RTF Chair: Have any of you played any Alternative Reality Games?
[pause]
McChris: Grad School.
[laughter around the room]
RTF Chair; I guess that is one of the longest running Alternative Reality Games, and for some people it takes longer than others.
I’ve written before about my frustrations with Blogger. And while I think it was a good solution the last time I taught RTF 319, I’ve given up on Blogger mid-way through the semester, which doesn’t make me feel very good about myself. Regardless, it has become a complete hassle, and I don’t think there’s anyway to salvage it. Beyond the reliability problems with Blogger, it introduces a few major problems with my teaching. The downtime provides students with an convenient excuse for not getting their work into me, and it fills up my already bulging inbox with nuisance email from students. Moreover, it gives the (not unwarranted) impression to students that I’m not on top of the class.
What I like about using blogs is that it provides a way to deliver assignments with a timestamp and usually minimizes the hassles of managing projects. The last time I used Blogger for deliverables, it worked beautifully. Now it’s turned into a nightmare, and Google’s increasingly strict identity management policies make me worry about protecting the privacy of my students. I think I will look into using Moodle if I ever teach this class again, which does seem like an adequate platform for posting work and discussion questions.
In case you’re wondering, I’ve come up with a new CSS project. It’s pretty lame, but I think it is appropriate for lower-division students.
Both of my readers probably know that Google’s Blogger service came out of beta in December, but, from my perspective, Blogger seems more beta than ever. This semester, I’m teaching a lower-division “Intro to Digital Media” class of about forty students. I require them to keep blogs to post reading responses and projects. The class is directed toward Web-based media – which irks some of the wannabe Scorseses – and it’s frankly easier for me to manage that many projects online than on paper and DVD.
I direct the students to use Blogger, which generally seems to be the most stable blogging platform, but my students are running into all kinds of problems! Blogs that students created are disappearing, students cannot retrieve passwords or even usernames, and students are running into problems with merging Google and Blogger user accounts. It’s a real mess, and I really do feel for the 18-20 year olds who come up with a clever name and URI to find that they can’t use it because their account has disappeared. I’ve drilled through their dashboards and user accounts, and I’m having the same experience they’re having: their blogs seem to have disappeared down some Blogger black hole. (I’m really impressed with the level of technical savvy these kids show. I did a lab where they were required to create an entirely hand-coded HTML page, and, while a handful acted like I was crazy, no one had any substantial problems.) Moreover, I’ve added these blogs to the Bloglines RSS reader, and I’m not seeing any updates in their feeds. Blogger has some substantial stability problems, and I’m not seeing anyone talk about it elsewhere.
I know Google isn’t in the education business, and I would rather have my students blog in another venue for privacy and political reasons, but Blogger seems to be the best solution I have. I thought about trying to get an installation of WordPress MU on a College of Communication server, but a few issues have stopped me. The bureaucracy of the College’s tech team is daunting, but the pedagogical issue is really what drives me to Blogger. I really, really think CSS is a core digital media skill in this era, and I need a project where students can apply CSS to a dynamic Web site. The template system in WordPress is too complex for intro-level communication students, and I can’t really think of anything but a blog that would make sense for this kind of project. Does anyone have any suggestions? Can students create individual subsites in Moodle or Drupal? Am I lacking in imagination for this project?
6 Comments I’m too busy with school to do much real blogging, so here’s a list of some of the books I’ll be reading this semester.
I saw this “Overheard in New York” post over at Sivacracy, but I think it’s worth re-posting here.
–Balcony, Hunter College
It’s a pity the site doesn’t use a Creative-Commons license, since the site relies on the submissions of readers.
I don’t usually review products on this site, but I thought I might offer a last-minute gift idea, at least for my Austin reader. The ChicoBag is a nylon grocery bag with an integrated stuff sack; it folds up like a backpacking rain parka into a compact little package. This thing is great. I have a pretty large gadget bag, but after loading my computer, school papers, a water bottle, and a book, I don’t have a lot of room to spare. Grabbing a few books at the library can present some logistical issues, but not with ChicoBag. With ChicoBag, I can pull it out of my pocket, unstuff the bag at the circ desk, and head to the bus stop in style. Or if I don’t want to shower at the gym, (and who does?) I can put my street clothes in ChicoBag, and walk home in my gym clothes. I bought my ChicoBag for three dollars at Wheatville Co-op, and I’m glad I did.
Techdirt has a post ridiculing a service that adds a social-networking component to taking a cab to the airport. I agree that this service is probably “niche within niche” – it’s unlikely to find someone with similar interests who’s going from your neighborhood to the airport at around the same time. While TechDirt takes a dim view of adding social networking to everything, I do think there are some services that could benefit from a little Web 2.0 mojo.
The UT library system – like many other university libraries – gives graduate students and faculty semester loans for books. Grad students can hang onto books a semester or longer (with online renewals) until another student recalls the book. Then the borrower has two weeks to return the book. I’m sure my department is not atypical when our grad student listserv propogates “who recalled my book” messages, where students try to coordinate sharing the book. It’s unfortunate the library doesn’t acknowledge this fact of grad student life, but I think this is an opportunity for a Web 2.0 startup. Here’s the pitch:
Forget Facebook, MySpace, and Orkut, Recallr will match people on what really matters, the books you want from the library. When you recall a book, the borrower gets a link to your Recallr profile and the option to contact you in hopes of learning, levity, and love. How else will you meet that special someone that shares your obsession with post-Marxist analyses of 80s console games or psychoanalytic readings of gender roles on “The Greatest American Hero”?
Obviously, I’m being a bit silly, but it would be nice if the general libraries could integrate some social networking features and perhaps tagging in the library catalog. I suspect many universities would be reluctant to develop a formal relationship with Facebook, but they seem to be the outfit that could develop this kind of service for schools.
1 Comment This semester I’m teaching an upper-division class I’ve titled “Making Alternative Media,” which takes a hands-on approach to learning about media activism. I’m assigning the students projects like making ‘zines and blogs in an effort to learn some low-cost media-making skills and historically situate personal publishing on the internet. (If you’re curious, the class blog is here.) I’m a little disappointed because I thought the class might attract some committed activists types or underground culture vultures, but the students started out largely indifferent to subject matter.
To jump-start discussion for today’s class, I told the students to spend 20-30 minutes looking at a non-commercial blog to find out who was behind the blog, the intentions behind the project, and what kinds of issues the blog treated. Most of the students did their homework, and we had a pretty good discussion today. One student, however, couldn’t remember what blog he browsed. Although I demonstrated Technorati on Friday and suggested using it as a tool for finding blogs, this student said he just queried Google for “blog” and looked at a result in the top ten results.
Out of sheer curiousity, I did a Google search for “blog” in front of the class to see what would be the top results. Unsurprisingly, the top result is Wikipedia’s entry for “blog,” followed by some blogging services like Blogger. What I was interested to know, however, was what was the top personal blog. It turns out it’s Larry Lessig’s blog, which I find a little surprising, since he’s not a particularly regular blogger. Obviously, he has a high profile among bloggers and cyber-hipsters, so I can see how he might have the highest PageRank. Mark Cuban comes in next, and he’s an even less prolific blogger. It’s interesting that these figures earned reputations for things outside of blogging, yet have the top results for “blog.” The blog the student examined, was Blog for America, which I wasn’t even aware of.
2 Comments One of my classmates in Don’s Semantic Web Technologies class last semester hacked together a Greasemonkey script that looks to see if a book you’re viewing on Amazon.com is available in the UT libraries. This script is enormously useful, since UT’s online catalog is darn near useless unless you have the exact title of the book you want. With this tool, I can search using Amazon’s interface, then click through to the catalog entry.
Tonight I was looking for a book assigned in one of my classes. I couldn’t remember the title or the author (OK, maybe this tool makes you a little stupider, too.) but I remembered it was about gay culture and television, so I did a query for “Gay TV.” The first result was the book I was looking for, but I was disturbed when I found this item in the top results. I certainly hope it’s not circulating in the UT libraries.
Arnold Zwicky at Language Log was kind enough to post a follow-up to my post about how the University of Oklahoma is abbreviated “OU,” which reverses the order of the initials. He calls this phenomenon “covert premodification,” and his informants also identified the universities of Kansas and Colorado as schools engaging in covert premodification. Zwicky offers an explanation for the phenomenon.
I think I understand what happened here: the Universities of California, Kentucky, and Oregon are referred to as UC, UK, and UO, respectively (Oregon even gets the URL www.uo.edu; Kentucky is www.uky.edu, and the campuses of the University of California have their own URLs), so Colorado, Kansas, and Oklahoma distinguish themselves with the reverse ordering.
I’m not sure I entirely buy this explanation. I suspect these abbreviations date back to before widespread mass media, and, particularly, national football coverage. Considering the dearth of media and difficulty of cross-country travel, it seems unlikely that many people would confuse the universities of Oklahoma and Oregon. Also, I can identify two other schools that engage in covert premodification. The University of Tulsa is abbreviated “TU” (although its URI is utulsa.edu), and The University of Missouri-Columbia is known as “Mizzou” or “MU.” Since Colorado, Kansas, and Missouri all border Oklahoma, I wonder if this is a southern plains regionalism.
I’m not sure how useful it is to look at domain names for how schools are named, since the abbreviations almost certainly predate the internet. I’ve already mentioned that TU’s URI is “utulsa.edu,” and the uc.edu domain went to The University of Cincinnati, which has to be one of the lesser-known Us of C. It’s worth noting, also, that until around 1997 OU’s domain was uoknor.edu, for “University of OKlahoma at NORman.” (At the time, OU also had its Health Sciences Center in Oklahoma City and a branch of the med school in Tulsa.) My first web page back in 1995 was at http://www.ecn.uoknor.edu/~cmcconn01, which was darn near impossible to relate to people unfamiliar with the internet.
Since Zwicky suggests that Oklahoma uses “OU” to distinguish itself from Oregon, I thought I would relate a mildly amusing anectdote. When I was a computer magazine editior, I was out in California visiting the Irvine office. Coming back from lunch, my co-worker Rita, who was originally from Switzerland, asked me where I went to college. Preoccupied with driving in a strange place, I answered “OU.”
Rita asked, “Is that Oregon?”
“Oh, no, Oklahoma. I think Oregon uses ‘U of O’.”
“That’s confusing.”
“Yeah,” I admitted, “Actually, I had a girlfriend in college who went to Oregon for two years, then transferred to OU.”
Rita asked, “What did she call Oklahoma, then?”
“OU.”
“Then what did she call Oregon?”
“Eugene.”
2 Comments 
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