Digital Rhetoric/Remediation and Remix - Wikibooks, collection of open-content textbooks

A cool project someone started:

Digital Rhetoric/Remediation and Remix - Wikibooks, collection of open-content textbooks

Prosumer Approaches to New Media Composition: Consumption and Production in Continuum

A great new media text about prosumer approaches to using new media in composition classes:
Prosumer Approaches to New Media Composition: Consumption and Production in Continuum

Day Two with the Droid

I continue to struggle to overcome the feeling that I'm talking into an mp3 player. As with the day before, my experience began with disenchantment -- my first dropped call. The whole impetus for choosing an Android Incredible over a Apple Iphone (business philosophies aside) was that the gurus in the Office of Information Technology told me the Iphone drops a lot of calls. For some reason, I can't get many bars in my house, causing my phone to drop my mother. To further test its capabilities I took the phone on a field trip to the basement of Delta College, a place known for abysmal reception. There my faith in the Incredible was restored.

User awkwardness continues. I hung up on my graduate committee director because the speaker button and the call end button are in near proximity. Forget about making a phone call when driving until shortcuts and voice activation are programmed. This is my next task programming, choosing a ring tone, basically making the phone function with me.

MIT TechTV – Session 3: Transmedia for Social Change

MIT TechTV – Session 3: Transmedia for Social Change

Day One with the Droid

Problem #1 - The Android Incredible is not an I-Phone

Some may say this is exactly the beauty of the Droid -- it is a dazzling smart phone that exists outside the Steve Jobs/Apple Closed System Universe. However, for those of us who began with the I-Pod touch (i.e. the mobile gateway drug), it comes with a learning curve. For instance, the on button isn't located conveniently under the touch screen. The first few hours I had the Android I was convinced Fed-Ex delivered me a dud. Of course, that was before I read the directions :) The button I had been pushing was actually the "optical joystick" (not a day one task). When I final understood where the power button was I waited for my Apps to magically appear before me in nice neat rows. Instead, I found myself staring at the time displayed over a fiery red background. At this point, I believed that I would be taking back the phone and succumbing to the Steve Jobs' Way. Eventually, when I actually could focus on what the Android could do and discovered all the wonderful free apps, my evening turned around.

Sophie's World

While beginning my own intellectual journey at Michigan State University, I became enthralled with the coming of age story/introduction to philosophy Sophie's World. Jostein Gaarder's novel begins with a fourteen-year-old Sophie receiving two questions in her mailbox, “Who are you?” and “Where does the world come from?” Her journey takes her through the theories of Socrates, Descartes, Hume, Freud, and Darwin, among others. Each theorists raised new questions, both for Sophie and myself. And while Sophie's journey may have ended, mine continues.

I thought of Sophie when I was introduced to a new Sophie, also coming of age, at the New Media Consortium Summer Conference in Anaheim, California. This Sophie, found at www.sophieproject.org, hopes to revolutionize our conception of what a book can be. Sophie, a free program, gives users the ability to create multimedia, interactive texts. Instead of typing onto a page -- you drag and drop elements (audio and video clips, photographs, text files, etc.) onto a "canvas". There are still separate, sequential pages; however, you can also run the book like a video, using a timeline to make the various elements run and appear at different moments. Not only does Sophie change our conception of a book; it changes the way we think about reading.

Like great philosophers, these new tools raise the questions, "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" Whether you are a gamer, a hacker, or a blogger, you look to form an identity by what you can do. What level have you achieved in World of Warcraft? What software have you cracked? And how many people follow your blog? These platforms, networks, and virtual spaces are a world we create by our actions. That is perhaps the most exciting aspect of the Internet -- this world comes from us and is (on the whole) made better than us.

These questions of our relationship with the Internet are important, as they tie to a great public debate -- does the Internet make us smarter? According to Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, the Internet has hurt our ability to concentrate and driven us to constant distraction. He cites hard scientific evidence about the neurological affects of long-term Internet use, which causes our brains to constantly scan for new information -- even when we are away from the keyboard. His argument directly contrasts Steven Johnson's hypothesis in Everything Bad is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter. Johnson argues that popular culture is becoming more complex and that viewers/users/players are required to focus on multiple narrative threads and pieces of data and connect them in meaningful ways.

One of the keynote speakers at the New Media Consortium, John Seely Brown, took up this question of fast analytical processing versus focused deep thought, using the example of Speed Chess Players. Speed chess is where players are required to make their move in under thirty seconds. What he discovered is that those who engaged in the exercise of speed chess were more likely to win in traditional chess tournaments. Speed chess helps the players identify patterns and rapidly identify the tactics of their opponents.

Speed chess is a good metaphor for the way we process data online. We are constantly pulling new bits of information and updates up on our screens (both mobile and static). Based on these constant streams and the patterns we find, we form our relationships and ideas. Learning is tied to interaction, collaboration, and constant seeking. It's networked, not unilaterally delivered from a professor or textbook. To go back to Jostein Gaarder's Sophie, she didn't learn philosophy by sitting and reading a stack of textbooks. She explored and collaborated with Alberto Knox. Together they problem solved riddles, both theoretical and personal. At the end, she understood not only philosophy, but how to apply it in her own life.

Switching to Augmented Reality

The first month of my spring/summer hiatus has been filled with various realities -- the reality of putting a home up for sale, the reality of finishing a dissertation before having a second child, etc. Tonight I'm exploring the buzz word "augmented reality" in preparation for the New Media Consortium Summer Conference. According to Wikipedia, this is "a term for a live direct or indirect view of a physical real-world environment whose elements are augmented by virtual computer-generated imagery. It is related to a more general concept called mediated reality in which a view of reality is modified (possibly even diminished rather than augmented) by a computer. As a result, the technology functions by enhancing one’s current perception of reality." It's a familiar concept, but it's not lingo I use in my daily life. Right now, I'm looking at incoming tweets with geophysically near to me through an Ipod app. Not sure what to do with this information :)