Poet Ponders the Digital

Teaching colleagues, especially those in "New Media" and the "Digital Humanities," might find the pattern below interesting. The image is the report for activity on an academic mailing list from 1999 to present. Similar patterns are visible when I check other mailing lists. It's like the USENET statistics. Where are people going to discuss academic topics?  I left the WPA-L and other lists, because they were too often off-topic and/or not about scholarship and pedagogy. I didn't enjoy the mailing lists anymore. The fun was gone, though a core set of users remained active on other issues. Maybe that's the problem for all online spaces: they become insular.  The loss of RSS from some sites also reduced my connection to academic discussion. I really miss having easy access to RSS, and don't like Twitter or Facebook as my news feeds. From 2002 through 2010 was an active, exciting time for online communities. That's eight or nine y...

I have Feedly, Newsify, and NetNewsWire on my various computing devices. Only a couple of years ago, I used RSS readers daily to check headlines on Slashdot, RealClear, MacWorld, and many other websites. Maybe it is me, but I felt there were great stories every few hours — and RSS made keeping up with the news easy and convenient. This week, MacOSXHints went into "archive" mode. Slashdot traffic has fallen dramatically. News sites favor Facebook and Twitter over RSS. Even some apps for news sites don't work well. Tom's Hardware for iOS wasn't updating for nearly a month. Only last week did updates start appearing on my phone and tablet again. Newsreaders and dedicated news apps are collecting virtual dust. The most disappointing failure might be Apple's Newsstand app for iOS, another stale and nearly useless slot for magazines and newspapers. Apple, which effectively killed RSS along with Google, just doesn't seem to value virtual periodicals. ...

Like most educators interested in technology and pedagogy, I have followed the digital revolution down many dead-end paths. We want to believe in publishing (and sharing) for the masses, but I'm less convinced today than I was twenty years ago that the masses want to share serious ideas. The masses want to share kitties, their latest meals, breaking celebrity gossip, and photos they will regret sharing almost as soon as the images enter the data stream. Blogger. Facebook. Twitter. Tumblr. I have five semi-active Blogger-based blogs. My wife and I have a less active writing blog. I have Facebook pages for the blogs, Twitter feeds, and two Tumblr accounts. The traffic to the blogs is in decline, from thousands of weekly visits to a few hundred. The Facebook pages are also trailing off, as Facebook seeks to charge for promoting content. Twitter just annoys me, with an endless stream of automated tweets. I do have one account from which I follow real people posting real,...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley February 3, 2014 Deadline March 2014 Issue Social Media Getting Older, Losing Its Cool Social media are losing their “cool” factor, becoming a part of the largely ignored information static in our daily lives. Automated “bots” dominate Twitter, sending out so many tweets that it takes an effort to find any value. A small group of real, human users remain entertaining and informative, but searching and sorting tweets requires too much effort to be fun anymore. If you follow sports scores, news alerts or special events then Twitter is a wonderful tool. My friends who participate in fantasy sports leagues rely on Twitter for breaking news, at least on game days. They seldom send tweets, except to trade barbs with other “team owners” in the leagues. Twitter was supposed to make “texting” more social and more engaging, but the sheer volume of traffic renders Twitter useless. For most of us, hashtags, those “#WordsToFollow” that need a secret decode...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley October 8, 2012 Deadline November 2012 Issue RSS Feeds: The Best Way to (not) Surf the Web Surfing the World Wide Web on a daily quest for the latest news is inefficient and frustrating. I read stories from at least a dozen technology sites and the experience can be annoying. From too many advertisements to videos that start automatically, I don’t like the websites. Why go from site to site when you can have latest news gathered conveniently in one place? No, I’m not suggesting you follow every news site on Google+ or Facebook. My Facebook feed is too cluttered to be useful for serious research and nobody I know uses Google+ on regular basis. There is a better solution for news junkies, though. The best way to read headlines is to use RSS feeds. With RSS, you can have the latest stories from your favorite news sources collected and organized in one location. I can open my RSS application and the latest headlines from more than 100 sources are ...

Blog post: describe the search methods and databases you employ to collect information for use in your writing; how do you determine the validity and credibility of the information you acquire and how you categorized and organize that information for use in writing; how might you use RSS feeds to Bloglines or Google Reader to enhance your students how could you improve your students’ search strategies (see the Teachers Teaching Teachers site) Work on your vlog This week we are being asked to consider two very different topics, so I'm going to split my response accordingly. However, I'm also going to take a detour, which isn't that unusual for me. I like detours. [rant] Knowing a blog is for a course, especially a course on teaching writing/composition using online technologies, leads to blog posts that are anything but "bloggy" in nature. Instead of a wry wit or wandering observations, the writing feels controlled — mediated by the context to the point it is an...