIFT conference on the “Social Cloud.” I haven’t had a chance to watch it all yet, but when I do, I’ll post some thoughts.

via ReadWriteWeb

Related: Tim Berners Lee on “the Graph”

Video-microblogging with Seesmic

Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read/Write Web claims that video-microblogging service Seesmic is more than just Twitter with video.

There appear to be two primary factors behind the early enthusiasm for Seesmic. The first is that it’s very well executed. Le Meur is the former head of SixApart Europe, the company hired Ben Metcalfe as an early consultant and there must be a number of other very social-media savvy people there whom I haven't met yet. The company takes feature requests via a public video thread. They hired at least one very skilled Flash designer. Usability is fairly high, it’s very easy to record a video on Seesmic and there’s literally zero turn-around time before your video is available in the public timeline and as a reply if appropriate. Can the company continue to scale? That will be a big question.

Aside from that, there’s something about a video-only environment that yields a level of personal accountability and quality discourse that you don’t find on other services. It’s a small, yet global, and very welcoming community. Many entrepreneurs claim that their community of users are the key to their momentum—but at Seesmic you can see the faces and hear the voices that prove it.

I’m not sure that these factors are so different as to make the description “Twitter with video” inaccurate, but Seesmic sounds like an interesting service. As more people’s cellphones are able to record and transmit video, this service (or services like it) are going to be increasingly popular. However, if the site wants to truly lock up the market, I don’t see why it wouldn’t include text messaging as well. (And I may be wrong about this: it seems that Seesmic is video only, but maybe it isn’t.)

‘The Simpsons’ on the death of print encyclopedias

Sunday night’s episode of The Simpsons, “E Pluribus Wigum,” featured a pretty good joke about the irrelevance of print encyclopedias.

(The setup: Ralph Wigum wins the Springfield presidential primary as a write-in, and is subsequently courted by both the Republicans and Democrats.)

P.S. I love Hulu.

Literature and Mathematics: Course trailer

I’ve created a trailer for my spring 2008 course, “Literature and Mathematics”; it is embedded below. The plan for the course is to investigate how mathematics and mathematicians are depicted in literature, particularly the ways in which these two themes are associated with delusions and insanity. I tried to emphasize these connections in the video (and make the course seem a little more interesting to prospective students).

Credits: The clips in the trailer are from MGM’s 1939 version of The Wizard of Oz, Darren Aronofsky’s Pi, Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind, and two episodes of The Simpsons, “Girls Just Want to Have Sums” and “Stop or My Dog Will Shoot.” The audio track is a modified version of Coldplay’s “Politik.”

Related: Course website design: Literature and Mathematics

“Television is about one thing: video”

This story in the New York Times describes Sony’s new Bravia TVs and their ability to connect to the Internet to play videos. However, you have to by a $300 dongle (see left) to attach the set to your home network, and the TVs will only be able to get video from certain, Sony-approved sites, including Yahoo, AOL, and Sony’s own Crackle. (In contrast, HP’s digital TV solution lets users play video content that is stored on their computers.)

Frankly, this limitation on Sony’s product makes it seem pretty ho-hum. In other words, the Sony Bravia Internet Video Link (catchy, huh?) isn’t iPhone of digital media on the TV. The article mentions research by HP that shows “more than half of consumers are interested in using a television to watch the digital content stored on their personal computers — and the Internet.” Unfortunately, the Sony solution won’t let consumers watch their own digital content, only content that is uploaded to the approved sites, none of which, it should be noted, are popular destinations for online video—no YouTube, no iTunes, no Amazon Unbox. The extreme miscalculation of this plan is evident in this quote from the article:

Sony says the severe limitations are by design, for a couple of reasons. Primarily, it asserts, it is tough to ensure picture quality and user experience if it allows its customers to download content willy-nilly.

Sony appears to completely misunderstand people’s motivations for viewing digital media. First, users don’t (primarily) care about the quality of their video. DivX never offered great quality, but it was good enough, and people could put their movies where they wanted them—on discs they could play on the TV. If Sony thinks that people are going to flock to buy this product so they can watch user generated content on video sites no one has ever heard of, I think they’re going to be in for a surprise. Second, the operative user experience here is not dependent on quality. It is dependent on people being able to watch their media when and where they want to, to ”download content willy-nilly,” you might say. The Bravia Internet Video Link doesn’t allow them to do that, so I can’t see that it is going to be a big draw for consumers, and Sony’s seeming ignorance of what consumers want might even alienate them from the brand.