CMC Research Collective

Just when you thought you had enough browsers to choose from (IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Konqueror), Google enters the fray with Google Chrome (currently only for Windows, and, naturally, it's a beta).

This rather impressive comic (http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/) introducing the browser and the rationale for building it is really worth reading, and seems to show that they're doing things slightly differently from the other browser builders, with what seem to be solid decisions on the speed and security front. But having played with it, there are a few things to dislike about it.

For one thing, I can't find any way to put a normal search box on the GUI, so you're forced to use the blended search+URL bar, which I find a bit confusing. More seriously, the cookie handling is rather scary. These are the options:

• Allow all cookies (the default)
• Restrict how third-party cookies can be used
• Block all cookies

In other words, there's no option to have the browser ask you whether to save cookies for specific sites.

The about:memory URL shows the kind of thing they've been focusing on (small memory footprint); it shows you the memory profile of all the browsers you currently have running, including IE and Firefox.

It also has the same bugs as Webkit/Safari (predictably), especially with JQuery UI components. There's no option to change the UA string (as far as I can find), so debugging these things on sites which already browser-sniff to work around them is going to be difficult. But it does have a neat little reporting mechanism for buggy web behaviour; it'll take a screenshot of the current page and send it off to Google with your explanation and the URL, automatically.

My biggest hope for this is that Google will put some developer time into bugfixing in the Webkit engine, which will help clean things up for Safari (and possibly Konqueror) as well as Chrome.

Texting is "bleak, bald, sad shorthand. Drab shrinktalk ... Linguistically it's all pig's ear ... it masks dyslexia, poor spelling and mental laziness. Texting is penmanship for illiterates."

Read more »

According to the blurb, Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

I tried it out with the text of Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent; not many surprises there thematically, but I didn't expect to see "money" feature in the word cloud.

Tennyson's In Memoriam yielded lots of Thou, Thee, Thy, and predictably "death,""love," and "dark."

And just because tomorrow's Canada Day, a Wordle version of the original lyrics of O Canada.

The end of the internet as we know it?

Yes, according to two pundits recently interviewed by the BBC.

In his book The Future of The Internet and How to Stop It, Jonathan Zittrain argues that the spread of internet viruses, malware, and what he describes as "bad code" will drive web users into the sterile embrace of virtual gated communities where everything is watched over and approved by a gatekeeper.

Lee Siegel, author of Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob argues the online world is not so much inhabited by us as by our egos, which are slowly destroying civilization.

Read more...

Earlier this week, Michael Wesch, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, talked about the generational impact of YouTube at the US Library of Congress. An audience member asked: So what? Why should anyone care about a subculture of homemade video makers, or the fact that some people watch amusing clips on the Internet instead of looking at TV? “I don’t understand how this is going to impact my life,” said the questioner, who said she’s only ever watched one YouTube video.

Wesch believes that the YouTube generation has already changed the face of US politics in the Obama-Clinton run-off: "Obama would not have taken the election without social media. Clinton with her machine would have just ran right over him.”

Wesch, who began his career studying the impact of communication technology on a tribe in Papua New Guinea, has himself become a YouTube star. You can watch his greatest hits--The Machine is Us/ing Us and the provocative A Vision of Students Today--on YouTube.

This week's New York Review of Books contains a a fascinating article by cultural historian Robert Darnton, a tour d'horizon of the history of written information, and a must-read for anyone who love libraries.

Information is exploding so furiously around us and information technology is changing at such bewildering speed that we face a fundamental problem: How to orient ourselves in the new landscape? What, for example, will become of research libraries in the face of technological marvels such as Google?

Read more...

According to a recent article in Scientific American, blogging--far from nurturing narcissism and physical inertia--may be a positive form of self-medication. According to the article, personal writing has long been recognized as having therapeutic value, and a study in February's Oncologist reports that "cancer patients who engaged in expressive writing just before treatment felt markedly better, mentally and physically, compared with patients who did not".

Although the neurobiology of therapeutic writing is still uncertain, experts are turning their attention to the phenomenon, and more and more people coping with serious conditions are turning to the blogosphere. Nancy Morgan, lead author of the Oncologist study, says “Blogging undoubtedly affords similar benefits”. She plans to incorporate writing programs into supportive care for cancer patients.

Read more...

According to Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University, "concern has been brewing about the dumbed-down popular culture available to young people and the impact it has on their futures. At the dawn of the digital age, many believed they saw a hopeful answer: The Internet, e-mail, blogs, and interactive and hyper-realistic video games promised to yield a generation of sharper, more aware, and intellectually sophisticated children..."

But...

Read more »

An exemplary review in Slate of Pierre-Laurent Aimard's solo-piano version of J.S. Bach's The Art of Fugue. Digital multimedia allowed the reviewer, Jan Swafford, to include clips of comparable performances, while explaining and illustrating what's meant by counterpoint and fugue.

Despite owning several other versions (vinyl, cassette, CD), I bought the Aimard version from iTunes. Wonderful.

As early as 2002, Stephen Greenblatt, Board Member of Open Humanities Press (whose advisory roster looks like the ultimate humanities All Stars), warns of the crisis in conventional scholarly publishing in the humanities:

The situation is this: over the course of the last few decades, most departments of language and literature have come to demand that junior faculty members produce, as a condition for being seriously considered for promotion to tenure, a full-length scholarly book published by a reputable press. A small number of departments expect the publication of two such books. Whether these expectations are reasonable or necessary is a question that we should collectively ponder and debate. The immediate problem, however, is that university presses, which in the past brought out the vast majority of scholarly books, are cutting back on the publication of works in some areas of language and literature. Indeed, we are told that certain presses have eliminated editorial positions in our disciplines.

To read the rest of Greenblatt's special letter to MLA members, follow this link:

If, like me, you're one of those people who can recite lengthy poems and prose passages from memory-- thanks to the rigors of an unreconstructed education--rejoice! A new study has found that it may be possible to train people to be more intelligent, increasing the brainpower they had at birth, and the key is carefully trained memory.

Read more »

It's interesting that they correlate, but what it probably means is that, in exactly the current climate, they happen to correlate; in other words, the same groups of students take them with the same level of seriousness and put similar amounts of effort into them. If the balance were disturbed -- for instance, if institutions were to start taking RateMyProfs much more seriously, because they believe it to be accurate and representative -- then the balance would be distorted, and the students' perceptions of, and willingness to contribute to, RateMyProfs would change.

There's something obnoxious about both of these evaluation systems, I think. On the one hand, the institutional imposition of a mandated evaluation system is heavy-handed and can frighten vulnerable instructors into adopting class-pleasing gimmicks instead of less popular, but ultimately more effective, teaching strategies; we've seen that particularly in the language-teaching industry, which has become to a large extent crowd-pleasing entertainment as much as it is instruction. On the other hand, taking commentary of something which is not really a public performance -- teaching -- into the public realm, without the consent of the person being discussed, is at least somewhat inappropriate; even though instructors are now able to "strike back" on the site, doing so implicitly validates the whole enterprise, and puts the prof into a kind of reality-show exchange which can get heated and unpleasant.

Perhaps the need for both of these systems apparently arises out of failures on the part of instructors and students to communicate properly with each other during ordinary teaching time. Ridiculous class sizes are surely at the root of this.

I want to like Wikis. Really. I want to use them in my classes because they seem to solve the problem of getting students to write collaboratively. But encouraging students to use wikis is like getting my kids to eat more vegetables. Sure. They understand wikis are good for them. Sometime in their far distant future career they'll have to write collaboratively. But right now wikis mean lots of reading and writing; the gun-to-the-head focus on individual GPAs makes wikis the equivalent of broccoli and celery

Read more »

A recent op/ed piece (March 20) in Inside Higher Ed, "Learning to Teach Tech-Savvy Students," made me crotchety all over again about the speed and ease with the trope of "digital native/digitial immigrant" has influenced so much current thinking about student "engagement."

Read more »

The dream of an archive of all human knowledge is at least as old as the fabled Library of Alexandria, started by Ptolemy I in 286 BC. Now, powered by mass digitization, major companies and organizations like Google Book Search, Microsoft Live Book Search, Amazon, and Open Library are digitizing millions of books and other printed texts. Their vision? No less than a comprehensive digital library that might someday contain every book ever written.

Think of it as the Alexandrian Library re-mix.

But like most utopian visions, this dream isn't without flaws. So what's at stake for humanists?

Read more:

From today's New York Times, a provocative article about the loss of anonymity on the Internet ("The Already Big Thing on the Internet: Spying on Users"). Op-ed writer Adam Cohen describes how companies track and sell information about user habits (you and me) to deliver targeted advertising:

The information, however, gets a lot more specific than age and gender — and more sensitive. Tech companies can keep track of when a particular Internet user looks up Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, visits adult Web sites, buys cancer drugs online or participates in anti-government discussion groups.

Once upon a time, according to the old saw, geography was all about maps, and history, chaps. Whatever about the chaps, maps--and mapping real and fictional spaces--have moved closer to non-cartographers, thanks to Google's My Maps. Read more...

...corrupts absolutely?

Yes, according to a number of experts. Possibly, say pedagogical mavens who worry that PowerPoint undermines active learning. Definitely, yawns anyone who's ever sat through an interminable slideware read-over, disguised as a lecture or presentation.

Read more »

For anyone who's wondered about the real trickle-down effects of new media and technology into the classroom, Judith Tabron's recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education makes for interesting reading. Tabron, director of faculty computing services at Hofstra University, muses about actual technology use on campus compared to much-touted investments in smart classrooms, course management systems, and more.

Read more »

Although it's only been open for a day, by late afternoon yesterday the Library's shiny new Bibliotheque Cafe had attracted a signficant number of UVic's laptop-using, coffee-drinking digital bedoins.

Read the rest of this entry...

A recent post in TechCrunch suggests that business use of e-mail is falling off in favour of newer synchronous services like texting, SMS, Twitter, but as early as 2004, Internet legal pioneer Lawrence Lessig declared "email bankruptcy" because of the overwhelming amount of personal email he received.

Read more »

Link: http://eliza08.wordpress.com/2008/03/19/will-videoconferencing-reduce-academics-carbon-footprints/

It's one thing to point the finger at greedy global corporations, gas-guzzling vehicles, and sprawling suburbs, but when Mark Pedelty’s op/ed article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (Academic Travel Causes Global Warming) turned the spotlight on academic travel habits, he asked some awkward questions:

More...

Link: http://eliza08.wordpress.com/2008/03/14/new-models-of-social-research-in-the-humanities/

Last December, Stan Katz published an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education asking "Can Humanities Scholars Collaborate?"

In a recent blog ("Signs that social scholarship is catching on in the humanities"), blogger Lisa Spiro, director of the Digital Media Center at Rice University’s Fondren Library, argues that social scholarship in the humanities--by which she means "the practice of scholarship in which the use of social tools is an integral part of the research and publishing process”--is growing.

To support her claim, she cites individual commitment by scholars to Open Access, and Open Access Publishing outlets, the availability of tools (like Seasr in the US, and TAPoR in Canada) to support collaboration, new forms of peer review, support for collaboration by funding agencies, and a new emphasis by universities on community as part of the graduate student education.

Read Spiro's full blog here

.