Monthly Archives: June 2005

wiki wiki: snapshot etymology

wikiwikibus.jpg
Found on Flickr: the famous “wiki wiki” shuttle bus at the Honolulu airport. In Hawaiian pidgin, “wiki wiki” means “quick,” or “informal,” and is what inspired Ward Cunningham in 1995 to name his new openly editable web document engine “wiki”, or the WikiWikiWeb.
(photo by cogdogblog)

“letter to the wikitor”

Ross Mayfield from Many 2 Many was dismayed when the LA Times hurriedly cancelled its “wikatorials” experiment after a single, unpleasant spate of vandalism:

I’m still a bit irked that the LA Times Editors shut down the Wikitorials community. I started to become engaged in the community and saw promise. They shut it down without warning and without thinking things through to begin with.

So he’s leading the charge on a community-penned letter to the editor on (you guessed it) a wiki, to perhaps breathe a little warmth into cold feet.

grant virtual asylum – adopt a chinese blog

People sometimes wonder what would have happened if the Soviet Union had survived long enough to experience the internet. It’s a delicious “what if” scenario to contemplate. The USSR was quite skilled at using broadcast and print media to achieve total message discipline (the Bush administration can only dream), but what would have happened if a totally decentralized medium like the web (a control freak’s nightmare) sprung up right under the Kremlin’s boots? Would the dissidents have bubbled over into cyberspace in a surging tide too powerful to control? Or would the the government have cracked down brutally, or cut off the emerging technology before it could develop, drawing the iron curtain still further over the information commons? Someone should write a novel (á la Thomas Harris, Philip Roth)..
But look to China today, and we can get at least some idea of what might have happened. Granted, China is now a booming frontier of global capitalism, having all but abandoned the communist economic model. But the regime is still quite Soviet in its attitudes toward the media (which it totally controls) and toward expressions of political dissent (which it forbids and punishes). The internet presents a particularly devilish challenge.
adoptablog.jpg In response, the government has set up a “Great Firewall” blocking off certain sections of the web (anything from Google News to Human Rights Watch) that it would rather its citizens didn’t see. Not wanting to get shut out of the world’s biggest emerging market, American corporations like Yahoo, Google, and most recently Microsoft, have complied with state demands that certain services, and even certain terms like “democracy,” “freedom” or “human rights,” are blocked in Chinese versions of their web applications. In addition, the government recently passed legislation requiring all websites to be registered. Anything deemed inappropriate gets taken off its server. A hundred flowers may bloom on the internet, but not if the government cuts them off at the root.
It’s estimated there are about 1 million Chinese blogs, and that number is sure to increase ten, twenty a hundred fold. Who knows? If it gets to that point, the government probably won’t be able to keep up. But for now, bloggers with even slightly controversial politics are in danger of getting shut down. This is why some Chinese bloggers are moving their sites abroad, seeking political haven on western servers. Isaac Mao, a venture capitalist in Shanghai for internet startups, self-professed “meta idea” generator, and one of the first Chinese bloggers, has set up an “adopt-a-blog” program that matches up fellow bloggers with foreigners willing to make a little extra room on their servers. It’s a great idea, and a chance for the blogosphere to come together as a global community.
Additional links:
More about Isaac Mao in Wired: “Chinese Blogger Slams Microsoft”
Someone found a way to circumvent Microsoft’s block on “freedom,” “democracy” etc.: “Loophole lets ‘Freedom’ ring in Chinese MSN blogs” (with complete instructions here)

The 2005 Computers and Writing Conference

Stanford University hosted the 2005 Computers and Writing conference this past weekend. Each session was rife with “future of the book” food for thought. This is an informal summary, with apologies to all the fabulous presentations that I don’t mention (sorry, being only one person, I could not attend them all). Some of the major themes (which dovetail nicely with issues we are exploring at the institute) included: Open Source, new interpretations of literacy and “writing,” the changing role of the teacher/student, performance, multimodality, and networked community. It is important to note that these themes often blur together in a complicated interdependence. This thematic interplay was evident in the pre-conference workshops which included instruction in open source tools and applications like Drupal that allow for multimodality and the creation of communal authoring environments. Workshops in “Reading Images” and “Using Video to Teach Writing” addressed multiple modalities and new concepts of writing.
I was excited to see that the Computers and Writing community understands the potential of, and imperative for, Open Source. It’s practical advantages (free and customizable) and it’s philosophical advantages (community-based and built for sharing rather than for selling) make it ideally suited to the goals of the educational community. Open Source came up over and over during the presentations and was featured in the first town hall session “Open Source Opens Thinking.” The session challenged the Computers and Writing community “to consider a position statement of collective principles and goals in relation to Open Source.” Such a statement would be useful and productive; I’m hoping it will materialize.
The changing role of the teacher and student was evident in several presentations: most notably, the pilot program at Penn State (see my earlier post) in which students publish their “papers” on a wiki. The wiki format allows for intensive peer-review and encourages a culture of responsibility.
There was a lot of speculation about how writing will evolve and how other modalities might be incorporated into our notion of literacy. Andrea Lunsford‘s keynote speech addressed this issue, calling for a return to oral and embodied “performative literacies.” She referred to Tara Shankar’s MIT dissertation “Speaking on the Record,” which confronts the way we privilege writing above other modalitites for knowledge and education. She says: “Reading and writing have become the predominant way of acquiring and expressing intellect in Western culture. Somewhere along the way, the ability to write has become completely identified with intellectual power, creating a graphocentric myopia concerning the very nature and transfer of knowledge. One of the effects of graphocentrism is a conflation of concepts proper to knowledge in general with concepts specific to written expression.”
Shankar calls for new practices that embrace oral communication. She introduces a new word: “to provide a counterpart to writing in a spoken modality: speak + write = sprite. Spriting in its general form is the activity of speaking “on the record” that yields a technologically supported representation of oral speech with essential properties of writing such as permanence of record, possibilities of editing, indexing, and scanning, but without the difficult transition to a deeply different form of representation such as writing itself.”
The need for a multimodal approach to writing was addressed in the second Town Hall meeting “Composition Beyond Words.” Virginia Kuhn opened by calling for a reconsideration of “writing,” and the goals of visual literacy. Bradley Dilger reminded us that literacy goes beyond “the letter;” we need multiple interfaces for the same data because not everyone looks at data the same way. Madeleine Sorapure pointed out that writing with computers is determined by underlying code structures which are, themselves, a form of writing. She quoted Loss Pequeno Glazier, “Code is the writing within the writing that makes the work happen.” Gail Hawisher, talked about the 10 year process of incorporating multiple modalities into the first-composition courses at the University of Illinois. Cynthia Selfe addressed this struggle, saying: “colleges are not comfortable with multiple modalities.” She advises the C&W community to “think about how to give professional development/support to resistant colleges in ways that are sustainable over time.” Stuart Moulthrop also offered some cautionary words of advice. In addition to faculty and administration, Moultrop says students are resistant to multimodality. Code, for example, is fatally hard to teach non-programmers or visually oriented people. “There is a political problem,” Moulthrop says, “we are living through a backlash moment. People are very angry about how fast the future has come down on them.”
Some participants delivered “papers” that attempted to demonstrate these new multimodal imperatives. Most notably, Todd Taylor‘s presentation, “The End of Composition,” which asked, “Can a paper be a film?” Todd argues “yes” with a cinematic montage of sampled and remixed clips along with original footage, which was enthusiastically received by the audience (alt. review in Machina Memorialis blog.) Morgan Gresham‘s Town Hall presentation was a student-produced video and a question to the audience; is this just a remake of a bad commercial, or is it a “paper”? Christine Alfano‘s presentation experimented with a hypertext, “Choose Your Own Adventure,” style that allowed the audience to determine the trajectory of the talk. Once the selection was made, she dropped the other two papers/options to the floor. The choice, unfortunately for me, eliminated the material that I most wanted to hear about (Shelly Jackson’s Patchwork Girl). Additionally, “virtual” presentations were delivered during an online companion conference called: Computers and Writing Online 2005 When Content Is No Longer King: Social Networking, Community, and Collaboration This interactive online conference served, “as an acknowledgment of the value of social networks in creating discourse of and about scholarly work.” CWOnline 2005 made both the submission and presentation process open to public review via the Kairosnews weblog. Despite some flaws, I thought these experimental presentations pushed at the boundaries of academic discourse in a useful way. They reminded us how far we have to go and how difficult the project of putting ideas into practice really is.
Finally, the conference highlighted ways in which computers are being used to cultivate community across cultures and institutions; and between students, teachers, and scholars. Sharing Cultures, a joint project of Columbia College Chicago and Nelson Mandela University Metropolitan University, in South Africa “creates two interconnected, on-line writing and learning communities…the project purposely includes students who traditionally have not had access to, or have been actively marginalized from, both digital and international experiences.” Virginia Kuhn approached computers and community at the local level, with a service learning class called, “Multicultural America,” which asked students to write an ebook documenting local history. The finished work is part of an ongoing display at a Milwaukee community center. This project inspired an interesting reversal; community members who worked with students on the project are now (thanks to a generous grant) coming to the University of Milwaukee for supplemental study. Within the academy there are also exciting opportunities for computer-based community-building. In her Town Hall presentation, Gail Hawisher said that literacy on campus is, “usually taken care of by first year composition.” If we are to incorporate visual literacy into our definition of literacy then, “Perhaps we should be looking to art and design for literacy instead of just the English dept.” This is an incredibly smart idea because, short of requiring composition teachers to have degrees in art, film, AND writing, collaborative efforts with other departments seem to be the best way to ensure a deep and rigorous understanding of the material. I had an interesting conversation with Stuart Moulthrop about this. We imagined a massively-multi-player game environment that would allow scholars from around world to collaborate on curriculum across institutional and disciplinary boundaries. Wouldn’t it be great, we thought, if someone who wanted to teach an odd combination like, film/biology/physics, could put a course scenario into the game where it would be played out by biologists, film scholars, and physicists. In other words a kind of life-time learning environment for the experts, a laboratory for the exchange of knowledge across disciplinary boundaries, and place to weave together different strands of human insight in order to create a more complete “picture” of the universe.

harlequin romances to hit cell phones

harlequinblackout.gif Missed this item from last month.. This fall, Harlequin, the leading publisher of “women’s fiction,” will release a series of titles for cell phones through distributor Vocel (who signed a deal with Random House earlier this year).

Harlequin will develop various applications, including daily-serialized novels by bestselling authors, romance-writing seminars and interactive pursuits such as helping to choose male cover models for upcoming novels or even using their camera phones to submit pictures of their own boyfriends as possible cover models.

(via Textually via moconews)

more than half of journalists use blogs, study shows

The Eleventh Annual Euro RSCG Magnet and Columbia University Survey of Media found that 51% of journalists use blogs, many of them for work, though few are actually writing their own. The study also found that, although more than half admit to using blogs, only 1% find them to be credible. Hmmm… From Business Wire:

The study found that blogs have become a large — and arguably, increasingly integral — part of how journalists do their jobs. Indeed, 70% of journalists who use blogs do so for work-related tasks. Most often, those work-related tasks involve finding story ideas, with 53% of journalist respondents reporting using blogs for such purposes. But respondents also turn to blogs for other uses, including researching and referencing facts (43%) and finding sources (36%). Most notable, fully 33% of journalists say they use blogs as a way of uncovering breaking news or scandals. Few blog-using journalists are engaging with this new medium by posting to blogs or publishing their own; such activities might be seen as compromising objectivity and thus credibility.

on second thought… (wikis are hard)

The LA Times has temporarily shelved its plans for running “wikatorials” – editorials that any reader can edit – due to a flood of “inappropriate material.” The whole experiement with wikis was a risky move for a well-established newspaper to take, and it’s not surprising that they immediately panicked once the riff raff showed up. It’s hard to establish an open, collaborative environment from the top-down. Whereas, if you start from a point of low stakes, with little prestige on the line (as Wikipedia did), then the enterprise can evolve slowly, embarrassing missteps, spam and all.
Someone should start an experiment: dump the LA Times content in a non-affiliated wiki and try the wikatorials there. Give it time, let the community build, work out the hiccups, and then give the LA Times a call.

Gataga – social bookmark search and exploration engine

gataga_big.gif We came across this the other day – an engine for searching the social bookmarking commons. Gataga allows you to search by tag across several popular web-clipping services including del.icio.us, furl, and others. Gataga’s simple interface looks a lot like Google’s, but the similarity ends there. The only ranking system is time – the most recent links come up at the top. So Gataga is a nice tool for the moment’s glimpse of the links people are saving, but that’s about all.
Bit by bit, the web is being catalogued by its users. But at the moment, Gataga (and the rest of these bookmarking tools) works more like a wire service than a library. Tags are sort of like a reporter’s “beat” and Gataga provides RSS feeds for all possible queries, so you can track areas of interest. But if you want to use it as an archive, you’ll have some pretty serious digging to do.
In the early days of the web, sites sprung up like Voice of the Shuttle (VOS) that thoughtfully catalogued interesting links. The fact that there was a single editor ensured that things stayed fairly organized, that broken links were repaired, and dead ones pruned. But as the web grew, the model quickly became unmanageable. Alan Liu, who single-handedly managed VOS from 1994-1999, said it came to the point where he was spending 2-3 hours per night simply combing for dead links. VOS allowed the community to suggest sites, but the burden of organizing, annotating, and “weeding” fell solely on Liu. The rise of blogs made it easier and less stressful to gather links, but ensured that it was a casual affair – a kind of day-to-day grazing. Of course, all blogs have archives, but they are not terribly useful (Dan talks about this here).
With social bookmarking, we seem to be laying the foundation for something more sustainable – “the only group that can organize everything is everybody.” The next step is for librarians, archivists, and new kinds of editors and curators to start making sense of this wilderness of tags.

Networked Pedagogies: Opensourcing the Writing Classroom

Penn State has initiated a pilot program of 10 wiki-based composition classes. Richard Doyle, Jeff Pruchnic, and Trey Conner, instructors in the pilot-program discussed their experiences this morning at the Computers & Writing Conference in Stanford. They found that students produce better work in a peer-reviewed environment. Grammar and mechanics are contextualized and there is greater motivation to create error-free work. Students read each other’s work, which forces them to consider their arguments carefully in order to avoid repeating someone else’s point.
They also found that the self-governing ecology of the networked wiki format creates a fruitful environment for discussion and debate. The wiki places control over the direction and duration of the discussion into the student’s hands. Richard Doyle also pointed out that there has not been a single editing war in the years that he has been teaching the course. He attributes the lack of unproductive “flame wars” to the amount of work his students have. Each student produces about 100 pages of material and must read, comment on, and GRADE their fellow students’ work. This is a learner-centered environment where, as Richard Doyle puts it, “the teacher acts as coach or zen master, making periodic interventions.” Doyle also points out that in these wiki-based courses, “students are learning how to interact in an information dense environment responsibly. They are being trained to deal with the fluid environments they are going to find themselves in.”