Poet Ponders the Digital

A drawing made in Tux Paint using various brushes and the Paint tool. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley November 2, 2015 Deadline December 2015 Issue Randomly clicking on letters, the young boy I was watching play an educational game “won” each level. He paid no attention to the letters themselves. His focus was on the dancing aliens at the end of each alphabet invasion. Situations like this occur in classrooms and homes every day. Technology appeals to parents, politicians and some educators as a path towards more effective teaching. We often bring technology into our schools and homes, imagining the latest gadgets and software will magically transfer skills and information to our children. This school year, I left teaching business communications to return to my doctoral specialty in education, technology and language development. As a board member of an autism-related charity, I speak to groups on how technology both helps and hinders special edu...

RFID chip pulled from new credit card (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley October 5, 2015 Deadline November 2015 Issue This summer, I had a credit card “cloned” while driving along the Interstate 76 Tollway. Because I check my credit card statements online after any trip, I noticed the fraudulent charges and cancelled the card. Credit cards remain one of the easiest targets for criminals and no easy solution seems likely. Two years ago, I had another credit card number stolen by a waiter. Local police informed me that such thefts remained the most common form of credit card fraud. In both instances, I did everything “right” and was still a victim of thieves. The waiter stealing card numbers asked to see my driver’s license before walking away from the table. He was writing down numbers, expiration dates and card verification values while standing behind a low wall. With these data, another criminal ran charges at a convenience store, listing charges as...

English: An HP LaserJet 4200 dtns printer (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley August 31, 2015 Deadline October 2015 Issue Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek hacked a Jeep in July of this year. Chrysler recalled 1.4 million vehicles to fix issues with the “Uconnect” network, which used cellular Internet connections to enable features like remote access. If you’ve wondered how OnStar and similar services, like Uconnect, unlock car doors, now you know. They use the Internet. Uber, the ride-scheduling app company, hired Miller and Valasek in August to work on security for Uber’s autonomous automobile project, since a self-driving car requires network and GPS access to function properly. Everything in an autonomous vehicle is computerized and this invites potential mischief. Uber hired hackers to identify security vulnerabilities. General Motors, Volkswagen and other car companies have been tested by hackers. The 2016 Corvette’s braking system has been hacke...

Speaking is composing, but is it writing? I have long used dictation software to quickly compose drafts of short stories, plays, essays, and magazine columns. The results tend to read more naturally than when I type directly into a word processor. I am pondering whether or not the dictated documents are "better" because they are more approachable for many readers. When I type, I aggressively attempt to avoid forms of "to be" and a list of "weak" words and phrases lacking precision. For this reason, I have considered my typed documents superior to dictated documents. After all, we tell our students that writing should be more refined and precise than the spoken word. Yet, when I read student papers, their attempts to sound "educated" produce jarring prose. In their eagerness to demonstrate vocabulary skills, they instead expose a lack of reading and true word comprehension. Overly complex sentences also reflect internalized models students h...

Call for proposals for an edited collection: Type Matters: the Rhetoricity of Letterforms Edited by C.S. Wyatt and Dànielle Nicole DeVoss Stephen Bernhardt warned us almost 30 years ago that our "preoccupation with conventional essay format" excludes the rhetorical rigor of typographic elements. Later, John Trimbur extended this argument, noting that "one of the main obstacles to seeing the materiality of writing has been the essayist tradition and its notion of a transparent text." Many visual rhetoric scholars have interrogated the ways in which meaning-making happens iconographically, photographically, and via other visual means. Few, however (save for Anne Frances Wysocki), have paid much attention to the rhetorical work that typography does. Although always part of any text's argument, the choice of typeface is an under-articulated and under-studied aspect of textual production within composition and rhetoric. Today, even as there are thousands of fon...

An illustration of an example IPv6 address (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley July 27, 2015 Deadline September 2015 Issue That convenient flashlight app knows where you are. So do your social media apps, your Web browser, your clock and many other apps on your phone, tablet and computer. And there’s not much you can do to hide. Many people don’t understand how their devices offer the functionality we love and worry upon hearing our devices and software track us constantly. And much of that information remains behind on our devices, or stored elsewhere beyond our control, because we agree to that in return for features, convenience and cheap (or free) apps. When you download an application or operating system, you agree to various terms and conditions. For example, to use Adobe Creative Cloud or Microsoft Office365, you agree that your computer will connect to corporate servers weekly and verify your subscription is paid. Adobe and Microsoft servers ...

Zork I cover art (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley July 6, 2015 Deadline August 2015 Issue “This is an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here. A rubber mat saying ‘Welcome to Zork !’ lies by the door.” These familiar words, which I once read on the blue screen of a Commodore 64, now appeared on my iPhone. Considered one of the first dozen computer games ever developed, Zork has a special place in computing history. Zork launched what is known as interactive fiction or text adventures. In 1977, four programmers working in the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science created the interactive fiction story “Zork.” Some of these friends would go on to create one of the earliest video game publishers, Infocom. From 1979 through 1986, Infocom was one of the leading game publishers, marketing games for every major home computer. Purchased by Activision in 1986, the Infocom brand and its classic games live on, a...

Film camera collection. (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley June 5, 2015 Deadline July 2015 Issue Every weekend a small group of filmmakers I know make at least one three-minute movie and share the short film on their YouTube channel, 3X7 Films. Inspired by the 48-Hour Film Project (48hourfilm.com), my colleagues started to joke about entering a 48-hour contest each month. Someone suggested that it might be possible to make a three-minute movie every week. Soon, 3X7 Films was launched as a Facebook group and members started to assemble teams to make movies. The 48-Hour Film Project, also known as 48HFP, launched in 2001 by Mark Ruppert. He convinced some colleagues in Washington, D.C., that they could make a movie in 48 hours. The idea became a friendly competition. Fifteen years later, 48HFP is an international phenomenon, with competitions in cities around the world. Regional winners compete in national and international festivals. On a Friday nig...

Sample of BASH through a shell in GNOME. Screenshot taken in Arch Linux (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley May 4, 2015 Deadline June 2015 Issue Personal computer and device operating systems are the personalities of the machines. The choices we make when selecting an operating system , or the choices we have made for us, determine how we interact with the digital world. Regardless of whether you prefer (or need to use) Windows, OS X , Linux or BSD , the operating systems do the same basic work. Click a mouse button, tap a touchscreen or type a letter and the operating system converts your action into something applications understand. The operating system determines how to manage software tasks and communicates with the hardware of a device to send or receive data. Operating systems accept commands or actions from users and software (input) and then display, print or otherwise communicate the results of these commands (output) to other software or the h...

Lego Digital Designer (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley April 6, 2015 Deadline May 2015 Issue Building things provides me with hours of relaxation and a sense of accomplishment. As children, we appreciate the creativity expressed by Tinker Toys, K’nex, Lincoln Logs and LEGO bricks . As we age, we discover new building kits, from detailed plastic models to advanced robotics kits. Yet, for many of us nothing beats the plastic, stud-covered bricks. Though LEGO remains the undisputed king of plastic bricks, interesting kits are available from Best-Lock and Mega Bloks. And recently, I discovered the challenges of working with Nanoblocks from Japanese toy company Kawada. Nanoblocks are one-eighth the size of standard blocks. Following standard plans, the resulting models are incredibly small. The real joy of bricks, however, isn’t in following a plan designed by someone else. Completing a Taj Mahal or Empire State Building model feels like a huge accompl...

My students like to use Google Docs for collaborative drafts of projects. They like the "Suggesting" mode for editing, though it takes time to get used to this approach compared to Microsoft Word, and they really like the "Chat" mode for working together remotely. I'm not as comfortable with Google's "Suggesting" edit mode. I like the "Track Changes" approach of Word, but that might be out of familiarity. The "Revision History" is also little clunky in Google Docs. Students have rolled back edits by accident, especially on tablets. Maybe the location of the "Editing Mode" and "History" (the upper right) makes them prone to accidental "palm clicks" when holding the devices. I've not used the JavaScript-based macro features, but I am glad there is a way to automate editing tasks. One of the reasons I love Word is the ease of Visual Basic for Applications. JavaScript ("GScript") ...

English: Dual disk drive (Combo Floppy drive) for 5.25 and 3.5 inch with floppy disks Deutsch: Duales Diskettenlaufwerk (Combo Floppy Drive) für 5 1/4 und 3 1/2 Zoll Disketten der Firma Canon Modell MD5511-V6 mit Disketten (Kombilaufwerk), Herstellung ca. 1995 (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley March 1, 2015 Deadline April 2015 Issue Sharing files and collaborating elevate computers beyond being glorified typewriters, ledger books and filing cabinets. I appreciate the convenience of using a word processor compared to typing on my old manual Smith Corona and nobody wants to trade spreadsheets for paper, but it is the portability of data that makes computing revolutionary. Beyond automating and improving the efficiency of tasks, moving data allows us to collaborate and develop better ideas. Today, we use “the cloud” to share data via the Internet. We upload files to servers operated by Google, Microsoft, Apple and several cloud-specific companies like D...