Poet Ponders the Digital

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley December 2, 2013 Deadline January 2014 Issue Our Valley Home: Virtual Life in the Valley Mornings begin with a check of the local headlines, a glance at the weather and a skim of Valley-related Facebook group updates. The top of my Google News page features “Fresno-Visalia” regional alerts. I try to be an informed, engaged resident of the Central Valley… except for the minor detail that my wife and I now live 2521 miles away.   We are “virtual” Valley residents, with friends, family and clients in Tulare County. Thanks to the Internet, cell phones and wireless data plans, we maintain some connections more actively than we did when living in the Valley. Even our cell phone numbers begin with the 559 area code, something that helps us remain connected to the region.   Being virtual residents of the Valley has drawbacks. We can read about the Blossom Trail and see the photos, but that’s not the same as driving through the foot...

Earlier this semester, there was a "glitch" with the Blackboard shell for my writing course. I had spent hours and hours uploading content, organizing the shell, and trying to perfect the course. And then it was gone. The Blackboard team eventually restored most, but not all, of the content. It was a tough reminder that online systems are, like all computing systems, imperfect. Systems crash. Databases get corrupted. Things go wrong and you need a contingency plan. The Blackboard bungle left my students frustrated and has cost me more than few hours. While I had copies of all materials, they were scattered about my hard drive. I didn't want to duplicate files, which I thought would waste space. I sometimes used "links" (aliases) to original files, as a compromise. On my computer, which is backed up to three external drives and mirrored to another computer, I now have a directory system that aligns with my Blackboard shell. There are folders for each w...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley November 4, 2013 Deadline December 2013 Issue Tablet Time: When Less is Best My next computer will be a tablet. Yes, I called it a computer because today’s tablets can replace a notebook system for many routine tasks. Though I sometimes need the power and features of a notebook or desktop computer, a tablet is perfect for surfing the Web, answering email, reading books and viewing presentations. When I upgraded from a 12-inch notebook to a 15-inch laptop, the portable computer replaced my desktop system. In return for the extra screen real estate and significant computing power, my carrying case gained weight. Walking across a university campus, the 5.6 pounds of a MacBook Pro plus the weight of its power supply and two video adapters starts to feel like 20 pounds. Most days, I don’t need the power of a laptop in my classroom. I use the laptop to show slides and pages of articles while lecturing. Students do ask to review work and grades, so ...

Online education is an accommodation to life's realities. For years I denied that online education was in many ways inferior to physical campuses. But, now that I'm working at a research university, my views are evolving. There simply are things that online education cannot do. Denying the differences, the strengths and weaknesses of various "locations" of education, can lead us to become promoters of either online or physical campuses. We should instead admit the space in which an institution exists matters. I once argued that online degrees awarded by leading universities could improve a regional economy. Now, I admit that the most a handful of degrees can do is improve the lives of a fraction of residents. A quick tangent: most online degrees aren't from leading universities. I've taught in an online program at a regional university and online was not equivalent to the on-campus degree. I don't blame the instructors who did all they could to ma...

English: Apple IIe computer (enhanced version) (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley October 7, 2013 Deadline November 2013 Issue Apple Tech is Evolutionary, Not Revolutionary Technology revolutions are not as sudden as people believe. Not even Apple has released successful revolutionary products every year or two. “The Myth of Steve Jobs’ Constant Breakthroughs” by Harry McCracken, appeared on Time Magazine ’s Techland site in September, 2013 (http://techland.time.com/). McCraken examines the myth of “revolution” that has lingered after the death of Jobs. You have to feel sorry for chief executive Tim Cook and lead designer Jonathan (“Jony”) Ive, as they try to live up to mythology. Apple, as a company, has a mixed history of innovation. My wife and I are an Apple household. We own an iMac , Mac mini, a collection of MacBook Pro models, iPhones , iPods , and an iPad. Apple dares to deliver products that its designers and engineers want, not what cust...

Back to school means back to Blackboard. My frustration with most learning management system (LMS) platforms is well known. The administration of a class, depending on your institution, is often left to the instructor. This includes layout and design choices that I have long believed should be standardized, at least minimally, at the institution level. Because instructors can do everything from the "massive single page" dump of materials to atomized folders by week or topic, students end up trying to relearn navigation of the system with each new course. I'm now teaching at a top university with the best Blackboard install I've used. It still has problems, of course, but it is much better than any previous version and installation I've used. I theorize that part of this is streamlining the tool choices and layout options. Requiring few choices of the instructor lets me focus on the course, not the website. There might be a model shell at the university, b...

Back to school means back to the battles with Blackboard (I've posted on that plenty of times). Even if BB was the perfect learning management system, there would still be the days spent planning and organizing online content for a new course. This week, I'm gathering the reusable materials I will upload and preparing new materials. By next week, the shell for the writing course I'm teaching will be reasonably complete. My summer was meant to be spent learning to program in Objective-C. It was also meant as a time to finished a research project and revise an academic book chapter. None of those things happened. Life in the digital age doesn't seem to give us more time, but it does give us more potential tasks. My to-do list kept growing faster than I could complete projects. Maybe it is a time management issue. I completed a lot of tasks in the last few months, many of them creative writing projects. I also am preparing a new website complementing my creative inte...

Video games are written, before and during the coding process. They are, after all, stories — from the simple story of a hungry "Pac-Man" avoiding ghosts to the complex stories of modern massive(ly) multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs). Yet, some of the aspiring game developers I've met don't quite appreciate how important storytelling is to game success. Blood and guts in high-def will only carry a game so far. During my early years as a computer geek, I'd sit at my VIC-20 keyboard and create text-based adventure games in BASIC. I continued to do this well into college, because there is something about writing a text adventure that forces you to consider the storyline of a game carefully. While text adventures have declined in popularity, graphical first-person games are still constructed as stories beneath the fancy rendering. The tool I've used in the classroom to teach video game writing is Inform [ http://inform7.com ]. The Inform website...

University instructors have it somewhat easier than K12 teachers: accepting "friend" requests from our students, especially our adult and non-traditional students, isn't much of an ethical quagmire. Still, you have to be careful and have some guidelines or you'll risk trouble. 1) I only accept "friend" requests from former students who are 21 or older, so nobody can claim I have favorites or suggest anything untoward. Connecting to young students is, in my opinion, always a bad idea — especially for male teachers, but we've seen female teachers have "problems" online, too. I explain to students that it isn't that I don't like them or want to be friends later in life, but it is important to maintain professional standing while they are in my courses. 2) LinkedIn is the "safest" social network for teachers to remain connected to former students. It is a professional, career-oriented network that is more about employment ...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley August 5, 2013 Deadline September 2013 Issue Desktop Databases: Still Great for Many Tasks “dBase LLC is very excited to announce the new and updated version… dBase Plus!” When I received an email announcement that dBase Plus 8 had shipped, compatible with Windows 8, I had to double check that the press release wasn’t a hoax. As a teenager, I loved experimenting with dBase III . Sure enough, dBase is back, trying to compete against Microsoft Access and FileMaker Pro. Easily one of the five most important personal computer applications of all time, dBase was the best database engine and development platform for many years. It spawned great competitors, too, from “clones” like FoxPro and Clipper to innovative databases like Alpha Five, Clarion, Revelation and Paradox. Even today, the many applications on your smartphone likely use SQLite , a relational database with tables similar to dBase IV of the 1990s. While Ashton-Tate’s dBase was not th...

Hamerschlag Hall is one of the principal teaching facilities of the Carnegie Institute of Technology (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley July 8, 2013 Deadline August 2013 Issue Finding My Way: Four Flawed Navigation Apps Pittsburgh, like many older cities, was not designed on a grid. It wasn’t planned at all, according to one historian I’ve met. Instead, the roads were created as landowners divided and connected their properties. The hilly terrain complicated the hodgepodge streets, with some climbs steeper than those of San Francisco, resulted in winding roads that twist and turn so sharply a compact car can barely make the corners. Freeways start and stop with little warning, including Interstates 279 and 579. This fall, I will be teaching as an adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University, located in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh. This summer, I’ve managed to miss freeway exits and one-way city streets nearly every trip into the city. Th...

Notice that technical courses and courses that were "automated" had higher completion rates.  New study of low MOOC completion rates | Inside Higher Ed : The course with the highest rate of completion was "Functional Programming Principles in Scala," from Switzerland's Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, offered on the MOOC platform Coursera. According to Jordan's research, some 19.2 percent of the 50,000 students who enrolled completed the course.  At the other end of the spectrum was "A History of the World since 1300" by Princeton University, also hosted by Coursera, which reportedly recruited 83,000 students with just 0.8 percent reaching the end.  Five of the top six most-completed MOOCs relied on automatic marking alone, meaning that no peer assessment was required. Courses that relied purely on peer grading generally fared far worse in terms of the percentage of students reaching the end. My assumptions: Technical students do...

Pittsburgh TechFest was Saturday, June 1, 2013. For me, this is like going to a county fair or theme park… minus the junk food I adore. Technology captures my imagination, and I do love new hardware, software, gizmos, and gadgets. But, reality has set in, yet again, and I cannot immerse myself in tech and do everything else I enjoy doing. As readers know, I've been trying in fits and starts to relearn programming concepts, and then teach myself Objective-C for OS X and iOS applications. I really do love code almost as much as I love creative writing of the English variety. The "almost as much" is the problem. Annually, TechFest features seminar "tracks" on everything from careers development to Web development. You can go from database sessions to object-oriented programming. It's wonderful, the skills on display and the discussions. Yet, I am forced to choose between writing or coding, because both require more than a full-time effort for success. ...