Poet Ponders the Digital

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,...

Those of us specializing in new media, digital composition, writing technology or whatever we might call our courses and research projects sometimes fall into the same idealistic fad-think as tech prognosticators. Remember interactive fiction? Our students don't. SecondLife? Not a single one of my university students has seen it or cares to see it. The list of gone and forgotten technologies seems endless. This week I made a reference to MySpace, something wildly popular only seven years ago among my composition students. Turns out, the MySpace of today is unpopular and doesn't even resemble the old version I knew. LiveJournal? Yahoo Groups? Don't even try to explain Usenet newsgroups or Internet Relay Chat. Remember AltaVista? GeoCities? Tripod? My students don't. In 1992, I operated a Fidonet BBS, first with WildCat and then RoboBoard. Boardwatch was a thick magazine. Internet meant dial-up at 2400 or 9600 baud. Does anyone say "baud rate" today? ...

For October 16, 2007... Blog post: Add a YackPack plugin to your PBwiki (click on plug-ins) and try it out. Sign-up for tappedin.org (http://ti2.sri.com/tappedin/index.jsp) and explore its features for online chat (see how it was used at Hillcrest High School: http://www.slideshare.net/sbgaddy/hillcrest-high-school-21st-century-project-student-products). Reflect on how you might use tappenin.org or other discussion sites (WebCT/Vista, Moodle, Drupal) or tools (IM’ing, etc.) or virtual/game sites (Second City, etc.) for online discussion. I gave up trying plug-ins with OS X and Safari, which I think might happen in many educational settings. I just don't have the energy to manually link and setup so many items, even though I have done so with images and other elements in PBwki. As with Google Docs and other "Web 2.0" items not supporting Apple's browser at this time, I generally won't sacrifice my system to another browser. (FireFox is the only major alternativ...

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley April 2007 Issue March 5, 2007 Virtual Utopia Proving Hard to Find The headquarters of a presidential candidate were violently assaulted in early February, with campaign workers beaten, windows broken, and obscene graffiti spray-painted inside and outside the building. As media reports of this attack were appearing in the Washington Post and New York Times, a small nuclear device was detonated in a popular shopping district. The shopping district had been the site of several drive-by shootings during 2006. No, these aren’t reports from Iraq or Afghanistan. These stories have been reported in major newspapers worldwide, but the events are taking place in the virtual world of Second Life (http://www.secondlife.com). Second Life is an online, virtual community launched officially in 2003 by Philip Rosedale, former chief technical officer of RealNetworks, a pioneer in online music and video streaming. Residents can play for free, but Rosedale’s L...