On the Search for the Genuine

Digital Rhetoric Nerding: Daniel Anderson at UNC and Clay Shirky at NYU

Posted by Jen - 10/05/09 at 02:05:00 pm

It’s no secret to people who work with me that I am a massive digital rhetoric nerd.  I’m hungry to see examples of great digital arguments being built in the undergrad curriculum, to understand them and analyze them, and to contribute to their spread (which is why I’m going back to grad school–more on that in a future post).  There’s a fair number of us trying to do it, but very few that I’d say are genuinely succeeding.  And two of the people that I think is doing that best is Todd Taylor and Daniel Anderson, both professors at UNC-Chapel Hill.

Dan Anderson is did these amazing digital mashups with his 2008 students, and in this video of his 4C’s presentation, he’s talking about (and showing) video mashups that his freshman students did: Mix and Mash Literacy.

So if that gets you addicted to Dan Anderson’s students’ work, see all of the class projects from that 2009 course on his LitCast page. Or, if you become a Dan Anderson addict, as I am, you can go to his professional web site and see even more of his projects.

And finally, Dan Anderson’s presentation briefly excerpts from Clay Shirky’s keynote at the 2008 Web 2.0 Expo, which is an excellent speech about social collaboration. Totally worth watching.

Taking Twitter Seriously: I Never Thought The Day Would Come

Posted by Jen - 09/05/09 at 08:05:47 am

Until yesterday at 9:00 a.m., I had A LOT of trouble taking Twitter seriously.  I’d been introduced to it about 10 months ago at an academic conference, but it just seemed…noisy.  Stupid.  Redundant with Facebook.

That all changed because of Chris Myers, the web guy at UM’s Ford School of Public Policy.  Yesterday morning, he gave a presentation titled “Taking Twitter Seriously”  during UM’s Enriching Scholarship 2009 conference (follow him on Twitter @myersca).  I now see Twitter in a very different way and have been having tons of fun reading other people’s Tweets (and occasionally tweeting myself, of course!).

Chris’ presentation was so helpful that I decided to blog about it.  All of the links below come from Chris’ great online Google Doc of Twitter Resources, so if you’re looking for exhaustive Twitter resources, here it is.  But I’ll try to hit the high points.

First, if you have no idea what Twitter is and need a crash course, click here. Or, if you’re a visual learner, click here for a Youtube vid about Twitter.

Regarding Twitter accounts, you can have as many as you want.  Chris Myers suggested having one “professional” account and one for personal use, but I’m going to stick with one account for now.  If I have something really personal to say, I say it on Facebook to my “real friends”.  As Chris Myers said, Twitter shines when you have an idea or piece of information to spread, not necessarily when you want to tell the world what you ate for breakfast.

If you need to find worthwhile people to follow on Twitter but don’t know where to start, try the search at Twitter.Grader, WeFollow, and Twellow.com.  Don’t forget to look up important people in your academic or career field and follow them!  And of course, whenever you follow someone, don’t forget to check their followers/following, where you can often find some excellent additional people to follow.

If you’re wondering who’s following you, or maybe you’re following someone like @mashable who has jillions of followers and you want to identify just the most enticing ones, try Twitual.com.

If you want to be able to see your Facebook status updates and Tweets in one place without having to switch back and forth between the two web sites, download a free desktop management piece like TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop.  Both allow you to post Facebook status updates and Tweets from the same desktop-based interface.  I tried both, and ultimately I went with Seesmic Desktop because I felt its group-making capabilities were better, and sometimes I only want to see a fraction of available tweets on my following list (for example, maybe I want to see just the tweets from news organizations or just the tweets from my real-life personal friends.) Seesmic was also more seamlessly integrated with Facebook–it showed me pictures and links in addition to Facebook status updates whereas TweetDeck only showed the status updates.

If you prefer to Tweet from an iPod Touch or an iPhone, I have done just fine on my iPod Touch with Twitterfon (a free App), but Kevin Rose at my favorite podcast Diggnation likes Tweetie (a paid App), and the blogosphere seems to like Twitteriffic (a paid App that lets you manage multiple Twitter accounts at once).  For you crackberry addicts out there, try Twitterberry.  You can also tweet via text message, so no excuses for those of us with “regular” phones.

By the time I peeled through those resources, I was already a Twittering maniac.  My newly improved Twitter feed, which jumped from following about 10 people to about 40 people, was pumping out tons of amazing links and ideas that I would have never found without Twitter.  And that made me hungry for more Twitter Toys, but I’m just barely scratching the surface there.

For example, I would love to use Twitter interactively in a presentation or in one of my classes. For that, Tweetchat.com is a great resource–it will show you only the Twitters that include a certain hashmark.  For example, here’s the Tweetchat room from Chris Myers’ presentation (you’ll have to log in using a Twitter name and ID, but you didn’t need to be at the meeting to see the Tweetchat).

There’s lots of good advice on the Internet about how to dig deeper with Twitter.  I’m slowly peeling my way through “7 ways to use twitter to engage your audience”, “Twitter for Academia”, “How to present while people are twittering”, “5 Terriffic Twitter Research Tools”, and most awesomely of all, “99 Essential Twitter Tools and Applications”.

Whew!  I’m ex-tweet-austed after all that.  Two last things, and off you go to Twittervillle: Thanks to Wefunction.com for the cute Twitter bird in this post, and don’t forget to follow me on Twitter!

Thylias Moss' Online Vector Poems: Write One Yourself!

Posted by Jen - 07/05/09 at 04:05:03 pm

The first time I heard Thylias Moss’ name, I was a senior undergrad at the University of Virginia sitting in Rita Dove’s office.  She was suggesting potential MFA programs to me, and when we began discussing the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, Rita said, “Thylias Moss is there.  Thylias is a maniac, and that’s exactly what you’ll think of her when you meet her.  You’ll get over that in about 30 days–she is a madwoman, but she’ll teach you to see the world in a new way.”  And sure enough, Rita was right.  For about 30 days, I couldn’t figure out why I was being assigned books on chaos theory, fractals, and the Platonic and Archimedean solids in what was “supposed” to be a poetry class.  But before I knew it, Thylias had me thinking about poetry in new–and more amazingly, fresh and exciting–ways.  I was walking around thinking things like, “If poem is like fork, and fork has branches, then is web more like fork or like spoon?”

Anyway, I owe Thylias a great deal, not only for changing the way I think about poetry but for changing the way I thought about words and literacy.  It was in Thylias’ class that, for the first time, I constructed a video poem in which the words moved, in which sound and video played a key role, in which my poem was more than just the words themselves.

Fortunately, one of Thylias’ latest projects called Vector Poem helps you experience that fun without the hell and hassle of learning Final Cut Pro.  In this flash-based prototype for what I’m sure will be many more Vector Poems to come, you can rearrange individual lines of poetry to create your own version.  Scott Hamm at U of M’s LSA built it under Thylias’ direction.  Go!  Write a Vector Poem at this link! Have fun!  Here’s mine:

Gaming: The Future of Learning? At the very least, it'll be a way to kill time on the Internet…

Posted by Jen - 05/05/09 at 08:05:17 am

I am determined to start blogging more consistently, even if it means borderline micro-blogging!

Today, I went to an awesome keynote address at the University of Michigan Enriching Scholarship conference.  It was by Jane McGonigal Ph.D., Director of Game Research for The Institute for the Future.  Despite IFTF’s completely lame-sounding name, they have a fascinating mission: to use information about the past and signals in our current culture to predict directions that the future might go–not because they think there’s one single predictable future out there, but because if we knew about the possible futures available, we might be able to meaningfully change our actions to maximize the future that we’ll actually get.

In her keynote address titled “Epic Win: Why Gaming is the Future of Learning” (see the slides from her talk by clicking here), McGonigal talked about research into gaming and why gaming has become such a pervasive cross-cultural phenomenon.  Among other things, one of the reasons that gaming attracts people is that it can make them feel like they’re part of something larger–there’s a greater incentive to collaborate when you feel like your small, tangible accomplishments (like levelling up in a game) contribute to a larger goal.

While that might sound like the domain of lazy teenagers slouching over their gaming mice, squinting through the Cheetos Dust in the air to see their World of Warcraft Screen, the rest of us People Who Claim to Be More Productive Than WoW People can play some awesome online games that contribute meaningfully to future development.

One example is Galaxy Zoo, “where you can help astronomers explore the universe”.  Basically, this game prompts you to classify objects photographed in space by shape, which researchers then use to build insights about the universe.  It turns out that human beings are much better at this classification than computers, and it’s fun to boot.  Here’s a screen capture of me playing Galaxy Zoo:

Another is FoldIt, a game in which you follow a few simple rules of protein folding to generate new protein structures so that scientists can better understand and notice interesting patterns in protein folding. Again, this turns out to be something that humans do much more quickly and effectively than computers.  While this might sound incredibly boring, I just signed up and started playing, and it’s addicting–imagine if Bedazzled actually had a real-life reason for existing, giving you a reason to feel like you’re slacking off!

Finally, McGonigal mentioned two other online games that, while technically time-bound and already complete projects, were extremely cool and still worth checking out:

World Without Oil — an Institute for the Future and PBS collaboration from a few years ago that asked real-life people to change their real lives for 6 weeks to match simulated conditions, then had the players report on those life changes and how the world might change if our oil supply decreased significantly.

Superstruct — Imagine if humanity was scheduled to expire in 2038 due to six major problems, among them pandemic disease, major famine due to overpopulation, the migration of 250 million people inland as global warming gobbled up land mass, etc.  What could you, as an individual person with a unique set of job and life skills, do to react and change that situation?  Superstruct challenges you to find out.

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